Planting the Seeds of Surreality, Cultivating the Dynamism of a Nation: Winston Miranda and the Rhetoric of Resilience in Post-Revolutionary Nicaraguan Art

Winston Miranda, a surrealist painter from the historic capital of Granada, Nicaragua, is creating a contemporary, post-revolutionary path that is distinct from yet informed by its revolutionary antecedents. In essence, his art is a literal and figurative bridge between war and healing. Critical research to date, however, has not considered the rhetorical implications of the role of art in Nicaragua after the revolutionary period (1990 to the present day). Henceforth, my thesis is a pentadic criticism of the post-revolutionary components of Mirandas surrealist oil paintings. By aggregating the literal and latent content of Miranda\u27s artworks as a collective drama and performance, I was able to locate and extract key act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose elements across three layers of pentads: Dream, Play, and Lived World. I ultimately reveal the artist\u27s underlying motivation in engendering resilience for himself, his country, and the world. My analytical tool is based primarily upon Kenneth Burke\u27s (1969a) theory of dramatism, with components of art therapy and psychoanalysis incorporated to capture the overall essence of the painting aggregate. I also utilize Walter Benjamin\u27s (1968) notion of translation to facilitate explanation of the ways in which Miranda navigates from pentad to pentad via translatory tools of historic artistic voices, the 4,000-year old world-renowned performance art of puppetry, and audience participation, respectively. What ultimately emerges from the analysis of Miranda\u27s surrealist paintings is an understanding of the symbolic nature of not only recovery, but above all resilience from trauma across a plethora of experiential fronts and how this regenerative healing may be conveyed through visual imagery. I conclude this thesis by propounding the major rhetorical strategies suggested by the role of art in post-revolutionary Nicaragua and how surrealism might function to mediate those strategies and negotiate a world that is increasingly becoming more visual in its communicative practices

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Empagliflozin in Patients with Chronic Kidney Disease

Background The effects of empagliflozin in patients with chronic kidney disease who are at risk for disease progression are not well understood. The EMPA-KIDNEY trial was designed to assess the effects of treatment with empagliflozin in a broad range of such patients. Methods We enrolled patients with chronic kidney disease who had an estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) of at least 20 but less than 45 ml per minute per 1.73 m(2) of body-surface area, or who had an eGFR of at least 45 but less than 90 ml per minute per 1.73 m(2) with a urinary albumin-to-creatinine ratio (with albumin measured in milligrams and creatinine measured in grams) of at least 200. Patients were randomly assigned to receive empagliflozin (10 mg once daily) or matching placebo. The primary outcome was a composite of progression of kidney disease (defined as end-stage kidney disease, a sustained decrease in eGFR to < 10 ml per minute per 1.73 m(2), a sustained decrease in eGFR of & GE;40% from baseline, or death from renal causes) or death from cardiovascular causes. Results A total of 6609 patients underwent randomization. During a median of 2.0 years of follow-up, progression of kidney disease or death from cardiovascular causes occurred in 432 of 3304 patients (13.1%) in the empagliflozin group and in 558 of 3305 patients (16.9%) in the placebo group (hazard ratio, 0.72; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.64 to 0.82; P < 0.001). Results were consistent among patients with or without diabetes and across subgroups defined according to eGFR ranges. The rate of hospitalization from any cause was lower in the empagliflozin group than in the placebo group (hazard ratio, 0.86; 95% CI, 0.78 to 0.95; P=0.003), but there were no significant between-group differences with respect to the composite outcome of hospitalization for heart failure or death from cardiovascular causes (which occurred in 4.0% in the empagliflozin group and 4.6% in the placebo group) or death from any cause (in 4.5% and 5.1%, respectively). The rates of serious adverse events were similar in the two groups. Conclusions Among a wide range of patients with chronic kidney disease who were at risk for disease progression, empagliflozin therapy led to a lower risk of progression of kidney disease or death from cardiovascular causes than placebo