Aboriginal health and institutional reform within Australian federalism

This paper examines relationships between institutional reform within Australian federalism and Aboriginal health, both historically and in prospect. It begins with a brief historical analysis of government involvement in the general health arena within Australian federalism. It then provides a more extended historical account of government involvement in Aboriginal health and the emergence in the last 25 years of a group of important non-government players, the Aboriginal community-controlled health services. A more normative prescriptive analysis then follows, which identifies lessons from past experiences and enunciates principles for future action. These lessons and principles relate in particular to ideas about complexity and the need for greater role clarification and coordination in institutional arrangements for Aboriginal health. We argue for a view which in large part accepts this complexity and sees a need to draw organisations and their efforts into the Aboriginal health arena, rather than drive them out. We also, however, caution against drawing in all relevant organisations in related fields such as housing, education and infrastructure provision in the name of 'intersectoral collaboration'. A third argument suggests, perhaps counter intuitively, that measuring the success of institutional reform in Aboriginal health should to some extent be disarticulated from changes in substantive Aboriginal health status. A brief penultimate section of the paper looks at current general developments in the health arena. The conclusion of the paper identifies the key challenge and current opportunity for institutional reform within Australian federalism relating to Aboriginal health. This relates to the linking of responsibility sharing within Australian federalism and Aboriginal self-determination

Multiomic Hypotheses Underlying Behavioral Manipulation of Camponotus floridanus ants by Ophiocordyceps camponoti-floridani fungi

Parasitic manipulation of host behavior lies at the intersection of disease, animal behavior, and coevolutionary processes. In many of these interactions, the underpinning biology is brought into sharp focus as they are obligate relationships, under strong selection to bring about specific changes in host behavior that determine if the parasite will transmit or die. However, experimental and molecular techniques to understand these interactions are still developing and identification of the mechanisms of manipulation is a primary goal in the field. As such, we investigated host-parasite interactions between Camponotus floridanus (Florida carpenter ant) and Ophiocordyceps camponoti-floridani (Florida zombie ant fungus) from multiple molecular perspectives. By combining genome, gene expression, protein-interaction, and metabolite data from multiple experiments, we analyzed parasitic manipulation in a multiomic framework. We considered the most robust hypotheses of how parasitic manipulation occurs to be those supported by multiomic data. Two major avenues of parasitic influence on host behavior appear to be direct interference with neurotransmission and dysregulation of core cellular pathways that affect behaviors. For example, heightened expression of host dopamine synthesis enzyme genes, predicted binding of secreted parasite proteins to dopamine receptors, and reduced dopamine precursor abundance during displays of manipulated behavior all correlate the dysregulation of dopaminergic processes to manipulation phenotypes. We discuss numerous possible hypotheses, many with multiomic support, some without. We predict that modification of host behavior is a complex and multi-layered process that integrates multiple mechanisms we propose here

Sparsification Enables Predicting Kissing Hairpin Pseudoknot Structures of Long RNAs in Practice

While computational RNA secondary structure prediction is an important tool in RNA research, it is still fundamentally limited to pseudoknot-free structures (or at best very simple pseudoknots) in practice. Here, we make the prediction of complex pseudoknots - including kissing hairpin structures - practically applicable by reducing the originally high space consumption. For this aim, we apply the technique of sparsification and other space-saving modifications to the recurrences of the pseudoknot prediction algorithm by Chen, Condon and Jabbari (CCJ algorithm). Thus, the theoretical space complexity of free energy minimization is reduced to Theta(n^3+Z), in the sequence length n and the number of non-optimally decomposable fragments ("candidates") Z. The sparsified CCJ algorithm, sparseCCJ, is presented in detail. Moreover, we provide and compare three generations of CCJ implementations, which continuously improve the space requirements: the original CCJ implementation, our first modified implementation, and our final sparsified implementation. The two latest implementations implement the established HotKnots DP09 energy model. In our experiments, using 244GB of RAM, the original CCJ implementation failed to handle sequences longer than 195 bases; sparseCCJ handles our pseudoknot data set (up to about length 400 bases) in this space limit. All three CCJ implementations are available at https://github.com/HosnaJabbari/CCJ

Social and acoustic determinants of perceived laughter intensity

Existing research links subjective judgments of perceived laughter intensity with features such as duration, amplitude, fundamental frequency, and voicing. We examine these associations in a new database of social laughs produced in situations inducing amusement, embarrassment, and schadenfreude. We also test the extent to which listeners’ judgments of laughter intensity vary as a function of the social situation in which laughs were produced

Social and acoustic determinants of perceived laughter intensity

Existing research links subjective judgments of perceived laughter intensity with features such as duration, amplitude, fundamental frequency, and voicing. We examine these associations in a new database of social laughs produced in situations inducing amusement, embarrassment, and schadenfreude. We also test the extent to which listeners’ judgments of laughter intensity vary as a function of the social situation in which laughs were produced

Why nanofibers are a good adsorptive surface – fundamental understanding and industrial applications for mAb bioprocessing

Over the years, chromatography has proven to be a powerful and versatile technique for the purification of high value biotherapeutics. Yet, today’s preparative chromatography of biologics still, in principle, looks the same as it did several decades ago. Any improvements made have been incremental; constrained by the stationary phase format (porous beads), associated column size (bed height and pressure drop), and historical modes of operation. To address future manufacturing challenges such as high cost of goods, diversity in product portfolios, market dynamics and manufacturing flexibility, new, more radical approaches to the development of chromatography materials and towards associated modes of operations are needed. With the biotechnology industry maturing, wide spread adoption of new high tech tools/products such as high throughput analytics, automated process control, single use materials and real time data analysis is already taking place, which in turn will lead towards revisiting and a subsequent improvement of how chromatography will be operated in the future. Examples of such improvements that are already considered include high productivity operations such as simulated moving bed and rapid, or extreme, cycling regimes. Please click Additional Files below to see the full abstract