7,114 research outputs found
Haunted
University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.From magic lantern shows to PowerPoint presentations, the slide show has cast a
long shadow on documentary film. In the 1880s the New York Police reporter,
Jacob Riis, barnstormed America with magic lantern images of urban poverty,
hoping to rouse sympathies and eventual relief for the city’s underclass. In mid-
2006, An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary woven around Al Gore’s slide show
PowerPoint presentation, screened to audiences around the world.
My film, Siberia, is a memory of a time and place but it could also be thought of
as a ‘slide show documentary’. This exegesis investigates my own fascination with
slide shows and films made from still images. Beyond this personal focus, the
exegesis looks more generally at the ‘still/moving’; that is, creative work that
occupies a space between still images (photography) and moving pictures
(cinema).
Recently there has been a wave of interest in the still/moving in installation art and
feature films but there has been virtually no written commentary on the
still/moving in documentary, and even less on the slide show and documentary.
This exegesis explores this gap in knowledge through a combination of
biographical, historical and theoretical approaches.
The ghost of the slide show haunts many still/moving documentaries but to equate
all still/moving works as being ‘slide show documentaries’ misses the mark. In this
exegesis, I analyse how stillness operates within a range of still/moving works and
argue that ‘still/moving-ness’ is also about punctuation, expression, rhythm and
music.
My examination of the intersection between the slide show and documentary
prises open the relationship between stillness, movement, cinema, photography
and auto/biography. It reveals that a characteristic of ‘slide show documentaries’ is
their preoccupation with time, memory, mortality and death
Crystallisation of Aspirin via Simulated Pulmonary Surfactant Monolayers and Lung-Specific Additives
Pain is a prevalent condition that can have a serious impact upon the socioeconomic function of a population. Numerous methods exist to administer analgesic medication (e.g. aspirin) to the body however inherent drawbacks limit patient acceptability. The inhaled route offers promise to facilitate the administration of medication to the body. Here, we consider the crystallisation behaviour of aspirin, our model therapeutic agent, when in contact with material of relevance to the lung. Thus, our approach aims to better understand the interaction between drug substances and the respiratory tract. Langmuir monolayers composed of a mixed surfactant system were supported on an aqueous subphase containing aspirin (7.5mg/ml). The surfactant film was compressed to either 5mN/m (i.e. inhalation end point) or 50mN/m (i.e. exhalation end point), whilst located within a humid environment for 16 hours. Standard cooling crystallisation procedures were employed to produce control samples. Antisolvent crystallisation in the presence or absence of lung-specific additives was conducted. All samples were analysed via scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD). Drug-surfactant interactions were confirmed via condensed Langmuir isotherms. SEM analysis revealed plate-like morphology. The crystallisation route dictated both the crystal habit and particle size distribution. Dominant reflections were the (100) and (200) aspects. The main modes of interaction were hydrogen bonding, hydrophobic associations and van der Waals forces. Here, we have demonstrated the potential of antisolvent crystallisation with lung-specific additives to achieve control over drug crystal morphology. The approach taken can be applied in respirable formulation engineering
Radio pulsar populations
The goal of this article is to summarize the current state of play in the
field of radio pulsar statistics. Simply put, from the observed sample of
objects from a variety of surveys with different telescopes, we wish to infer
the properties of the underlying sample and to connect these with other
astrophysical populations (for example supernova remnants or X-ray binaries).
The main problem we need to tackle is the fact that, like many areas of
science, the observed populations are often heavily biased by a variety of
selection effects. After a review of the main effects relevant to radio
pulsars, I discuss techniques to correct for them and summarize some of the
most recent results. Perhaps the main point I would like to make in this
article is that current models to describe the population are far from complete
and often suffer from strong covariances between input parameters. That said,
there are a number of very interesting conclusions that can be made concerning
the evolution of neutron stars based on current data. While the focus of this
review will be on the population of isolated Galactic pulsars, I will also
briefly comment on millisecond and binary pulsars as well as the pulsar content
of globular clusters and the Magellanic Clouds.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures, to appear in Proceedings of ICREA Workshop on
The High-Energy Emission from Pulsars and their Systems, Sant Cugat, Spain,
2010 April 12-16 (Springer
Cytotoxic T lymphocyte lysis of HTLV-1 infected cells is limited by weak HBZ protein expression, but non-specifically enhanced on induction of Tax expression
BACKGROUND: Immunogenetic evidence indicates that cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs) specific for the weak CTL antigen HBZ limit HTLV-1 proviral load in vivo, whereas there is no clear relationship between the proviral load and the frequency of CTLs specific for the immunodominant antigen Tax. In vivo, circulating HTLV-1-infected cells express HBZ mRNA in contrast, Tax expression is typically low or undetectable. To elucidate the virus-suppressing potential of CTLs targeting HBZ, we compared the ability of HBZ- and Tax-specific CTLs to lyse naturally-infected cells, by co-incubating HBZ- and Tax-specific CTL clones with primary CD4(+) T cells from HLA-matched HTLV-1-infected donors. We quantified lysis of infected cells, and tested whether specific virus-induced host cell surface molecules determine the susceptibility of infected cells to CTL-mediated lysis. RESULTS: Primary infected cells upregulated HLA-A*02, ICAM-1, Fas and TRAIL-R1/2 in concert with Tax expression, forming efficient targets for both HTLV-1-specific CTLs and CTLs specific for an unrelated virus. We detected expression of HBZ mRNA (spliced isoform) in both Tax-expressing and non-expressing infected cells, and the HBZ(26–34) epitope was processed and presented by cells transfected with an HBZ expression plasmid. However, when coincubated with primary cells, a high-avidity HBZ-specific CTL clone killed significantly fewer infected cells than were killed by a Tax-specific CTL clone. Finally, incubation with Tax- or HBZ-specific CTLs resulted in a significant decrease in the frequency of cells expressing high levels of HLA-A*02. CONCLUSIONS: HTLV-1 gene expression in primary CD4(+) T cells non-specifically increases susceptibility to CTL lysis. Despite the presence of HBZ spliced-isoform mRNA, HBZ epitope presentation by primary cells is significantly less efficient than that of Tax. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12977-014-0116-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users
Influence of management practice on the microbiota of a critically endangered species: a longitudinal study of kākāpō chick faeces and associated nest litter
BACKGROUND: The critically endangered kākāpō is a flightless, nocturnal parrot endemic to Aotearoa New Zealand. Recent efforts to describe the gastrointestinal microbial community of this threatened herbivore revealed a low-diversity microbiota that is often dominated by Escherichia-Shigella bacteria. Given the importance of associated microbial communities to animal health, and increasing appreciation of their potential relevance to threatened species conservation, we sought to better understand the development of this unusual gut microbiota profile. To this end, we conducted a longitudinal analysis of faecal material collected from kākāpō chicks during the 2019 breeding season, in addition to associated nest litter material. RESULTS: Using an experimental approach rarely seen in studies of threatened species microbiota, we evaluated the impact of a regular conservation practice on the developing kākāpō microbiota, namely the removal of faecal material from nests. Artificially removing chick faeces from nests had negligible impact on bacterial community diversity for either chicks or nests (p > 0.05). However, the gut microbiota did change significantly over time as chick age increased (p < 0.01), with an increasing relative abundance of Escherichia-Shigella coli over the study period and similar observations for the associated nest litter microbiota (p < 0.01). Supplementary feeding substantially altered gut bacterial diversity of kākāpō chicks (p < 0.01), characterised by a significant increase in Lactobacillus bacteria. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, chick age and hand rearing conditions had the most marked impact on faecal bacterial communities. Similarly, the surrounding nest litter microbiota changed significantly over time since a kākāpō chick was first placed in the nest, though we found no evidence that removal of faecal material influenced the bacterial communities of either litter or faecal samples. Taken together, these observations will inform ongoing conservation and management of this most enigmatic of bird species
Quorum Sensing Controls Adaptive Immunity through the Regulation of Multiple CRISPR-Cas Systems
Bacteria commonly exist in high cell density populations, making them prone to viral predation and horizontal gene transfer (HGT) through transformation and conjugation. To combat these invaders, bacteria possess an arsenal of defenses, such as CRISPR-Cas adaptive immunity. Many bacterial populations coordinate their behavior as cell density increases, using quorum sensing (QS) signaling. In this study, we demonstrate that QS regulation results in increased expression of the type I-E, I-F, and III-A CRISPR-Cas systems in cells in high-density populations. Strains unable to communicate via QS were less effective at defending against invaders targeted by any of the three CRISPR-Cas systems. Additionally, the acquisition of immunity by the type I-E and I-F systems was impaired in the absence of QS signaling. We propose that bacteria can use chemical communication to modulate the balance between community-level defense requirements in high cell density populations and host fitness costs of basal CRISPR-Cas activity.This work was supported by a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship (P.C.F.) from the Royal Society of New Zealand (RSNZ) and the Marsden Fund, RSNZ. A.G.P. was supported by a University of Otago Doctoral Scholarship. G.P.C.S. is funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, UK
The discovery of a novel antibiotic for the treatment of Clostridium difficile infections: a story of an effective academic-industrial partnership
Academic drug discovery is playing an increasingly important role in the identification of new therapies for a wide range of diseases. There is no one model that guarantees success. We describe here a drug discovery story where chance, the ability to capitalise on chance, and the assembling of a range of expertise, have all played important roles in the discovery and subsequent development of an antibiotic chemotype based on the bis-benzimidazole scaffold, with potency against a number of current therapeutically challenging diseases. One compound in this class, SMT19969, has recently entered Phase 2 human clinical trials for the treatment of Clostridium difficile infections
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