Massimo Scotti, Storia degli spettri. Fantasmi, medium e case infestate fra scienza e letteratura

Review of the book Storia degli spettri. Fantasmi, medium e case infestate fra scienza e letteratura by Massimo ScottiCome denuncia in maniera esaustiva il sottotitolo, Storia degli spettri costituisce uno studio diacronico sugli spiriti e sullo spiritismo che si propone di seguire nella maniera il più possibile ampia e discorsiva due linee di indagine inscindibili: da un lato quella che interessa la nascita e lo sviluppo di una mentalità di tipo scientifico, dall’altro quella che coinvolge le produzioni letterarie. È infatti un presupposto continuamente dimostrato dall’autore che la storia dei saperi occulti intersechi strettamente quella delle scienze, delle religioni e delle più svariate manifestazioni artistiche.&nbsp

L’ironia funzionale di Mark Twain: rileggere e contestualizzare The Private Life of Adam and Eve

Mark Twain was lifelong fascinated by the biblical book of Genesis. The characters of Adam and Eve returned many times in his writings and they became the symbol of a conflict between human creatures and God. In The Private Life of Adam and Eve, the American novelist uses humoristic strategies to conduct his argument and to show up his serious reasoning about some religious themes. In this way, we can place Twain’s irony side by side to Pirandello’s notion of “umorismo” to understand how the diaries of Adam and Eve are important in the main Twainian works.Composti tra il 1893 e il 1905, i Diari di Adamo ed Eva rappresentano per Mark Twain l’occasione di ritornare su un tema che lo aveva già in precedenza affascinato, per mettersi alla prova in un divertissement letterario colto e virtuosistico, per porre le tecniche dell’ironia e i principali topoi comici sulla differenza di genere al servizio di una rilettura/riscrittura del libro della Genesi. L’opera, che si pone sulla linea di confine tra la parodia e il travestimento burlesco di genettiana memoria, dimostra la profonda conoscenza dell’autore del materiale biblico, che viene pertanto ripreso e sovvertito con piena consapevolezza. Passi delle Scritture perfettamente identificabili sono prestati ad una riflessione solo apparentemente superficiale sulla dialettica maschile/femminile, che mira a mettere in evidenza le differenze laddove nell’ipertesto biblico si sottolineavano piuttosto le analogie. Una lettura puntuale dei Diari può aiutare a smascherare le strategie attraverso cui l’autore conduce il suo gioco, fino ad una morale conclusiva che – pur configurandosi di primo acchito come sostanzialmente laica – sottolinea in realtà il passaggio ad una nuova forma di religiosità, non più vetero ma neotestamentaria

Angelica, la forma del desiderio nella letteratura contemporanea

The aim of the article is to demonstrate how the beautiful heroine of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso continued after the Renaissance to charm the collective imagination, becoming a successful literary myth. Above all, during the 20th and the 21st century Angelica, incarnation of unreachable desire, grows more and more complex, taking on all the contradictions and inconsistencies of the present day. A previously evanescent creature, she becomes a flesh and blood woman, victim of her own selfishness and of a regained corporeality. In an age of crisis of values, things couldn’t be different. A comparative reading of the novels which – whether consciously or unconsciously –summon Ariosto’s character goes to show that every writer, through their book, creates a new Angelica, perfectly recognisable but ever original and different from the others. All of them however, just like the first, are perturbing figures who strongly influence the surrounding reality.Scopo dell’intervento è dimostrare come la bella eroina dell’Orlando Furioso di Ludovico Ariosto non abbia cessato dopo il Rinascimento di esercitare il suo fascino sull’immaginario collettivo e sia anzi diventata un mito letterario che tende a riproporsi continuamente nel corso del tempo. In particolare, nel XX e nel XXI secolo Angelica, incarnazione del desiderio irraggiungibile, diventa una figura sempre più complessa, che assume su di sé tutte le incongruenze e le contraddizioni della contemporaneità. Da creatura sovrannaturale e inafferrabile, la giovane donna dalla straordinaria avvenenza diventa essere di carne e sangue, succube del proprio egoismo e di una riconquistata corporeità. Nell’epoca della crisi dei valori e del superominismo maschile, d’altro canto, non poteva andare diversamente. Un’analisi comparativa dei romanzi che riprendono più o meno consapevolmente il personaggio ariostesco consente di appurare che ogni scrittore con la sua opera crea una nuova Angelica, perfettamente riconoscibile nei suoi tratti caratterizzanti, ma sempre unica e originale rispetto alle altre. Tutte però, fedeli al modello, rimangono figure conturbanti e perturbanti, destinate ad influire in modo significativo sulla realtà che le circonda.&nbsp

Proteins structured as spherical micelles

The image depicts a highly regular, spherically symmetrical structure. Shades of gray correspond to increasing concentrations of hydrophobicity, which is low on the surface but high at the center. The only difference between the presented image and the theoretical Gaussian lies in the fact that the Gaussian distribution is continuous rather than discrete.9766

Motor versus body awareness: Voxel-based lesion analysis in anosognosia for hemiplegia and somatoparaphrenia following right hemisphere stroke

This is the accepted manuscript version of the following article: Valentina Moro, Simone Pernigo, Manos Tsakiris, Renato Avesani, Nicola M. J. Edelstyn, Paul M. Jenkinson, and Aikaterini Fotopoulou, ‘Motor versus body awareness: Voxel-based lesion analysis in anosognosia for hemiplegia and somatoparaphrenia following right hemisphere stroke’, Cortex, Vol 83, pp. 62-77, first published online 15 Jul 2016. The version of record is available online at doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2016.07.001 Published by Elsevier. © Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Anosognosia for hemiplegia (AHP) is informative about the neurocognitive basis of motor awareness. However, it is frequently associated with concomitant symptoms, such as hemispatial neglect and disturbances in the sense of body ownership (DSO). Although double dissociations between these symptoms have been reported, there is ongoing debate about whether they are manifestations of independent abnormalities, or a single neuro- cognitive deficit. We aimed to investigate the specificity of lesions associated with AHP by surpassing four, existing methodological limitations: (a) recruit a relatively large sample of patients (total N 1⁄4 70) in a multi-centre study; (b) identify lesions associated with AHP in grey and white matter using voxel-based methods; (c) take into account the duration of AHP and concomitant neglect symptoms; and (d) compare lesions against a control hemiplegic group, patients suffering from AHP and DSO, and a few, rare patients with selective DSO. Results indicated that acute AHP is associated with a wide network, mainly including: (1) the Rolandic operculum, (2) the insula and (3) the superior temporal gyri. Subcortically, damage mainly involved the basal ganglia and white matter, mostly the superior corona radiate, arcuate fasciculus and the part of the ventral, superior longitu- dinal fasciculus. Persistent symptoms were linked with wider damage involving fronto- temporal cortex and long white matter tracts. A shift in the latero-medial direction (mainly involving the basal ganglia and surrounding white matter) emerged when DSO was taken accounted for. These results suggest that while bodily awareness is processed by areas widely distributed across the brain, intact subcortical structures and white matter tracts may be necessary to support basic feelings of owning and controlling contralateral body parts. An accurate and ‘up-to-date’ awareness of our motor abilities, however, may rely also on intact processing in cortical areas which presumably allow higher-order in- ferences about the current state of the body.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Binding of myomesin to obscurin-like-1 to the muscle M-band provides a strategy for isoform-specific mechanical protection

The sarcomeric cytoskeleton is a network of modular proteins that integrate mechanical and signalling roles. Obscurin, or its homolog obscurin-like-1, bridges the giant ruler titin and the myosin crosslinker myomesin at the M-band. Yet, the molecular mechanisms underlying the physical obscurin(-like-1):myomesin connection, important for mechanical integrity of the M-band, remained elusive. Here, using a combination of structural, cellular, and single-molecule force spectroscopy techniques, we decode the architectural and functional determinants defining the obscurin(-like-1): myomesin complex. The crystal structure reveals a trans-complementation mechanism whereby an incomplete immunoglobulin-like domain assimilates an isoform-specific myomesin interdomain sequence. Crucially, this unconventional architecture provides mechanical stability up to forces of 135 pN. A cellular competition assay in neonatal rat cardiomyocytes validates the complex and provides the rationale for the isoform specificity of the interaction. Altogether, our results reveal a novel binding strategy in sarcomere assembly, which might have implications on muscle nanomechanics and overall M-band organization.We thank the Diamond Light Source and the European Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory for access to MX and SAXS beamlines, respectively. This work was supported by a British Heart Foundation grant (PG/10/67/28527) awarded to R.A.S. and M.G. as well as MRC grant MR/J010456/1 to M.G. and a British Heart Foundation grant (PG/13/50/30426) and EPSRC Fellowship (K00641X/1) to S.G.-M

Frame rate required for speckle tracking echocardiography: A quantitative clinical study with open-source, vendor-independent software

Background Assessing left ventricular function with speckle tracking is useful in patient diagnosis but requires a temporal resolution that can follow myocardial motion. In this study we investigated the effect of different frame rates on the accuracy of speckle tracking results, highlighting the temporal resolution where reliable results can be obtained. Material and methods 27 patients were scanned at two different frame rates at their resting heart rate. From all acquired loops, lower temporal resolution image sequences were generated by dropping frames, decreasing the frame rate by up to 10-fold. Results Tissue velocities were estimated by automated speckle tracking. Above 40 frames/s the peak velocity was reliably measured. When frame rate was lower, the inter-frame interval containing the instant of highest velocity also contained lower velocities, and therefore the average velocity in that interval was an underestimate of the clinically desired instantaneous maximum velocity. Conclusions The higher the frame rate, the more accurately maximum velocities are identified by speckle tracking, until the frame rate drops below 40 frames/s, beyond which there is little increase in peak velocity. We provide in an online supplement the vendor-independent software we used for automatic speckle-tracked velocity assessment to help others working in this field

SKIP controls lysosome positioning using a composite kinesin-1 heavy and light chain-binding domain

The molecular interplay between cargo recognition and regulation of the activity of the kinesin-1 microtubule motor is not well understood. Using the lysosome adaptor SKIP (also known as PLEKHM2) as model cargo, we show that the kinesin heavy chains (KHCs), in addition to the kinesin light chains (KLCs), can recognize tryptophanacidic- binding determinants on the cargo when presented in the context of an extended KHC-interacting domain. Mutational separation of KHC and KLC binding shows that both interactions are important for SKIP-kinesin-1 interaction in vitro and that KHC binding is important for lysosome transport in vivo. However, in the absence of KLCs, SKIP can only bind to KHC when autoinhibition is relieved, suggesting that the KLCs gate access to the KHCs. We propose a model whereby tryptophan-acidic cargo is first recognized by KLCs, resulting in destabilization of KHC autoinhibition. This primary event then makes accessible a second SKIP-binding site on the KHC C-terminal tail that is adjacent to the autoinhibitory IAK region. Thus, cargo recognition and concurrent activation of kinesin-1 proceed in hierarchical stepwise fashion driven by a dynamic network of inter- and intra-molecular interactions

The light chains of kinesin-1 are autoinhibited

The light chains (KLCs) of the microtubule motor kinesin-1 bind cargoes and regulate its activity. Through their tetratricopeptide repeat domain (KLCTPR), they can recognize short linear peptide motifs found in many cargo proteins characterized by a central tryptophan flanked by aspartic/glutamic acid residues (W-acidic). Using a fluorescence resonance energy transfer biosensor in combination with X-ray crystallographic, biochemical, and biophysical approaches, we describe how an intramolecular interaction between the KLC2TPR domain and a conserved peptide motif within an unstructured region of the molecule, partly occludes the W-acidic binding site on the TPR domain. Cargo binding displaces this interaction, effecting a global conformational change in KLCs resulting in a more extended conformation. Thus, like the motor-bearing kinesin heavy chains, KLCs exist in a dynamic conformational state that is regulated by self-interaction and cargo binding. We propose a model by which, via this molecular switch, W-acidic cargo binding regulates the activity of the holoenzyme