OHH HE LIKES THE GIRLS: A GENEALOGY OF THE “TRANNY CHASER”

Research presented in this project examines how the social construction of sexuality affects cisgender (cis) men\u27s attraction to transgender women. While mainstream discourse roots gender normative males\u27 attraction to transgender women in heterosexuality, this project demonstrates how cis-trans pairings emerged from homosexuality in the twentieth century. This project traces the way sexologists\u27 elaboration of the differences between sex, gender, and sexuality helped to distinguish transfeminine people from trans-attracted gender normative males using Foucauldian genealogy. Further, this project examines how researchers have adapted nineteenth-century frameworks of same-sex desires as sexual fetishes to construct gender-conforming “healthy” desires aimed at transsexual women by using the elaboration of these categories in the science of transsexualism. By doing so, this project illustrates how researchers deemphasized the body of trans people and elevated their gender to ensure a white middle-class cis-normative society

The importance of unique populations for conservation: the case of the Great Orme’s Head grayling butterfly Hipparchia semele (Linnaeus, 1758) (Lepidoptera: Satyrinae)

Small populations with unusual characteristics subject to extreme conditions provide opportunities for exploring adaptability in the face of environmental changes. Two sets of data have been examined to determine how unusual is the population of Hipparchia semele on the Great Orme’s Head, North Wales, compared with other sites in the UK. The population on the Great Orme is shown to have unique features, including significantly reduced wing expanse and wing ocellation and extreme flight period characteristics. Analyses of flight period data from the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme (UKBMS) using over a 100 sites reveals that, although the Great Orme population is one of a number of sites from the Channel Islands to northern Scotland with an early mean flight period, it has by far the earliest flight period and longest flight period of all populations—the latter raising the mean flight period date. Furthermore the unique characteristics of H. semele on the Orme may well be underestimated, inasmuch as sampling of individuals for the phenotype study is incomplete, including only the area along the North Wales coast into Cheshire, while the UKBMS transect is restricted to the south-west portion of the headland. Unique populations are often accorded focused conservation effort; especially potential flagship species in decline as in the case of British H. semele. As the Great Orme population presents a rare opportunity for studying adaptations in an extreme local environment, particularly considering current projections for climate changes, we advocate further research and attention being given to this unusual population

Ten Years of Affordable Housing Policy: Is Maine Making Progress-- A Symposium

In December 1987 Governor McKernan appointed a 30-member, statewide task force to address the issue of affordable housing in Maine. The task force was charged with investigating the quality and cost of affordable housing for lower- and middle-income families, and recommending a set of actions to improve the quality of existing housing as well as to increase the supply of housing. In September 1998 the Task Force issued a report that prescribed a number of local and regional—as well as private and public—solutions to the problem of affordable housing. More than ten years later Maine housing advocates note that the state’s “crisis” in affordable housing has returned. Housing markets are tight and, particularly in southern Maine, there is a shortage of affordable housing options for middle- and low-income families. In dealing with the current dearth of affordable housing, policymakers may find it useful to reflect back on the recommendations put forward little more than a decade ago. In this symposium, MPR asked four individuals with long-standing commitments to the issue of housing to comment on the recommendations put forth by the 1988 Task Force: Did Maine accomplish what it said was important ten years ago? Do the Task Force’s recommendations offer sound advice now

The amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer's disease at 25 years

Abstract Despite continuing debate about the amyloid β‐protein (or Aβ hypothesis, new lines of evidence from laboratories and clinics worldwide support the concept that an imbalance between production and clearance of Aβ42 and related Aβ peptides is a very early, often initiating factor in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Confirmation that presenilin is the catalytic site of γ‐secretase has provided a linchpin: all dominant mutations causing early‐onset AD occur either in the substrate (amyloid precursor protein, APP) or the protease (presenilin) of the reaction that generates Aβ. Duplication of the wild‐type APP gene in Down's syndrome leads to Aβ deposits in the teens, followed by microgliosis, astrocytosis, and neurofibrillary tangles typical of AD. Apolipoprotein E4, which predisposes to AD in > 40% of cases, has been found to impair Aβ clearance from the brain. Soluble oligomers of Aβ42 isolated from AD patients' brains can decrease synapse number, inhibit long‐term potentiation, and enhance long‐term synaptic depression in rodent hippocampus, and injecting them into healthy rats impairs memory. The human oligomers also induce hyperphosphorylation of tau at AD‐relevant epitopes and cause neuritic dystrophy in cultured neurons. Crossing human APP with human tau transgenic mice enhances tau‐positive neurotoxicity. In humans, new studies show that low cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) Aβ42 and amyloid‐PET positivity precede other AD manifestations by many years. Most importantly, recent trials of three different Aβ antibodies (solanezumab, crenezumab, and aducanumab) have suggested a slowing of cognitive decline in post hoc analyses of mild AD subjects. Although many factors contribute to AD pathogenesis, Aβ dyshomeostasis has emerged as the most extensively validated and compelling therapeutic target

Conservation in the age of gentrification: historic cities from the 1960s

A joint review of three books (Françoise Choay's "Le patrimoine en questions", Loretta Lees, Tom Slater and Elvin Wyly's "Gentrification" and John Pendlebury's "Conservation in the Age of Consensus") that discusses some recent trends in the study of the history of urban conservatio

Greene's Residue Criterion for the Breakup of Invariant Tori of Volume-Preserving Maps

Invariant tori play a fundamental role in the dynamics of symplectic and volume-preserving maps. Codimension-one tori are particularly important as they form barriers to transport. Such tori foliate the phase space of integrable, volume-preserving maps with one action and $d$ angles. For the area-preserving case, Greene's residue criterion is often used to predict the destruction of tori from the properties of nearby periodic orbits. Even though KAM theory applies to the three-dimensional case, the robustness of tori in such systems is still poorly understood. We study a three-dimensional, reversible, volume-preserving analogue of Chirikov's standard map with one action and two angles. We investigate the preservation and destruction of tori under perturbation by computing the "residue" of nearby periodic orbits. We find tori with Diophantine rotation vectors in the "spiral mean" cubic algebraic field. The residue is used to generate the critical function of the map and find a candidate for the most robust torus.Comment: laTeX, 40 pages, 26 figure

Garden varieties: how attractive are recommended garden plants to butterflies?

One way the public can engage in insect conservation is through wildlife gardening, including the growing of insect-friendly flowers as sources of nectar. However, plant varieties differ in the types of insects they attract. To determine which garden plants attracted which butterflies, we counted butterflies nectaring on 11 varieties of summer-flowering garden plants in a rural garden in East Sussex, UK. These plants were all from a list of 100 varieties considered attractive to British butterflies, and included the five varieties specifically listed by the UK charity Butterfly Conservation as best for summer nectar. A total of 2659 flower visits from 14 butterfly and one moth species were observed. We performed a principal components analysis which showed contrasting patterns between the species attracted to Origanum vulgare and Buddleia davidii. The “butterfly bush” Buddleia attracted many nymphalines, such as the peacock, Inachis io, but very few satyrines such as the gatekeeper, Pyronia tithonus, which mostly visited Origanum. Eupatorium cannibinum had the highest Simpson’s Diversity score of 0.75, while Buddleia and Origanum were lower, scoring 0.66 and 0.50 respectively. No one plant was good at attracting all observed butterfly species, as each attracted only a subset of the butterfly community. We conclude that to create a butterfly-friendly garden, a variety of plant species are required as nectar sources for butterflies. Furthermore, garden plant recommendations can probably benefit from being more precise as to the species of butterfly they attract

Integrated functional visualization of eukaryotic genomes

BACKGROUND: Increasing amounts of data from large scale whole genome analysis efforts demands convenient tools for manipulation, visualization and investigation. Whole genome plots offer an intuitive window to the analysis. We describe two applications that enable users to easily plot and explore whole genome data from their own or other researchers' experiments. RESULTS: STRIPE and GFFtool (General Feature Format Tool) are softwares designed to support integration, visualization and exploration of whole genome data from eukaryotic genomes. STRIPE, in addition to providing a highly customizable and interactive data plot, provides access to numerous well-selected databases with updated information on all genes of a genome. GFFtool provides a user-friendly solution to integrating experimental data with the genomic information available in public databases. They also obviate the need for users to maintain large annotation resources, as they link to well-known resources using standard gene and protein identifiers. CONCLUSION: The programs provide the user with broad genomic overviews of data distribution, fast access to data of interest, and the ability to navigate speedily from one resource to another, and gain a better understanding of result of whole genome analysis experiments

Garden and landscape-scale correlates of moths of differing conservation status: significant effects of urbanization and habitat diversity

Moths are abundant and ubiquitous in vegetated terrestrial environments and are pollinators, important herbivores of wild plants, and food for birds, bats and rodents. In recent years, many once abundant and widespread species have shown sharp declines that have been cited by some as indicative of a widespread insect biodiversity crisis. Likely causes of these declines include agricultural intensification, light pollution, climate change, and urbanization; however, the real underlying cause(s) is still open to conjecture. We used data collected from the citizen science Garden Moth Scheme (GMS) to explore the spatial association between the abundance of 195 widespread British species of moth, and garden habitat and landscape features, to see if spatial habitat and landscape associations varied for species of differing conservation status. We found that associations with habitat and landscape composition were species-specific, but that there were consistent trends in species richness and total moth abundance. Gardens with more diverse and extensive microhabitats were associated with higher species richness and moth abundance; gardens near to the coast were associated with higher richness and moth abundance; and gardens in more urbanized locations were associated with lower species richness and moth abundance. The same trends were also found for species classified as increasing, declining and vulnerable under IUCN (World Conservation Union) criteria