Crime fiction, South Africa : a critical introduction

Crime fiction is an emergent category in South African literary studies. This introduction positions South African crime fiction and its scholarship in a global lineage of crime and detective fiction. The survey addresses the question of its literary status as ‘highbrow’ or ‘lowbrow’. It also identifies and describes two distinct sub-genres of South African crime fiction: the crime thriller novel; and the literary detective novel. The argument is that South African crime fiction exhibits a unique capacity for social analysis: a capacity which is being optimised by authors and interrogated by scholar

Synaptotagmin 5 regulates Ca2+-dependent Weibel-Palade body exocytosis in human endothelial cells.

Membrane protein insertion is an essential cellular process. The broad biophysical and topological range of membrane proteins necessitates multiple insertion pathways, which remain incompletely defined. Here, we have discovered a new membrane protein insertion pathway, identified the class of substrates it handles, explained why other known pathways do not work for these substrates and reconstituted the pathway using purified components

A novel approach to analyze lysosomal dysfunctions through subcellular proteomics and lipidomics : the case of NPC1 deficiency

Superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs) have mainly been used as cellular carriers for genes and therapeutic products, while their use in subcellular organelle isolation remains underexploited. We engineered SPIONs targeting distinct subcellular compartments. Dimercaptosuccinic acid-coated SPIONs are internalized and accumulate in late endosomes/lysosomes, while aminolipid-SPIONs reside at the plasma membrane. These features allowed us to establish standardized magnetic isolation procedures for these membrane compartments with a yield and purity permitting proteomic and lipidomic profiling. We validated our approach by comparing the biomolecular compositions of lysosomes and plasma membranes isolated from wild-type and Niemann-Pick disease type C1 (NPC1) deficient cells. While the accumulation of cholesterol and glycosphingolipids is seen as a primary hallmark of NPC1 deficiency, our lipidomics analysis revealed the buildup of several species of glycerophospholipids and other storage lipids in selectively late endosomes/lysosomes of NPC1-KO cells. While the plasma membrane proteome remained largely invariable, we observed pronounced alterations in several proteins linked to autophagy and lysosomal catabolism reflecting vesicular transport obstruction and defective lysosomal turnover resulting from NPC1 deficiency. Thus the use of SPIONs provides a major advancement in fingerprinting subcellular compartments, with an increased potential to identify disease-related alterations in their biomolecular compositions

Temples and Mysteries in Romantic Infidel Writing

Not all apparently religious imagery in Romantic Period writing is in fact religious. Temples—particularly when presided over by a priestess and linked with the ideas of reason or nature—often denote active hostility to Christianity if not to all religion. Examples from the Temple of Reason in revolutionary Paris to Shelley are considered, as well as references to Eleusinian and other Greek Mystery cults, seen as revealing hidden truths to an elite while concealing them from the masses. For Coleridge, these truths were quasi-Christian; for many others, they were materialistic and religiously subversive, but suppressed for political reasons. Hints of the latter position are briefly examined in Godwin, Richard Payne Knight, and Blake, as are some parallels in Freemasonry. Perhaps the fullest poetic use of temple and Mystery imagery is in The Temple of Nature (1803) by Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles, whose evolutionary theory it anticipates. Despite a brief deistic identification of God as First Cause, its opening uses an exciting technique of imagistic montage to overthrow the story of Adam and Eve as a vulgar myth, to be replaced by an Eleusinian-style initiation of the few into the truths of the materialist self-sufficiency of nature. Its elaboration of these images makes it a crucial reference-point for their use in religiously unorthodox Romantic period literature

The Other Darwin’s Plots: Evolution as Literature in Erasmus Darwin, Samuel Butler and George Bernard Shaw

Whereas Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots traces the sometimes-indirect impact of Charles Darwin on a number of major Victorian novels, this article proposes to examine the fictions of two writers very directly concerned with evolution, but preferring what they took to be Erasmus Darwin’s version of it. The first of these is Samuel Butler, who progressed from sympathetically spoofing Charles’ evolutionism to bitterly attacking his theory of natural selection, holding up what he believed to be the goal-directed evolutionary model of Erasmus and others instead. Along with a glance at Butler’s polemical evolutionary works, his two major novels Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh are explored both for their critiques of Charles and the ways they may have drawn on Erasmus, particularly his Botanic Garden and Zoonomia.The other writer with links to Erasmus is George Bernard Shaw, the Preface to whose ambitious five-play cycle Back to Methuselah denounces Charles and explicitly praises both Butler and Erasmus’s Zoonomia, while its plot bears interesting similarities to Erasmus’s final evolutionary poem, The Temple of Nature. Since it is not certain Shaw had read this poem the following comparison runs the unproved possibility of direct influence in parallel with Viktor Shklovsky’s idea of the transmission of literary forms in a series of “knight’s moves,” “discontinuous but teleological” as Fredric Jameson calls them. While the parallels between the two works are striking, including the political contexts to which they are responding, the article finally distances Erasmus’s full-blooded but non-exclusory evolutionism from the hints of “survival of the fittest” Social-Darwinism to be found in Shaw’s (and to a lesser extent Butler’s) works

Earthship architecture: post occupancy evaluation, thermal performance & life cycle assessment.

Minimising environmental impact from buildings and building construction processes while providing thermal comfort to the occupants are some of the main goals of green building design. Many different approaches exist to achieve these goals, one of which is the “Earthship”, invented by American architect Michael Reynolds. The Earthship is an earth-sheltered autonomous house with walls made substantially from waste products, most notably, discarded car tyres. This thesis presents original research to investigate claims about Earthship performance: that it provides passive thermal comfort in any climate and is the most sustainable green building design in the world. This investigation has been conducted by using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to evaluate the overall environmental impact of the Earthship and to compare it to a variety of similar building types characterised by their wall construction materials and other design features. To support assumptions in the LCA, a Post Occupancy Evaluation and a Thermal Performance study were conducted to estimate heating and cooling energy use in a variety of climates. The environmental credentials of the Earthship are then compared to that of other housing types, using both the LCA and thermal modelling approaches. A post occupancy evaluation (POE) of Earthship homes in Taos, New Mexico, USA, was conducted. This included interviews and surveys of the occupants, and monitoring of the indoor thermal environment. Some aspects of the POE were also extended to an international cohort of Earthship occupants to help justify the assumptions that Earthships provide a level of amenity comparable to conventional housing. The indoor monitored data were also used to calibrate a thermal simulation model of an Earthship home in Taos to ensure the accuracy of the model. The tested approach and parameters to model this Earthship were then used in a model to predict the indoor temperature and theoretical heating and cooling energy requirement of an Earthship design in cold climates and in a warm Mediterranean climate of Adelaide, Australia – the particular context of the LCA study. Thermal modelling of other building types, characterised by their wall materials, was conducted for the Adelaide climate, to predict the heating and cooling energy requirement which was needed for the comparative LCA study. The research produced the following results. Firstly, in the extreme climate of Taos, the Earthship is able to provide thermal comfort without active heating and cooling systems, and that people are generally very satisfied with the level of comfort and amenity provided. Secondly, in the Adelaide climate, Earthship performance would be similar to Taos; approaching zero energy use for heating and cooling, while in cold and overcast climates minimal space heating may be required. Finally, in the Adelaide climate and context, of all the house types considered, the Earthship had the least environmental impacts and these were considerably less than conventional grid connected homes. The Earthship’s comparatively low environmental impact arises from the holistic design, in particular the greenhouse and earth-sheltering, which enable occupants to be extremely energy and water efficient, and therefore live within the limits of modestly sized “off-grid” systems (autonomously) while still enjoying a high level of comfort and amenity. The use of tyres to construct the Earthship’s external walls proved to be a low impact method for constructing a retaining wall capable of being earth-sheltered. The study has provided scientific evidence about the thermal performance and environmental credentials of the Earthship and other housing types, supporting claims that Earthships can provide passive thermal comfort in many climates and that it may be the most sustainable green building design compared to the other building types investigated by this study.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Architecture and Built Environment, 201