WHAT GETS INSIDE: Violent Entanglements and Toxic Boundaries in Mexico City

Entanglement is a key concept in contemporary anthropology and science and technology studies. By tracing the contingent and uncertain relations that endow objects with seemingly stable boundaries, entanglement allows us to see how such boundaries restrict our ability to know the world better. This article examines the concept of entanglement in the context of contemporary life in a working‐class Mexico City neighborhood, Colonia Periférico, and a longitudinal environmental health project that studies the neighborhood’s residents. While entanglement has its uses, the entanglement of working‐class bodies with globalizing processes like NAFTA and the ongoing War on Drugs shows that the concept has its limits. For working‐class residents, life is already deeply entangled with chronic economic and political instability shaped through the violent ravages of transnational capital. Instead, I trace how residents in Colonia Periférico secure stability through toxic boundaries that protectively keep out the disruptive effects of police and public health surveillance. Colonia Periférico’s boundaries, which include a sewage‐filled dam, cement dust, and freeway exhaust, are clearly entangled with residents’ bodies. They get inside. These entanglements are the price paid for a remarkable stability, in which children can play on the streets and attentive care for drug‐addicted and disabled residents is part of everyday life. With the goal of knowing the world better, then, we might complicate celebratory calls for the uncertainty of entanglement by taking into account both the practices that make boundaries and what boundaries have to offer.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/140030/1/cuan32407_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/140030/2/cuan32407.pd

Scars of Nation: Surgical Penetration and the Ecuadorian State

In Ecuador, middle‐class women, and increasingly more working‐class women, eagerly pay to be scarred. Cesarean sections carried out in private clinics leave a lateral scar—the mark of women not subject to the indignities of devalued public medical services. It is not citizenship per se that these women are after with their scars, since in Ecuador, citizenship, especially in the medical realm, is denigrated. Instead, the scar is a sign of a woman's ability to remain distinct from the governed masses who need to make citizenship claims for social services on state institutions. Scars and the bodies that carry them enact a racialized relationship to the nation. Browner bodies can withstand vaginal birth within the disciplines of public maternity care. When women pay for cesarean sections, the private scars make them whiter and more worthy of the nation. After all, they have not taken anything from the state.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/92454/1/jlca1223.pd

Abandonment and Accumulation: Embryonic Futures in the United States and Ecuador

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/98284/1/j.1548-1387.2011.01151.x.pd

Systems Analysis Implicates WAVE2 Complex in the Pathogenesis of Developmental Left-Sided Obstructive Heart Defects.

Genetic variants are the primary driver of congenital heart disease (CHD) pathogenesis. However, our ability to identify causative variants is limited. To identify causal CHD genes that are associated with specific molecular functions, the study used prior knowledge to filter de novo variants from 2,881 probands with sporadic severe CHD. This approach enabled the authors to identify an association between left ventricular outflow tract obstruction lesions and genes associated with the WAVE2 complex and regulation of small GTPase-mediated signal transduction. Using CRISPR zebrafish knockdowns, the study confirmed that WAVE2 complex proteins brk1, nckap1, and wasf2 and the regulators of small GTPase signaling cul3a and racgap1 are critical to cardiac development

Ovine pedomics : the first study of the ovine foot 16S rRNA-based microbiome

We report the first study of the bacterial microbiome of ovine interdigital skin based on 16S rRNA by pyrosequencing and conventional cloning with Sanger-sequencing. Three flocks were selected, one a flock with no signs of footrot or interdigital dermatitis, a second flock with interdigital dermatitis alone and a third flock with both interdigital dermatitis and footrot. The sheep were classified as having either healthy interdigital skin (H), interdigital dermatitis (ID) or virulent footrot (VFR). The ovine interdigital skin bacterial community varied significantly by flock and clinical condition. The diversity and richness of operational taxonomic units was greater in tissue from sheep with ID than H or VFR affected sheep. Actinobacteria, Bacteriodetes, Firmicutes and Proteobacteria were the most abundant phyla comprising 25 genera. Peptostreptococcus, Corynebacterium and Staphylococcus were associated with H, ID and VFR respectively. Sequences of Dichelobacter nodosus, the causal agent of ovine footrot, were not amplified due to mismatches in the 16S rRNA universal forward primer (27F). A specific real time PCR assay was used to demonstrate the presence of D. nodosus which was detected in all samples including the flock with no signs of ID or VFR. Sheep with ID had significantly higher numbers of D. nodosus (104-109 cells/g tissue) than those with H or VFR feet

Insecticide resistance and the future of malaria control in Zambia.

BACKGROUND: In line with the Global trend to improve malaria control efforts a major campaign of insecticide treated net distribution was initiated in 1999 and indoor residual spraying with DDT or pyrethroids was reintroduced in 2000 in Zambia. In 2006, these efforts were strengthened by the President's Malaria Initiative. This manuscript reports on the monitoring and evaluation of these activities and the potential impact of emerging insecticide resistance on disease transmission. METHODS: Mosquitoes were captured daily through a series of 108 window exit traps located at 18 sentinel sites. Specimens were identified to species and analyzed for sporozoites. Adult Anopheles mosquitoes were collected resting indoors and larva collected in breeding sites were reared to F1 and F0 generations in the lab and tested for insecticide resistance following the standard WHO susceptibility assay protocol. Annual cross sectional household parasite surveys were carried out to monitor the impact of the control programme on prevalence of Plasmodium falciparum in children aged 1 to 14 years. RESULTS: A total of 619 Anopheles gambiae s.l. and 228 Anopheles funestus s.l. were captured from window exit traps throughout the period, of which 203 were An. gambiae malaria vectors and 14 An. funestus s.s.. In 2010 resistance to DDT and the pyrethroids deltamethrin, lambda-cyhalothrin and permethrin was detected in both An. gambiae s.s. and An. funestus s.s.. No sporozoites were detected in either species. Prevalence of P. falciparum in the sentinel sites remained below 10% throughout the study period. CONCLUSION: Both An. gambiae s.s. and An. funestus s.s. were controlled effectively with the ITN and IRS programme in Zambia, maintaining a reduced disease transmission and burden. However, the discovery of DDT and pyrethroid resistance in the country threatens the sustainability of the vector control programme

Search for flavour-changing neutral-current interactions of a top quark and a gluon in pp collisions at s√=13 TeV with the ATLAS detector

A search is presented for the production of a single top quark via left-handed flavour-changing neutral-current (FCNC) interactions of a top quark, a gluon and an up or charm quark. Two production processes are considered: u+g→t and c+g→t. The analysis is based on proton–proton collision data taken at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. The data set corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 139 fb−1. Events with exactly one electron or muon, exactly one b-tagged jet and missing transverse momentum are selected, resembling the decay products of a singly produced top quark. Neural networks based on kinematic variables differentiate between events from the two signal processes and events from background processes. The measured data are consistent with the background-only hypothesis, and limits are set on the production cross-sections of the signal processes: σ(u+g→t)×B(t→Wb)×B(W→ℓν)<3.0pb and σ(c+g→t)×B(t→Wb)×B(W→ℓν)<4.7pb at the 95% confidence level, with B(W→ℓν)=0.325 being the sum of branching ratios of all three leptonic decay modes of the W boson. Based on the framework of an effective field theory, the cross-section limits are translated into limits on the strengths of the tug and tcg couplings occurring in the theory: |CutuG|/Λ2<0.057TeV−2 and |CctuG|/Λ2<0.14TeV−2. These bounds correspond to limits on the branching ratios of FCNC-induced top-quark decays: B(t→u+g)<0.61×10−4 and B(t→c+g)<3.7×10−4

Extra embryos: The ethics of cryopreservation in Ecuador and elsewhere

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/73714/1/ae.2007.34.1.181.pd