Blackfish Lessons on Environmental Sustainability, Food, and Indigenous Culture

This essay, “Blackfish Lessons on Environmental Sustainability, Food, and Indigenous Culture,” examines Yup’ik interventions into understanding the place of human-nonhuman animal relations in regard to ecological sustainability. In lending consideration to Indigenous culture, the first part of the essay explicates the Yup’ik way of living, the Yuuyaraq, and its relationship to the environment. Then the essay turns toward two Yup’ik stories about blackfish, John Active’s “Why Subsistence is a Matter of Cultural Survival: A Yup’ik Point of View” (2001) and Emily Johnson’s “Blackfish,” taken from The Thank-You Bar recorded performance (Johnson, 2009), that speak to the imbrications of Indigenous culture and the environment

Clinical validation of an autoantibody test for lung cancer

Background: Autoantibodies may be present in a variety of underlying cancers several years before tumours can be detected and testing for their presence may allow earlier diagnosis. We report the clinical validation of an autoantibody panel in newly diagnosed patients with lung cancer (LC)

Effect of betaine supplementation on cycling sprint performance

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Purpose</p> <p>To examine the effect of betaine supplementation on cycling sprint performance.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Sixteen recreationally active subjects (7 females and 9 males) completed three sprint tests, each consisting of four 12 sec efforts against a resistance equal to 5.5% of body weight; efforts were separated by 2.5 min of cycling at zero resistance. Test one established baseline; test two and three were preceded by seven days of daily consumption of 591 ml of a carbohydrate-electrolyte beverage as a placebo or a carbohydrate-electrolyte beverage containing 0.42% betaine (approximately 2.5 grams of betaine a day); half the beverage was consumed in the morning and the other half in the afternoon. We used a double blind random order cross-over design; there was a 3 wk washout between trials two and three. Average and maximum peak and mean power were analyzed with one-way repeated measures ANOVA and, where indicated, a Student Newman-Keuls.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Compared to baseline, betaine ingestion increased average peak power (6.4%; p < 0.001), maximum peak power (5.7%; p < 0.001), average mean power (5.4%; p = 0.004), and maximum mean power (4.4%; p = 0.004) for all subjects combined. Compared to placebo, betaine ingestion significantly increased average peak power (3.4%; p = 0.026), maximum peak power max (3.8%; p = 0.007), average mean power (3.3%; p = 0.034), and maximum mean power (3.5%; p = 0.011) for all subjects combined. There were no differences between the placebo and baseline trials.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>One week of betaine ingestion improved cycling sprint power in recreationally active males and females.</p

A realist review to explore how low-income pregnant women use food vouchers from the UK’s Healthy Start programme

Objectives: To explore how low-income pregnant women use Healthy Start food vouchers, the potential impacts of the programme, which women might experience these impacts and why. Design: A realist review. Eligibility criteria for selecting studies: Primary or empirical studies (of any design) were included if they contributed relevant evidence or insights about how low-income women use food vouchers from the Healthy Start (UK) or the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (US) programmes. The assessment of ‘relevance’ was deliberately broad to ensure that reviewers remained open to new ideas from a variety of sources of evidence. Analysis: A combination of evidence synthesis and realist analysis techniques was used to modify, refine and substantiate programme theories, which were constructed as explanatory ‘context – mechanism – outcome’ (CMO) configurations. Results: 38 primary studies were included in this review: four studies on Healthy Start and 34 studies on WIC. Two main outcome strands were identified: dietary improvements (intended) and financial assistance (unintended). Three evidence-informed programme theories were proposed to explain how aspects of context (and mechanisms) may generate these outcomes: the ‘relative value’ of healthy eating (prioritisation of resources); retailer discretion (pressure to ‘bend the rules’); the influence of other family members (disempowerment). Conclusions: This realist review suggests that some low-income pregnant women may use Healthy Start vouchers to increase their consumption of fruits and vegetables and plain cow’s milk, whereas others may use them to reduce food expenditure and save money for other things

Proteomics as a Method for Early Detection of Cancer: A Review of Proteomics, Exhaled Breath Condensate, and Lung Cancer Screening

The study of expressed proteins in neoplasia is undergoing a revolution with the advent of proteomic analysis. Unlike genomic studies where individual changes may have no functional significance, protein expression is closely aligned with cellular activity. This perspective will review proteomics as a method of detecting markers of neoplasia with a particular emphasis on lung cancer and the potential to sample the lung by exhaled breath condensate (EBC). EBC collection is a simple, new, and noninvasive technique, which allows sampling of lower respiratory tract fluid. EBC enables the study of a wide variety of biological markers from low molecular weight mediators to macromolecules, such as proteins, in a range of pulmonary diseases. EBC may be applied to the detection of lung cancer where it could be a tool in early diagnosis. This perspective will explore the potential of applying proteomics to the EBC from lung cancer patients as an example of detecting potential biomarkers of disease and progression

Cama'i America: Alaska Natives, Narrative, and the Spaces of Empire

The word "cama'i" in the title, pronounced cha-my, is the Alutiiq word for "hello." Given that in the nineteenth-century Alutiiqs, working in California, passed the word on to Kashaya speaking Pomo whom still presently use the greeting in their language today, I use the term to underscore global geopolitical articulations in the field of Native American and Indigenous studies. The first chapter, "Cama'i America," examines oral narratives by conscripted Alaska Natives and colonized Kashaya Indians at the village of Metini, California during the Fort Ross trading period in the early nineteenth-century. The second chapter, "Citizens/Subjects in the Last Frontier," analyzes Alaska Native citizenship during the movement that resulted in statehood in 1959. This chapter focuses on the textuality of the Alaska flag, adopted in 1927, and how images and representations of Jon "Benny" Benson, the flag's Alutiiq designer, and the children of Athabascan Chief Luke, relate to the perceived incorporation of the region's indigenous people into the nation's racial culture and gender hierarchy. The third chapter, "Impossible Sovereignty," reads the indigenously-produced films Our Aleut History: Alaska Natives in Progress (1986) and Aleut Story (2005) as indigenous heritage recovery projects with contrasting goals, covering twentieth-century enslavement, World War II internment, and United States citizenship. Chapter four, "Of Displacement and Domestication," turns to the play River Woman as Tlingit writer and Alaska politician Diane E. Benson's dramaturgical response to the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971. The final chapter, "The Ends of Imperialism," articulates the Bering region as an indigenous cultural center reading the Cold War-era politics of transcontinental Yupik culture through the work of "American" and "Russian" Bering Strait Yupik women writers