50,968 research outputs found
Garuda 5 (khyung lnga): Ecologies of Potency and the Poison-Medicine Spectrum of Sowa Rigpa’s Renowned ‘Black Aconite’ Formula
This article focuses on ethnographic work conducted at the Men-Tsee-Khang (Dharamsala, India) on Garuda 5 (khyung lnga), a commonly prescribed Tibetan medical formula. This medicine’s efficacy as a painkiller and activity against infection and inflammation is largely due to a particularly powerful plant, known as ‘virulent poison’ (btsan dug) as well as ‘the great medicine’ (sman chen), and identified as a subset of Aconitum species. Its effects, however, are potentially dangerous or even deadly. How can these poisonous plants be used in medicine and, conversely, when does a medicine become a poison? How can ostensibly the same substance be both harmful and helpful? The explanation requires a more nuanced picture than mere dose dependency. Attending to the broader ‘ecologies of potency’ in which these substances are locally enmeshed, in line with Sienna Craig’s Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine (2012), provides fertile ground to better understand the effects of Garuda 5 and how potency is developed and directed in practice. I aim to unpack the spectrum between sman (medicine) and dug (poison) in Sowa Rigpa by elucidating some of the multiple dimensions which determine the activity of Garuda 5 as it is formulated and prescribed in India. I thus embrace the full spectrum of potency— the ‘good’ and the ‘bad,’ the ‘wanted’ and the ‘unwanted’—without presuming the universal validity of biomedical notions of toxicity and side effects
Development of Novel Density Functionals for Thermochemical Kinetics
A new density functional theory (DFT) exchange-correlation functional for the
exploration of reaction mechanisms is proposed. This new functional, denoted
BMK (Boese-Martin for Kinetics), has an accuracy in the 2 kcal/mol range for
transition state barriers but, unlike previous attempts at such a functional,
this improved accuracy does not come at the expense of equilibrium properties.
This makes it a general-purpose functional whose domain of applicability has
been extended to transition states, rather than a specialized functional for
kinetics. The improvement in BMK rests on the inclusion of the kinetic energy
density together with a large value of the exact exchange mixing coefficient.
For this functional, the kinetic energy density appears to correct `back' the
excess exact exchange mixing for ground-state properties, possibly simulating
variable exchange.Comment: J. Chem. Phys., in press (303431JCP, scheduled for August 15, 2004
issue); supplementary data available at
http://theochem.weizmann.ac.il/web/papers/BMK.htm
Protein-based materials, toward a new level of structural control
Through billions of years of evolution nature has created and refined structural proteins for a wide variety of specific purposes. Amino acid sequences and their associated folding patterns combine to create elastic, rigid or tough materials. In many respects, nature’s intricately designed products provide challenging examples for materials scientists, but translation of natural structural concepts into bio-inspired materials requires a level of control of macromolecular architecture far higher than that afforded by conventional polymerization processes. An increasingly important approach to this problem has been to use biological systems for production of materials. Through protein engineering, artificial genes can be developed that encode protein-based materials with desired features. Structural elements found in nature, such as β-sheets and α-helices, can be combined with great flexibility, and can be outfitted with functional elements such as cell binding sites or enzymatic domains. The possibility of incorporating non-natural amino acids increases the versatility of protein engineering still further. It is expected that such methods will have large impact in the field of materials science, and especially in biomedical materials science, in the future
Introduction | Approaching Potent Substances in Medicine and Ritual across Asia
Introduction to themed research articles on Approaching Potent Substances in Medicine and Ritual across Asia
Synchronisation of financial crises
This paper develops concordance indices for studying the simultaneous occurrence of financial crises. The indices are designed to cope with these typically low incidence events. This leads us to confine attention to non-tranquil periods to develop a bivariate index and its multivariate analog for potentially serially correlated categorical data. An application to the Bordo et al. (2001) data set reveals the extent of concordance in banking and currency crises across countries. The internationalisation of financial crises in the 20th century is shown to have increased for currency crises and decreased for banking crises
Hybridization and spin decoherence in heavy-hole quantum dots
We theoretically investigate the spin dynamics of a heavy hole confined to an
unstrained III-V semiconductor quantum dot and interacting with a narrowed
nuclear-spin bath. We show that band hybridization leads to an exponential
decay of hole-spin superpositions due to hyperfine-mediated nuclear pair flips,
and that the accordant single-hole-spin decoherence time T2 can be tuned over
many orders of magnitude by changing external parameters. In particular, we
show that, under experimentally accessible conditions, it is possible to
suppress hyperfine-mediated nuclear-pair-flip processes so strongly that
hole-spin quantum dots may be operated beyond the `ultimate limitation' set by
the hyperfine interaction which is present in other spin-qubit candidate
systems.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figure
Initial state dependence in multi-electron threshold ionization of atoms
It is shown that the geometry of multi-electron threshold ionization in atoms
depends on the initial configuration of bound electrons. The reason for this
behavior is found in the stability properties of the classical fixed point of
the equations of motion for multiple threshold fragmentation. Specifically for
three-electron break-up, apart from the symmetric triangular configuration also
a break-up of lower symmetry in the form of a T-shape can occur, as we
demonstrate by calculating triple photoionization for the lithium ground and
first excited states. We predict the electron break-up geometry for threshold
fragmentation experiments
Ultrahigh harmonics from laser-assisted ion-atom collisions
We present a theoretical analysis of high-order harmonic generation from
ion-atom collisions in the presence of linearly polarized intense laser pulses.
Photons with frequencies significantly higher than in standard atomic
high-harmonic generation are emitted. These harmonics are due to two different
mechanisms: (i) collisional electron capture and subsequent laser-driven
transfer of an electron between projectile and target atom; (ii) reflection of
a laser-driven electron from the projectile leading to recombination at the
parent atom.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure
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