331 research outputs found

    Gender and "History": 1980s South African Women's Stories in English

    Get PDF

    Bodies of Writing: Recovering the Past in Zoe Wicomb’s David’s Story and Elleke Boehmer’s Bloodlines

    Get PDF
    There are remarkable similarities between Zoe Wicomb’s David’s Story and Elleke Boehmer’s Bloodlines which were published in 2000. Both present characters, classified as coloured under the race categories of apartheid, who are compelled to re-examine their past, and both texts set this endeavour in the South Africa of 1990-91 which they represent as a time of euphoria and fear-filled uncertainty. The resistance movements had just been unbanned and leaders released from prison, and an interim constitution was being drawn up so that a government of national unity could oversee the country’s first democratic elections in 1994. At the same time, as previously exiled revolutionary groupings re-established themselves in the country, rumours of counter-coups circulated and ordinary people were subjected to a decade of continuing terror as various factions either enforced or resisted change

    Areas of the Mind: "The Memoirs of a Survivor" and Doris Lessing's African Stories

    Get PDF

    Optimisation of post-drawing treatments by means of neutron diffraction

    Full text link
    The mechanical properties and the durability of cold-drawn eutectoid wires (especially in aggressive environments) are influenced by the residual stresses generated during the drawing process. Steelmakers have devised procedures (thermomechanical treatments after drawing) attempting to relieve them in order to improve wire performance. In thiswork neutron diffraction measurements have been used to ascertain the role of temperature and applied force – during post-drawing treatments – on the residual stresses of five rod batches with different treatments. The results show that conventional thermomechanical treatments are successful in relieving the residual stresses created by cold-drawing, although these procedures can be improved by changing the temperature or the stretching force. Knowledge of the residual stress profiles after these changes is a useful tool to improve the thermomechanical treatments instead of the empirical procedures used currently

    Combining community wastewater genomic surveillance with state clinical surveillance: A framework for SARS-CoV-2 public health practice

    Get PDF
    Study objective: To garner a framework for combining community wastewater surveillance with state clinical surveillance that influence confirmation of SARS-CoV-2 variants within the community, and recommend how the flow of such research evidence could be expanded and employed for public health response. Design, setting, and participants: This work involved analyzing wastewater samples collected weekly from 17 geographically resolved locations in Louisville/Jefferson County, Kentucky from February 10 to November 29, 2021. Genomic surveillance and RT-qPCR platforms were used as screening to identify SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater, and state clinical surveillance was used for confirmation. Main results: The results demonstrate increased epidemiological value of combining community wastewater genomic surveillance and RT-qPCR with conventional case auditing methods. The spatial scale and temporal frequency of wastewater sampling provides promising sensitivity and specificity to be useful to gain public health screening insights about community emergence, seeding, and spread. Conclusions: Better national surveillance systems are needed for future pathogens and variants, and wastewater-based genomic surveillance represents opportune coupling. This paper presents current evidence that complementary wastewater and clinical testing is enhanced cost-effectively when linked; making a strong case for a joint public health framework. The findings suggest significant potential for rapid progress to be made in extending this work to consider pathogens of interest as a whole within wastewater, which could be examined in either a targeted fashion as we currently do with SARS-CoV-2 or in terms of a global monitoring of all pathogens found, and developing evidence based public health practice to best support community health

    Detection of human, porcine and canine picornaviruses in municipal sewage sludge using pan-enterovirus amplicon-based long-read Illumina sequencing

    Get PDF
    We describe the successful detection of human, porcine and canine picornaviruses (CanPV) in sewage sludge (at each stage of treatment) from Louisville, Kentucky, USA, using Pan-enterovirus amplicon-based long-read Illumina sequencing. Based on publicly available sequence data in GenBank, this is the first detection of CanPV in the USA and the first detection globally using wastewater-based epidemiology. Our findings also suggest there might be clusters of endemic porcine enterovirus (which have been shown capable of causing systemic infection in porcine) circulation in the USA that have not been sampled for around two decades. Our findings highlight the value of WBE coupled with amplicon based long-read Illumina sequencing for virus surveillance and demonstrates this approach can provide an avenue that supports a “One Health” model to virus surveillance. Finally, we describe a new CanPV assay targeting the capsid protein gene region that can be used globally, especially in resource limited settings for its detection and molecular epidemiology

    The pattern of gray matter atrophy in Parkinson’s disease differs in cortical and subcortical regions

    Get PDF
    Cortical and subcortical gray matter (GM) atrophy may progress differently during the course of Parkinson's disease (PD). We delineated and compared the longitudinal pattern of these PD-related changes
    • …
    corecore