Legal Rights and Issues Surrounding Conception, Pregnancy, and Birth

Advances in medicine are reported almost daily in the media. Medical researchers have developed and are continuing to develop new methods of creating, saving, and prolonging life. This Special Project examines the impact that rapidly advancing medical technology has on the law governing conception, pregnancy, and birth. Although medical techniques have advanced rapidly during the past decades, state and federal legislatures have responded in-adequately to the legal consequences of these new birth technologies. The resulting lag between technology and the law has forced courts to confront new situations that do not fit neatly into the statutory framework created to deal with past fact situations. For example, courts have applied statutes prohibiting child bartering to surrogate parenting cases and statutes prohibiting fetal experimentation to artificial insemination cases although it is clear that the legislators never considered such fact patterns when passing the statutes. A lag is inevitable because the law can only respond to, rather than predict, emerging medical developments. Nonetheless, legislators must respond promptly by confronting the new legal issues that result from new medical technologies. One impediment to prompt legislative response to the lag between medical technology and the law is the controversial nature of the legal problems posed. Abortion continues to be an extremely controversial issue thirteen years after the Supreme Court legalized it in the landmark decision Roe v. Wade. The Baby Doe issue of whether to force hospitals and parents of severely deformed newborns to provide medical care is another extremely controversial issue. Baby Doe has become highly politicized as the Reagan administration, Congress, right-to-life groups, disability groups, medical professionals, and other groups have taken stances. Surrogate parenting also has produced controversial situations. In one incident, a New York couple contracted with a California surrogate mother. When the surrogate mother breached the agreement, the couple brought suit. The court discovered that the couple consisted of a man and a transsexual, thus raising the issue of whether transsexuals or homosexuals should be allowed to adopt children by contracting with surrogate mothers

Technology and Contemporary Classical Music: Methodologies in Practice-Based Research

This position paper provides a distillation of the NCRM Innovation Forum, ‘Technology and Contemporary Classical Music: Methodologies in Creative Practice Research’, hosted by Cyborg Soloists in June 2023. It features contributions from a variety of creative practitioner-researchers to debate the current state and future of technologically focused, practice-based research in contemporary classical music. The position paper is purposefully polyphonic and pluralistic. By collating a range of perspectives, experiences and expertise, the paper seeks to provoke and delineate a space for further questioning, inquiry, and response. The paper will be of interest to those working within creative practice research, particularly in relation to music, music technologists and those interested in research methodologies more broadly

Generalizing Galileons

The Galileons are a set of terms within four-dimensional effective field theories, obeying symmetries that can be derived from the dynamics of a 3+1-dimensional flat brane embedded in a 5-dimensional Minkowski Bulk. These theories have some intriguing properties, including freedom from ghosts and a non-renormalization theorem that hints at possible applications in both particle physics and cosmology. In this brief review article, we will summarize our attempts over the last year to extend the Galileon idea in two important ways. We will discuss the effective field theory construction arising from co-dimension greater than one flat branes embedded in a flat background - the multiGalileons - and we will then describe symmetric covariant versions of the Galileons, more suitable for general cosmological applications. While all these Galileons can be thought of as interesting four-dimensional field theories in their own rights, the work described here may also make it easier to embed them into string theory, with its multiple extra dimensions and more general gravitational backgrounds.Comment: 16 pages; invited brief review article for a special issue of Classical and Quantum Gravity. Submitted to CQ

Integration of kinase and calcium signaling at the level of chromatin underlies inducible gene activation in T cells

TCR signaling pathways cooperate to activate the inducible transcription factors NF-κB, NFAT, and AP-1. In this study, using the calcium ionophore ionomycin and/or PMA on Jurkat T cells, we show that the gene expression program associated with activation of TCR signaling is closely related to specific chromatin landscapes. We find that calcium and kinase signaling cooperate to induce chromatin remodeling at ∼2100 chromatin regions, which demonstrate enriched binding motifs for inducible factors and correlate with target gene expression. We found that these regions typically function as inducible enhancers. Many of these elements contain composite NFAT/AP-1 sites, which typically support cooperative binding, thus further reinforcing the need for cooperation between calcium and kinase signaling in the activation of genes in T cells. In contrast, treatment with PMA or ionomycin alone induces chromatin remodeling at far fewer regions (∼600 and ∼350, respectively), which mostly represent a subset of those induced by costimulation. This suggests that the integration of TCR signaling largely occurs at the level of chromatin, which we propose plays a crucial role in regulating T cell activation

'To live and die [for] Dixie': Irish civilians and the Confederate States of America

Around 20,000 Irishmen served in the Confederate army in the Civil War. As a result, they left behind, in various Southern towns and cities, large numbers of friends, family, and community leaders. As with native-born Confederates, Irish civilian support was crucial to Irish participation in the Confederate military effort. Also, Irish civilians served in various supporting roles: in factories and hospitals, on railroads and diplomatic missions, and as boosters for the cause. They also, however, suffered in bombardments, sieges, and the blockade. Usually poorer than their native neighbours, they could not afford to become 'refugees' and move away from the centres of conflict. This essay, based on research from manuscript collections, contemporary newspapers, British Consular records, and Federal military records, will examine the role of Irish civilians in the Confederacy, and assess the role this activity had on their integration into Southern communities. It will also look at Irish civilians in the defeat of the Confederacy, particularly when they came under Union occupation. Initial research shows that Irish civilians were not as upset as other whites in the South about Union victory. They welcomed a return to normalcy, and often 'collaborated' with Union authorities. Also, Irish desertion rates in the Confederate army were particularly high, and I will attempt to gauge whether Irish civilians played a role in this. All of the research in this paper will thus be put in the context of the Drew Gilpin Faust/Gary Gallagher debate on the influence of the Confederate homefront on military performance. By studying the Irish civilian experience one can assess how strong the Confederate national experiment was. Was it a nation without a nationalism

How hot? How often? Getting the fire frequency and timing right for optimal management of woody cover and pasture composition in northern Australian grazed tropical savannas. Kidman Springs Fire Experiment 1993-2013

Abstract. A long-term (1993-2013) experiment in grazed semiarid tropical savannas in northern Australia tested the impact of varying the frequency (every 2, 4 and 6 years) and season (June -EDS versus October -LDS) of fire compared with unburnt controls on woody cover and pasture composition, in grassland and open woodland. Over an 18-year period, woody cover increased by 4% (absolute) in the woodland even with the most severe (i.e. frequent, late dry season) fire treatments. With less severe or no fire, woody cover increased by 12-17%. In the grassland, woody cover remained static when subjected to LDS fires every 2 or 4 years, but increased by 3-6% under other fire treatments, and by 8% when unburnt. Major shifts in understorey species composition occurred at both sites regardless of fire regime. The effect of fire on herbage mass and composition was compounded by higher grazing after fires. The herbage mass of perennial grasses declined and that of annual grasses and forbs increased following early or frequent fires. Brachyachne convergens, Gomphrena canescens and Flemingia pauciflora increased in response to fire while Aristida latifolia and Heteropogon contortus decreased. Four-yearly LDS fire provided the most effective management of woody cover and pasture composition. Although EDS fire is recommended for biodiversity management and reducing greenhouse gas emissions in wet tropical savannas, on grazed pastoral land, it can promote woodland thickening and pasture degradation. Optimal fire management, therefore, depends on vegetation type, land use and the prevailing seasonal timing and frequency of fire. Additional keywords: fire management, fire season, rangeland management, time since fire

Ramified rolling circle amplification for synthesis of nucleosomal DNA sequences

Nucleosomes are a crucial platform for the recruitment and assembly of protein complexes that process the DNA. Mechanistic and structural in vitro studies typically rely on recombinant nucleosomes that are reconstituted using artificial, strong-positioning DNA sequences. To facilitate such studies on native, genomic nucleosomes, there is a need for methods to produce any desired DNA sequence in an efficient manner. The current methods either do not offer much flexibility in choice of sequence or are less efficient in yield and labor. Here, we show that ramified rolling circle amplification (RCA) can be used to produce milligram amounts of a genomic nucleosomal DNA fragment in a scalable, one-pot reaction overnight. The protocol is efficient and flexible in choice of DNA sequence. It yields 10-fold more product than PCR, and rivals production using plasmids. We demonstrate the approach by producing the genomic DNA from the human LIN28B locus and show that it forms functional nucleosomes capable of binding pioneer transcription factor Oct4