The Design and Synthesis of Novel Chaetomellic Acid A Analogues

Chaetomellic acid A is an alkyl dicarboxylic acid isolated from the fermentation of Chaetomella acutiseta. Chaetomellic acid A has been shown to be a potent, highly specific inhibitor of RAS farnesyl protein transferase (FPTase). The association between RAS proteins and cancer has made chaetomellic acd A a potential chemotherapeutic agent. Two novel chaetomellic acid A analogues have been prepared that incorporate aromoatic rings in the alkyl tail. It is anticipated that these compounds will bind more tightly to the FPTase active site than the natural product due to intermolecular interactions between the aromatic rings in the tail and the aromatic amino acid residues that have been shown to line the enzyme pocket

The Tipping Point: A Faith Perspective

The Journal of Faith Education, and Community’s (JFEC) Special Issue entitled, The Tipping Point: A Faith Perspective, features articles written from a first-person point of view and faith perspective. The articles focus on the authors’ feelings, emotions, and/or experiences surrounding critical and impactful diversity-related events (i.e. the horrific death of George Floyd, protests for equity and the eradication of hate, etc.)

Observation of a Second-Order Phase Transition and Its Associated P - T Phase Diagram in Liquid He3

A specific-heat discontinuity is observed in liquid He3 from 241 lb/in.2 to the melting pressure in the temperature range 2-3 mK

Research activities arising from the University of Kent

In this paper I describe research activities in the field of optical fiber sensing undertaken by me after leaving the Applied Optics Group at the University of Kent. The main topics covered are long period gratings, neural network based signal processing, plasmonic sensors, and polymer fiber gratings. I also give a summary of my two periods of research at the University of Kent, covering 1985–1988 and 1991–2001

Employability and higher education: contextualising female students' workplace experiences to enhance understanding of employability development

Current political and economic discourses position employability as a responsibility of higher education, which deploys mechanisms such as supervised work experience (SWE) to embed employability skills development into the undergraduate curriculum. However, workplaces are socially constructed complex arenas of embodied knowledge that are gendered. Understanding the usefulness of SWE therefore requires consideration of the contextualised experiences of it, within these complex environments. This study considers higher education's use of SWE as a mechanism of employability skills development through exploration of female students' experiences of accounting SWE, and its subsequent shaping of their views of employment. Findings suggest that women experience numerous, indirect gender-based inequalities within their accounting SWE about which higher education is silent, perpetuating the framing of employability as a set of individual skills and abilities. This may limit the potential of SWE to provide equality of employability development. The study concludes by briefly considering how insights provided by this research could better inform higher education's engagement with SWE within the employability discourse, and contribute to equality of employability development opportunity

Accelerating fishes increase propulsive efficiency by modulating vortex ring geometry

Swimming animals need to generate propulsive force to overcome drag, regardless of whether they swim steadily or accelerate forward. While locomotion strategies for steady swimming are well characterized, far less is known about acceleration. Animals exhibit many different ways to swim steadily, but we show here that this behavioral diversity collapses into a single swimming pattern during acceleration regardless of the body size, morphology, and ecology of the animal. We draw on the fields of biomechanics, fluid dynamics, and robotics to demonstrate that there is a fundamental difference between steady swimming and forward acceleration. We provide empirical evidence that the tail of accelerating fishes can increase propulsive efficiency by enhancing thrust through the alteration of vortex ring geometry. Our study provides insight into how propulsion can be altered without increasing vortex ring size and represents a fundamental departure from our current understanding of the hydrodynamic mechanisms of acceleration. Our findings reveal a unifying hydrodynamic principle that is likely conserved in all aquatic, undulatory vertebratesauthorsversionPeer reviewe

An exploration of within-herd dynamics of a transboundary livestock disease : a foot and mouth disease case study

Transboundary livestock diseases are a high priority for policy makers because of the serious economic burdens associated with infection. In order to make well informed preparedness and response plans, policy makers often utilize mathematical models to understand possible outcomes of different control strategies and outbreak scenarios. Many of these models focus on the transmission between herds and the overall trajectory of the outbreak. While the course of infection within herds has not been the focus of the majority of models, a thorough understanding of within-herd dynamics can provide valuable insight into a disease system by providing information on herd-level biological properties of the infection, which can be used to inform decision making in both endemic and outbreak settings and to inform larger between-herd models. In this study, we develop three stochastic simulation models to study within-herd foot and mouth disease dynamics and the implications of different empirical data-based assumptions about the timing of the onset of infectiousness and clinical signs. We also study the influence of herd size and the proportion of the herd that is initially infected on the outcome of the infection. We find that increasing herd size increases the duration of infectiousness and that the size of the herd plays a more significant role in determining this duration than the number of initially infected cattle in that herd. We also find that the assumptions made regarding the onset of infectiousness and clinical signs, which are based on contradictory empirical findings, can result in the predictions about when infection would be detectable differing by several days. Therefore, the disease progression used to characterize the course of infection in a single bovine host could have significant implications for determining when herds can be detected and subsequently controlled; the timing of which could influence the overall predicted trajectory of outbreaks

Postmodern professions? The fragmentation of legal education and the legal profession

This article considers the institutional dimensions of professionalism and the legal profession's struggle with the challenges of post-modernity. An aspect of this is the Law Society's Training Framework Review (TFR) which promises changes to solicitors' education from 'cradle to grave'. The first part of the article analyses the structure and drivers of the TFR, their origins, and how they will be articulated. Secondly, the TFR is considered in the context of the political economy of higher education and its role in the new capitalism. Finally, we examine the potential effects of the TFR for the legal profession in the context of increasing practice segmentation and the threat of deprofessionalization, and also for the Law Society itself, whether it can retain a key role in the life course of the legal profession