Designed to fail : a biopolitics of British Citizenship.

Tracing a route through the recent 'ugly history' of British citizenship, this article advances two central claims. Firstly, British citizenship has been designed to fail specific groups and populations. Failure, it argues, is a design principle of British citizenship, in the most active and violent sense of the verb to design: to mark out, to indicate, to designate. Secondly, British citizenship is a biopolitics - a field of techniques and practices (legal, social, moral) through which populations are controlled and fashioned. This article begins with the 1981 Nationality Act and the violent conflicts between the police and black communities in Brixton that accompanied the passage of the Act through the British parliament. Employing Michel Foucault's concept of state racism, it argues that the 1981 Nationality Act marked a pivotal moment in the design of British citizenship and has operated as the template for a glut of subsequent nationality legislation that has shaped who can achieve citizenship. The central argument is that the existence of populations of failed citizens within Britain is not an accident of flawed design, but is foundational to British citizenship. For many 'national minorities' the lived realities of biopolitical citizenship stand in stark contradistinction to contemporary governmental accounts of citizenship that stress community cohesion, political participation, social responsibility, rights and pride in shared national belonging

Is pregnancy a teachable moment for smoking cessation among US Latino expectant fathers? A pilot study

Pregnancy may be a time when US Latino expectant fathers consider quitting smoking. A ‘teachable moment’ is theorized to increase motivation to change a behavior through increased risk perceptions, emotional responses, and changes in self-image

Genome Size and Transposable Element Content as Determined by High-Throughput Sequencing in Maize and Zea luxurians

The genome of maize (Zea mays ssp. mays) consists mostly of transposable elements (TEs) and varies in size among lines. This variation extends to other species in the genus Zea: although maize and Zea luxurians diverged only ∼140,000 years ago, their genomes differ in size by ∼50%. We used paired-end Illumina sequencing to evaluate the potential contribution of TEs to the genome size difference between these two species. We aligned the reads both to a filtered gene set and to an exemplar database of unique repeats representing 1,514 TE families; ∼85% of reads mapped against TE repeats in both species. The relative contribution of TE families to the B73 genome was highly correlated with previous estimates, suggesting that reliable estimates of TE content can be obtained from short high-throughput sequencing reads, even at low coverage. Because we used paired-end reads, we could assess whether a TE was near a gene by determining if one paired read mapped to a TE and the second read mapped to a gene. Using this method, Class 2 DNA elements were found significantly more often in genic regions than Class 1 RNA elements, but Class 1 elements were found more often near other TEs. Overall, we found that both Class 1 and 2 TE families account for ∼70% of the genome size difference between B73 and luxurians. Interestingly, the relative abundance of TE families was conserved between species (r = 0.97), suggesting genome-wide control of TE content rather than family-specific effects

Consistent Pattern of Local Adaptation during an Experimental Heat Wave in a Pipefish-Trematode Host-Parasite System

Extreme climate events such as heat waves are expected to increase in frequency under global change. As one indirect effect, they can alter magnitude and direction of species interactions, for example those between hosts and parasites. We simulated a summer heat wave to investigate how a changing environment affects the interaction between the broad-nosed pipefish (Syngnathus typhle) as a host and its digenean trematode parasite (Cryptocotyle lingua). In a fully reciprocal laboratory infection experiment, pipefish from three different coastal locations were exposed to sympatric and allopatric trematode cercariae. In order to examine whether an extreme climatic event disrupts patterns of locally adapted host-parasite combinations we measured the parasite's transmission success as well as the host's adaptive and innate immune defence under control and heat wave conditions. Independent of temperature, sympatric cercariae were always more successful than allopatric ones, indicating that parasites are locally adapted to their hosts. Hosts suffered from heat stress as suggested by fewer cells of the adaptive immune system (lymphocytes) compared to the same groups that were kept at 18°C. However, the proportion of the innate immune cells (monocytes) was higher in the 18°C water. Contrary to our expectations, no interaction between host immune defence, parasite infectivity and temperature stress were found, nor did the pattern of local adaptation change due to increased water temperature. Thus, in this host-parasite interaction, the sympatric parasite keeps ahead of the coevolutionary dynamics across sites, even under increasing temperatures as expected under marine global warming

Is food addiction a predictor of treatment outcome among patients with eating disorder?

ObjectivesThe study aimed to examine whether food addiction (FA) was associated with greater severity in both binge eating disorders (BED) and bulimia nervosa and, therefore, to determine if FA was predictive of treatment outcome.MethodSeventy-one adult patients with bulimia nervosa and BED (42 and 29, respectively) participated in the study. FA was assessed by means of the Yale Food Addiction Scale.ResultsThe results confirmed a high prevalence of FA in patients with binge disorders (around 87%) and also its association with a greater severity of the disorder (i.e., related to an increased eating psychopathology and greater frequency of binge eating episodes). Although FA did not appear as a predictor of treatment outcome in general terms, when the diagnostic subtypes were considered separately, FA was associated with poor prognosis in the BED group. In this vein, FA appeared as a mediator in the relationship between ED severity and treatment outcome.DiscussionsOur findings suggest that FA may act as an indicator of ED severity, and it would be a predictor of treatment outcome in BED but not in BN.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/152018/1/erv2705.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/152018/2/erv2705_am.pd

Geospatial data analysis in Russia’s geoweb

The chapter examines the role of geospatial data in Russia’s online ecosystem. Facilitated by the rise of geographic information systems and user-generated content, the distribution of geospatial data has blurred the line between physical spaces and their virtual representations. The chapter discusses different sources of these data available for Digital Russian Studies (e.g., social data and crowdsourced databases) together with the novel techniques for extracting geolocation from various data formats (e.g., textual documents and images). It also scrutinizes different ways of using these data, varying from mapping the spatial distribution of social and political phenomena to investigating the use of geotag data for cultural practices’ digitization to exploring the use of geoweb for narrating individual and collective identities online

Stress-Induced Activation of Heterochromatic Transcription

Constitutive heterochromatin comprising the centromeric and telomeric parts of chromosomes includes DNA marked by high levels of methylation associated with histones modified by repressive marks. These epigenetic modifications silence transcription and ensure stable inheritance of this inert state. Although environmental cues can alter epigenetic marks and lead to modulation of the transcription of genes located in euchromatic parts of the chromosomes, there is no evidence that external stimuli can globally destabilize silencing of constitutive heterochromatin. We have found that heterochromatin-associated silencing in Arabidopsis plants subjected to a particular temperature regime is released in a genome-wide manner. This occurs without alteration of repressive epigenetic modifications and does not involve common epigenetic mechanisms. Such induced release of silencing is mostly transient, and rapid restoration of the silent state occurs without the involvement of factors known to be required for silencing initiation. Thus, our results reveal new regulatory aspects of transcriptional repression in constitutive heterochromatin and open up possibilities to identify the molecular mechanisms involved

Detailed Analysis of a Contiguous 22-Mb Region of the Maize Genome

Most of our understanding of plant genome structure and evolution has come from the careful annotation of small (e.g., 100 kb) sequenced genomic regions or from automated annotation of complete genome sequences. Here, we sequenced and carefully annotated a contiguous 22 Mb region of maize chromosome 4 using an improved pseudomolecule for annotation. The sequence segment was comprehensively ordered, oriented, and confirmed using the maize optical map. Nearly 84% of the sequence is composed of transposable elements (TEs) that are mostly nested within each other, of which most families are low-copy. We identified 544 gene models using multiple levels of evidence, as well as five miRNA genes. Gene fragments, many captured by TEs, are prevalent within this region. Elimination of gene redundancy from a tetraploid maize ancestor that originated a few million years ago is responsible in this region for most disruptions of synteny with sorghum and rice. Consistent with other sub-genomic analyses in maize, small RNA mapping showed that many small RNAs match TEs and that most TEs match small RNAs. These results, performed on ∼1% of the maize genome, demonstrate the feasibility of refining the B73 RefGen_v1 genome assembly by incorporating optical map, high-resolution genetic map, and comparative genomic data sets. Such improvements, along with those of gene and repeat annotation, will serve to promote future functional genomic and phylogenomic research in maize and other grasses