Cruel and Usual: Contaminated Water in New York State Prisons

People who are currently or formerly incarcerated in New York State prisons know that the water inside is often not safe to drink. However, when they advocate for access to clean water, they are regularly met with retaliation and denial. This article brings together firsthand accounts, case law, and ongoing investigations regarding water quality in New York State prisons. Contaminated water is not an anomaly in prisons–it is one of many severe conditions that people in prison are forced to live under which threaten their physical, mental, and emotional health. The daily abuses and harms suffered by incarcerated people are normalized by prison officials, the courts, and accepted societal narratives around crime and punishment. This research was born of firsthand accounts shared by Ramon Henriquez, Phil Miller, and others who have survived or are currently surviving deplorable conditions of incarceration. Section II of the article presents writ- ten versions of two of these accounts, one written firsthand by Phil Miller, the other based on interviews between Shannon Haupt and Ramon Henriquez. Section III summarizes the statutory mechanisms in place to monitor public water system compliance with Federal and State drinking water standards. Section IV examines barriers to due process. Section V discusses recent pro se litigation raising the issue of contaminated water in New York courts. Section VI concludes with a discussion of current efforts to uncover more information on the current state of New York prison water systems compliance and monitoring. Prisons are inherently violent and toxic places by design. The goal of this work is to amplify the tireless work of people currently incarcerated in New York State prisons to advocate for their rights, despite the gauntlet of administrative and legal barriers to doing so. The authors and contributors of this work hope to advance critical discussion of how these barriers can be not reformed but removed

Cruel and Usual

A transcription of the Footnote Forum Podcast, a CUNY Law Review Productio

Histidine-Rich Glycoprotein Protects from Systemic Candida Infection

Fungi, such as Candida spp., are commonly found on the skin and at mucosal surfaces. Yet, they rarely cause invasive infections in immunocompetent individuals, an observation reflecting the ability of our innate immune system to control potentially invasive microbes found at biological boundaries. Antimicrobial proteins and peptides are becoming increasingly recognized as important effectors of innate immunity. This is illustrated further by the present investigation, demonstrating a novel antifungal role of histidine-rich glycoprotein (HRG), an abundant and multimodular plasma protein. HRG bound to Candida cells, and induced breaks in the cell walls of the organisms. Correspondingly, HRG preferentially lysed ergosterol-containing liposomes but not cholesterol-containing ones, indicating a specificity for fungal versus other types of eukaryotic membranes. Both antifungal and membrane-rupturing activities of HRG were enhanced at low pH, and mapped to the histidine-rich region of the protein. Ex vivo, HRG-containing plasma as well as fibrin clots exerted antifungal effects. In vivo, Hrg−/− mice were susceptible to infection by C. albicans, in contrast to wild-type mice, which were highly resistant to infection. The results demonstrate a key and previously unknown antifungal role of HRG in innate immunity

Characterization of tomato Cycling Dof Factors reveals conserved and new functions in the control of flowering time and abiotic stress responses

[EN] DNA binding with One Finger (DOF) transcription factors are involved in multiple aspects of plant growth and development but their precise roles in abiotic stress tolerance are largely unknown. Here we report a group of five tomato DOF genes, homologous to Arabidopsis Cycling DOF Factors (CDFs), that function as transcriptional regulators involved in responses to drought and salt stress and flowering-time control in a gene-specific manner. SlCDF15 are nuclear proteins that display specific binding with different affinities to canonical DNA target sequences and present diverse transcriptional activation capacities in vivo. SlCDF15 genes exhibited distinct diurnal expression patterns and were differentially induced in response to osmotic, salt, heat, and low-temperature stresses. Arabidopsis plants overexpressing SlCDF1 or SlCDF3 showed increased drought and salt tolerance. In addition, the expression of various stress-responsive genes, such as COR15, RD29A, and RD10, were differentially activated in the overexpressing lines. Interestingly, overexpression in Arabidopsis of SlCDF3 but not SlCDF1 promotes late flowering through modulation of the expression of flowering control genes such as CO and FT. Overall, our data connect SlCDFs to undescribed functions related to abiotic stress tolerance and flowering time through the regulation of specific target genes and an increase in particular metabolites.This work was supported by grants from Instituto Nacional de Investigacion y Tecnologia Agraria y Alimentaria (INIA; project numbers: 2009-0004-C01, 2012-0008-C01), the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (project number: BIO2010-14871), and the MERIT Project (FP7 ITN2010-264474). ARC was supported by a pre-doctoral fellowship from the INIA. The authors would like to thank Mar Gonzalez and Victor Carrasco for technical assistance and Dr Pablo Gonzalez-Melendi for technical handling of the confocal microscope. We also thank Eugenio Grau for technical assistance with RT-PCR analyses.Corrales, A.; González Nebauer, S.; Carrillo, L.; Fernández Nohales, P.; Marques Signes, J.; Renau Morata, B.; Granell, A.... (2014). Characterization of tomato Cycling Dof Factors reveals conserved and new functions in the control of flowering time and abiotic stress responses. Journal of Experimental Botany. 65(4):995-1012. https://doi.org/10.1093/jxb/ert451S9951012654AbuQamar, S., Luo, H., Laluk, K., Mickelbart, M. V., & Mengiste, T. (2009). Crosstalk between biotic and abiotic stress responses in tomato is mediated by theAIM1transcription factor. The Plant Journal, 58(2), 347-360. doi:10.1111/j.1365-313x.2008.03783.xAlonso, R., Oñate-Sánchez, L., Weltmeier, F., Ehlert, A., Diaz, I., Dietrich, K., … Dröge-Laser, W. (2009). 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Noise Amplification in Human Tumor Suppression following Gamma Irradiation

The influence of noise on oscillatory motion is a subject of permanent interest, both for fundamental and practical reasons. Cells respond properly to external stimuli by using noisy systems. We have clarified the effect of intrinsic noise on the dynamics in the human cancer cells following gamma irradiation. It is shown that the large amplification and increasing mutual information with delay are due to coherence resonance. Furthermore, frequency domain analysis is used to study the mechanisms

On the mechanisms governing gas penetration into a tokamak plasma during a massive gas injection

A new 1D radial fluid code, IMAGINE, is used to simulate the penetration of gas into a tokamak plasma during a massive gas injection (MGI). The main result is that the gas is in general strongly braked as it reaches the plasma, due to mechanisms related to charge exchange and (to a smaller extent) recombination. As a result, only a fraction of the gas penetrates into the plasma. Also, a shock wave is created in the gas which propagates away from the plasma, braking and compressing the incoming gas. Simulation results are quantitatively consistent, at least in terms of orders of magnitude, with experimental data for a D 2 MGI into a JET Ohmic plasma. Simulations of MGI into the background plasma surrounding a runaway electron beam show that if the background electron density is too high, the gas may not penetrate, suggesting a possible explanation for the recent results of Reux et al in JET (2015 Nucl. Fusion 55 093013)

Velocity-space sensitivity of the time-of-flight neutron spectrometer at JET

The velocity-space sensitivities of fast-ion diagnostics are often described by so-called weight functions. Recently, we formulated weight functions showing the velocity-space sensitivity of the often dominant beam-target part of neutron energy spectra. These weight functions for neutron emission spectrometry (NES) are independent of the particular NES diagnostic. Here we apply these NES weight functions to the time-of-flight spectrometer TOFOR at JET. By taking the instrumental response function of TOFOR into account, we calculate time-of-flight NES weight functions that enable us to directly determine the velocity-space sensitivity of a given part of a measured time-of-flight spectrum from TOFOR

Multi-messenger observations of a binary neutron star merger

On 2017 August 17 a binary neutron star coalescence candidate (later designated GW170817) with merger time 12:41:04 UTC was observed through gravitational waves by the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors. The Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor independently detected a gamma-ray burst (GRB 170817A) with a time delay of ~1.7 s with respect to the merger time. From the gravitational-wave signal, the source was initially localized to a sky region of 31 deg2 at a luminosity distance of 40+8-8 Mpc and with component masses consistent with neutron stars. The component masses were later measured to be in the range 0.86 to 2.26 Mo. An extensive observing campaign was launched across the electromagnetic spectrum leading to the discovery of a bright optical transient (SSS17a, now with the IAU identification of AT 2017gfo) in NGC 4993 (at ~40 Mpc) less than 11 hours after the merger by the One- Meter, Two Hemisphere (1M2H) team using the 1 m Swope Telescope. The optical transient was independently detected by multiple teams within an hour. Subsequent observations targeted the object and its environment. Early ultraviolet observations revealed a blue transient that faded within 48 hours. Optical and infrared observations showed a redward evolution over ~10 days. Following early non-detections, X-ray and radio emission were discovered at the transient’s position ~9 and ~16 days, respectively, after the merger. Both the X-ray and radio emission likely arise from a physical process that is distinct from the one that generates the UV/optical/near-infrared emission. No ultra-high-energy gamma-rays and no neutrino candidates consistent with the source were found in follow-up searches. These observations support the hypothesis that GW170817 was produced by the merger of two neutron stars in NGC4993 followed by a short gamma-ray burst (GRB 170817A) and a kilonova/macronova powered by the radioactive decay of r-process nuclei synthesized in the ejecta