High-resolution net and gross biological production during a Celtic Sea spring bloom

Shelf seas represent only 10% of the ocean area, but support up to 30% of all oceanic primary production. There are few measurements of shelf-sea biological production at high spatial and temporal resolution in such heterogeneous and physically dynamic systems. Here, we use dissolved oxygen-to-argon (O2/Ar) ratios and oxygen triple isotopes (16O, 17O, 18O) to estimate net and gross biological production in the Celtic Sea during spring 2015. O2/Ar ratios were measured continuously using a shipboard membrane inlet mass spectrometer (MIMS). Additional discrete water samples from CTD hydrocasts were used to measure O2/Ar depth profiles and the δ(17O) and δ(18O) values of dissolved O2. These high-resolution data were combined with wind-speed based gas exchange parameterisations to calculate biologically driven air-sea oxygen fluxes. After correction for disequilibrium terms and diapycnal diffusion, these fluxes yielded estimates of net community (N(O2/Ar)) and gross O2 production (G(17O)). N(O2/Ar) was spatially heterogeneous and showed predominantly autotrophic conditions, with an average of (33±41) mmol m-2 d-1. G(17O) showed high variability between 0 and 424 mmol m-2 d-1. The ratio of N(O2/Ar) to G(17O), ƒ(O2), was (0.18±0.03) corresponding to 0.34±0.06 in carbon equivalents. We also observed rapid temporal changes in N(O2/Ar), e.g. an increase of 80 mmol m-2 d-1 in less than 6 hours during the spring bloom, highlighting the importance of high-resolution biological production measurements. Such measurements will help reconcile the differences between satellite and in situ productivity observations, and improve our understanding of the biological carbon pump

The Princeton Protein Orthology Database (P-POD): A Comparative Genomics Analysis Tool for Biologists

Many biological databases that provide comparative genomics information and tools are now available on the internet. While certainly quite useful, to our knowledge none of the existing databases combine results from multiple comparative genomics methods with manually curated information from the literature. Here we describe the Princeton Protein Orthology Database (P-POD, http://ortholog.princeton.edu), a user-friendly database system that allows users to find and visualize the phylogenetic relationships among predicted orthologs (based on the OrthoMCL method) to a query gene from any of eight eukaryotic organisms, and to see the orthologs in a wider evolutionary context (based on the Jaccard clustering method). In addition to the phylogenetic information, the database contains experimental results manually collected from the literature that can be compared to the computational analyses, as well as links to relevant human disease and gene information via the OMIM, model organism, and sequence databases. Our aim is for the P-POD resource to be extremely useful to typical experimental biologists wanting to learn more about the evolutionary context of their favorite genes. P-POD is based on the commonly used Generic Model Organism Database (GMOD) schema and can be downloaded in its entirety for installation on one's own system. Thus, bioinformaticians and software developers may also find P-POD useful because they can use the P-POD database infrastructure when developing their own comparative genomics resources and database tools

Gazing Forward, Not Looking Back: Comfort Food without Nostalgia in the Novels of Polly Horvath

Conventionally, children are depicted finding comfort in the sensory appeal of food, as part of experiences that eventually will become sources of adult nostalgia. Polly Horvath’s novels provide narratives that depict the creation of such moments without the accompanying nostalgia. This essay analyzes two of Horvath’s most successful and food-focused novels, Everything on a Waffle and The Canning Season, using the disciplinary and theoretical frames of children’s literature, food studies, social science research on comfort food as well as literary scholarship on nostalgia and on Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, pursuing a counter-argument to the conventional view of children’s literature as a locus of nostalgia.   DOI: 10.1353/jeu.2014.000

Metamorphosis: The Disabled Toy Made Real as an Eternally Abled Rabbit

At first glance, The Velveteen Rabbit seems to pursue a conventionally ableist view of disability. For the boy, scarlet fever is a temporary indisposition that leaves no lasting effects and functions primarily as a plot device—the burning of his childhood possessions—which signals his normal development into adolescence. For the rabbit, functioning as toy mirror to the boy, the narrative has the typical happy ending as the disabled toy with no functioning back legs is magically metamorphosed into a fully functioning, living and able rabbit. After his physically limited existence as a toy, he is rewarded by being incarnated as an eternal, real, and conventionally abled rabbit. Williams writes what all “normate” narratives do, using a term coined by Garland-Thompson: she would erase disability from the Boy’s and toy’s present and future, so that readers no longer have to worry, because “the traces of disability” have been eradicated and the future is full of promise. But there is another interpretation of The Velveteen Rabbit—worth pursuing as a counter-narrative to ableist closure—which opens the book up to a disabling reading, what Nancy Mairs characterizes in Carnal Acts as living with “ambivalences” without searching for a cure (or death or tragedy), a resolution, or a way out of or around the experience of disability. There are two points in the book where abled and disabled blur, become inseparable, and in which disability leaves an indelible trace. First, when the Velveteen Rabbit asks the Skin Horse what makes a toy become real, the horse claims love, a process which happens over time and that results in the wearing down, the disabling, of the toy body. The toy becomes real once it is no longer pristine, ideal, normate. Love makes disability real, makes the disabled body visible (and not repugnant). Second, at the end of the book, the recovered Boy witnesses the visible traces of his beloved toy in the magically metamorphosed rabbit, made real twice over and, thus, preserving the trace of the disabled body. On the one hand, in The Velveteen Rabbit Williams pursues a conventional ableist narrative, but on the other the book remains a receptacle “capable of being in uncertainties” (Keats), open to the possibility—as Micah and McTiernan define Disability Studies—“that a life that includes impairment can also include positive change over time. It can include growth.