REPRESENTATIONS OF KNOSSOS AND MINOAN CRETEIN THE BRITISH, AMERICAN AND CONTINENTAL PRESS 1900 - c.1930

The Arthur Evans archive in the Department of Antiquities of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford contains 11 volumes of newspaper and journal cuttings which cover the years from roughly 1900 to 1930. Many of them refer to Evans’ work at Knossos or to other aspects of the Minoan civilization. It seems probable that Evans himself amassed most of these cuttings, which number well over a thousand, and kept them in a largely unsystematised state. Despite the number and range of these cuttings, they cannot be regarded as comprehensive. Nevertheless, there is enough to give us a good idea of the press coverage that Evans and Knossos received in those thirty years, both in Britain and abroad. This paper aims to give some idea of the variety of press approaches and reactions, and a preliminary glimpse into how Evans’ strategy for presenting Knossos to as wide a public as possible actually worked in practice

Increased peri-ductal collagen micro-organization may contribute to raised mammographic density

BACKGROUND: High mammographic density is a therapeutically modifiable risk factor for breast cancer. Although mammographic density is correlated with the relative abundance of collagen-rich fibroglandular tissue, the causative mechanisms, associated structural remodelling and mechanical consequences remain poorly defined. In this study we have developed a new collaborative bedside-to-bench workflow to determine the relationship between mammographic density, collagen abundance and alignment, tissue stiffness and the expression of extracellular matrix organising proteins. METHODS: Mammographic density was assessed in 22 post-menopausal women (aged 54–66 y). A radiologist and a pathologist identified and excised regions of elevated non-cancerous X-ray density prior to laboratory characterization. Collagen abundance was determined by both Masson’s trichrome and Picrosirius red staining (which enhances collagen birefringence when viewed under polarised light). The structural specificity of these collagen visualisation methods was determined by comparing the relative birefringence and ultrastructure (visualised by atomic force microscopy) of unaligned collagen I fibrils in reconstituted gels with the highly aligned collagen fibrils in rat tail tendon. Localised collagen fibril organisation and stiffness was also evaluated in tissue sections by atomic force microscopy/spectroscopy and the abundance of key extracellular proteins was assessed using mass spectrometry. RESULTS: Mammographic density was positively correlated with the abundance of aligned periductal fibrils rather than with the abundance of amorphous collagen. Compared with matched tissue resected from the breasts of low mammographic density patients, the highly birefringent tissue in mammographically dense breasts was both significantly stiffer and characterised by large (>80 μm long) fibrillar collagen bundles. Subsequent proteomic analyses not only confirmed the absence of collagen fibrosis in high mammographic density tissue, but additionally identified the up-regulation of periostin and collagen XVI (regulators of collagen fibril structure and architecture) as potential mediators of localised mechanical stiffness. CONCLUSIONS: These preliminary data suggest that remodelling, and hence stiffening, of the existing stromal collagen microarchitecture promotes high mammographic density within the breast. In turn, this aberrant mechanical environment may trigger neoplasia-associated mechanotransduction pathways within the epithelial cell population. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13058-015-0664-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

Oral discourse: Right-brain damage, demographic variables and sampling effects

This study aimed to determine the effects of right brain-damage (RBD), demographic variables and sampling techniques on oral discourse performance using a systematic approach based on a multi-layered discourse processing model. In the first stage, the oral discourse of thirty-two neurologically-normal male subjects (in four age and four socioeconomic status categories) was analysed to determine the effect of age and socioeconomic status and of task factors (genre, method of elicitation, topic) on their discourse production. Narrative and procedural discourse was elicited using two methods (oral request and picture-sequences) with a maximum of fourteen samples from each subject. These were analysed in terms of relevance, discourse grammar, syntactic complexity and productivity, clausal structure, cohesion, clarity disrupters and dysfluency (twenty-three measures). The findings were statistically analysed and correlated with three attention tests. The discourse measures were also inter-correlated to observe their interaction. It was found that the demographic and task variables had a substantial and varying effect on the discourse measures. This finding has important implications as results of discourse analyses will be misleading and inconsistent without taking these into account. In the second stage, the discourse production of seven male RBD subjects was examined using eight narrative and procedural tasks evaluated in the first stage as being the most impervious to the effects of age and socio-economic status. Their discourse performance was compared to a matched control group. Due to the heterogeneity of RBD subjects, their discourse was also examined using single-case methodology and three sub-groups were differentiated. In addition, these subjects were assessed on standardised attention, general communication and RBD assessments and the relationships between these and the discourse measures were explored. The impairments which were typical of all RBD subjects and characteristic of each sub-group were explained in terms of a multi-level discourse processing model. Clinical implications and directions for future research are presented

Interdisciplinary perspectives on glocalization

Glocalization is a growing area of research within the social sciences and humanities, yet its application to archaeology remains relatively overlooked. Acknowledging that this concept is worth examining in greater detail, we aimed to facilitate an interdisciplinary dialogue exploring its relative merits for archaeological research and practice. Given the origins of glocal theory within sociology, and its broad application across the social sciences and humanities more generally, scholars from diverse fields were invited to discuss its applicability to archaeology and heritage.status: publishe

Two related recombinases are required for site-specific recombination at dif and cer in E. coli K12

The stable inheritance of ColE1-related plasmids and the normal partition of the E. coli chromosome require the function of the Xer site-specific recombination system. We show that in addition to the XerC recombinase, whose function has already been implicated in this system, a second chromosomally encoded recombinase, XerD, is required. The XerC and XerD proteins show 37% identity and bind to separate halves of the recombination site. Both proteins act catalytically in the recombination reaction. Recombination site asymmetry and the requirement of two recombinases ensure that only correctly aligned sites are recombined. We predict that normal partition of most circular chromosomes requires the participation of site-specific recombination to convert any multimers (arising by homologous recombination) to monomers

Hydrophobic triaryl-substituted \u3b2-lactams as activity-based probes for profiling eukaryotic enzymes and host-pathogen interactions

ABPP with \u3b2-lactams: We identified the eukaryotic targets of \u3b2-lactam-containing compounds by activity-based protein profiling. Using this method, we demonstrated that \u3b2-lactam-based activity probes can be applied to identify differentially active enzymes in different cell lines and during hepatitis C virus replication.Peer reviewed: YesNRC publication: Ye