Lipid Coated Gold Nanoparticle Cores: Synthesis and Characterization

Including environmental, industrial, and biomedical sciences, applications of gold nanoparticles are on the forefront of research in many areas. By altering the surface treatment of spherical gold nanoparticle cores, particularly those smaller than 100 nm (nanometers), one can influence their potential use in a number of ways. Lipid coated nanoparticles with specifically selected surface ligands can be used for multiple biomedical functions, including medical imaging, for use as colorimetric and plasmonic sensors within the body, and as cell or organelle specific targets for therapeutic drug delivery or cancer treatment. Here, spherical gold nanoparticles ranging in size from 8-40 nm (avg. diameter 23-48 nm) have been synthesized and coated with poly(allylamine hydrochloride) (PAH) and a mixed lipid solution of 1:1 1-palmitoyl-2-oleoyl-sn-glycero-3-phospho-L-serine (POPS) and lysophosphatidylcholine (LPC), two of the four major types of lipids found in the human body. Characterization was performed using a NanoSight LM10HS particle sizer, and shows a gradual increase in size after each step in the coating process for nanoparticle cores ranging in size from 16-27 nm. The thickness of these purified and lipid coated nanoparticles was consistently 2-3 times that of the PAH coated sample it was layered onto, suggesting a successful, multi-layered coat that ranges in size based on the PAH coated core size. UV-Vis spectroscopy shows a slight red shift, indicating an increase in size and change in refractive index, which supports the presence of lipid coating on the PAH coated gold nanoparticle cores

Twenty-Five Years of Change in Spruce Grouse Occupancy at Their Southern Range Margin in Maine, USA

Species at their southern range margin are often dispersed throughout fragmented populations where they experience less optimum conditions compared to their central range. Spruce Grouse (Falcipennis canadensis) are boreal forest obligates distributed throughout the Northern United States and Canada and reach their southeastern range extent in Maine. I resurveyed 18 Black Spruce (Picea mariana) – Tamarack (Larix laricina) stands on Mount Desert Island, Maine, to observe changes in Spruce Grouse occupancy and abundance between the early 1990s (Whitcomb et al. 1996) and present day. I conducted two rounds of call back surveys within each stand from April to May, 2017. I used iButton units to collect stand-level temperature and humidity data for a three-week period starting July 25th, at the 18 sites to examine relationships between these variables and stand occupancy. Single-season occupancy models predicted that Spruce Grouse would occupy 0.226 (±0.100 SE) of stands with a detection probability of 0.857 (±0.141 SE). I only found 7 individuals. I found that stands which remained occupied were larger ( = 82.8ha) than unoccupied stands ( = 14.0ha), however, there was limited statistical support for this difference. There was no relationship between average daily maximum temperature and average daily humidity per stand and Spruce Grouse occupancy. Stand occupancy decreased from 8 stands to 4 when compared to the Whitcomb et al. (1996) study, and the number of individuals observed decreased from 39 individuals in 1993 to 7 individuals in 2017. My results suggest that over a span of 25 years Spruce Grouse populations on Mount Desert Island have decreased. Potential reasons for decline include habitat loss to development and loss of horizontal cover within stands due to forest succession

Pissing in Political Cisterns, or Laughing Into the Pot of The Flight 93 Election

Laughter can provoke both cultural catharsis and sociopolitical critique. However, in an era of Trumpism, laughter has become troubled by vulgar rhetoric of shrugging off comic possibilities insofar as the act of “laughing-at” has overtaken US media culture. This essay argues that political laughter in the shadow of President Donald J. Trump is at risk of being enervated by an overwhelming sense of humorless ridicule. Nowhere is this more apparent than the infamous manifesto, “The Flight 93 Election,” which makes Trumpism into the laughable outgrowth of a crude comicality so prevalent in democratic—and anti-democratic—affairs

Bawdy Blows: VET Tv and the Comedy of Combat Masculinity

It is a practical truism that hypermasculine rules of engagement pervade U.S. military culture. Veteran Television (VET Tv), the self-proclaimed “Comedy Central of the military,” amplifies it to the ribald. This article takes up the online network’s contention that bloodthirstiness, indecency, cocksureness, and libidinous impudence characterize the new normal of the post-9/11 male soldier. By examining its comic framework for aligning bawdry with masculinity in bello (in or at war), I argue that VET Tv promotes the vice of male decadence in the guise of military virtue, particularly by making women the stooges for flippant misogyny, unadulterated maleness, and warlike eroticism on the home front

Putting holes in holey geometry: Topology change for arbitrary surfaces

This paper presents a method for computing topology changes for triangle meshes in an interactive geometric modeling environment. Most triangle meshes in practice do not exhibit desirable geometric properties, so we develop a solution that is independent of standard assumptions and robust to geometric errors. Specifically, we provide the first method for topology change applicable to arbitrary non-solid, non-manifold, non-closed, self-intersecting surfaces. We prove that this new method for topology change produces the expected conventional results when applied to solid (closed, manifold, non-self-intersecting) surfaces---that is, we prove a backwards-compatibility property relative to prior work. Beyond solid surfaces, we present empirical evidence that our method remains tolerant to a variety of surface aberrations through the incorporation of a novel error correction scheme. Finally, we demonstrate how topology change applied to non-solid objects enables wholly new and useful behaviors

Trumping Tropes with Joke(r)s: The Daily Show “Plays the Race Card”

The race card is at once a trope and a topic that reductively prefigures racial meaning and performance. As a trope, it frames most racial discourse as a cheat or violation and thus prevents deliberation over material realities of race. As a topic, it exists as a resource for diminishing the social and political significance of persistent racial problems. We argue that The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (TDS) deploys political humor as a troping device that disrupts the contradictory logics of race card rhetoric and disorders a range of reductive commonplaces and figures of racial discourses. Specifically, we maintain that TDS pushes the boundaries of everyday negotiations of race, performs alternative conventions, and models manners of thinking, speaking, and acting useful for contemporary understandings of race. This essay therefore enhances the contemporary body of scholarship on politics and humor while expanding upon analyses of the rhetoricity of race and race relations