Anatomies of Melancholy

The works presented in Anatomies of Melancholy explore the residual affects of pain and trauma through photography. By combining personal stories with documentary photography this body of work conveys a tension between the (in)visibility of pain and the need to speak*. Through the process of spending time with individuals and discussing their personal trauma while making photographs, I hope to acknowledge and even conserve the pain of others. Though the images do not include a narrative of the subjects\u27 pain, they are able to communicate and begin a visual discourse. The raw and emotive images become a platform for the viewer to empathize with the pain of others or understand their own pain. I am interested in a photograph\u27s power to console, articulate and offer a map of our experiences. Anatomies of Melancholy questions the stigmatization of pain by serving as a reminder that it is a human condition, felt by all. *Reinhardt, Mark, Holly Edwards and Erina Dugganne. Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain, 11

A new method for direct determination for salinity

The solid material obtained upon freeze-drying sea water is not a true measure of salinity since it contains 9 or 10 % water of crystallization, the exact content being a sensitive function of temperature and humidity. The residual water is determinable with Karl Fischer reagent, although the method is not yet capable of yielding salinity with the precision hitherto obtainable through the Knudsen titration...

High-throughput experimental and computational studies of bacterial evolution

The work in this thesis is concerned with the study of bacterial adaptation on short and long timescales. In the first section, consisting of three chapters, I describe a recently developed high-throughput technology for probing gene function, transposon-insertion sequencing, and its application to the study of functional differences between two important human pathogens, Salmonella enterica subspecies enterica serovars Typhi and Typhimurium. In a first study, I use transposon-insertion sequencing to probe differences in gene requirements during growth on rich laboratory media, revealing differences in serovar requirements for genes involved in iron-utilization and cell-surface structure biogenesis, as well as in requirements for non-coding RNA. In a second study I more directly probe the genomic features responsible for differences in serovar pathogenicity by analyzing transposon-insertion sequencing data produced following a two hour infection of human macrophage, revealing large differences in the selective pressures felt by these two closely related serovars in the same environment. The second section, consisting of two chapters, uses statistical models of sequence variation, i.e. covariance models, to examine the evolution of intrinsic termination across the bacterial kingdom. A first collaborative study provides background and motivation in the form of a method for identifying Rho-independent terminators using covariance models built from deep alignments of experimentally-verified terminators from Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis. In the course of the development of this method I discovered a novel putative intrinsic terminator in Mycobacterium tuberculosis. In the final chapter, I extend this approach to de novo discovery of intrinsic termination motifs across the bacterial phylogeny. I present evidence for lineage-specific variations in canonical Rho-independent terminator composition, as well as discover seven non-canonical putative termination motifs. Using a collection of publicly available RNA-seq datasets, I provide evidence for the function of some of these elements as bona fide transcriptional attenuators.This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust [grant numbers WT076964, WT079643 and WT098051]

Brain function early after stroke in relation to subsequent recovery.

This study aimed to characterize brain activation and perfusion early after stroke within cortical regions that would later change activation during recovery. Patients were studied serially after stroke (mean t1, = 16 days after stroke, t2 = 3.5 months later) using perfusion-weighted imaging and functional magnetic resonance imaging during finger movement. Controls (n = 7) showed no significant change in regional activation volumes over time. Among stroke patients (n = 8), however, recovery was accompanied by several patterns of functional magnetic resonance imaging change, with increased activation volumes over time in five patients and decreased in two. Most regions increasing activation over time were in the stroke hemisphere. Of the five patients showing increased activation over time, specific activation foci enlarged at t2 were already activated at t1 in four patients, and at least one focus growing from t1 to t2 was in a different arterial distribution from the infarct in all five patients. Perfusion of sensorimotor cortex at t1 was generally not reduced in the stroke hemisphere (94% of noninfarcted hemisphere). Improved clinical outcome was related to increased activation within sensory cortices of both brain sides, including bilateral secondary somatosensory areas. Early after stroke, cortical activation that will later increase in parallel with recovery is often already identifiable, can be remote from the vascular territory of the infarct, and is not likely hindered by reduced perfusion. The findings may be useful for restorative interventions introduced during the weeks after a stroke

Some Microbiological and Sanitary Aspects of Military Operations in Greenland

Describes, from a longer report (cf. No. 64724.) studies of sanitation practices and problems of wound healing and fly-borne contamination at Camp Tuto, 14 mi from the Thule Air Force Base, supplemented with data from two camps on the icecap. Bacteria from water supplies, from surface snow, and soil and also bacteria from wounds and from flies were isolated, identified and counted. No evidence of water contamination was found though bacteria appear to survive the arctic winter in the soil