Parents, children and the porous boundaries of the sexual family in law and popular culture

This article focuses on a perceived ideological overlap between popular cultural and judicial treatments of sex and conjugality that contributes to a discursive construction of parenthood and parenting. The author perceives that in both legal and popular cultural texts, there is a sense in which notions of ‘natural’ childhood are discursively constituted as being put at risk by those who reproduce outside of dominant sexual norms, and that signs of normative sexuality (typically in the form of heterosexual coupling) may be treated as a sign of safety. These ideas are rooted in ancient associations between fertility, sexuality and femininity that can also be traced in the historical development of the English language. With the help of commentators such as Martha Fineman, the article situates parents and children within a discourse of family which prioritises conjugality, with consequences for the ways in which the internal and external boundaries of families are delineated

An introduction to Elinor Glyn : her life and legacy

This special issue of Women: A Cultural Review re-evaluates an author who was once a household name, beloved by readers of romance, and whose films were distributed widely in Europe and the Americas. Elinor Glyn (1864–1943) was a British author of romantic fiction who went to Hollywood and became famous for her movies. She was a celebrity figure of the 1920s, and wrote constantly in Hearst's press. She wrote racy stories which were turned into films—most famously, Three Weeks (1924) and It (1927). These were viewed by the judiciary as scandalous, but by others—Hollywood and the Spanish Catholic Church—as acceptably conservative. Glyn has become a peripheral figure in histories of this period, marginalized in accounts of the youth-centred ‘flapper era’. Decades on, the idea of the ‘It Girl’ continues to have great pertinence in the post-feminist discourses of the twenty-first century. The 1910s and 1920s saw the development of intermodal networks between print, sound and screen cultures. This introduction to Glyn's life and legacy reviews the cross-disciplinary debate sparked by renewed interest in Glyn by film scholars and literary and feminist historians, and offers a range of views of Glyn's cultural and historical significance and areas for future research

Micrometeoroid Events in LISA Pathfinder

The zodiacal dust complex, a population of dust and small particles that pervades the Solar System, provides important insight into the formation and dynamics of planets, comets, asteroids, and other bodies. Here we present a new set of data obtained using a novel technique: direct measurements of momentum transfer to a spacecraft from individual particle impacts. This technique is made possible by the extreme precision of the instruments flown on the LISA Pathfinder spacecraft, a technology demonstrator for a future space-based gravitational wave observatory that operated near the first Sun-Earth Lagrange point from early 2016 through Summer of 2017. Using a simple model of the impacts and knowledge of the control system, we show that it is possible to detect impacts and measure properties such as the transferred momentum (related to the particle's mass and velocity), direction of travel, and location of impact on the spacecraft. In this paper, we present the results of a systematic search for impacts during 4348 hours of Pathfinder data. We report a total of 54 candidates with momenta ranging from 0.2$\,\mu\textrm{Ns}$ to 230$\,\mu\textrm{Ns}$. We furthermore make a comparison of these candidates with models of micrometeoroid populations in the inner solar system including those resulting from Jupiter-family comets, Oort-cloud comets, Hailey-type comets, and Asteroids. We find that our measured population is consistent with a population dominated by Jupiter-family comets with some evidence for a smaller contribution from Hailey-type comets. This is in agreement with consensus models of the zodiacal dust complex in the momentum range sampled by LISA Pathfinder.Comment: 22 pages, 14 figures, accepted in Ap

Author Correction: A consensus-based transparency checklist.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper

In Vivo RNAi Screening Identifies a Leukemia-Specific Dependence on Integrin Beta 3 Signaling

We used an in vivo small hairpin RNA (shRNA) screening approach to identify genes that are essential for MLL-AF9 acute myeloid leukemia (AML). We found that Integrin Beta 3 (Itgb3) is essential for murine leukemia cells in vivo and for human leukemia cells in xenotransplantation studies. In leukemia cells, Itgb3 knockdown impaired homing, downregulated LSC transcriptional programs, and induced differentiation via the intracellular kinase Syk. In contrast, loss of Itgb3 in normal hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells did not affect engraftment, reconstitution, or differentiation. Finally, using an Itgb3 knockout mouse model, we confirmed that Itgb3 is dispensable for normal hematopoiesis but is required for leukemogenesis. Our results establish the significance of the Itgb3 signaling pathway as a potential therapeutic target in AML.National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Harvard Stem Cell Institute. GlaxoSmithKline. Grant P01 CA108631)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Harvard Stem Cell Institute. GlaxoSmithKline. Grant RC1 CA145229)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Harvard Stem Cell Institute. GlaxoSmithKline. Grant R01 CA140292)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Harvard Stem Cell Institute. GlaxoSmithKline. Grant CA148180

The Origin of Malarial Parasites in Orangutans

Background Recent findings of Plasmodium in African apes have changed our perspectives on the evolution of malarial parasites in hominids. However, phylogenetic analyses of primate malarias are still missing information from Southeast Asian apes. In this study, we report molecular data for a malaria parasite lineage found in orangutans. Methodology/Principal Findings We screened twenty-four blood samples from Pongo pygmaeus (Kalimantan, Indonesia) for Plasmodium parasites by PCR. For all the malaria positive orangutan samples, parasite mitochondrial genomes (mtDNA) and two antigens: merozoite surface protein 1 42 kDa (MSP-142) and circumsporozoite protein gene (CSP) were amplified, cloned, and sequenced. Fifteen orangutans tested positive and yielded 5 distinct mitochondrial haplotypes not previously found. The haplotypes detected exhibited low genetic divergence among them, indicating that they belong to one species. We report phylogenetic analyses using mitochondrial genomes, MSP-142 and CSP. We found that the orangutan malaria parasite lineage was part of a monophyletic group that includes all the known non-human primate malaria parasites found in Southeast Asia; specifically, it shares a recent common ancestor with P. inui (a macaque parasite) and P. hylobati (a gibbon parasite) suggesting that this lineage originated as a result of a host switch. The genetic diversity of MSP-142 in orangutans seems to be under negative selection. This result is similar to previous findings in non-human primate malarias closely related to P. vivax. As has been previously observed in the other Plasmodium species found in non-human primates, the CSP shows high polymorphism in the number of repeats. However, it has clearly distinctive motifs from those previously found in other malarial parasites. Conclusion The evidence available from Asian apes indicates that these parasites originated independently from those found in Africa, likely as the result of host switches from other non-human primates

LISA Pathfinder: First steps to observing gravitational waves from space

LISA Pathfinder, the European Space Agency's technology demonstrator mission for future spaceborne gravitational wave observatories, was launched on 3 December 2015, from the European space port of Kourou, French Guiana. After a short duration transfer to the final science orbit, the mission has been gathering science data since. This data has allowed the science community to validate the critical technologies and measurement principle for low frequency gravitational wave detection and thereby confirming the readiness to start the next generation gravitational wave observatories, such as LISA. This paper will briefly describe the mission, followed by a description of the science operations highlighting the performance achieved. Details of the various experiments performed during the nominal science operations phase can be found in accompanying papers in this volume

GCR flux 9-day variations with LISA Pathfinder

Galactic cosmic-ray (GCR) energy spectra in the heliosphere vary on the basis of the level of solar activity, the status of solar polarity and interplanetary transient magnetic structures of solar origin. A high counting rate particle detector (PD) aboard LISA Pathfinder (LPF) allows for the measurement of galactic cosmic-ray and solar energetic particle (SEP) integral fluxes at energies > 70 MeV n−1 up to 6500 counts s−1. Data are gathered with a sampling time of 15 s. A study of GCR flux depressions associated with the third harmonic of the Sun rotation period (∼ 9 days) is presented here