Monsters, myths, and masculinities in Boscán's Respuesta a Don Diego de Mendoza

Renowned for its portrayal of conjugal love, Juan Boscán’s Respuesta a Don Diego de Mendoza also makes use of lesser-studied mythological references to the androgyne, harpies, and King Phineus. Through a consideration of these references in context, namely the poetic voice’s description of the couple’s union and the rewrite of Petrarch’s “Passer mai solitario in alcun tetto”, I expose hitherto unexplored tensions resulting from the complex and often contradictory strands of contemporary masculinity that fed into the radical reshaping of gender constructs among the nobility due to the rise of the courtier. In particular, I show how Boscán’s social commentary and originality in advocating for a conjugal model also had the potential to spark masculinity-related anxieties, which take the form of monstrosities, among his noble readership during this period of transition.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Sources, Syncretism, and Significance in Calderón’s El divino Orfeo (c. 1634)

Calderón de la Barca’s El divino Orfeo (c.1634), first published by Pablo Cabañas in 1948, makes use of a mytho-allegorical narrative to tell the story of the creation, fall, and redemption of humankind. This study offers fresh insights into Calderón’s handling of the mythological sources used in the creation of his Christian allegorical play beyond the eponymous Orpheus and Eurydice. Specifically, I focus upon Calderón’s interaction with four additional mythological episodes: creation from Book 1 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Orpheus in the Garden of the Hesperides, the abduction of Proserpina, and the entry of Aeneas and the Sibyl of Cumae into the Underworld in Book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid. These myths are shown to form part of a syncretic a lo divino allegorical drama that recognises the importance of select pagan texts as valuable contributors to our comprehension of key issues in Christianity, such as the immortal soul, the culpability of humankind for Original Sin, and Christ’s dual nature as mortal and divine. Within this syncretic narrative, I explore Calderón’s use of symbols common to both traditions as a means to engineer challenging new perspectives from which an educated courtly audience could explore the mysteries at the heart of this religious drama.This is the author accepted manuscript. It is currently under an indefinite embargo pending publication by Comediantes

Conversion and Colonial History in Icíar Bollaín’s También la lluvia (2010)

This study concerns the representation of colonial Latin American history and the characterisation of Daniel/Hatuey in the 2010 film-about-a-film También la lluvia. A metacinematic work comprising historical study and political commentary, También la lluvia has received mixed critical reactions regarding its portrayal of the historical and social inequalities it analyses. This article examines the ambiguous nature of the work by analysing the motif of conversion. It argues that, by foregrounding the contemporary conversion story of Costa, the film sacrifices both nuanced historical attention to the colonial past it dramatises and sustained development of one of its apparently central characters: Daniel/Hatuey, who is repeatedly converted into narrative and symbolic figures of secondary prominence, despite their importance to the development and legibility of the work as a whole

The Near-Earth Object Surveyor Mission

The Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission is a NASA observatory designed to discover and characterize near-Earth asteroids and comets. The mission's primary objective is to find the majority of objects large enough to cause severe regional impact damage ($>$140 m in effective spherical diameter) within its five-year baseline survey. Operating at the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrange point, the mission will survey to within 45 degrees of the Sun in an effort to find the objects in the most Earth-like orbits. The survey cadence is optimized to provide observational arcs long enough to reliably distinguish near-Earth objects from more distant small bodies that cannot pose an impact hazard. Over the course of its survey, NEO Surveyor will discover $\sim$200,000 - 300,000 new NEOs down to sizes as small as $\sim$10 m and thousands of comets, significantly improving our understanding of the probability of an Earth impact over the next century.Comment: accepted to PS

Paratextual subversion: Herrera and his poetry in the anotaciones

The year 1580 saw the publication of the Anotaciones a las obras de Garcilaso de la Vega by the critic and poet Fernando de Herrera (c. 1534–97). This study develops previous scholarship on the paratextual strategies employed by Herrera, especially with regard to the inclusion of his own poetry within the Anotaciones. Two Garcilasian sonnets, ‘D’aquella vista pura i ecelente’ (VIII) and ‘Si para refrenar este desseo’ (XII), in conjunction with Herrera’s poetic responses, lie at the heart of this investigation, representing two respectively dominant cultural currents of the period: Neoplatonism and Classical mythography. It will be shown how Herrera exploits Counter-Reformation attitudes towards secularity and mythography to engage in a critique that goes deeper than the attacks previously noted by Navarrete’s 1991 study. Indeed, Herrera’s lyric occupies a central role in a complete re-evaluation of Garcilasian lyric that not only moves to subvert the supremacy of the Toledan but also the hegemonic rule of intellectuals from Castile. Herrera presents himself as a learned Andalusian model for Neoplatonic poetics and as the model for imitation for Spanish letters in the wake of the Counter-Reformation. En 1580 el poeta y crítico Fernando de Herrera (c. 1534–97) publicó sus Anotaciones a las obras de Garcilaso de la Vega. Este artículo desarrolla estudios anteriores sobre esta obra en relación con las estrategias paratextuales empleadas por Herrera, sobre todo por lo que respecta a la inclusión de su propia poesía en el texto de las Anotaciones. Este trabajo se centra en dos sonetos de Garcilaso, ‘D’aquella vista pura i ecelente’ (VIII) y ‘Si para refrenar este deseo’ (XII), en conjunción con otros tantos textos poéticos de Herrera, teniendo en cuenta sus deudas con dos corrientes culturales contemporáneas: el neoplatonismo y la mitología clásica. Las actitudes hacia el amor neoplatónico y la mitología fueron explotadas por Herrera de una manera más profunda de lo que se suele creer. En efecto, la poesía de Herrera ocupa un papel central en la reevaluación completa de Garcilaso que no sólo subvierte la posición del poeta en el canon literario sino también la hegemonía de los intelectuales de Castilla. Herrera se presenta como un andaluz sabio y defensor de la poesía neoplatónica y como el modelo de referencia para la imitación poética en la nueva era que se abre con la Contrarreforma.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Maney via http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/1468273715Z.00000000012

A framework for human microbiome research

A variety of microbial communities and their genes (the microbiome) exist throughout the human body, with fundamental roles in human health and disease. The National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded Human Microbiome Project Consortium has established a population-scale framework to develop metagenomic protocols, resulting in a broad range of quality-controlled resources and data including standardized methods for creating, processing and interpreting distinct types of high-throughput metagenomic data available to the scientific community. Here we present resources from a population of 242 healthy adults sampled at 15 or 18 body sites up to three times, which have generated 5,177 microbial taxonomic profiles from 16S ribosomal RNA genes and over 3.5 terabases of metagenomic sequence so far. In parallel, approximately 800 reference strains isolated from the human body have been sequenced. Collectively, these data represent the largest resource describing the abundance and variety of the human microbiome, while providing a framework for current and future studies

An international effort towards developing standards for best practices in analysis, interpretation and reporting of clinical genome sequencing results in the CLARITY Challenge

There is tremendous potential for genome sequencing to improve clinical diagnosis and care once it becomes routinely accessible, but this will require formalizing research methods into clinical best practices in the areas of sequence data generation, analysis, interpretation and reporting. The CLARITY Challenge was designed to spur convergence in methods for diagnosing genetic disease starting from clinical case history and genome sequencing data. DNA samples were obtained from three families with heritable genetic disorders and genomic sequence data were donated by sequencing platform vendors. The challenge was to analyze and interpret these data with the goals of identifying disease-causing variants and reporting the findings in a clinically useful format. Participating contestant groups were solicited broadly, and an independent panel of judges evaluated their performance. RESULTS: A total of 30 international groups were engaged. The entries reveal a general convergence of practices on most elements of the analysis and interpretation process. However, even given this commonality of approach, only two groups identified the consensus candidate variants in all disease cases, demonstrating a need for consistent fine-tuning of the generally accepted methods. There was greater diversity of the final clinical report content and in the patient consenting process, demonstrating that these areas require additional exploration and standardization. CONCLUSIONS: The CLARITY Challenge provides a comprehensive assessment of current practices for using genome sequencing to diagnose and report genetic diseases. There is remarkable convergence in bioinformatic techniques, but medical interpretation and reporting are areas that require further development by many groups

Multiple novel prostate cancer susceptibility signals identified by fine-mapping of known risk loci among Europeans

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous common prostate cancer (PrCa) susceptibility loci. We have fine-mapped 64 GWAS regions known at the conclusion of the iCOGS study using large-scale genotyping and imputation in 25 723 PrCa cases and 26 274 controls of European ancestry. We detected evidence for multiple independent signals at 16 regions, 12 of which contained additional newly identified significant associations. A single signal comprising a spectrum of correlated variation was observed at 39 regions; 35 of which are now described by a novel more significantly associated lead SNP, while the originally reported variant remained as the lead SNP only in 4 regions. We also confirmed two association signals in Europeans that had been previously reported only in East-Asian GWAS. Based on statistical evidence and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure, we have curated and narrowed down the list of the most likely candidate causal variants for each region. Functional annotation using data from ENCODE filtered for PrCa cell lines and eQTL analysis demonstrated significant enrichment for overlap with bio-features within this set. By incorporating the novel risk variants identified here alongside the refined data for existing association signals, we estimate that these loci now explain ∼38.9% of the familial relative risk of PrCa, an 8.9% improvement over the previously reported GWAS tag SNPs. This suggests that a significant fraction of the heritability of PrCa may have been hidden during the discovery phase of GWAS, in particular due to the presence of multiple independent signals within the same regio

Structure, function and diversity of the healthy human microbiome

Author Posting. © The Authors, 2012. This article is posted here by permission of Nature Publishing Group. The definitive version was published in Nature 486 (2012): 207-214, doi:10.1038/nature11234.Studies of the human microbiome have revealed that even healthy individuals differ remarkably in the microbes that occupy habitats such as the gut, skin and vagina. Much of this diversity remains unexplained, although diet, environment, host genetics and early microbial exposure have all been implicated. Accordingly, to characterize the ecology of human-associated microbial communities, the Human Microbiome Project has analysed the largest cohort and set of distinct, clinically relevant body habitats so far. We found the diversity and abundance of each habitat’s signature microbes to vary widely even among healthy subjects, with strong niche specialization both within and among individuals. The project encountered an estimated 81–99% of the genera, enzyme families and community configurations occupied by the healthy Western microbiome. Metagenomic carriage of metabolic pathways was stable among individuals despite variation in community structure, and ethnic/racial background proved to be one of the strongest associations of both pathways and microbes with clinical metadata. These results thus delineate the range of structural and functional configurations normal in the microbial communities of a healthy population, enabling future characterization of the epidemiology, ecology and translational applications of the human microbiome.This research was supported in part by National Institutes of Health grants U54HG004969 to B.W.B.; U54HG003273 to R.A.G.; U54HG004973 to R.A.G., S.K.H. and J.F.P.; U54HG003067 to E.S.Lander; U54AI084844 to K.E.N.; N01AI30071 to R.L.Strausberg; U54HG004968 to G.M.W.; U01HG004866 to O.R.W.; U54HG003079 to R.K.W.; R01HG005969 to C.H.; R01HG004872 to R.K.; R01HG004885 to M.P.; R01HG005975 to P.D.S.; R01HG004908 to Y.Y.; R01HG004900 to M.K.Cho and P. Sankar; R01HG005171 to D.E.H.; R01HG004853 to A.L.M.; R01HG004856 to R.R.; R01HG004877 to R.R.S. and R.F.; R01HG005172 to P. Spicer.; R01HG004857 to M.P.; R01HG004906 to T.M.S.; R21HG005811 to E.A.V.; M.J.B. was supported by UH2AR057506; G.A.B. was supported by UH2AI083263 and UH3AI083263 (G.A.B., C. N. Cornelissen, L. K. Eaves and J. F. Strauss); S.M.H. was supported by UH3DK083993 (V. B. Young, E. B. Chang, F. Meyer, T. M. S., M. L. Sogin, J. M. Tiedje); K.P.R. was supported by UH2DK083990 (J. V.); J.A.S. and H.H.K. were supported by UH2AR057504 and UH3AR057504 (J.A.S.); DP2OD001500 to K.M.A.; N01HG62088 to the Coriell Institute for Medical Research; U01DE016937 to F.E.D.; S.K.H. was supported by RC1DE0202098 and R01DE021574 (S.K.H. and H. Li); J.I. was supported by R21CA139193 (J.I. and D. S. Michaud); K.P.L. was supported by P30DE020751 (D. J. Smith); Army Research Office grant W911NF-11-1-0473 to C.H.; National Science Foundation grants NSF DBI-1053486 to C.H. and NSF IIS-0812111 to M.P.; The Office of Science of the US Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231 for P.S. C.; LANL Laboratory-Directed Research and Development grant 20100034DR and the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency grants B104153I and B084531I to P.S.C.; Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO) grant to K.F. and J.Raes; R.K. is an HHMI Early Career Scientist; Gordon&BettyMoore Foundation funding and institutional funding fromthe J. David Gladstone Institutes to K.S.P.; A.M.S. was supported by fellowships provided by the Rackham Graduate School and the NIH Molecular Mechanisms in Microbial Pathogenesis Training Grant T32AI007528; a Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of Canada Grant in Aid of Research to E.A.V.; 2010 IBM Faculty Award to K.C.W.; analysis of the HMPdata was performed using National Energy Research Scientific Computing resources, the BluBioU Computational Resource at Rice University