Returning to an old question: What do television actors do when they act?

This article argues for acknowledging and exploring actors’ processes in critical considerations of television drama. Theatre Studies boasts a tradition of research privileging the actor, including a century’s worth of actor-training manuals, academic works observing rehearsals and performances, and actor accounts. However, such considerations within Television Studies are relatively nascent. Drawing upon continuing drama as a fertile case study for investigating the specificities of television acting, the article concludes that the only way to understand television acting is through the analysis of insights from actors themselves, in combination with the well-established practices of analysing the textual end-products of television acting

Fractal-like Distributions over the Rational Numbers in High-throughput Biological and Clinical Data

Recent developments in extracting and processing biological and clinical data are allowing quantitative approaches to studying living systems. High-throughput sequencing, expression profiles, proteomics, and electronic health records are some examples of such technologies. Extracting meaningful information from those technologies requires careful analysis of the large volumes of data they produce. In this note, we present a set of distributions that commonly appear in the analysis of such data. These distributions present some interesting features: they are discontinuous in the rational numbers, but continuous in the irrational numbers, and possess a certain self-similar (fractal-like) structure. The first set of examples which we present here are drawn from a high-throughput sequencing experiment. Here, the self-similar distributions appear as part of the evaluation of the error rate of the sequencing technology and the identification of tumorogenic genomic alterations. The other examples are obtained from risk factor evaluation and analysis of relative disease prevalence and co-mordbidity as these appear in electronic clinical data. The distributions are also relevant to identification of subclonal populations in tumors and the study of the evolution of infectious diseases, and more precisely the study of quasi-species and intrahost diversity of viral populations

Modeling the evolution space of breakage fusion bridge cycles with a stochastic folding process

Breakage-Fusion-Bridge cycles in cancer arise when a broken segment of DNA is duplicated and an end from each copy joined together. This structure then 'unfolds' into a new piece of palindromic DNA. This is one mechanism responsible for the localised amplicons observed in cancer genome data. The process has parallels with paper folding sequences that arise when a piece of paper is folded several times and then unfolded. Here we adapt such methods to study the breakage-fusion-bridge structures in detail. We firstly consider discrete representations of this space with 2-d trees to demonstrate that there are 2^(n(n-1)/2) qualitatively distinct evolutions involving n breakage-fusion-bridge cycles. Secondly we consider the stochastic nature of the fold positions, to determine evolution likelihoods, and also describe how amplicons become localised. Finally we highlight these methods by inferring the evolution of breakage-fusion-bridge cycles with data from primary tissue cancer samples

A catalogue of ULX coincidences with FIRST radio sources

We search for ultra luminous X-ray source (ULXs) radio counterparts located in nearby galaxies in order to constrain their physical nature. Our work is based on a systematic cross-identification of the most recent and extensive available ULX catalogues and archival radio data. A catalogue of 70 positional coincidences is reported. Most of them are located within the galaxy nucleus. Among them, we find 11 new cases of non-nuclear ULX sources with possibly associated radio emission.Comment: Accepted for publication in A&A; 17 pages, 9 figure

A gene to organism approach--assessing the impact of environmental pollution in eelpout (Zoarces viviparus) females and larvae

A broad biomarker approach was applied to study the effects of marine pollution along the Swedish west coast using the teleost eelpout (Zoarces viviparus) as the sentinel species. Measurements were performed on different biological levels, from the molecular to the organismal, including measurements of messenger RNA (mRNA), proteins, cellular and tissue changes, and reproductive success. Results revealed that eelpout captured in Stenungsund had significantly higher hepatic ethoxyresorufin O-deethylase activity, high levels of both cytochrome P4501A and diablo homolog mRNA, and high prevalence of dead larvae and nuclear damage in erythrocytes. Eelpout collected in Göteborg harbor displayed extensive macrovesicular steatosis, whereby the majority of hepatocytes were affected throughout the liver, which could indicate an effect on lipid metabolism. Results also indicate that eelpouts collected at polluted sites might have an affected immune system, with lower mRNA expression of genes involved in the innate immune system and a higher number of lymphocytes. Biomarker assessment also was performed on livers dissected from unborn eelpout larvae collected from the ovary of the females. No significant differences were noted, which might indicate that the larvae to some extent are protected from effects of environmental pollutants. In conclusion, usage of the selected set of biological markers, covering responses from gene to organism, has demonstrated site-specific biomarker patterns that provided a broad and comprehensive picture of the impact of environmental stressors

Amplification and Overexpression of Hsa-miR-30b, Hsa-miR-30d and KHDRBS3 at 8q24.22-q24.23 in Medulloblastoma

Medulloblastoma is the most common malignant brain tumour of childhood. The identification of critical genes involved in its pathogenesis will be central to advances in our understanding of its molecular basis, and the development of improved therapeutic approaches.We performed a SNP-array based genome-wide copy number analysis in medulloblastoma cell lines, to identify regions of genomic amplification and homozygous deletion, which may harbour critical disease genes. A series of novel and established medulloblastoma defects were detected (MYC amplification (n = 4), 17q21.31 high-level gain (n = 1); 9p21.1-p21.3 (n = 1) and 6q23.1 (n = 1) homozygous deletion). Most notably, a novel recurrent region of genomic amplification at 8q24.22-q24.23 was identified (n = 2), and selected for further investigation. Additional analysis by interphase fluorescence in situ hybridisation (iFISH), PCR-based mapping and SNP-array revealed this novel amplification at 8q24.22-q24.23 is independent of MYC amplification at 8q24.21, and is unique to medulloblastoma in over 800 cancer cell lines assessed from different tumour types, suggesting it contains key genes specifically involved in medulloblastoma development. Detailed mapping identified a 3Mb common minimal region of amplification harbouring 3 coding genes (ZFAT1, LOC286094, KHDRBS3) and two genes encoding micro-RNAs (hsa-miR-30b, hsa-miR-30d). Of these, only expression of hsa-miR-30b, hsa-miR-30d and KHDRBS3 correlated with copy number status, and all three of these transcripts also displayed evidence of elevated expression in sub-sets of primary medulloblastomas, measured relative to the normal cerebellum.These data implicate hsa-miR-30b, hsa-miR-30d and KHDRBS3 as putative oncogenic target(s) of a novel recurrent medulloblastoma amplicon at 8q24.22-q24.23. Our findings suggest critical roles for these genes in medulloblastoma development, and further support the contribution of micro-RNA species to medulloblastoma pathogenesis

Shape polarization in the tin isotopes near N=60N=60 from precision gg-factor measurements on short-lived 11/2−11/2^- isomers

The $g$ factors of $11/2^-$ isomers in semimagic $^{109}$Sn and $^{111}$Sn (isomeric lifetimes $\tau = 2.9(3)$ ns and $\tau = 14.4(7)$ ns, respectively) were measured by an extension of the Time Differential Perturbed Angular Distribution technique, which uses \LaBr detectors and the hyperfine fields of a gadolinium host to achieve precise measurements in a new regime of short-lived isomers. The results, $g(11/2^-; {^{109}\textrm{Sn}}) = -0.186(8)$ and $g(11/2^-; {^{111}\textrm{Sn}}) = -0.214(4)$, are significantly lower in magnitude than those of the $11/2^-$ isomers in the heavier isotopes and depart from the value expected for a near pure neutron $h_{11/2}$ configuration. Broken-symmetry density functional theory calculations applied to the sequence of $11/2^-$ states reproduce the magnitude and location of this deviation. The $g(11/2^-)$ values are affected by shape core polarization; the odd $0h_{11/2}$ neutron couples to $J^{\pi}=2^+,4^+,6^+...$ configurations in the weakly-deformed effective core, causing a decrease in the $g$-factor magnitudes.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures. Accepted in Physics Letters