Ghostly Children: The Spectre of Melancholy in Sonya Hartnett’s The Ghost’s Child

Images of alienation in young adult fictions are common, arguably because they mirror the cultural discourses around adolescence as displaced between two (constructed) 'knowable' states: childhood and adulthood. The connection between displacement and melancholy in texts for young adults provides a vast array of narrative symbolism that often blurs reality and fantasy as knowable versus unknowable states respectively. Sonya Hartnett's approach to adolescent introspection and states of melancholy-depression is often confrontational and her (critically acclaimed) young adult fiction interleaves often destructive narratives of incest, familial violence, murder and suicide with contemporary and historical landscapes.'The Ghost's Child' (2007), is a fictionalized and historicized account of individual alienation and sadness whereby, melancholy and depression serve as powerful forces (of lossdesire) able to induce spectral presences in the life of the protagonist in ways that allow fantasy to become a means to negotiate loss and combat alienation. The overt psychological dimensions of the narrative are obviated through images of melancholy, madness, abjection and death. This paper initiates a discussion of the text's psychoanalytic connotations through the ideas of both Freud and Kristeva. However, in order to question if/how the narrative moves beyond the traditional parameters that construct melancholy as either a clinical pathology or a useful literary/aesthetic device, melancholy is also discussed through the ideas of Gilles Deleuze. The incorporation of Deleuze's work enables a way to re-think conventional representations of the melancholic as an essentially abject and marginalised subject position

Medication Complications in Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation.

The need for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) therapy is a marker of disease severity for which multiple medications are required. The therapy causes physiologic changes that impact drug pharmacokinetics. These changes can lead to exposure-driven decreases in efficacy or increased incidence of side effects. The pharmacokinetic changes are drug specific and largely undefined for most drugs. We review available drug dosing data and provide guidance for use in the ECMO patient population

Refinement of a Methodology for Untargeted Detection of Serum Albumin Adducts in Human Populations.

Covalently modified blood proteins (e.g., serum albumin adducts) are increasingly being viewed as potential biomarkers via which the environmental causes of human diseases may be understood. The notion that some (perhaps many) modifications have yet to be discovered has led to the development of untargeted adductomics methods, which attempt to capture entire populations of adducts. One such method is fixed-step selected reaction monitoring (FS-SRM), which analyses distributions of serum albumin adducts via shifts in the mass of a tryptic peptide [Li et al. (2011) Mol. Cell. Proteomics 10, M110.004606]. Working on the basis that FS-SRM might be able to detect biological variation due to environmental factors, we aimed to scale the methodology for use in an epidemiological setting. Development of sample preparation methods led to a batch workflow with increased throughput and provision for quality control. Challenges posed by technical and biological variation were addressed in the processing and interpretation of the data. A pilot study of 20 smokers and 20 never-smokers provided evidence of an effect of smoking on levels of putative serum albumin adducts. Differences between smokers and never-smokers were most apparent in putative adducts with net gains in mass between 105 and 114 Da (relative to unmodified albumin). The findings suggest that our implementation of FS-SRM could be useful for studying other environmental factors with relevance to human health

A necroptosis-independent function of RIPK3 promotes immune dysfunction and prevents control of chronic LCMV infection

Necroptosis is a lytic and inflammatory form of cell death that is highly constrained to mitigate detrimental collateral tissue damageand impaired immunity. These constraints make it difficult to define the relevance of necroptosis in diseases such as chronic andpersistent viral infections and within individual organ systems. The role of necroptotic signalling is further complicated becauseproteins essential to this pathway, such as receptor interacting protein kinase 3 (RIPK3) and mixed lineage kinase domain-like(MLKL), have been implicated in roles outside of necroptotic signalling. We sought to address this issue by individually defining therole of RIPK3 and MLKL in chronic lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (LCMV) infection. We investigated if necroptosis contributesto the death of LCMV-specific CD8+ T cells or virally infected target cells during infection. We provide evidence showing thatnecroptosis was redundant in the pathogenesis of acute forms of LCMV (Armstrong strain) and the early stages of chronic (Docilestrain) LCMV infection in vivo. The number of immune cells, their specificity and reactivity towards viral antigens and viral loads arenot altered in the absence of either MLKL or RIPK3 during acute and during the early stages of chronic LCMV infection. However, weidentified that RIPK3 promotes immune dysfunction and prevents control of infection at later stages of chronic LCMV disease. Thiswas not phenocopied by the loss of MLKL indicating that the phenotype was driven by a necroptosis-independent function ofRIPK3. We provide evidence that RIPK3 signaling evoked a dysregulated type 1 interferone response which we linked to animpaired antiviral immune response and abrogated clearance of chronic LCMV infectio

Twenty questions about design behavior for sustainability, report of the International Expert Panel on behavioral science for design

How behavioral scientists, engineers, and architects can work together to advance how we all understand and practice design—in order to enhance sustainability in the built environment, and beyond.https://www.nature.com/documents/design_behavior_for_sustainability.pdfPublished versio

Children’s and adults’ understanding of death: Cognitive, parental, and experiential influences

This study explored the development of understanding of death in a sample of 4- to 11-year-old British children and adults (N = 136). It also investigated four sets of possible influences on this development: parents’ religion and spiritual beliefs, cognitive ability, socioeconomic status, and experience of illness and death. Participants were interviewed using the “death concept” interview that explores understanding of the subcomponents of inevitability, universality, irreversibility, cessation, and causality of death. Children understood key aspects of death from as early as 4 or 5 years, and with age their explanations of inevitability, universality, and causality became increasingly biological. Understanding of irreversibility and the cessation of mental and physical processes also emerged during early childhood, but by 10 years many children’s explanations reflected not an improved biological understanding but rather the coexistence of apparently contradictory biological and supernatural ideas—religious, spiritual, or metaphysical. Evidence for these coexistent beliefs was more prevalent in older children than in younger children and was associated with their parents’ religious and spiritual beliefs. Socioeconomic status was partly related to children’s biological ideas, whereas cognitive ability and experience of illness and death played less important roles. There was no evidence for coexistent thinking among adults, only a clear distinction between biological explanations about death and supernatural explanations about the afterlife

A dwarf disrupting - Andromeda XXVII and the North West Stream

We present a kinematic and spectroscopic analysis of 38 red giant branch stars, in seven fields, spanning the dwarf spheroidal galaxy Andromeda XXVII and the upper segment of the North West Stream. Both features are located in the outer halo of the Andromeda galaxy at a projected radius of 50–80 kpc, with the stream extending for ∼3◦ on the sky. Our data are obtained as part of the PAndAS survey and enables us to confirm that Andromeda XXVII’s heliocentric distance is 827 ± 47 kpc and spectroscopic metallicity is −2.1+0.4 −0.5. We also re-derive Andromeda XXVII’s kinematic properties, measuring a systemic velocity = −526.1+10.0 −11.0 km s−1 and a velocity dispersion that we find to be non-Gaussian but for which we derive a formal value of 27.0+2.2 −3.9 km s−1. In the upper segment of the North West Stream we measure mean values for the metallicity = −1.8 ± 0.4, systemic velocity = −519.4 ± 4.0 km s−1, and velocity dispersion = 10.0 ± 4.0 km s−1. We also detect a velocity gradient of 1.7 ± 0.3 km s−1 kpc−1 on an infall trajectory towards M31. With a similar gradient, acting in the same direction, in the lower segment we suggest that the North West Stream is not a single structure. As the properties of the upper segment of the North West Stream and Andromeda XXVII are consistent within 90 per cent confidence limits, it is likely that the two are related and plausible that Andromeda XXVII is the progenitor of this stream