The Grizzly, September 17, 2009

Recycling Team Takes Action Against Campus Waste • Annual Activities Fair Starts the Year Off • Campus Safety, Police Relations: Battle of Jurisdiction • Berman\u27s New Exhibit: Muriel\u27s Moores • Is the Power Plant Damaging More Than Our Eardrums? • Restaurant Review: Iron Hill Brewery • Club Spotlight: InterVarsity Christian Fellowship • Hidden Treasures in the Berman and Myrin • Opinion: Liberal Arts, Limited Choices?; Facebook Friends: How Far is Too Far?; Obama\u27s Administration and the Takeover of the Communist Czar Regime; Socialism is the New Word for Progress • UC Men\u27s Soccer Coach Adds Sustainability Coordinator to His Title • Positivity and Friendship Staples of the UC Women\u27s Volleyball Teamhttps://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/grizzlynews/1791/thumbnail.jp

The Lantern Vol. 76, No. 1, Fall 2008

• Cruel • A Night in Three Parts • The Moment I Said It • To Know • I Will Never Skipskipskip a Rock • The Ravine • Untitled • Skeleton • Midnight Letter • Where Children Come From • Orphan of War • Ciega / Mezquita • The Other Side • Those Dancing Days are Gone • Cycling • The 2nd of July • The Tantric Semantics of Studying Abroad • A Three-Part Study in Musical Relations • Amway Man • Hard Luck Investigator • Spring • Interview With Poet Eleanor Wilnerhttps://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/lantern/1173/thumbnail.jp

The Lantern Vol. 75, No. 2, Spring 2008

• In a French Courtyard at the Philadelphia Museum of Art • Picky Mangoes • And for My Un-Birthday I Drank Poets\u27 Tea and Got to See • Tree-Baby • Wrestling With Plants • I Smile • Walking Home • The Wall Between • Phalangese, or the Art of Speaking to Fingers • Early Spring • Karma Kids • A Bazaar Triptych • The Joys of Ritual Circumcision • [Of] Archetype[s] or I Don\u27t Like Your Poetry • Truth and Beauty Bombed • Chevalier Anachronistic • Kinds of Birds • Sparknotes Entry for The Changing Tide by Eric Relvas • Thirst • The Devil\u27s Dictionary • Portrait of an Artist Who Loves Icarus • Dinner at the Old House • The Meaning of a Dust-Busterhttps://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/lantern/1172/thumbnail.jp

?2-Microglobulin Amyloid Fibril-Induced Membrane Disruption Is Enhanced by Endosomal Lipids and Acidic pH

Although the molecular mechanisms underlying the pathology of amyloidoses are not well understood, the interaction between amyloid proteins and cell membranes is thought to play a role in several amyloid diseases. Amyloid fibrils of ?2-microglobulin (?2m), associated with dialysis-related amyloidosis (DRA), have been shown to cause disruption of anionic lipid bilayers in vitro. However, the effect of lipid composition and the chemical environment in which ?2m-lipid interactions occur have not been investigated previously. Here we examine membrane damage resulting from the interaction of ?2m monomers and fibrils with lipid bilayers. Using dye release, tryptophan fluorescence quenching and fluorescence confocal microscopy assays we investigate the effect of anionic lipid composition and pH on the susceptibility of liposomes to fibril-induced membrane damage. We show that ?2m fibril-induced membrane disruption is modulated by anionic lipid composition and is enhanced by acidic pH. Most strikingly, the greatest degree of membrane disruption is observed for liposomes containing bis(monoacylglycero)phosphate (BMP) at acidic pH, conditions likely to reflect those encountered in the endocytic pathway. The results suggest that the interaction between ?2m fibrils and membranes of endosomal origin may play a role in the molecular mechanism of ?2m amyloid-associated osteoarticular tissue destruction in DRA

A New Malaria Agent in African Hominids

Plasmodium falciparum is the major human malaria agent responsible for 200 to 300 million infections and one to three million deaths annually, mainly among African infants. The origin and evolution of this pathogen within the human lineage is still unresolved. A single species, P. reichenowi, which infects chimpanzees, is known to be a close sister lineage of P. falciparum. Here we report the discovery of a new Plasmodium species infecting Hominids. This new species has been isolated in two chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) kept as pets by villagers in Gabon (Africa). Analysis of its complete mitochondrial genome (5529 nucleotides including Cyt b, Cox I and Cox III genes) reveals an older divergence of this lineage from the clade that includes P. falciparum and P. reichenowi (∼21±9 Myrs ago using Bayesian methods and considering that the divergence between P. falciparum and P. reichenowi occurred 4 to 7 million years ago as generally considered in the literature). This time frame would be congruent with the radiation of hominoids, suggesting that this Plasmodium lineage might have been present in early hominoids and that they may both have experienced a simultaneous diversification. Investigation of the nuclear genome of this new species will further the understanding of the genetic adaptations of P. falciparum to humans. The risk of transfer and emergence of this new species in humans must be now seriously considered given that it was found in two chimpanzees living in contact with humans and its close relatedness to the most virulent agent of malaria

Efficient and Directive Generation of Two Distinct Endoderm Lineages from Human ESCs and iPSCs by Differentiation Stage-Specific SOX17 Transduction

The establishment of methods for directive differentiation from human embryonic stem cells (ESCs) and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) is important for regenerative medicine. Although Sry-related HMG box 17 (SOX17) overexpression in ESCs leads to differentiation of either extraembryonic or definitive endoderm cells, respectively, the mechanism of these distinct results remains unknown. Therefore, we utilized a transient adenovirus vector-mediated overexpression system to mimic the SOX17 expression pattern of embryogenesis. The number of alpha-fetoprotein-positive extraembryonic endoderm (ExEn) cells was increased by transient SOX17 transduction in human ESC- and iPSC-derived primitive endoderm cells. In contrast, the number of hematopoietically expressed homeobox (HEX)-positive definitive endoderm (DE) cells, which correspond to the anterior DE in vivo, was increased by transient adenovirus vector-mediated SOX17 expression in human ESC- and iPSC-derived mesendoderm cells. Moreover, hepatocyte-like cells were efficiently generated by sequential transduction of SOX17 and HEX. Our findings show that a stage-specific transduction of SOX17 in the primitive endoderm or mesendoderm promotes directive ExEn or DE differentiation by SOX17 transduction, respectively

Cultural trauma, counter-narratives, and dialogical intellectuals: the works of Murakami Haruki and Mori Tatsuya in the context of the Aum affair

In this article, we offer a new conceptualization of intellectuals as carriers of cultural trauma through a case study of the Aum Affair, a series of crimes and terrorist attacks committed by the Japanese new religious movement Aum Shinrikyō. In understanding the performative roles intellectuals play in trauma construction, we offer a new dichotomy between “authoritative intellectuals,” who draw on their privileged parcours and status to impose a distinct trauma narrative, and “dialogical intellectuals,” who engage with local actors dialogically to produce polyphonic and open-ended trauma narratives. We identify three dimensions of dialogical intellectual action: firstly, the intellectuals may be involved in dialogue with local participants; secondly, the intellectual products themselves may be dialogical in content; and thirdly, there might be a concerted effort on the part of the intellectuals to record and to disseminate dialogue between local participants. In the context of the Aum Affair, we analyze the works of Murakami Haruki and Mori Tatsuya as dialogical intellectuals while they sought, with the help of local actors’ experiences, to challenge and to alter the orthodox trauma narrative of Aum Shinrikyō as exclusively a social evil external to Japanese society and an enemy to be excluded from it. Towards the end of the article, we discuss the broader significance of this case study and suggest that in light of recent societal and technological developments, the role and scope of dialogical intellectuals as carriers of trauma are changing and possibly expanding

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements

Lick Observatory Supernova Search Follow-Up Program: Photometry Data Release of 93 Type Ia Supernovae

We present BVRI and unfiltered light curves of 93 Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) from the Lick Observatory Supernova Search (LOSS) follow-up program conducted between 2005 and 2018. Our sample consists of 78 spectroscopically normal SNe Ia, with the remainder divided between distinct subclasses (three SN 1991bg-like, three SN 1991T-like, four SNe Iax, two peculiar, and three super-Chandrasekhar events), and has a median redshift of 0.0192. The SNe in our sample have a median coverage of 16 photometric epochs at a cadence of 5.4 days, and the median first observed epoch is ~4.6 days before maximum B-band light. We describe how the SNe in our sample are discovered, observed, and processed, and we compare the results from our newly developed automated photometry pipeline to those from the previous processing pipeline used by LOSS. After investigating potential biases, we derive a final systematic uncertainty of 0.03 mag in BVRI for our dataset. We perform an analysis of our light curves with particular focus on using template fitting to measure the parameters that are useful in standardising SNe Ia as distance indicators. All of the data are available to the community, and we encourage future studies to incorporate our light curves in their analyses.Comment: 29 pages, 13 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA