All the Flavours of Asia

A travel article about food and landscape in Thailand. Thick forest islands the first limestone karst that we see. In the cracks and ledges of these cliff faces, low trees make a steady ascent. From the road, it looks an impossible climb, but the forest has managed to find a line to the top and to form a platform of dense canopy. We’re coming into Krabi, an area of southern Thailand famous for these formations. Soon, the forest base will be replaced by ocean. Grottos, undercuts, and yellow beaches will add a skirt of luxury to the drama to the cliffs...

Authentic in all caps

AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS is an award-winning web audio adventure for the iPad and Chrome browser. The app combines audio drama, audio tours, and online storytelling. You travel across the web with characters who face ridiculous obstacles to being themselves. It's about identity, mortality, and pizza toppings. It's an audio drama for people who live on the Internet.

Pharmacokinetics and tumor disposition of PEGylated, methotrexate conjugated poly-l-lysine dendrimers

Dendrimers have potential for delivering chemotherapeutic drugs to solid tumours via the enhanced permeation and retention (EPR) effect. The impact of conjugation of hydrophobic anticancer drugs to hydrophilic PEGylated dendrimer surfaces, however, has not been fully investigated. The current study has therefore characterised the effect on dendrimer disposition of conjugating α-carboxyl protected methotrexate (MTX) to a series of PEGylated 3H-labelled poly-L-lysine dendrimers ranging in size from generation 3 (G3) to 5 (G5) in rats. Dendrimers contained 50% surface PEG and 50% surface MTX. Conjugation of MTX generally increased plasma clearance when compared to conjugation with PEG alone. Conversely, increasing generation reduced clearance, increased metabolic stability and reduced renal elimination of the administered radiolabel. For constructs with molecular weights >20 kDa increasing the molecular weight of conjugated PEG also reduced clearance and enhanced metabolic stability but had only a minimal effect on renal elimination. Tissue distribution studies revealed retention of MTX conjugated smaller (G3-G4) PEG570 dendrimers (or their metabolic products) in the kidneys. In contrast, the larger G5 dendrimer was concentrated more in the liver and spleen. The G5 PEG1100 dendrimer was also shown to accumulate in solid Walker 256 and HT1080 tumours and comparative disposition data in both rats (1 to 2% dose/g in tumour) and mice (11% dose/g in tumour) are presented. The results of this study further illustrate the potential utility of biodegradable PEGylated poly-L-lysine dendrimers as long circulating vectors for the delivery and tumour-targeting of hydrophobic drugs.

A distributed computing framework for all-to-all comparison problems

Distributed computation and storage have been widely used for processing of big data sets. For many big data problems, with the size of data growing rapidly, the distribution of computing tasks and related data can affect the performance of the computing system greatly. In this paper, a distributed computing framework is presented for high performance computing of All-to-All Comparison Problems. A data distribution strategy is embedded in the framework for reduced storage space and balanced computing load. Experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed approach. They have shown that about 88% of the ideal performance capacity have be achieved in multiple machines through using the approach presented in this paper.