Stephen Sondheim\u27s Gesamtkunstwerk: The Concept Musical As Wagnerian Total Theatre

Stephen Sondheim, famous for writing such musicals as Company, Into the Woods, Sweeney Todd, and Assassins, is often referred to as the originator of the modern concept musical. Despite varying definitions of the concept musical, it is generally agreed that the form embodies a specific identity or mood, which it communicates to an audience both emotionally and intellectually. As such it offers audience members a complete experience resembling in theory the idea of total theatre proposed in the nineteenth century by composer Richard Wagner. My thesis will argue that the similarity between Sondheim\u27s concept musical and Wagner\u27s total theatre is more than purely theoretical; it is practical as well, involving structural parallels such as leitmotif, minor chord development, and intricate lyricism. Congruently, many of Sondheim\u27s choices describing communication with audiences on the emotional and intellectual levels also recall those utilized by Wagner over a century earlier. These similarities not withstanding, Sondheim, as a contemporary artist, creates work that has often been described in terms of theoretical movements that post-date Wagner, including desconstructionism and Brechtian theatre. While these terms certainly describe some differences between the work of Sondheim and Wagner, I will argue that their existence with regard to Sondheim does not preclude a Wagnerian approach to the contemporary composer\u27s work. Elements of deconstruction and Brechtian alienation may, in fact, be linked back to Wagner in specific manners. My thesis will explore these connections, concluding that an approach to the work of Sondheim in the vein of Richard Wagner may suggest a successful method of interpreting the contemporary concept musical

Neural recovery after cortical injury: effects of MSC derived exosomes in the cervical spinal cord

Stroke is the leading cause of long-term disability costing the United States (US) health care system 34 billion dollars. However, stem cell based therapies have been shown to improve recovery after cortical injury by enhancing neural recovery and modulating immune responses (Lambertsen, Finsen, & Clausen, 2018; Orczykowski et al., 2018; Stonesifer et al., 2017). Specifically, reorganization of the motor circuit at the level of the spinal cord has been shown to improve functional recovery after injury (Christoph Wiessner; Weidner et al., 2001; Lee et al., 2004; Zai et al., 2009). In our study we used a non-human primate (NHP) model to study the neural recovery after cortical injury similar to damage from an ischemic stroke in the motor cortex with or without a systemic treatment of mesenchymal stem cell derived (MSCd) exosomes. We find a robust recovery in motor function within the first few weeks after injury including improved grasp patterns and faster retrieval times during behavioral tasks. Additionally, assessment of the cervical spinal cord (CSC) reveals decreased levels of sprouting axons from ipsilesional corticospinal tract (CST) and MAP2+ synapses in the contralesional ventral horn at 14 weeks post-injury, which correlates with improved retrieval latencies. We hypothesize that MSCd exosomes may encourage an earlier switch to anti-inflammatory and repair processes that reduces secondary damage in the cortex resulting in earlier pruning of axon collaterals and reducing the need for compensatory mechanisms of the spinal cord at 14 weeks post injury

"My Arm Is Complete": A Cognitive Approach to Gestural Life in Stephen Sondheim's Musical Genres

Traditionally, musical theatre has been accepted more as a practical field than an academic one, as demonstrated by the relative scarcity of lengthy theory‐based publications addressing musicals as study topics. However, with increasing scholarly application of cognitive theories to such fields as theatre and music theory, musical theatre now has the potential to become the topic of scholarly analysis based on empirical data and scientific discussion. This dissertation seeks to contribute such an analysis, focusing on the implied gestural lives of the characters in three musicals by Stephen Sondheim, as these lives exemplify the composer’s tendency to challenge traditional audience expectations in terms of genre through his music and lyrics. Based on the research of David McNeill and others, scholars have argued that the synchronization of speech and gesture support their conflation into a single language for the purposes of audience understanding and response to theatre and film. Meanwhile, research relating to cognition and music has indicated that music and gesture are similarly connected, supporting the relevance of gestural interpretation to the communication of musical notation as well. With regard to musical theatre in particular, the work of composer Stephen Sondheim lends itself to studies related to the relevance of gesture to v audience affective response, given Sondheim’s tendencies to write with an actor’s physical interpretation in mind. My three main chapters, therefore, address the language of music, lyrics, and gesture in three musicals that both support and challenge traditional audience response in terms of the genres within which they are most easily categorized. The first addresses A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum as farce, analyzing implied physical tendencies related to base aggression and laughter most often associated with farce. The second addresses Sweeney Todd as melodrama, examining the ways in which Sondheim’s music and lyrics imply an onstage gestural life that both supports and pushes beyond traditional audience expectations for engagement in the fear and delight related to melodrama. Finally, I address Into the Woods as romance, analyzing this musical’s relative exploration of concerns based in romantic heroism through the communicative value of its music/lyric/gesture language

Loss of phosphoserine polar group asymmetry and inhibition of cholesterol transport in Jurkat cells treated with cholesterylphosphoserine

Abstract Cholesterylphosphoserine (CPHS) is a synthetic ester of cholesterol showing immunosuppressive activity. In the present study, we have used the T cell line Jurkat to investigate its mechanism of action. CPHS incorporates into cells reaching a molar ratio of 0.23 and 3.9 with the total phospholipid and cholesterol content, without inducing necrosis or apoptosis. CPHS incorporation elicits a dose-dependent binding of fluorescein isothiocyanate-labeled annexin V, suggesting that the steroid distributes in the external leaflet of plasma membrane exposing the phosphoserine group to the external cell environment and inserting the steroid ring into the phospholipid bilayer. In agreement with a preferential steroid association with sphingolipids, CPHS is included in a Triton X-100-insoluble complex when mixed with sphingomyelin and cholesterol. CPHS incorporation inhibits the esterification of low density lipoprotein (LDL)-derived cholesterol, producing a minor influence on the endogenous synthesis of cholesterol and on the acyl-CoA:cholesterol acyltransferase activity. In this effect, CPHS is as potent as progesterone (IC50 of 3.5 μ m ). It is concluded that the insertion of cholesterylphosphoserine (CPHS) in the Jurkat plasma membrane neutralizes the asymmetric distribution of the phosphoserine group and inhibits the movement of cholesterol to the endoplasmic reticulum. As CPHS is a negatively charged steroid, this last effect may be linked to the perturbation of sphingolipid/cholesterol-based microdomains, proposed to play a role in cholesterol trafficking.—Cusinato, F., W. Habeler, F. Calderazzo, F. Nardi, and A. Bruni. Loss of phosphoserine polar group asymmetry and inhibition of cholesterol transport in Jurkat cells treated with cholesterylphosphoserine

Stochastic modelling of transcriptional regulation with applications to circadian genes.

Circadian rhythms, i.e. rhythms exhibiting a cyclic behaviour with a period of approximately 24 hours, are present in the metabolism of most living organisms. The transcriptional processes, i.e. the processes associated with mRNA synthesis, critically contribute to their origination, and are responsible for most of the mechanisms which regulate gene expression levels in cells. Inhibition or activation of a putative transcriptionally regulated ‘child’ gene can be achieved via binding of proteins called transcription factors (TFs) to the gene promoter, a region of the DNA containing protein-specific binding sites. In this work, we investigate modelling and inference approaches for different scenarios of circadian transcriptional regulation. We focus on a system which comprises two transcription factors and a regulated child gene. We first perform parameter inference in the context of state-space models on simulated data from a mechanistic stochastic model describing this scenario. Additionally, we investigate the effect of data aggregation across different cells, and derive the smoothing equations for a destructive sampling scenario. In the second part of this work, we consider a situation in which an important regulator of a child gene has not been observed. We apply our model to mRNA expression levels of a subset of circadian genes of the Arabidopsis Thaliana model plant. Inference is in this case aimed at estimating both the model parameters and the unobserved transcription factor profile. We compare a posteriori the inferred transcription factor profiles with available time-series data for one important circadian regulator in the Arabidopsis Thaliana, namely late elongated hypocotyl (LHY), and identify similarities for a several genes known to belong to the central clock. Finally, we focus on a scenario of transcriptional regulation which includes an auto-regulatory negative feedback loop. This modelling framework is motivated by the availability of spatio-temporal imaging data of genes belonging to the mammalian central clock in mice suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), and in particular here we focus on Cry1. We introduce a distributed delay to account for nuclear export, translation, protein complex formation, and nuclear import, of the molecular species involved. To perform inference, we develop a novel filtering algorithm that can be applied to any system with distributed delays. We finally apply the methodology to Cry-luc spatio-temporal data, and find that parameter estimates are spatially distributed, with a marked difference between central and peripheral SCN regions

Development and Testing of Pt/Al2O3 Catalysts for Hydrogen Peroxide Decomposition

Supported Pt/Al2O3 and Pt/SiC catalysts for hydrogen peroxide (HP) decomposition have been prepared by means of two innovative implantation techniques on spheres and granules of several alumina-based carriers (lanthanum-doped alumina, bimodal delta –alumina and theta –alumina, silicon carbide and alpha–alumina) with BET surface areas between 4 and 200 m2/g. In order to evaluate the chemical activity and thermal shock resistance of the supporting pellets, two focused sets of experiments have been carried out in a specifically-designed test bench. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) measurements of the platinum load on the supporting surface have been used to assess the effectiveness of the deposition and monitor the degradation induced by hydrogen peroxide decomposition. Two of the Pt/α−Al2O3 catalysts showed excellent activity, high thermo-mechanical strength, and negligible loss of platinum after repeated cycles of hydrogen peroxide decomposition. In addition, h..

Создатели ядерного щита

The first example of a crystallographically established bis-adduct of tridentate 2,2':6',2:6',2"'-quaterpyridine (qtpy) of formula [Fe(qtpy)(2)][ClO4](2) has been obtained by treating an aqueous solution of iron(II) perchlorate with the ligand in the presence of triethylamine

Head covering and SUDEP: Lessons from sudden infant death syndrome

Universidade Federal de São Paulo EPM UNIFESP, Escola Paulista Med, Disciplina Neurol Expt, São Paulo, BrazilUniversidade Federal de São Paulo EPM UNIFESP, Escola Paulista Med, Disciplina Neurol Expt, São Paulo, BrazilWeb of Scienc