Incontri artistici in spazi estremi. Solar di Ian McEwan e il progretto Cape Farewell

Cape Farewell is an international not-for-profit programme based in the UK which brings creatives, scientists and informers together to see global warming with their own eyes, with the aim to engage and inspire a sustainable future society and instigate a cultural response to the climate challenge. This chapter analyses two artistic experiences which stemmed from the Cape Farewell project: the one of the novelist Ian McEwan and the one of the choreographer Siobhan Davies, both members of the 2005 Cape Farewell Expedition to Spitsbergen, in the Svalbard, in the Artic Sea. While Davies’s response to her experience is a work embodying the idea of fragility of the body she had experienced in the Artic, McEwan writes a satirical and allegorical novel about a greedy and selfish Nobel Prize-winning physicist. Davies’s artistic work took the form of a projection titled Endangered Species, in which a ballerina dances inside a museum display case, wearing a costume made of long bending rods, suggesting the dramatic uneasiness of the body in the extreme spaces of the North Pole. The key element of McEwan’s novel, on the contrary, is irony, which is used to make fun of the Cape Farewell Expedition crew, and above all to depict the anti-hero Micheal Beard, who takes part to the Expedition but is actually shocked by the entire experience, insomuch as to imagine, while dreading to die from hypothermia, one of his colleagues proclaiming his obituary on TV by saying “He went to see global warming for himself”. Both works focus on the vulnerability and unsuitableness of the human body in extreme conditions, aiming at highlighting that it is time for humans to understand they do not belong to such spaces. To do this, both artists use the trope of metaphor: Davies makes use of the metaphor of the ‘endangered animal’ in a cage, out of place, while McEwan uses the metaphor of the boot room, which the crew is unable to keep tidy responsibly, concluding «How were they to save the earth […] when it was so much larger than the boot room?». Thanks to the use McEwan makes of irony, he manages to rise in the reader an awareness towards two great faults of humanity: egoism and incoherence, which are among the main causes of most environmental issues. Both artists present planet Earth as an autonomous ecosystem whose functioning does not depend on humans, but which humans must respect if they are to survive

The urban sprawl dynamics: does a neural network understand the spatial logic better than a cellular automata?

Cellular Automata are usually considered the most efficient technology to understand the spatial logic of urban dynamics: they are inherently spatial, they are simple and computationally efficient and are able to represent a wide range of pattern and situations. Nevertheless the implementation of a CA requires the formulation of explicit spatial rules which represents the greatest limit of this approach. Whatever rich and complex the rules are, they don`t are able to capture satisfactorily the variety of the real processes. Recent developments in natural algorithms, and particularly in Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), allow to reverse the approach by learning the rules and the behaviours in urban land use dynamics directly from the Data Base, following a bottom-up process. The basic problem is to discover how and in to what extent the land use change of each cell i at time t+1 is determined by the neighbouring conditions (CA assumptions) or by other social, environmental, territorial features (i.e. political maps, planning rules) which where holding at the previous time t. Once the NN has learned the rules, it is able to predict the changes at time t+2 and following. In this paper we show and discuss the prediction capability of different architectures of supervised and unsupervised ANN. The Case study and Data Base concern the land use dynamics, between two temporal thresholds, in the South metropolitan area of Milan. The records have been randomly split in two sets which have been alternatively used in Training and in Testing phase in each ANN. The different ANNs performances have been evaluated with Statistical Functions. Finally, for the prediction, we have used the average of the prediction values of the 10 ANNs, and tested the results through the usual Statistical Functions.

One-step preparation of enantiopure L- or D-amino acid benzyl esters avoiding the use of banned solvents

The enantiomers of amino acid benzyl esters are very important synthetic intermediates. Many of them are currently prepared by treatment with benzyl alcohol and p-toluenesulfonic acid in refluxing benzene or carbon tetrachloride, to azeotropically remove water, and then precipitated as tosylate salt by adding diethyl ether. Here, we report a very efficient preparation of eight l- or d-amino acid benzyl esters (Ala, Phe, Tyr, Phg, Val, Leu, Lys, Ser), in which these highly hazardous solvents are dismissed using cyclohexane as a water azeotroping solvent and ethyl acetate to precipitate the tosylate salt. With some work-up modifications and lower yield, the procedure can be applied also to methionine. Chiral HPLC analysis shows that all the benzyl esters, including the highly racemizable ones such as those of phenylglycine, tyrosine and methionine, are formed enantiomerically pure under these new reaction conditions thus validating the solvents replacement. Contrariwise, toluene cannot be used in place of benzene or carbon tetrachloride because leading to partially or totally racemized amino acid benzyl esters depending on the polar effect of the amino acid \u3b1-side chain as expressed by Taft\u2019s substituent constant (\u3c3*)

"Existences holding hands": Winterson retelling Shakespeare

To celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death,The Hogarth Press inaugurated The Hogarth Shakespeare project, which sees Shakespeare's works retold by acclaimed and bestselling novelists of today. The first volume of the series to appear was Jeanette Winterson's "The Gap of Time" (2015), a cover version of "The Winter's Tale". Winterson considers it a "talismanic text" for her,in part because it is a play about a foundling, and Winterson is one. But "The Winter's Tale" is also a play about forgiveness, a theme which has always been dear to Winterson, who wrote about it in "Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?" (2011).The paper aims to underline such aspects in her rewriting of Shakespeare's play, together with the theme of time, fundamental to both Shakespeare and Winterson. Time is indeed among the protagonists of "The Winter's Tale", which can be read as a "meditation on time" (Lombardo 2004), so much so that time is embodied as a speaking character in the Chorus. "Time is reversible", declares Winterson in her cover version; time redeems and can be redeemed, Shakespeare seems to suggest in "The Winter's Tale". "The Gap of Time" completes a retelling of such themes that Winterson started back in 1989 with her novel "Sexing the Cherry", in which she claimed that parallel lives, made of the alternative decisions not taken in the past, go on living so as to create an alternative present, which is what happens in "The Winter's Tale"

ItalianWoolf project: schools workshops

This dataset is part of the outputs of the research project Virginia Woolf and Italian Readers funded from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 838658. The dataset contains the data collected from workshops addressed to college students and teachers in collaboration, respectively, with Istituto Salesiani, Milan, Istituto Erasmo da Rotterdam, Sesto San Giovanni (Milan) and Istituto Alcide De Gasperi, Borgo Valsugana (Trento). The workshops focused on Point 5 of the UNESCO Sustainable Development Goals: Gender equality, and involved the active participation of the students, who were asked to answer a short anonymous survey in the form of paper questionnaires (which became Google Modules when the workshops had to be made online because of the Covid-19 pandemic) consisting of 10 questions with self-anchoring scale answers, designed to test their perception of gender equality. The same questionnaires were handed out to the students before the workshop and afterwards. The purpose of the questionnaire was to understand if the students’ gender equality perceptions had changed after the workshop and the reading of Virginia Woolf’s essays

ENANTIOPURI, senza usare solventi ‘HH’

Gli amminoacidi con BnOH e p-TsOH in benzene o CCl4 a riflusso danno l\u2019estere benzilico salificato enantiomericamente puro. Se si usa toluene, in sostituzione di questi solventi \u2018highly hazardous\u2019 (HH), l\u2019estere racemizza. Il cicloesano \ue8, invece, una valida alternativa: acido aspartico ed acido glutammico ne sono un esempio

A selective alpha1D-adrenoreceptor antagonist inhibits human prostate cancer cell proliferation and motility "in vitro"

The progression of prostate cancer (PC) to a metastatic hormone refractory disease is the major contributor to the overall cancer mortality in men, mainly because the conventional therapies are generally ineffective at this stage. Thus, other therapeutic options are needed as alternatives or in addition to the classic approaches to prevent or delay tumor progression. Catecholamines participate to the control of prostate cell functions by the activation of alpha1-adrenoreceptors (alpha1-AR) and increased sympathetic activity has been linked to PC development and evolution. Molecular and pharmacological studies identified three alpha1-AR subtypes (A, B and D), which differ in tissue distribution, cell signaling, pharmacology and physiological role. Within the prostate, alpha1A-ARs mainly control stromal cell functions, while alpha1B- and alpha1D- subtypes seem to modulate glandular epithelial cell growth. The possible direct contribution of alpha1D-ARs in tumor biology is supported by their overexpression in PC. The studies here presented investigate the "in vitro" antitumor action of A175, a selective alpha1D-AR antagonist we have recently obtained by modifying the potent, but not subtype-selective alpha1-AR antagonist (S)-WB4101, in the hormone-refractory PC3 and DU145 PC cell lines. The results indicate that A175 has an alpha1D-AR-mediated significant and dose-dependent antiproliferative action that possibly involves the induction of G0/G1 cell cycle arrest, but not apoptosis. In addition, A175 reduces cell migration and adhesiveness to culture plates. In conclusion, our work clarified some cellular aspects promoted by alpha1D-AR activity modulation and supports a further pharmacological approach in the cure of hormone-refractory PC, by targeting specifically this AR subtype

Filling the void: Virginia Woolf and the feminism of difference in Italy

Using unpublished archival material, this article analyses the reception of Virginia Woolf in the Milanese feminist context of the late 1970s, attempting to understand the role Woolf’s work played in the theoretical development of the feminism of difference in Italy. The study focuses on two key texts: the Italian publication of Three Guineas by the feminist press La Tartaruga; and the Catalogo giallo, the second publication of the Milan-based Libreria delle donne, which played a vital role in the evolution of the feminism of difference

A plant 3'-phosphoesterase involved in the repair of DNA strand breaks generated by oxidative damage.

Two novel, structurally and functionally distinct phosphatases have been identified through the functional complementation, by maize cDNAs, of an Escherichia coli diphosphonucleoside phosphatase mutant strain. The first, ZmDP1, is a classical Mg(2+)-dependent and Li(+)-sensitive diphosphonucleoside phosphatase that dephosphorylates both 3'-phosphoadenosine 5'-phosphate (3'-PAP) and 2'-PAP without any discrimination between the 3'- and 2'-positions. The other, ZmDP2, is a distinct phosphatase that also catalyzes diphosphonucleoside dephosphorylation, but with a 12-fold lower Li(+) sensitivity, a strong preference for 3'-PAP, and the unique ability to utilize double-stranded DNA molecules with 3'-phosphate- or 3'-phosphoglycolate-blocking groups as substrates. Importantly, ZmDP2, but not ZmDP1, conferred resistance to a DNA repairdeficient E. coli strain against oxidative DNA-damaging agents generating 3'-phosphate- or 3'-phosphoglycolate-blocked single strand breaks. ZmDP2 shares a partial amino acid sequence similarity with a recently identified human polynucleotide kinase 3'-phosphatase that is thought to be involved in DNA repair, but is devoid of 5'-kinase activity. ZmDP2 is the first DNA 3'-phosphoesterase thus far identified in plants capable of converting 3'-blocked termini into priming sites for reparative DNA polymerization

A Nick-sensing DNA 3′-Repair Enzyme fromArabidopsis

DNA single-strand breaks, a major cause of genome instability, often produce unconventional end groups that must be processed to restore terminal moieties suitable for reparative DNA gap filling or ligation. Here, we describe a bifunctional repair enzyme from Arabidopsis (named AtZDP) that recognizes DNA strand breaks and catalyzes the removal of 3'-end-blocking lesions. The isolated C-terminal domain of AtZDP is by itself competent for 3'-end processing, but not for strand break recognition. The N-terminal domain instead contains three Cys(3)-His zinc fingers and recognizes various kinds of damaged double-stranded DNA. Gapped DNA molecules are preferential targets of AtZDP, which bends them by approximately 73 degrees upon binding, as measured by atomic force microscopy. Potential partners of AtZDP were identified in the Arabidopsis genome using the human single-strand break repairosome as a reference. These data identify a novel pathway for single-strand break repair in which a DNA-binding 3'-phosphoesterase acts as a "nick sensor" for damage recognition, as the catalyst of one repair step, and possibly as a nucleation center for the assembly of a fully competent repair complex