London eyes: William Dean Howells and the shift to instant photography

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, one of William Dean Howells's many avid readers, finally meeting him in the flesh, expressed surprise that the famed writer was not dead. Although he had not actually departed from the world, it was true that by this time the venerable "Dean"was at a low ebb. While younger authors were taking the novel in directions about which he was, at the least, ambivalent, Howells was aware that his own best work was behind him. Yet, throughout his career, he maintained a desire to test different literary approaches. In England in 1904, Howells tested a conceit that would allow him to keep pace with the literary movements of the day. This consisted of an extended photographic metaphor: an association of himself with the Kodak camera. He used this figuration to move beyond the philosophical foundations of his previous work. Criticism has largely overlooked this endeavor, which Howells buried away in the somewhat obscure travelogue London Films (1905). This essay shows how London Films used its photographic metaphor to question positivistic observational assumptions, the way in which this was a response to William James's Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912), and, finally, why Howells ultimately went back on his attempt to create a Kodak school in fiction

Going ‘beyond’? New frontiers in photography

A review of the book 'William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography' (2013)

We’re All Anglo-Saxons Now: Alfred Tennyson and the United States

This article traces Tennyson’s changing relationship to the United States. The poet first associated Americans with what he saw as the exploitative practices of the transatlantic literary marketplace, before the Civil War modified his opinion. After this conflict, he would maintain a personal preference for Southerners along with a distaste for ‘Yankees’. This discrimination paralleled an increased suspicion of the United States’ imperial ambitions, though his attitude to postbellum America was also mixed with admiration. As a result of what he understood as its superior federal system of political organisation, he came to see the United States as the likely successor to a declining British Empire. He would eventually adopt an ideology akin to Manifest Destiny in ‘Kapiolani’ (1892), a work that encapsulated his sense of a coming shift in global power

Flirting with photography: Henry James and photographic exchange

Like many authors of the long nineteenth-century period, Henry James was both fascinated and troubled by photography’s capacity to extend social relations across distance and time. As this article will show, in The Awkward Age (1899) and ‘Crapy Cornelia’ (1909) he represents photography as enabling new forms of virtual flirtation. The Awkward Age projects its protagonist, an adolescent girl named Nanda, into a network of photographic exchange. This leads to serious problems when her mother seeks to win Nanda a suitor. The text not only depicts photographs as modes of flirtation; it also shares with photography a concern for deixical signification. The book presents the identity of its individual characters through a blank writing style that is both flirtatious and photographic in its pleasurable deferral of meaning. By the time he wrote ‘Crapy Cornelia’, James had adjusted to the new instantaneous and portable photography. As a result, this later story portrays obsolete carte-de-visite photography in nostalgic terms: as a form that enabled affective (and effective) networks of connection, even between the living and the dead

Detection of N15NH+ in L1544

Excess levels of 15N isotopes which have been detected in primitive solar system materials are explained as a remnant of interstellar chemistry which took place in regions of the protosolar nebula. Chemical models of nitrogen fractionation in cold clouds predict an enhancement in the gas-phase abundance of 15N-bearing molecules, thus we have searched for 15N variants of the N2H+ ion in L1544, which is one of the best candidate sources for detection owing to its low central core temperature and high CO depletion. With the IRAM 30m telescope we have obtained deep integrations of the N2H+(1-0) line at 91.2 GHz. The N2H+(1-0) line has been detected toward the dust emission peak of L1544. The 14N/15N abundance ratio in N2H+ resulted 446+/-71, very close to the protosolar value of ~450, higher than the terrestrial ratio of ~270, and significantly lower than the lower limit in L1544 found by Gerin et al. (2009, ApJ, 570, L101) in the same object using ammonia isotopologues.Comment: Accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysic

Inhibition of Ral GTPases Using a Stapled Peptide Approach

Aberrant Ras signalling drives numerous cancers and drugs to inhibit this are urgently required. This compelling clinical need, combined with recent innovations in drug discovery including the advent of biologic therapeutic agents, has propelled Ras back to the forefront of targeting efforts. Activated Ras has proved extremely difficult to target directly and the focus has moved to the main downstream Ras-signalling pathways. In particular, the Ras-Raf and Ras-PI3K pathways have provided conspicuous enzyme therapeutic targets, which were more accessible to conventional drug-discovery strategies. The Ras-RalGEF-Ral pathway is a more difficult challenge for traditional medicinal development and there have therefore been few inhibitors reported that disrupt this axis. We have used our structure of a Ral-effector complex as a basis for the design and characterization of α-helical stapled peptides that bind selectively to active, GTP-bound Ral proteins and that compete with downstream effector proteins. The peptides have been thoroughly characterized biophysically. Crucially, the lead peptide enters cells and is biologically active, inhibiting isoform-specific RalB-driven cellular processes. This therefore provides a starting point for therapeutic inhibition of the Ras-RalGEF-Ral pathway.This work was supported by a Cambridge Cancer Centre Pump Priming award to CA, DO and HRM, a BBSRC Studentship to NSC, and a National Institutes for Health grant (CA71443) and the Welch Foundation (grant number I-1414) to MAW.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology via https://doi.org/10.1074/jbc.M116.72024

Inhibition of Ral GTPases Using a Stapled Peptide Approach.

Aberrant Ras signaling drives numerous cancers, and drugs to inhibit this are urgently required. This compelling clinical need combined with recent innovations in drug discovery including the advent of biologic therapeutic agents, has propelled Ras back to the forefront of targeting efforts. Activated Ras has proved extremely difficult to target directly, and the focus has moved to the main downstream Ras-signaling pathways. In particular, the Ras-Raf and Ras-PI3K pathways have provided conspicuous enzyme therapeutic targets that were more accessible to conventional drug-discovery strategies. The Ras-RalGEF-Ral pathway is a more difficult challenge for traditional medicinal development, and there have, therefore, been few inhibitors reported that disrupt this axis. We have used our structure of a Ral-effector complex as a basis for the design and characterization of α-helical-stapled peptides that bind selectively to active, GTP-bound Ral proteins and that compete with downstream effector proteins. The peptides have been thoroughly characterized biophysically. Crucially, the lead peptide enters cells and is biologically active, inhibiting isoform-specific RalB-driven cellular processes. This, therefore, provides a starting point for therapeutic inhibition of the Ras-RalGEF-Ral pathway.This work was supported by a Cambridge Cancer Centre Pump Priming award to CA, DO and HRM, a BBSRC Studentship to NSC, and a National Institutes for Health grant (CA71443) and the Welch Foundation (grant number I-1414) to MAW.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology via https://doi.org/10.1074/jbc.M116.72024

Assessment of ridden horse behavior

Assessments of the behavior of ridden horses form the basis of performance evaluation. The purpose of any performance being evaluated will determine the factors considered important, those indicative of 'poor' performance and what makes a successful equine athlete. Currently there is no consistent objective means of assessing ridden horse behavior and inevitably, given the different equestrian disciplines, the likelihood of a universal standard of good and bad performance is remote. Nevertheless, in order to protect the welfare of the ridden horse regardless of its specific role, we should strive for consensus on an objective means of identifying behavioral signs indicative of mental state. Current technological developments enable objective evaluation of movement patterns, but many aspects of the assessment of ridden behavior still rely on subjective judgement. The development of a list of behaviors exhibited by ridden horses, a ridden horse ethogram, will facilitate recording of observable behavioral events. However, without objective evidence of the relevance of these behavioral events, such a resource has limited value

Origin of volatiles in the Main Belt

We propose a scenario for the formation of the Main Belt in which asteroids incorporated icy particles formed in the outer Solar Nebula. We calculate the composition of icy planetesimals formed beyond a heliocentric distance of 5 AU in the nebula by assuming that the abundances of all elements, in particular that of oxygen, are solar. As a result, we show that ices formed in the outer Solar Nebula are composed of a mix of clathrate hydrates, hydrates formed above 50 K and pure condensates produced at lower temperatures. We then consider the inward migration of solids initially produced in the outer Solar Nebula and show that a significant fraction may have drifted to the current position of the Main Belt without encountering temperature and pressure conditions high enough to vaporize the ices they contain. We propose that, through the detection and identification of initially buried ices revealed by recent impacts on the surfaces of asteroids, it could be possible to infer the thermodynamic conditions that were present within the Solar Nebula during the accretion of these bodies, and during the inward migration of icy planetesimals. We also investigate the potential influence that the incorporation of ices in asteroids may have on their porosities and densities. In particular, we show how the presence of ices reduces the value of the bulk density of a given body, and consequently modifies its macro-porosity from that which would be expected from a given taxonomic type.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRA