‘mere prattle without practice’: Authorship in Performance

Over the last ten years there has been a struggle within Shakespeare studies between the vast majority of scholars who have remained committed to the orthodox view on Shakespeare’s authorship of the plays that bear his name and a much smaller group of scholars, working with profoundly different levels of rigour, who have sought to question this position. Recently there has been a degree of agreement that it is more productive to approach the issue in terms of acknowledging the collaborative nature of early modern play writing. It is noticeable, however, that for the literary critics and historians involved in this debate collaboration seems to end at the playhouse’s door. There is an assumption that the collaborators who produced early modern drama were all writers and not the other people involved in the production of Tudor and Stuart plays. This is profoundly problematic. In this article, Thomas Betteridge and Greg Thompson propose a non-textual approach to the authorship question through the use of performance as a research technique. The first part of the article will map out the current ground of Shakespeare authorship studies while the second part is an account of a performance as research workshop carried out by Betteridge and Thompson with students from Brunel University, London

The impact of cell crowding and active cell movement on vascular tumour growth

A multiscale model for vascular tumour growth is presented which includes systems of ordinary differential equations for the cell cycle and regulation of apoptosis in individual cells, coupled to partial differential equations for the spatio-temporal dynamics of nutrient and key signalling chemicals. Furthermore, these subcellular and tissue layers are incorporated into a cellular automaton framework for cancerous and normal tissue with an embedded vascular network. The model is the extension of previous work and includes novel features such as cell movement and contact inhibition. We presented a detailed simulation study of the effects of these additions on the invasive behaviour of tumour cells and the tumour's response to chemotherapy. In particular, we find that cell movement alone increases the rate of tumour growth and expansion, but that increasing the tumour cell carrying capacity leads to the formation of less invasive dense hypoxic tumours containing fewer tumour cells. However, when an increased carrying capacity is combined with significant tumour cell movement, the tumour grows and spreads more rapidly, accompanied by large spatio-temporal fluctuations in hypoxia, and hence in the number of quiescent cells. Since, in the model, hypoxic/quiescent cells produce VEGF which stimulates vascular adaptation, such fluctuations can dramatically affect drug delivery and the degree of success of chemotherapy

Henry VIII’s Court and its Spatial Politics: Using drama to enhance visitor experience and inform policy at Hampton Court Palace

The impact detailed here demonstrates how, through his work with Historic Royal Palaces and Goat and Monkey and Schtanhaus theatre companies, Professor Tom Betteridge has helped to inform and influence the relationship between historical, literary and performance-based research with visitor experience at a major heritage site. Through the research-led collaboration between Oxford Brookes and Edinburgh Universities, Betteridge has enhanced public interaction with Tudor dramatic culture, developed visitors’ imaginative appreciation of Tudor cultural history and produced new modes of visitor and audience engagement. This work has enriched visitor numbers at Hampton Court Palace and also contributed to Historic Royal Palaces’ research policies and public engagement strategy

The constancy of global regulation across a species: the concentrations of ppGpp and RpoS are strain-specific in Escherichia coli.

BACKGROUND: Sigma factors and the alarmone ppGpp control the allocation of RNA polymerase to promoters under stressful conditions. Both ppGpp and the sigma factor σS (RpoS) are potentially subject to variability across the species Escherichia coli. To find out the extent of strain variation we measured the level of RpoS and ppGpp using 31 E. coli strains from the ECOR collection and one reference K-12 strain. RESULTS: Nine ECORs had highly deleterious mutations in rpoS, 12 had RpoS protein up to 7-fold above that of the reference strain MG1655 and the remainder had comparable or lower levels. Strain variation was also evident in ppGpp accumulation under carbon starvation and spoT mutations were present in several low-ppGpp strains. Three relationships between RpoS and ppGpp levels were found: isolates with zero RpoS but various ppGpp levels, strains where RpoS levels were proportional to ppGpp and a third unexpected class in which RpoS was present but not proportional to ppGpp concentration. High-RpoS and high-ppGpp strains accumulated rpoS mutations under nutrient limitation, providing a source of polymorphisms. CONCLUSIONS: The ppGpp and σS variance means that the expression of genes involved in translation, stress and other traits affected by ppGpp and/or RpoS are likely to be strain-specific and suggest that influential components of regulatory networks are frequently reset by microevolution. Different strains of E. coli have different relationships between ppGpp and RpoS levels and only some exhibit a proportionality between increasing ppGpp and RpoS levels as demonstrated for E. coli K-12

Stemofoline ethyl acetate solvate

Crystals of the title compound, C22H29NO5·C4H8O2, {[systematic name: (2R,3R,5R,5aS,6R,8aR,9S)-(5Z)-5-[3-butyl­tetra­hydro-6-methyl-2,5-methano-4,3,8a-[1]propan­yl[3]yl­idene­furo[3,2-f][1,4]oxazepin-7(5H)-yl­idene]-4-meth­oxy-3-methyl­furan-2(5H)-one ethyl acetate solvate} were isolated from the root extracts of Stemona aphylla (Stemonaceae). The structure closely resembles those of stemofoline derivatives which have previously been reported. Inter­molecular contacts are observed between some C-bonded H atoms and nearby O atoms, perhaps indicating weak inter­actions which could influence the packing of species within the unit cell

12-Eth­oxy-2,3,8,9-tetra­methoxy­benzo[c]phenanthridine dichloro­methane solvate

The title compound, C23H23NO5·CH2Cl2, was obtained via the alkyl­ation of the 12-hydr­oxy-2,3,8,9-tetra­methoxy­benzo[c]phenanthridine salt. The benzo[c]phenanthridine ring system is essentially planar, with a mean out-of-plane deviation of 0.026 Å. A dicloromethane mol­ecule of solvation is present and located between the sheets of phenanthridine mol­ecules, preventing any significant inter­molecular hydrogen-bonding or π–π inter­actions

Pioglitazone Improves Myocardial Blood Flow and Glucose Utilization in Nondiabetic Patients With Combined Hyperlipidemia A Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Study

ObjectivesThis study’s aim was to examine whether treatment with pioglitazone, added to conventional lipid-lowering therapy, would improve myocardial glucose utilization (MGU) and blood flow (MBF) in nondiabetic patients with familial combined hyperlipidemia (FCHL).BackgroundThiazolidinediones were found to improve insulin sensitivity and MGU in type 2 diabetes and MBF in Mexican Americans with insulin resistance. Familial combined hyperlipidemia is a complex genetic disorder conferring a high risk of premature coronary artery disease, characterized by high serum cholesterol and/or triglyceride, low high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, and insulin resistance.MethodsWe undertook a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study in 26 patients with FCHL, treated with pioglitazone or matching placebo 30 mg daily for 4 weeks, followed by 45 mg daily for 12 weeks. Positron emission tomography was used to measure MBF at rest and during adenosine-induced hyperemia and MGU during euglycemic hyperinsulinemic clamp at baseline and after treatment.ResultsWhereas no change was observed in the placebo group after treatment, patients receiving pioglitazone showed a significant increase in whole body glucose disposal (3.93 ± 1.59 mg/kg/min to 5.24 ± 1.65 mg/kg/min; p = 0.004) and MGU (0.62 ± 0.26 μmol/g/min to 0.81 ± 0.14 μmol/g/min; p = 0.0007), accompanied by a significant improvement in resting MBF (1.11 ± 0.20 ml/min/g to 1.25 ± 0.21 ml/min/g; p = 0.008). Furthermore, in the pioglitazone group HDL cholesterol (+28%; p = 0.003) and adiponectin (+156.2%; p = 0.0001) were increased and plasma insulin (−35%; p = 0.017) was reduced.ConclusionsIn patients with FCHL treated with conventional lipid-lowering therapy, the addition of pioglitazone led to significant improvements in MGU and MBF, with a favorable effect on blood lipid and metabolic parameters. (A study to investigate the effect of pioglitazone on whole body and myocardial glucose uptake and myocardial blood flow/coronary vasodilator reserve in patients with familial combined hyperlipidaemia; http://www.controlled-trials.com/mrct/trial/230761/ISRCTN78563659; ISRCTN78563659

Hybridised multigrid preconditioners for a compatible finite-element dynamical core

Compatible finite-element discretisations for the atmospheric equations of motion have recently attracted considerable interest. Semi-implicit timestepping methods require the repeated solution of a large saddle-point system of linear equations. Preconditioning this system is challenging, since the velocity mass matrix is nondiagonal, leading to a dense Schur complement. Hybridisable discretisations overcome this issue: weakly enforcing continuity of the velocity field with Lagrange multipliers leads to a sparse system of equations, which has a similar structure to the pressure Schur complement in traditional approaches. We describe how the hybridised sparse system can be preconditioned with a non-nested two-level preconditioner. To solve the coarse system, we use the multigrid pressure solver that is employed in the approximate Schur complement method previously proposed by the some of the authors. Our approach significantly reduces the number of solver iterations. The method shows excellent performance and scales to large numbers of cores in the Met Office next-generation climate and weather prediction model LFRic

Observations of velocities, sand concentrations, and fluxes under velocity-asymmetric oscillatory flows

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