Allergic to the Twentieth Century: Intentional Communities and Therapeutic Landscapes in The Village and Safe

The concept of therapeutic landscapes has been used to explore diverse spaces and places of healing or wellness, from hospitals to gardens, libraries to smoking areas. A central strand of this work considers rural and/or natural landscapes as affording particular healing experiences. In this paper, I draw on this lineage of work alongside research into the formation of intentional communities in rural settings and the body of writing on representations of rural landscapes and country life. The two representations I analyse are films: The Village (M. Night Shyamalan, 2004) and Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995). In the former, an apparent settler village in rural Pennsylvania is revealed, in the film’s denouement, as an intentional community built as a retreat from the violence of contemporary urban life, guarded by Elders and a shared mythology about border-policing creatures. In Safe, the health hazards of modern suburban living, which lead the central character to develop multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS), can only be escaped by a similar retreat to a wilderness commune in the American desert. In both films, the spaces of rural life are constructed as therapeutic landscapes through their nostalgic, anti-modern withdrawal, and their protective boundary keeping

The translational response of the human mdm2 gene in HEK293T cells exposed to rapamycin: a role for the 5′-UTRs

Polysomal messenger RNA (mRNA) populations change rapidly in response to alterations in the physiological status of the cell. For this reason, translational regulation, mediated principally at the level of initiation, plays a key role in the maintenance of cellular homeostasis. In an earlier translational profiling study, we followed the impact of rapamycin on polysome re-seeding. Despite the overall negative effect on transcript recruitment, we nonetheless observed that some mRNAs were significantly less affected. Consequently, their relative polysomal occupancy increased in the rapamycin-treated cells. The behaviour of one of these genes, mdm2, has been further analysed. Despite the absence of internal ribosome entry site activity we demonstrate, using a dual reporter assay, that both the reported mdm2 5′-UTRs confer resistance to rapamycin relative to the 5′-UTR of β-actin. This relative resistance is responsive to the downstream targets mTORC1 but did not respond to changes in the La protein, a reported factor acting positively on MDM2 translational expression. Furthermore, extended exposure to rapamycin in the presence of serum increased the steady-state level of the endogenous MDM2 protein. However, this response was effectively reversed when serum levels were reduced. Taken globally, these studies suggest that experimental conditions can dramatically modulate the expressional output during rapamycin exposure

Mediating newspeople: Cultures of writing and the mechanisms of change at three daily newspapers

The past few decades have seen rapid changes in the technology of news production, in the financial health of news organizations and in the demographic balance within American newsrooms. Amid this tumult, there are other forces questioning the way newsgathering is practiced and the way news is defined. As part of the process of questioning journalistic practices and traditions, some print newsrooms have seen the rise of clusters of editors and reporters whose beliefs and activities also have significantly affected the transformation of American print newsrooms in apparent counterpoint to prevailing economic and technological trends in journalism. These groups are part of phenomena I call cultures of writing. Cultures of writing are ideological frameworks--or systems of values and beliefs--that are manifested in sets of relationships centering on distinctive methods of reporting and styles of writing. This research examines cultures of writing at three mainstream daily newspapers, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Record-Journal of Meriden, CT, and The Providence (RI) Journal Bulletin. It shows how the newsrooms of these newspapers in the mid 1990s were the consequences of multipartite processes expressed as regularized negotiations between members of writing cultures, or \u27elite\u27 journalists, the interests of the fiscal proprietors of the organization, the interests of the readers and the interests of the larger newsroom. Elite journalism constitutes a tactic through which American reporters and editors have had to contest the sense of lost autonomy and contend with changes external to the newsroom by reconstituting the newsgathering and news writing processes. The practices and beliefs of cultures of writing not only challenge older notions of the role of objectivity but seek to replace it with a renewed and transformed sense of what constitutes news.

Mosaic quadrivalent influenza vaccine single nanoparticle characterization

Abstract Recent work by our laboratory and others indicates that co-display of multiple antigens on protein-based nanoparticles may be key to induce cross-reactive antibodies that provide broad protection against disease. To reach the ultimate goal of a universal vaccine for seasonal influenza, a mosaic influenza nanoparticle vaccine (FluMos-v1) was developed for clinical trial (NCT04896086). FluMos-v1 is unique in that it is designed to co-display four recently circulating haemagglutinin (HA) strains; however, current vaccine analysis techniques are limited to nanoparticle population analysis, thus, are unable to determine the valency of an individual nanoparticle. For the first time, we demonstrate by total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy and supportive physical–chemical methods that the co-display of four antigens is indeed achieved in single nanoparticles. Additionally, we have determined percentages of multivalent (mosaic) nanoparticles with four, three, or two HA proteins. The integrated imaging and physicochemical methods we have developed for single nanoparticle multivalency will serve to further understand immunogenicity data from our current FluMos-v1 clinical trial