New Exploration in the Chitral Valley, Pakistan: An Extension of the Gandharan Grave Culture

NoNew survey in the Chitral Valley has doubled the number of recorded Gandharan Grave culture sites in the region and extended their geographical range. The numbers and location of sites indicates that the Gandharan Grave culture was well established in the Chitral valley, suggesting that the valley may have been central to this cultural development, rather than marginal

First Record of \u3ci\u3eOchlerotatus Japonicus\u3c/i\u3e (Diptera: Culicidae) in St. Joseph County, Indiana

A single female specimen of Ochlerotatus japonicus (Theobald)(formerly Aedes japonicus), the Asian bush mosquito, was captured in St. Joseph County, IN on 29 July 2004. This is the first report of that species in northern Indiana. Additional specimens were subsequently collected, indicating probable establishment throughout the county

Affinity Spaces and Gamers: Time Online and Associated Emotion

Scholars in information science often take interest in a wide variety of questions and dilemmas relative to games and gamers, technology and users. With this project, we focus on affinity space confessions. Our focus addresses video-game players’ perceptions of their time spent gaming in a time-scarce world. Though exploratory in nature, this study raises powerful questions around user perception of time spent in leisure activities. Indeed, this project raises many important issues between the time players devote to entertainment and the privilege of being able to play “too much.” We provide a discussion of what our findings can mean for information scientists, game developers, and other scholars across disciplines interested in the relationship between game playing, psychology, and behavior

Animal Performance in Big-Time Vaudeville

Animal vaudevillians have been neglected by academic accounts of vaudeville. Drawing on the rapidly proliferating and highly interdisciplinary field of animal studies, this dissertation combines archival research and cultural theory to fill an important gap in our understanding of how animal bodies and images circulated during the vaudeville era. Taking up Nicole Shukin’s notion of animal capital as both animal “signs and substances” circulating in cultures of capital, I argue that vaudeville animal acts theatricalized animal capital for US citizen-consumers and often circulated animalized capital via racist ideologies and performance modes. Theatre bookers balanced their reliance on animal acts with fears of diminishing vaudeville’s ambitions for refinement and this tension is clear in the marketing materials for the animal acts.Vaudeville’s animal acts both destabilized and reified important categories of child/adult and lowbrow/middlebrow. Contemporary ethical debates about animal welfare resonate with critiques from animal activists who wanted performing animals removed from vaudeville. These acts influenced and were influenced by circus, melodrama, and even newly forming fields of scientific inquiry. Primate and canine acts mobilized associations with evolution and coevolution, theatricalizing the mysteries of human origins. Animal vaudevillians were much more than diverting novelties shoved at the end of shows for audience members who chose to stay in their seats. Animal vaudevillians’ fur, feathers, and anthropomorphic antics created discourses of animality that mediated audience members’ own humanity and embodied a simultaneous ambivalence and nostalgia for nature in the increasingly urban and industrial United States

Take Me Away: The Relationship Between Escape Drinking and Attentional Bias for Alcohol-Related Cues

Previous research has indicated that implicit attentional bias to alcohol-related cues may serve as a cognitive measure of susceptibility to alcohol dependence. The primary goal of the current study was to examine whether college students who drink to escape dysphoric emotions or moods (i.e., escape drinkers) have stronger attentional biases for alcohol-related cues than non-escape drinkers. Additionally, because previous research has shown that presentation time and content of smoking-related stimuli moderates differences between smokers\u27 and nonsmokers\u27 reaction times, this study sought to determine whether these effects generalized to alcohol-related stimuli. Participants who were identified as either escape (n = 74) or non-escape drinkers (n = 48) completed a dot-probe task in which alcohol-related pictures that contained humans interacting with the alcohol-related cues (active) or alcohol-related cues alone (inactive) were presented along with matched control pictures. These stimuli were presented for either 500 ms or 2000 ms to determine whether attentional biases occur as a function of initial or maintained attention to the alcohol-related cues. Escape drinkers displayed a significantly stronger attentional bias for alcohol-related inactive cues at longer presentation times (i.e., 2000 ms) compared to non-escape drinkers. This bias was independent of alcohol dependence and family history of alcoholism. These results suggest that in addition to dependence and family history, escape drinking is an important factor to consider when examining attentional biases to alcohol-related cues

Multiwavelength observations of the black hole transient XTE J1752-223 during its 2010 outburst decay

Galactic black hole transients show many interesting phenomena during outburst decays. We present simultaneous X-ray (RXTE, Swift, and INTEGRAL), and optical/near-infrared (O/NIR) observations (SMARTS), of the X-ray transient, XTE J1752-223 during its outburst decay in 2010. The multi- wavelength observations of 150 days in 2010 cover the transition from soft to hard spectral state. The evolution of ATCA/VLBI radio observations are shown to confirm the compact jet appearance. The source shows flares in O/NIR during changes in X-ray and radio properties. One of those flares is bright and long, and starts about 20 days after the transition in timing. Other, smaller flares occur along with the transition in timing and increase in power-law flux, and also right after the detection of the core with VLBI. Furthermore, using the simultaneous broadband X-ray spectra including IN- TEGRAL, we found that a high energy cut-off is necessary with a folding energy at around 250 keV around the time that the compact jet is forming. The broad band spectrum can also be fitted equally well with a Comptonization model. In addition, using photoelectric absorption edges in the XMM– Newton RGS X-ray spectra and the extinction of red clump giants in the direction of the source, we found a lower limit on the distance of > 5 kpc

Relationship Between Alcohol Dependence, Escape Drinking, and Early Neural Attention to Alcohol-related Cues

Rationale Previous work has indicated that implicit attentional biases to alcohol-related cues are indicative of susceptibility to alcohol dependence and escape drinking, or drinking to avoid dysphoric mood or emotions. Objective The goal of the current study was to examine whether alcohol dependence and escape drinking were associated with early neural attentional biases to alcohol cues. Methods Electroencephalography data were recorded from 54 college students who reported that they regularly drank alcohol, while they viewed alcohol and control pictures that contained human content (active) or no human content (inactive). Results Those who were alcohol dependent showed more neural attentional bias to the active alcohol-related stimuli than to the matched control stimuli early in processing, as indicated by N1 amplitude. Escape drinkers showed greater neural attention to the active alcohol cues than non-escape drinkers, as measured by larger N2 amplitudes. Conclusions While alcohol dependence is associated with enhanced automatic attentional biases early in processing, escape drinking is associated with more controlled attentional biases to active alcohol cues during a relatively later stage in processing. These findings reveal important information about the time-course of attentional processing in problem drinkers and have important implications for addiction models and treatment

Reciprocal knock-in mice to investigate the functional redundancy of lamin B1 and lamin B2.

Lamins B1 and B2 (B-type lamins) have very similar sequences and are expressed ubiquitously. In addition, both Lmnb1- and Lmnb2-deficient mice die soon after birth with neuronal layering abnormalities in the cerebral cortex, a consequence of defective neuronal migration. The similarities in amino acid sequences, expression patterns, and knockout phenotypes raise the question of whether the two proteins have redundant functions. To investigate this topic, we generated "reciprocal knock-in mice"-mice that make lamin B2 from the Lmnb1 locus (Lmnb1(B2/B2)) and mice that make lamin B1 from the Lmnb2 locus (Lmnb2(B1/B1)). Lmnb1(B2/B2) mice produced increased amounts of lamin B2 but no lamin B1; they died soon after birth with neuronal layering abnormalities in the cerebral cortex. However, the defects in Lmnb1(B2/B2) mice were less severe than those in Lmnb1-knockout mice, indicating that increased amounts of lamin B2 partially ameliorate the abnormalities associated with lamin B1 deficiency. Similarly, increased amounts of lamin B1 in Lmnb2(B1/B1) mice did not prevent the neurodevelopmental defects elicited by lamin B2 deficiency. We conclude that lamins B1 and B2 have unique roles in the developing brain and that increased production of one B-type lamin does not fully complement loss of the other

Spread of porcine circovirus associated disease (PCVAD) in Ontario (Canada) swine herds: Part II. Matched case-control study

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The emergence of porcine circovirus associated disease (PCVAD) was associated with high mortality in swine populations worldwide. Studies performed in different regions identified spatial, temporal, and spatio-temporal trends as factors contributing to patterns of the disease spread. Patterns consistent with spatial trend and spatio-temporal clustering were already identified in this dataset. On the basis of these results, we have further investigated the nature of local spread in this report. The primary objective of this study was to evaluate risk factors for incidence cases of reported PCVAD.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A time-matched case-control study was used as a study design approach, and conditional logistic regression as the analytical method. The main exposure of interest was local spread, which was defined as an unidentified mechanism of PCVAD spread between premises located within 3 kilometers of the Euclidean distance. Various modifications of variables indicative of local spread were also evaluated. The dataset contained 278 swine herds from Ontario originally sampled either from diagnostic laboratory submissions or directly from the target population. A PCVAD case was defined on the basis of the producer's recall. Existence of apparent local spread over the entire study period was confirmed (OR = 2.26, 95% CI: 1.06, 4.83), and was further identified to be time-varying in nature - herds experiencing outbreaks in the later part of the epidemic were more likely than control herds to be exposed to neighboring herds experiencing recent PCVAD outbreaks. More importantly, the pattern of local spread was driven by concurrent occurrence of PCVAD on premises under the same ownership (OR_{EXACTwithin ownership}= 25.6, 95% CI: 3.4, +inf; OR_{EXACToutside ownership}= 1.3, 95% CI: 0.45, 3.3). Other significant factors included PRRSv status of a herd (OR_EXACT= 1.9, 95% CI: 1.0, 3.9), after adjusting for geographical location by including the binary effect of the easting coordinate (Easting > 600 km = 1; OR_EXACT= 1.8, 95% CI: 0.5, 5.6).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>These results preclude any conclusion regarding the existence of a mechanism of local spread through airborne transmission or indirectly through contaminated fomites or vectors, as simultaneous emergence of PCVAD could also be a result of concurrent change in contributing factors due to other mechanisms within ownerships.</p