‘Savage times come again’ : Morel, Wells, and the African Soldier, c.1885-1920

The African soldier trained in western combat was a figure of fear and revulsion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My article examines representations of African soldiers in nonfictional writings by E.D. Morel about the Congo Free State (1885-1908), the same author’s reportage on African troops in post-First World War Germany, and H.G. Wells’s speculative fiction When the Sleeper Wakes (1899, 1910). In each text racist and anti-colonialist discourses converge in representing the African soldier as the henchman of corrupt imperialism. His alleged propensity for taboo crimes of cannibalism and rape are conceived as threats to white safety and indeed supremacy. By tracing Wells’s connections to the Congo reform campaign and situating his novel between two phases of Morel’s writing career, I interpret When the Sleeper Wakes as neither simply a reflection of past events in Africa or as a prediction of future ones in Europe. It is rather a transcultural text which reveals the impact of European culture upon the ‘Congo atrocities’, and the inscription of this controversy upon European popular cultural forms and social debates

Spatial and temporal patterns of Ellenberg nutrient values in forests of Germany and adjacent regions - a survey based on phytosociological databases

Within the last 30 years the role of nitrogen in Central European forests has changed fundamentally from limiting resource to environmental problem. As the retrospective tracking of nutrient availability by soil chemical and biogeochemical measurements faces serious problems, bioindication based on understorey species composition is indispensable for monitoring broad-scale eutrophication. Based on a broad survey of more than 100,000 forest vegetation plots accessible in electronic data-bases from Germany and adjacent countries, we calculated unweighted average Ellenberg nutrient values (mN) as a proxy of plant-available macronutrients. Based on the quantiles of the frequency distribution of mN in a regionally stratified sample, we define five trophic classes, which can be used to compare dimensionless mN values. We studied spatial patterns of average nutrient values within 17 regions and compared the periods from 1899 to 1975 and 1976 to 2006. After 1975 eutrophic (mN > 5.67) and hypertrophic (mN > 6.28) conditions were common everywhere except in the Alps and Saxony-Anhalt, but very oligotrophic conditions (mN <3.44) were still widespread in regions with nutrient-poor bedrock. Before 1975 mN of plots had been lower than after 1975 in all but the southeastern regions. Between the pre- and post-1975 data the proportion of hypertrophic plots increased from 5.7 to 11.8%, and that of very oligo-trophic plots decreased from 14.6 to 8.3%. To remove bias resulting from uneven distribution, the dataset was stratified by five tree layer dom-inance types, period and region and resampled. In pre-1975 plots medians of mN increased in the order Pinus sylvestris, Quercus spp., Picea abies, Fagus sylvatica and Alnus spp, whereas the increase of mN was highest in forest types with historically low nutrient values. Therefore, the widespread change in mN must be attributed to the pronounced vegetation changes in Quercus and Pinus stands, indicating the importance of land-use change, i.e. recovery of nutrient cycles after hundreds of years of exploita-tion through coppicing, grazing and litter use. The analysis confirms eutrophication as a megatrend of modern vegetation change and demonstrates the high research potential of linking vegetation plot databases across large regions. Keywords: bioindication, Central Europe, Ellenberg indicator values, eutrophication, nitrogen deposi-tion, soil nutrients, vegetation-plot dat

Search for Neutrino-Induced Cascades with AMANDA

We report on a search for electro-magnetic and/or hadronic showers (cascades) induced by high energy neutrinos in the data collected with the AMANDA II detector during the year 2000. The observed event rates are consistent with the expectations for atmospheric neutrinos and muons. We place upper limits on a diffuse flux of extraterrestrial electron, tau and muon neutrinos. A flux of neutrinos with a spectrum $\Phi \propto E^{-2}$ which consists of an equal mix of all flavors, is limited to $E^2 \Phi(E)=8.6 x 10^{-7} GeV/(cm^{2} s sr)$ at a 90% confidence level for a neutrino energy range 50 TeV to 5 PeV. We present bounds for specific extraterrestrial neutrino flux predictions. Several of these models are ruled out.Comment: 18 pages, 12 figure

Interaction of inflammatory cytokines and erythropoeitin in iron metabolism and erythropoiesis in anaemia of chronic disease

In chronic inflammatory conditions increased endogenous release of specific cytokines (TNFα, IL-1, IL-6, IFNγ and others) is presumed. It has been shown that those of monocyte lineage play a key role in cytokine expression and synthesis. This may be associated with changes in iron metabolism and impaired erythropoiesis and may lead to development of anaemia in patients with rheumatoid arthritis. Firstly, increased synthesis of acute phase proteins, like ferritin, during chronic inflammation is proposed as the way by which the toxic effect of iron and thereby the synthesis of free oxy-radicals causing the damage on the affected joints, may be reduced. This is associated with a shift of iron towards the mononuclear phagocyte system which may participate in the development of anaemia of chronic disease. Secondly, an inhibitory action of inflammatory cytokines (TNFα, IL-1), on proliferation and differentiation of erythroid progenitors as well as on synthesis of erythropoietin has been shown, thereby also contributing to anaemia. Finally, chronic inflammation causes multiple, complex disturbances in the delicate physiologic equilibrium of interaction between cytokines and cells (erythroid progenitors, cells of mononuclear phagocyte system and erythropoietin producing cells) leading to development of anaemia of chronic disease (Fig. 1)

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Different degradation pathways for glucose and fructose in Rhodopseudomonas capsulata.

In Rhodopseudomonas capsulata the enzymes of the Entner-Doudoroff pathway and the Embden-Meyerhof pathway have been examined. Fructose-grown cells contained inducible activities of phosphoenolpyruvate-fructosephospho-transferase and 1-phosphofructokinase and only low levels of fructokinase and 6-phosphofructokinase. Although fructose-grown cells contained, in addition, all the enzymes of the Entner-Doudoroff pathway together with fructose-1,6-diphosphatase and phosphoglucose isomerase, the Entner-Doudoroff pathway was not operative in fructose catabolism and served only the degradation of glucose. The functional separation of glucose and fructose catabolism via the Entner-Doudoroff and a modified Embden-Meyerhof pathway, respectively, was confirmed by different approaches: 1. Radiorespirometric experiments with glucose and fructose labelled in positions 1, 2, 3+4 and 6 have been carried out. The pattern of 14CO2-evolution from position-labelled glucose was characteristic for the Entner-Doudoroff pathway, that from position-labelled fructose for the Embden-Meyerhof pathway. 2. In the presence of arsenite up to 50% of glucose-and fructose-carbon was excreted as pyruvate. Using 1-14C-glucose, 86% of the pyruvate was labelled in the carboxyl group, whereas using 1-14C-fructose only 19% of the pyruvate was labelled in the carboxyl group. 3. A glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase-deficient mutant was isolated which lacked a functional Entner-Doudoroff pathway but which was unaltered in its ability to grow on fructose