Albert Pierrepoint and the cultural persona of the twentieth-century hangman

Albert Pierrepoint was Britain’s most famous 20th-century hangman. This article utilises diverse sources in order to chart his public representation, or cultural persona, as hangman from his rise to prominence in the mid-1940s to his portrayal in the biopic Pierrepoint(2005). It argues that Pierrepoint exercised agency in shaping this persona through publishing his autobiography and engagement with the media, although there were also representations that he did not influence. In particular, it explores three iterations of his cultural persona – the Professional Hangman, the Reformed Hangman and the Haunted Hangman. Each of these built on and reworked historical antecedents and also communicated wider understandings and contested meanings in relation to capital punishment. As a hangman who remained in the public eye after the death penalty in Britain was abolished, Pierrepoint was an important, authentic link to the practice of execution and a symbolic figure in debates over reintroduction. In the 21st century, he was portrayed as a victim of the ‘secondary trauma’ of the death penalty, which resonated with worldwide campaigns for abolition

De Novo assembly and transcriptome analysis of the mediterranean fruit fly ceratitis capitata early embryos

The agricultural pest Ceratitis capitata, also known as the Mediterranean fruit fly or Medfly, belongs to the Tephritidae family, which includes a large number of other damaging pest species. The Medfly has been the first non-drosophilid fly species which has been genetically transformed paving the way for designing geneticbased pest control strategies. Furthermore, it is an experimentally tractable model, in which transient and transgene-mediated RNAi have been successfully used. We applied Illumina sequencing to total RNA preparations of 8-10 hours old embryos of C. capitata, This developmental window corresponds to the blastoderm cellularization stage. In summary, we assembled 42,614 transcripts which cluster in 26,319 unique transcripts of which 11,045 correspond to protein coding genes; we identified several hundreds of long ncRNAs; we found an enrichment of transcripts encoding RNA binding proteins among the highly expressed transcripts, such as CcTRA-2, known to be necessary to establish and, most likely, to maintain female sex of C. capitata. Our study is the first de novo assembly performed for Ceratitis capitata based on Illumina NGS technology during embryogenesis and it adds novel data to the previously published C. capitata EST databases. We expect that it will be useful for a variety of applications such as gene cloning and phylogenetic analyses, as well as to advance genetic research and biotechnological applications in the Medfly and other related Tephritidae

Motif co-regulation and co-operativity are common mechanisms in transcriptional, post-transcriptional and post-translational regulation

A substantial portion of the regulatory interactions in the higher eukaryotic cell are mediated by simple sequence motifs in the regulatory segments of genes and (pre-)mRNAs, and in the intrinsically disordered regions of proteins. Although these regulatory modules are physicochemically distinct, they share an evolutionary plasticity that has facilitated a rapid growth of their use and resulted in their ubiquity in complex organisms. The ease of motif acquisition simplifies access to basal housekeeping functions, facilitates the co-regulation of multiple biomolecules allowing them to respond in a coordinated manner to changes in the cell state, and supports the integration of multiple signals for combinatorial decision-making. Consequently, motifs are indispensable for temporal, spatial, conditional and basal regulation at the transcriptional, post-transcriptional and post-translational level. In this review, we highlight that many of the key regulatory pathways of the cell are recruited by motifs and that the ease of motif acquisition has resulted in large networks of co-regulated biomolecules. We discuss how co-operativity allows simple static motifs to perform the conditional regulation that underlies decision-making in higher eukaryotic biological systems. We observe that each gene and its products have a unique set of DNA, RNA or protein motifs that encode a regulatory program to define the logical circuitry that guides the life cycle of these biomolecules, from transcription to degradation. Finally, we contrast the regulatory properties of protein motifs and the regulatory elements of DNA and (pre-)mRNAs, advocating that co-regulation, co-operativity, and motif-driven regulatory programs are common mechanisms that emerge from the use of simple, evolutionarily plastic regulatory modules

The Haber Bosch–harmful algal bloom (HB–HAB) link

Large-scale commercialization of the Haber–Bosch (HB) process is resulting in intensification of nitrogen (N) fertilizer use worldwide. Globally N fertilizer use is far outpacing that of phosphorus (P) fertilizer. Much of the increase in N fertilizers is also now in the form of urea, a reduced form of N. Incorporation of these fertilizers into agricultural products is inefficient leading to significant environmental pollution and aquatic eutrophication. Of particular concern is the increased occurrence of harmful algal blooms (HABs) in waters receiving nutrient enriched runoff. Many phytoplankton causing HABs have physiological adaptive strategies that make them favored under conditions of elevated N : P conditions and supply of chemically reduced N (ammonium, urea). We propose that the HB-HAB link is a function of (1) the inefficiency of incorporation of N fertilizers in the food supply chain, the leakiness of the N cycle from crop to table, and the fate of lost N relative to P to the environment; and (2) adaptive physiology of many HABs to thrive in environments in which there is excess N relative to classic nutrient stoichiometric proportions and where chemically reduced forms of N dominate. The rate of HAB expansion is particularly pronounced in China where N fertilizer use has escalated very rapidly, where soil retention is declining, and where blooms have had large economic and ecological impacts. There, in addition to increased use of urea and high N : P based fertilizers overall, escalating aquaculture production adds to the availability of reduced forms of N, as does atmospheric deposition of ammonia. HABs in both freshwaters and marginal seas in China are highly related to these overall changing N loads and ratios. Without more aggressive N control the future outlook in terms of HABs is likely to include more events, more often, and they may also be more toxic

A new composite measure of ethnic diversity: Investigating the controversy over minority ethnic recruitment at Oxford and Cambridge universities

Measuring ethnic diversity currently amounts simply to counting ethnicities. This makes it impossible to correlate with achievement, to track changes over time or to compare institutions in a meaningful way. It is not clear, for example, whether it is more diverse to have many ethnicities with a large majority in one or two categories, or to have fewer ethnicities with a larger proportion in each. This paper is not about race per se, but develops indices from cryptography and ecology to solve the problem of measuring diversity properly. Using data from Freedom of Information requests and university admissions offices, it analyzes the ethnic diversity of undergraduate recruitment at Oxford and Cambridge universities over the past ten years to resolve one of the most controversial issues in higher education today. It finds that both Oxford and Cambridge universities have increased ethnic diversity by more than 25% over the last decade, but that the problem of under-recruitment of Black UK students remains. The paper is an important contribution to research methodology, with clear applications in the field of school effectiveness, and informs the debate on social justice in education, particularly in a period of significant demographic change across Europe