Contemporary medical television and crisis in the NHS

This article maps the terrain of contemporary UK medical television, paying particular attention to Call the Midwife as its centrepiece, and situating it in contextual relation to the current crisis in the NHS. It provides a historical overview of UK and US medical television, illustrating how medical television today has been shaped by noteworthy antecedents. It argues that crisis rhetoric surrounding healthcare leading up to the passing of the Health and Social Care Act 2012 has been accompanied by a renaissance in medical television. And that issues, strands and clusters have emerged in forms, registers and modes with noticeable regularity, especially around the value of affective labour, the cultural politics of nostalgia and the neoliberalisation of healthcare

The Makapansgat Limeworks grey breccia: hominids, hyaenas, hystricids or hillwash?

Main articleThe question of the origin of the Makapansgat Limeworks grey breccia is here considered from two viewpoints: (a) the accumulation of bones within a catchment area; and (b) the possible concentration of the bones in their final resting place. The potential role of hyaenas and porcupines as bone-accumulating agents is investigated. Nine categories of hyaena damage to bone surfaces could be distinguished on collections of bone taken from a series of recent hyaena breeding dens. All nine categories can be demonstrated in identical form on fossil bones from the grey breccia. It is concluded that carnivores have played a more substantial role as accumulators of the bones in this breccia than has previously been acknowledged. Porcupines are excluded as major contributors to the grey breccia bone assemblage on the basis of the low percentage of porcupine-gnawed bones present compared with recent porcupine accumulations. Furthermore, the pattern of damage observed on porcupine-collected skeletal elements does not resemble that documented for the grey breccia. A 3-dimensional computer plot of the topography of the Limeworks travertine floor shows the presence of two larger and two smaller basins separated from each other by floor "highs". A floor "high" around the grey breccia is demonstrated and may have been a significant factor in bone concentration. Sedimentation within separate basins need -not necessarily have been synchronous or equivalent, and the practice of equating Members from one part of the cavern to another is questioned. Stereographic projections of the dip and strike orientations of the long axes of a number of in situ grey breccia bones in two separate areas indicate orientation patterns and imbrication. The results of the projections suggest that a combination of water current action and gravity may have been responsible for the present configuration of the bones.Non

The uncontrolled cooking test : measuring three-stone fire performance in northern Mozambique

The assessment of cooking system performance in developing countries is a continued area of interest, with laboratory testing methods often being unrepresentative of real world use, and field based methods tending to be resource intensive with high levels of variability. This paper presents the Uncontrolled Cook Test (UCT), a relatively low cost field testing protocol that assesses the task-based performance of the system when cooking any meal and operated as per local conditions and practice. A total of 29 UCTs were conducted in households in a study village in rural northern Mozambique, all on wood-burning three stone fires. The UCT proved a capable method for the assessment of cooking system performance and, critically, returned a data set with less variation than is typically reported by existing field test methods, so offering the potential to use fewer resources to detect a statistically significant difference between baseline and ‘improved’ stove results

Rapid Targeted Gene Disruption in Bacillus Anthracis

Anthrax is a zoonotic disease recognized to affect herbivores since Biblical times and has the widest range of susceptible host species of any known pathogen. The ease with which the bacterium can be weaponized and its recent deliberate use as an agent of terror, have highlighted the importance of gaining a deeper understanding and effective countermeasures for this important pathogen. High quality sequence data has opened the possibility of systematic dissection of how genes distributed on both the bacterial chromosome and associated plasmids have made it such a successful pathogen. However, low transformation efficiency and relatively few genetic tools for chromosomal manipulation have hampered full interrogation of its genome. Results: Group II introns have been developed into an efficient tool for site-specific gene inactivation in several organisms. We have adapted group II intron targeting technology for application in Bacillus anthracis and generated vectors that permit gene inactivation through group II intron insertion. The vectors developed permit screening for the desired insertion through PCR or direct selection of intron insertions using a selection scheme that activates a kanamycin resistance marker upon successful intron insertion. Conclusions: The design and vector construction described here provides a useful tool for high throughput experimental interrogation of the Bacillus anthracis genome and will benefit efforts to develop improved vaccines and therapeutics.Chem-Bio Diagnostics program from the Department of Defense Chemical and Biological Defense program through the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) B102387MNIH GM037949Welch Foundation F-1607Cellular and Molecular Biolog