Counties most at risk of environmental hazards are losing higher income migrants to lower risk areas, which decreases their resilience

When looking at environmental hazards, migration tends to be focused on as a result of disasters, rather than a contributor to community vulnerability. Using data from across the U.S. on hazards and county-to-county migration, J. Matthew Shumway finds that counties most at risk of experiencing severe and/or frequent environmental hazards are losing both people and income as a result of migration. He writes that counties with lower hazard levels are attracting migrants with higher incomes from those with higher hazard levels, and that this is decreasing their resilience to cope with hazards

Smoke gets in your eyes: re-reading gender in the "nostalgia film"

Upon its release, American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973) was much admired by critics and audiences alike. Yet, in subsequent years, the film became known for its supposed “flattening of history,” and celebration of patriarchal values. This article demonstrates that such a judgement owes much to Fredric Jameson’s historically contingent work on postmodernism, which argues that American Graffiti constitutes the paradigmatic nostalgia film. In contrast, using close textual analysis, I demonstrate that American Graffiti provides a more complex construction of the past, and of gender, than has hitherto been acknowledged. Far from blindly idealising the early 1960s, the film interrogates the processes through which the period and its gender relations come to be idealised. This article has consequences not only for our understanding of Lucas’ seminal film, but also for the American New Wave, and the “nostalgia” text

Sequencing of Culex quinquefasciatus establishes a platform for mosquito comparative genomics

Culex quinquefasciatus (the southern house mosquito) is an important mosquito vector of viruses such as West Nile virus and St. Louis encephalitis virus, as well as of nematodes that cause lymphatic filariasis. C. quinquefasciatus is one species within the Culex pipiens species complex and can be found throughout tropical and temperate climates of the world. The ability of C. quinquefasciatus to take blood meals from birds, livestock, and humans contributes to its ability to vector pathogens between species. Here, we describe the genomic sequence of C. quinquefasciatus: Its repertoire of 18,883 protein-coding genes is 22% larger than that of Aedes aegypti and 52% larger than that of Anopheles gambiae with multiple gene-family expansions, including olfactory and gustatory receptors, salivary gland genes, and genes associated with xenobiotic detoxification

Patient-derived xenograft (PDX) models in basic and translational breast cancer research

Patient-derived xenograft (PDX) models of a growing spectrum of cancers are rapidly supplanting long-established traditional cell lines as preferred models for conducting basic and translational preclinical research. In breast cancer, to complement the now curated collection of approximately 45 long-established human breast cancer cell lines, a newly formed consortium of academic laboratories, currently from Europe, Australia, and North America, herein summarizes data on over 500 stably transplantable PDX models representing all three clinical subtypes of breast cancer (ER+, HER2+, and "Triple-negative" (TNBC)). Many of these models are well-characterized with respect to genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic features, metastatic behavior, and treatment response to a variety of standard-of-care and experimental therapeutics. These stably transplantable PDX lines are generally available for dissemination to laboratories conducting translational research, and contact information for each collection is provided. This review summarizes current experiences related to PDX generation across participating groups, efforts to develop data standards for annotation and dissemination of patient clinical information that does not compromise patient privacy, efforts to develop complementary data standards for annotation of PDX characteristics and biology, and progress toward "credentialing" of PDX models as surrogates to represent individual patients for use in preclinical and co-clinical translational research. In addition, this review highlights important unresolved questions, as well as current limitations, that have hampered more efficient generation of PDX lines and more rapid adoption of PDX use in translational breast cancer research

Environmental Hazards as Disamenities: Selective Migration and Income Change in the United States from 2000-2010

An emerging area of migration research is the complex relationship between migration and environmental hazards, broadly defined. Environmental hazards are best viewed through a vulnerability lens, which has two components. The first is exposure - the frequency and duration of the hazardous events-and the second is adaptive capacity - the ability of communities to mitigate, deflect, or absorb the effects of exposure. Because migration is selective of individuals and places, it changes both the population's size and composition, thus affecting its exposure and adaptive capacity. In this article we examine how migration varies among sets of counties that experience significantly different exposures to all environmental hazards in the United States. We create an environmental hazards impact index in an attempt to measure the impacts of environmental hazards at the county level over a period of years. We found that counties that experience the greatest impacts from environmental hazards are losing income as a result of the migration. In counties with the highest impacts, income is lost through both net outmigration as well as income loss through out-migrants having higher incomes than in-migrants