Zoetrope Blues

Zoetrope Blues surveys the zoetrope style of animation from its inception to its contemporary practitioners, discussing both the unique charms of the medium and the technical elements that make it work. This paper delineates the process behind zoetrope creation while also investigating the effects made possible by modern technology. The zoetrope was the world’s first motion picture format, using the flicker of a handheld carousel to transform a spinning disc into the illusion of a moving image. This Victorian parlor trick changed our understanding of vision and laid the foundation for cinema, but was largely forgotten with the invention of the film projector. Despite being a “dead medium,” the zoetrope has seen recent applications as varied as turntablism, sculpture, and augmented reality. Its quirks give it a careworn aesthetic which stands out against the glossy sheen of digital design, and its mandala-like polar grid gives it a psychedelic edge

A Language Without Words: Music as an Agent of Identity in Brian Friel\u27s Dancing at Lughnasa

Music has consistently played a major role in the work of Irish playwright Brian Friel and provides a steady backdrop for Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), a memory play about a family in Northern Ireland struggling to stay together in the August of 1936. This paper examines the function of music within the context of the play to see how it heightens the themes of identity, otherness, and memory. It also examines the history and various genres of selected works from the play to further investigate how Friel\u27s selection of particular songs reflects the emotional states and ideologies of the characters

Surjectivity of operators in Banach spaces

AbstractThe surjectivity of operators from a Banach space into its topological conjugate space is important to the study of solutions of integral equations. In this paper, we derive some conditions under which operators will be surjective. In Hilbert space case, weaker conditions are also derived. An application to the coincidence theorem is considered

Enhanced transmission through arrays of subwavelength holes in gold films coated by a finite dielectric layer

Enhanced transmissions through a gold film with arrays of subwavelength holes are theoretically studied, employing the rigid full vectorial three dimensional finite difference time domain method. Influence of air-holes shape to the transmission is firstly studied, which confirms two different resonances attributing to the enhanced transmission: the localized waveguide resonance and periodic surface plasmon resonances. For the film coated with dielectric layers, calculated results show that in the wavelength region of interest the localized waveguide resonant mode attributes to sensing rather than the periodic gold-glass surface plasmon mode. Although the detected peak is fairly broad and the shift is not too pronounced, we emphasize the contribution for sensing from the localized waveguide resonant mode, which may opens up new ways to design surface plasmon based sensors.Comment: 11 pages including 4 figures. Accepted for JEOS:R

Mono-2-ethylhexyl Phthalate Stimulates Parturition-Related Responses in Human Gestational Tissues and Cells.

Diethyhexyl phthalate (DEHP) is an environmental pollutant used universally as a plasticizer in polyvinyl consumer products. Exposure to DEHP increases risk of adverse pregnancy outcomes in humans, including decreased gestation length, preterm birth, low birth weight, and early pregnancy loss. Moreover, monoethylhexyl phthalate (MEHP), the active metabolite of DEHP increases oxidative stress and inflammatory responses in vitro. Because oxidative stress and inflammatory responses are linked to the pathogenesis of preterm birth, we investigated MEHP stimulated oxidative stress and inflammatory responses in human gestational cells and tissues as mechanisms by which MEHP exposure may contribute to preterm birth. To identify whether MEHP exposure induces oxidative stress responses in the gestational compartment, we treated human placental cells (HTR-8/SVneo) with MEHP and measured reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation using the dichlorofluorescein (DCF) assay, oxidized thymine (oT) with mass-spectrometry, redox-sensitive gene expression with RT-PCR, and activation of caspase 3/7 using a luminescence assay. We found that MEHP increased ROS generation, oxidative DNA damage, and apoptosis, and modified redox-sensitive gene expression. Notably, MEHP significantly induced mRNA expression of prostaglandin-endoperoxide synthase 2 (PTGS2), the gene for COX-2, an enzyme important for prostaglandin synthesis. To assess whether MEHP may stimulate inflammatory responses in the gestational compartment, we treated human primary placental macrophages, primary decidual macrophages, gestational membrane explants, and HTR-8 cells with MEHP and measured prostaglandin and cytokine release using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISA) and PTGS2 mRNA expression using RT-PCR. Our results demonstrate that MEHP treatment significantly increased total prostaglandin, PGF2α, and PGE2 release in human primary placental macrophage Hofbauer cells, and induced PTGS2 mRNA expression in the HTR-8 human trophoblast cell line. MEHP treatment showed no effect on pro-inflammatory cytokine release. The results from the present study are consistent with the hypothesis that MEHP stimulates oxidative stress and prostaglandin synthesis in gestational tissues and cells. The findings from the current study warrant future epidemiological studies of oxidative stress and prostaglandin synthesis as mechanisms by which MEHP may contribute to preterm birth and other adverse pregnancy outcomes.PHDToxicologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/94101/1/ltetz_1.pd

Микробиота и онкологические заболевания (обзор литературы)

Article presents current data on the contribution of the human microbiota to the development of oncological conditions, microbial impact on cell transformation, influence on chemotherapy outcome. Brief description of the methods used for studying microbiota in carcinogenesis as well as prospects of creating non-invasive diagnostic tools is given.Представлены современные данные о вкладе микробиоты человека в развитие неопластических заболеваний, механизмы клеточной трансформации и эффективность химиотерапии. Описаны методы изучения микробиоты при опухолевых заболеваниях, перспективы создания неинвазивных методов диагностики неоплазий

Optimal light harvesting structures at optical and infrared frequencies

One-dimensional light harvesting structures with a realistic geometry nano-patterned on an opaque metallic film are optimized to render high transmission efficiencies at optical and infrared frequencies. Simple design rules are developed for the particular case of a slit-groove array with a given number of grooves that are symmetrically distributed with respect to a central slit. These rules take advantage of the hybridization of Fabry-Perot modes in the slit and surface modes of the corrugated metal surface. Same design rules apply for optical and infrared frequencies. The parameter space of the groove array is also examined with a conjugate gradient optimization algorithm that used as a seed the geometries optimized following physical intuition. Both uniform and nonuniform groove arrays are considered. The largest transmission enhancement, with respect to a uniform array, is obtained for a chirped groove profile. Such enhancement is a function of the wavelength. It decreases from 39% in the optical part of the spectrum to 15% at the long wavelength infrared.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figure

ГЕТЕРОЛОГИЧНАЯ ЭКСПРЕССИЯ ЭКСТРАКЛЕТОЧНОГО ДОМЕНА РЕЦЕПТОРА HER2 В БАКТЕРИЯХ

Human epidermal growth factor receptor (HER2/neu, c ErbB2) is a protooncogene protein which is overexpressed in some oncological diseases including 30 % of breast cancers, tumors in the ovary, stomach and other organs of the human body as well. Since Her2tumor status testing is the essential part of successful cancer treatment, expression and purification of substantial amounts of the extracellular domain of the ECD HER2 is an important task. In this work sequence encoding HER2 extracellular domain was cloned and expressed in E.coli.Рецептор эпидермального ростового фактора человека (HER2/neu, c-ErbB2) представляет собой протоонкогенный белок и экспрессируется при ряде онкологических заболеваний, включающих 30 % случаев рака молочной железы, а также опухоли яичника, желудка и других органов. Получение значительных количеств экстраклеточного домена ECD HER2 в очищенном виде остается весьма актуальной задачей для иммунодиагностики и терапии. Клонирована последовательность, кодирующая экстраклеточный домен рецептора HER2 человека, и осуществлена эффективная наработка рекомбинантного белка в бактериях E.coli