Closeup: Hawaii\u27s Women\u27s Studies Program

As the University of Hawaii seeks to cut its budget and its position count, Women\u27s Studies at the Manoa campus can only hope that its modest requirements, low profile, absence of an administrative head, and experience in developing within the most precarious of situations may allow it to survive. None of the faculty have tenure; only two out of eight have career ladder positions; three of our faculty will not know until late summer whether they have even part-time jobs; one has been fired; and the rest have job security for one more year

Dose-dependent consequences of sub-chronic fentanyl exposure on neuron and glial co-cultures.

Fentanyl is one of the most common opioid analgesics administered to patients undergoing surgery or for chronic pain management. While the side effects of chronic fentanyl abuse are recognized (e.g., addiction, tolerance, impairment of cognitive functions, and inhibit nociception, arousal, and respiration), it remains poorly understood what and how changes in brain activity from chronic fentanyl use influences the respective behavioral outcome. Here, we examined the functional and molecular changes to cortical neural network activity following sub-chronic exposure to two fentanyl concentrations, a low (0.01 μM) and high (10 μM) dose. Primary rat co-cultures, containing cortical neurons, astrocytes, and oligodendrocyte precursor cells, were seeded in wells on either a 6-well multi-electrode array (MEA, for electrophysiology) or a 96-well tissue culture plate (for serial endpoint bulk RNA sequencing analysis). Once networks matured (at 28 days in vitro), co-cultures were treated with 0.01 or 10 μM of fentanyl for 4 days and monitored daily. Only high dose exposure to fentanyl resulted in a decline in features of spiking and bursting activity as early as 30 min post-exposure and sustained for 4 days in cultures. Transcriptomic analysis of the complex cultures after 4 days of fentanyl exposure revealed that both the low and high dose induced gene expression changes involved in synaptic transmission, inflammation, and organization of the extracellular matrix. Collectively, the findings of this in vitro study suggest that while neuroadaptive changes to neural network activity at a systems level was detected only at the high dose of fentanyl, transcriptomic changes were also detected at the low dose conditions, suggesting that fentanyl rapidly elicits changes in plasticity

Mechanisms of regulation in speech: Linguistic structure and physical control system

International audienc

More than a magic moment – Paving the way for dynamics of articulation and prosodic structure†

Research into human communication through the spoken language is full of dichotomies that have often stood in the way of progress in the past, notably the distinction between phonetics and phonology, and more recently, and somewhat orthogonally, between prosody and articulation. The papers collected here make considerable advances in overcoming these restrictions, providing valuable contributions towards the integration of these fields. The increasing evidence for dependencies across the different levels of linguistic structure, and the complexity of the interplay between them, has led to the application of dynamical approaches to spoken language description. With these approaches, coordination and variation within and across systems have begun to play a central role. This paper identifies a common thread through the papers in this issue, in which variation is a consequence of dynamically time-varying behavior that cannot be captured by static snapshots (magic moments). (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved