Rapidly solidified NiAl and FeAl

Melt spinning was used to produce rapidly solidified ribbons of the B2 intermetallics NiAl and FeAl. Both Fe-40Al and Fe-45Al possessed some bend ductility in the as spun condition. The bend ductility of Fe-40Al, Fe-45Al, and equiatomic NiAl increased with subsequent heat treatment. Heat treatment at approximately 0.85 T (sub m) resulted in significant grain growth in equiatomic FeAl and in all the NiAl compositions. Low bend ductility in both FeAl and NiAl generally coincided with intergranular failure, while increased bend ductility was characterized by increasing amounts of transgranular cleavage fracture

Climate change impact on Western Australian mixed farm systems

Primary enterprises are expected to contend with more frequent climate crises, environmental degradation and even climate-related regulatory change (IPCC, 2014). These stressors occur against an existing backdrop of conventional drivers including economic, biophysical, institutional, cultural and political pressures (Marshall et al., 2012). Australia’s primary industries have historically operated in a highly variable climate and this has posed significant challenges to production, requiring sound and responsive risk management practices. Climate change, brings with it a number of new challenges not yet accounted for by Australian primary producers, and so understanding the scale of these impacts is of importance in undertsanding the changing nature of agricultural risk in the near future. Western Australia with about 4 million ha of wheat production is a major contributor to the Australian agrifood sector and economy. Like cereal production, pastures in WA play a major role in agricultural enterprises and contribute over $3 billion annually through animal production, improvements to crop rotations and conserved fodder (The Department of Agriculture and Food, 2014). Farming profitably in the Western Australia in recent years has been a challenge due in part to declines in annual rainfall as well as exposure to both heat and cold teperature extremes (McConnell & O’Hare, 2013), although lower production might be still profitable. Climate drives the productivity, profitability and environmental health of these systems as they often have to respond to low and variable rainfall. Here we identify the likely effect of climate change in 2030 on mixed farm systems of the Western Australia across a climate transect in terms of production, profit, and environmental impacts for projected climate scenarios in 2030 relative to the baseline of 1980-1999. This work will give insight for designing strategies to respond to changes in climate such as optimized shift towards more intensive livestock systems, dual-purpose cropping, etc

Hedgehog signaling regulates dental papilla formation and tooth size during zebrafish odontogenesis

Intercellular communication by the hedgehog cell signaling pathway is necessary for tooth development throughout the vertebrates, but it remains unclear which specific developmental signals control cell behavior at different stages of odontogenesis. To address this issue, we have manipulated hedgehog activity during zebrafish tooth development and visualized the results using confocal microscopy. Results: We first established that reporter lines for dlx2b, fli1, NF-κB, and prdm1a are markers for specific subsets of tooth germ tissues. We then blocked hedgehog signaling with cyclopamine and observed a reduction or elimination of the cranial neural crest derived dental papilla, which normally contains the cells that later give rise to dentin-producing odontoblasts. Upon further investigation, we observed that the dental papilla begins to form and then regresses in the absence of hedgehog signaling, through a mechanism unrelated to cell proliferation or apoptosis. We also found evidence of an isometric reduction in tooth size that correlates with the time of earliest hedgehog inhibition. Conclusions: We hypothesize that these results reveal a previously uncharacterized function of hedgehog signaling during tooth morphogenesis, regulating the number of cells in the dental papilla and thereby controlling tooth size

Linking adaptation science to action to build food secure Pacific Island communities

Climate change is a major threat to food security in Pacific Island countries, with declines in food production and increasing variability in food supplies already evident across the region. Such impacts have already led to observed consequences for human health, safety and economic prosperity. Enhancing the adaptive capacity of Pacific Island communities is one way to reduce vulnerability and is underpinned by the extent to which people can access, understand and use new knowledge to inform their decision-making processes. However, effective engagement of Pacific Island communities in climate adaption remains variable and is an ongoing and significant challenge. Here, we use a qualitative research approach to identify the impediments to engaging Pacific Island communities in the adaptations needed to safeguard food security. The main barriers include cultural differences between western science and cultural knowledge, a lack of trust among local communities and external scientists, inappropriate governance structures, and a lack of political and technical support. We identify the importance of adaptation science, local social networks, key actors (i.e., influential and trusted individuals), and relevant forms of knowledge exchange as being critical to overcoming these barriers. We also identify the importance of co-ordination with existing on-ground activities to effectively leverage, as opposed to duplicating, capacity

Provinciality and the Art World: The Midland Group 1961- 1977

This paper takes as its focus the Midland Group Gallery in order to first, make a case for the consideration of the geographies of art galleries. Second, highlight the importance of galleries in the context of cultural geographies of the sixties. Third, discuss the role of provinciality in the operation of art worlds. In so doing it explicates one set of geographies surrounding the gallery – those of the local, regional and international networks that connected to produce art works and art space. It reveals how the interactions between places and practices outside of metropolitan and regional hierarchies provides a more nuanced insight into how art worlds operated during the sixties, a period of growing internationalism of art, and how contested definitions of the provincial played an integral role in this. The paper charts the operations of the Midland Group Gallery and the spaces that it occupied to demonstrate how it was representative of a post-war discourse of provincialism and a corresponding re-evaluation of regional cultural activity

Photography as an act of collaboration

The camera is usually considered to be a passive tool under the control of the operator. This definition implicitly constrains how we use the medium, as well as how we look at – and what we see in – its interpretations of scenes, objects, events and ‘moments’. This text will suggest another way of thinking about – and using – the photographic medium. Based on the evidence of photographic practice (mine and others’), I will suggest that, as a result of the ways in which the medium interprets, juxtaposes and renders the elements in front of the lens, the camera is capable of depicting scenes, events and moments that did not exist and could not have existed until brought into being by the act of photographing them. Accordingly, I will propose that the affective power of many photographs is inseparable from their ‘photographicness’ – and that the photographic medium should therefore be considered as an active collaborator in the creation of uniquely photographic images

Foucault, the museum and the diagram

Foucault’s work on the museum is partial and fragmentary but provides an interesting opportunity through which to explore issues of power, subjectivity and imagination. Following a discussion of Deleuze’s reading of Foucault and his introduction of the issue of diagram as a way of understanding the discursive and visual operation of power, the paper explores some of Foucault’s work from the period around 1967-9 on the non-relation to explore how he engaged with the question of seeing/saying that Deleuze identifies as a key problematic in his work. Through analysis of Foucault’s discussions of the themes of the outside, heterotopia and the work of the painter Manet, in the context of the museum, the paper explores how power operating through the diagram of the museum allows us to understand the space of imagination as one in which subjectivity is constituted

A rapid assessment framework for food system shocks: lessons learned from COVID-19 in the Indo-Pacific region

The frequency and severity of shocks to food systems is accelerating globally, exemplified by the current COVID-19 outbreak. In low- and middle-income countries, the impacts have exacerbated existing food system vulnerabilities and poverty. Governments and donors must respond quickly, but few tools are available that identify interventions to build food system resilience, or emerging opportunities for transformation. In this paper we reflect on the application of a systems-based rapid assessment which we applied across 11 Indo-Pacific countries in May-July 2020. Our approach was shaped by three design parameters: the integration of key informants’ perspectives engaged remotely within the countries, applicability to diverse food systems and COVID-19 experiences across the region, and the consideration of food systems as complex systems. For the rapid assessment we adopted an analytical framework proposed by Allen and Prosperi (2016). To include a development lens, we added the analysis of vulnerable groups and their exposure, impacts, recovery potential and resilience, and pro-poor interventions. We concluded that the framework and approach facilitated integration and triangulation of disparate knowledge types and data to identify priority interventions and was sufficiently flexible to be applied across food systems, at both national, sub-national and commodity scales. The step-wise method was simple and enabled structured inquiry and reporting. Although the systems concepts appeared more easily transferrable to key informants in some countries than others, potentially transformational interventions were identified, and also some risks of maladaptation. We present a refined framework that emphasises analysis of political, economic and institutional drivers of exposure and vulnerability, the constraints that they pose for building recovery potential and resilience, and trade-offs amongst winners and losers inherent in proposed interventions

Introduction : narcissism, melancholia and the subject of community.

Sigmund Freud’s twin papers, ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’ (1914) and ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917 [1915]), take as their formative concern the difficulty of setting apart the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ worlds, and of preserving a stable image of a boundaried self. Whilst it is true that the term narcissism especially has come to be deployed in ways that seem foreign to the complexities of Freud’s 1914 paper (by its reduction to a personality disorder or its use as a broad-brush cultural diagnosis), we suggest in this introductory chapter that neither narcissism nor melancholia can be thought about today without expressing some debt to Freudian metapsychology. However, whereas Freud was most evidently concerned to describe the structure of ego-formation, subsequent commentators have preferred to emphasize the cultural and normative dimensions of these terms. Accordingly, we consider the respective discursive histories of narcissism and melancholia and find that although they have been put to work in very different ways they remain grounded by a shared concern with mechanisms of relation and identification. Indeed, this shared concern is the basis upon which they’ve been most productively reanimated in recent years: the rise of melancholia as a critical aid to the study of cultural displacement and dispossession, and the determined redemption of narcissism from its pejorative characterization as fundamentally anti-social. We argue that what is most noteworthy in this post-Freudian literature is the increasing relevance of metapsychology to social and political theory. The language of psychoanalysis, extrapolated from the clinic, permits a detailed examination of the boundaries which construct and challenge the terms of social solidarity. Specifically, this takes place though careful reading of the complex practices of (dis)identification at the heart of ego-formation (at both individual and group levels), and the associated mechanisms of defence, for example: introjection, incorporation, projective-identification, and splitting. By recognising the complexity of how communities get made, and connecting this with recent literature on counter publics and the commons, we demonstrate that Freud’s frameworks of narcissism and melancholia remain essential for any contemporary understanding of political association