Historical geographies of the future: airships and the making of imperial atmospheres

This article explores the elemental encounters and imaginative geographies of empire to develop a new means of engaging with the historical geographies of the future. Futures have recently become an important topic of historical and cultural inquiry, and historical geographers have an important role to play in understanding the place of the future in the past and in interrogating the role of posited futures in shaping action in historical presents. Drawing on literature from science and technology studies, a framework is developed for engaging with the material and imaginative geographies that coalesce around practices of imagination, expectation, and prediction. This framework is then used to reconstruct efforts to develop airship travel in the British Empire in the 1920s and 1930s. At a moment of imperial anxiety, airships were hoped to tie the empire together by conveying bodies, capital, and military capacity between its furthest points. Confident projections of the colonization of global airspace were nonetheless undermined by material encounters with a vibrant, often unpredictable atmospheric environment. The article aims to spur renewed work on the historical geographies of the future, while also contributing to debates on the cultural and political geographies of the atmosphere and of atmospheric knowledge making. Key Words: atmosphere, empire, future, mobility, technology

Plasma proteins elevated in severe asthma despite oral steroid use and unrelated to Type-2 inflammation

Rationale Asthma phenotyping requires novel biomarker discovery. Objectives To identify plasma biomarkers associated with asthma phenotypes by application of a new proteomic panel to samples from two well-characterised cohorts of severe (SA) and mild-to-moderate (MMA) asthmatics, COPD subjects and healthy controls (HCs). Methods An antibody-based array targeting 177 proteins predominantly involved in pathways relevant to inflammation, lipid metabolism, signal transduction and extracellular matrix was applied to plasma from 525 asthmatics and HCs in the U-BIOPRED cohort, and 142 subjects with asthma and COPD from the validation cohort BIOAIR. Effects of oral corticosteroids (OCS) were determined by a 2-week, placebo-controlled OCS trial in BIOAIR, and confirmed by relation to objective OCS measures in U-BIOPRED. Results In U-BIOPRED, 110 proteins were significantly different, mostly elevated, in SA compared to MMA and HCs. 10 proteins were elevated in SA versus MMA in both U-BIOPRED and BIOAIR (alpha-1-antichymotrypsin, apolipoprotein-E, complement component 9, complement factor I, macrophage inflammatory protein-3, interleukin-6, sphingomyelin phosphodiesterase 3, TNF receptor superfamily member 11a, transforming growth factor-β and glutathione S-transferase). OCS treatment decreased most proteins, yet differences between SA and MMA remained following correction for OCS use. Consensus clustering of U-BIOPRED protein data yielded six clusters associated with asthma control, quality of life, blood neutrophils, high-sensitivity C-reactive protein and body mass index, but not Type-2 inflammatory biomarkers. The mast cell specific enzyme carboxypeptidase A3 was one major contributor to cluster differentiation. Conclusions The plasma proteomic panel revealed previously unexplored yet potentially useful Type-2independent biomarkers and validated several proteins with established involvement in the pathophysiology of SA