Becoming Mongrel: Grotesque Complicity in Don LePan’s Animals

Don LePan’s novel Animals, a dystopian account of a future gone wrong, is an animal story with an ironic twist. Featuring no actual animals – indeed, set at a time when there are virtually no animals left on the planet, Animals is driven by narrative tensions that disrupt enduring forms of speciesism and highlight the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of such categories. The novel converges with the efforts of posthumanist critics like Cary Wolfe, Jodey Castricano, and Donna Haraway in its depiction of the human/non-human divide and in its insistence on the philosophical necessity of including non-human animals in the designation of the Other to whom we remain morally responsible. In this sense, Sam’s experience of becoming mongrel – his descent from human, to mongrel, to raw material for consumption – epitomizes the broader dehumanization of an entire culture. By inviting readers to judge the decisions characters make in reinforcing and policing the constructed categories of mongrels and humans, LePan questions the unstable classificatory systems through which we organize physical and textual worlds

“Imagining What We Know”: The Humanities in a Utilitarian Age

This paper explores the ways that critics writing in the early nineteenth century developed arguments in favor of what we think of today as the humanities in the face of utilitarian pressures that dismissed the arts as self-indulgent pursuits incapable of addressing real-world problems. Its focus reflects the extent to which the financial crisis in our own day has manifested itself in a jarring shift in research priorities towards applied knowledge: a retrenchment which has foregrounded all over again the question of how to make the case for the value of the humanities. These problems, however, also constitute an important opportunity: a chance to re-imagine our answers to questions about the nature and role of the humanities, their potential benefits to contemporary life, and how we might channel these benefits back into the larger society. The good news is that in many ways, this self-reflexive challenge is precisely what the humanities have always done best: highlight the nature and the force of the narratives that have helped to define how we understand our society—its various pasts and its possible futures—and to suggest the larger contexts within which these issues must ultimately be situated. History repeats itself, but never in quite the same way: knowing more about past debates will provide a crucial basis for moving forward as we position themselves to respond to new social, economic, technological, and cultural challenges during an age of radical change

Mathematical model predicts anti-adhesion--antibiotic--debridement combination therapies can clear an antibiotic resistant infection

As antimicrobial resistance increases, it is crucial to develop new treatment strategies to counter the emerging threat. In this paper, we consider combination therapies involving conventional antibiotics and debridement, coupled with a novel anti-adhesion therapy, and their use in the treatment of antimicrobial resistant burn wound infections. Our models predict that anti-adhesion–antibiotic–debridement combination therapies can eliminate a bacterial infection in cases where each treatment in isolation would fail. Antibiotics are assumed to have a bactericidal mode of action, killing bacteria, while debridement involves physically cleaning a wound (e.g. with a cloth); removing free bacteria. Anti-adhesion therapy can take a number of forms. Here we consider adhesion inhibitors consisting of polystyrene microbeads chemically coupled to a protein known as multivalent adhesion molecule 7, an adhesin which mediates the initial stages of attachment of many bacterial species to host cells. Adhesion inhibitors competitively inhibit bacteria from binding to host cells, thus rendering them susceptible to removal through debridement. An ordinary differential equation model is developed and the antibiotic-related parameters are fitted against new in vitro data gathered for the present study. The model is used to predict treatment outcomes and to suggest optimal treatment strategies. Our model predicts that anti-adhesion and antibiotic therapies will combine synergistically, producing a combined effect which is often greater than the sum of their individual effects, and that anti-adhesion–antibiotic–debridement combination therapy will be more effective than any of the treatment strategies used in isolation. Further, the use of inhibitors significantly reduces the minimum dose of antibiotics required to eliminate an infection, reducing the chances that bacteria will develop increased resistance. Lastly, we use our model to suggest treatment regimens capable of eliminating bacterial infections within clinically relevant timescales

Dimensional crossover of correlated anion disorder in oxynitride perovskites

A simple crossover from two-dimensional to three-dimensional correlated disorder of O and N atoms on a cubic lattice has been discovered within the Ba1xSrxTaO2N series of perovskite oxynitrides. The crossover is driven by lattice expansion as x decreases, and provides a rapid increase in entropy due to a change from subextensive to extensive configurational entropy regimes.We thank STFC, UK for support for H. J. and provision of ISIS beamtime, and EPSRC for additional support. This work was also supported by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad (MINECO), Spain through Project MAT2017-86616-R, the Severo Ochoa Program SEV-2015-0496, and Fellowship support to AB (MAT2011-24757). We thank the ALBA synchrotron for the provision of beamtime and Prof. Rosa Palacin, Dr Carlos Frontera (ICMAB-CSIC) and Dr F. Fauth (ALBA) for assistance with data collection.Peer reviewe

The Lantern Vol. 21, No. 3, Summer 1953

• Millie and Murph • Waxy • Nor Bars a Prison Make • The Shows at Killapoorsparrow • Sahonnet to a Mahodern Sahinger • In Each Man: A Collection • Mirrors • The Offspring of My Song • Come Sweet Night • A Modern Ballad • Uninvitedhttps://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/lantern/1060/thumbnail.jp