Male Same-Sex Relations in Modern China: Language, Media Representation, and Law, 1900–1949

The article discusses the tension in the Chinese indigenous terminology for male same-sex relations which was similar to Eve Sedgwich\u27s description of the Western modern homosexual/heterosexual definition. It argues that the Western sexological concept of homosexuality was accepted in the early 20th century China and notes that its legal apparatus had no clear stipulations on sex between men. It indicates how writers during the first half of the 20th century were more concerned with the proper gender behavior and the image of the nation than sex itself

Queer Life, Communities and Activism in Contemporary China

What do queer life, communities, and activism look like in contemporary China? The two books under review here provide some valuable answers to this question. Based mainly on ethnographic research conducted between 2004 and 2006, Elisabeth L. Engebretsen’s book specifically studies the lalas (queer women) in China’s capital, Beijing. Hongwei Bao’s work, which draws on his field research from 2007 to 2009, attends to the more general issues of gay men and queer politics. Although actively engaged with recent scholarship on queer ethnography and Chinese studies, Engebretsen intentionally avoids academic jargon that might alienate the interested public; the result is an academically informed but highly accessible work. Bao’s writing, by contrast, often invokes concepts, ideas, and theories of famous thinkers and theorists that risk muddling, rather than enhancing, his analysis of Chinese texts and situations. Together, however, the two studies, with their different focuses and writing styles, offer a rich picture of queer life and politics in China during the first decade of the new millennium

Experimental Observation of Dual Magnetic States in Topological Insulators

The recently discovered topological phase offers new possibilities for spintronics and condensed matter. Even insulating material exhibits conductivity at the edges of certain systems, giving rise to an anomalous quantum Hall effect and other coherent spin transport phenomena, in which heat dissipation is minimized, with potential uses for next-generation energy-efficient electronics. While the metallic surface states of topological insulators (TIs) have been extensively studied, direct comparison of the surface and bulk magnetic properties of TIs has been little explored. We report unambiguous evidence for distinctly enhanced surface magnetism in a prototype magnetic TI, Cr-doped Bi 2 Se 3 . Using synchrotron-based x-ray techniques, we demonstrate a “three-step transition” model, with a temperature window of ~15 K, where the TI surface is magnetically ordered while the bulk is not. Understanding the dual magnetization process has strong implications for defining a physical model of magnetic TIs and lays the foundation for applications to information technology

Gadolinium‐Doped Iron Oxide Nanoprobe as Multifunctional Bioimaging Agent and Drug Delivery System

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116012/1/adfm201502868.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116012/2/adfm201502868-sup-0001-S1.pd

Analysis of 6,515 exomes reveals a recent origin of most human protein-coding variants

Establishing the age of each mutation segregating in contemporary human populations is important to fully understand our evolutionary history1,2 and will help facilitate the development of new approaches for disease gene discovery3. Large-scale surveys of human genetic variation have reported signatures of recent explosive population growth4-6, notable for an excess of rare genetic variants, qualitatively suggesting that many mutations arose recently. To more quantitatively assess the distribution of mutation ages, we resequenced 15,336 genes in 6,515 individuals of European (n=4,298) and African (n=2,217) American ancestry and inferred the age of 1,146,401 autosomal single nucleotide variants (SNVs). We estimate that ~73% of all protein-coding SNVs and ~86% of SNVs predicted to be deleterious arose in the past 5,000-10,000 years. The average age of deleterious SNVs varied significantly across molecular pathways, and disease genes contained a significantly higher proportion of recently arisen deleterious SNVs compared to other genes. Furthermore, European Americans had an excess of deleterious variants in essential and Mendelian disease genes compared to African Americans, consistent with weaker purifying selection due to the out-of-Africa dispersal. Our results better delimit the historical details of human protein-coding variation, illustrate the profound effect recent human history has had on the burden of deleterious SNVs segregating in contemporary populations, and provides important practical information that can be used to prioritize variants in disease gene discovery

Enhancing Magnetic Ordering in Cr-doped Bi2Se3 using High-TC Ferrimagnetic Insulator

We report a study of enhancing the magnetic ordering in a model magnetically doped topological insulator (TI), Bi2-xCrxSe3, via the proximity effect using a high-TC ferrimagnetic insulator Y3Fe5O12. The FMI provides the TI with a source of exchange interaction yet without removing the nontrivial surface state. By performing the elemental specific X-ray magnetic circular dichroism (XMCD) measurements, we have unequivocally observed an enhanced TC of 50 K in this magnetically doped TI/FMI heterostructure. We have also found a larger (6.6 nm at 30 K) but faster decreasing (by 80% from 30 K to 50 K) penetration depth compared to that of diluted ferromagnetic semiconductors (DMSs), which could indicate a novel mechanism for the interaction between FMIs and the nontrivial TIs surface