‘Should we try to Self Remember while playing Snakes and Ladders?’: Dr. Gambit as Gurdjieff in Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet (1950)

Arising from the Paris surrealist group, the English-born writer and painter Leonora Carrington (England 1917 - Mexico 2011) was perpetually suspicious of orthodoxy and she often pokes fun at, parodies, and, ultimately, upsets traditional hierarchies of power. In her work animals impart wisdom, Goddesses loom large, and domestic spaces become sites of occult power. In this paper I will investigate Carrington's suspicion of gurus with claims to esoteric truth. Carrington participated in Fourth Way groups run by students of Gurdjieff (Christopher Fremantle) and Ouspensky (Rodney Collin). However, while she had a deep interest in the teachings, Carrington remained suspicious of the group practices of the Fourth Way, as can be seen in Elena Poniatowska’s fictionalised biography Leonora (2015). This articles explores Carrington's contact with the ‘Work’ in order to shed light on the character of Dr. Gambit in her 1950 novel, The Hearing Trumpet, commonly thought to be a parody of Gurdjieff. In doing so, it will investigate Carrington’s feminist objections to the role of the guru, while also contributing to a discussion of the unease some felt toward the praxis of the Fourth Way, despite their attraction to the philosophy.

Spectral simulation of laser ablated magnesium plasmas

We describe a collisional-radiative equilibrium model for predicting the optical emission spectrum of low-temperature magnesium plasmas, specifically those created by laser ablation. In the model, levels are populated by a balance of collisional and radiative rates. We include Stark widths of lines and trapping of radiation in the calculations. By use of this model we discuss various issues of importance in spectral analysis of laser ablated plasma plumes, such as the partial local thermodynamic equilibrium approximation, line trapping and time dependence.

‘Ghosts in the Head and Ghost Towns in the Field: Ethnography and the Experience of Presence and Absence’

This article is about an anthropologist coming to terms with the field and fieldwork. In 1995, I left – was evacuated from – my fieldsite as a volcanic eruption started just as my period of fieldwork drew to a close. These eruptions dramatically and instantaneously altered life on the island of Montserrat, a British colony in the Caribbean. While Montserrat the land, and Montserratians the people, migrated and moved on with their lives, Montserrat and Montserratians were preserved in my mind and in my anthropological writings as from “back home.” Revisiting Montserrat several years into the volcano crisis, I drove through the villages and roads leading to the former capital of the island, where I had worked from. My route to this modern-day Pompeii threw up a stark contrast between absence and presence, the imagined past and the experienced present. This is understood, in part, by examining the literary work of two other travelers through Montserrat, Henry Coleridge and Pete McCarthy, both of whom have a very different experience of the place and the people.

‘Hearing Voices': Punishing women’s mental ill-health in Northern Ireland’s jails

Informed by primary interviews and observational research conducted by the authors with women prisoners in Northern Ireland, this article focuses on prison as an institutional manifestation of women’s powerlessness and vulnerability, particularly those enduring mental ill-health. It contextualises their experiences within continua of violence and ‘unsafety’. It also considers official responses to critical inspection reports and those of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission based on the authors’ research findings. Finally, the primary research demonstrates that three decades on from publication the first critical analyses of women’s imprisonment, the conditions of gendered marginalisation, medicalisation and punishment remain. This is brought into stark relief in the punitive regimes imposed on those most vulnerable through mental ill-health.

Quasi-classical model of non-destructive wavepacket manipulation by intense ultrashort nonresonant laser pulses

A quasi-classical model (QCM) of nuclear wavepacket generation, modification and imaging by three intense ultrafast near-infrared laser pulses has been developed. Intensities in excess of 10(13) W cm(-2) are studied, the laser radiation is non-resonant and pulse durations are in the few-cycle regime, hence significantly removed from the conditions typical of coherent control and femtochemistry. The 1s sigma ground state of the D-2 precursor is projected onto the available electronic states in D-2(+) (1s sigma(g) ground and 2p sigma(u) dissociative) and D+ + D+ (Coulomb explosion) by tunnel ionization by an ultrashort 'pump' pulse, and relative populations are found numerically. A generalized non-adiabatic treatment allows the dependence of the initial vibrational population distribution on laser intensity to be calculated. The wavepacket is approximated as a classical ensemble of particles moving on the 1s sigma(g) potential energy surface (PES), and hence follow trajectories of different amplitudes and frequencies depending on the initial vibrational state. The 'control' pulse introduces a time-dependent polarization of the molecular orbital, causing the PES to be modified according to the dynamic Stark effect and the transition dipole. The trajectories adjust in amplitude, frequency and phase-offset as work is done on or by the resulting force; comparing the perturbed and unperturbed trajectories allows the final vibrational state populations and phases to be determined. The action of the 'probe' pulse is represented by a discrete internuclear boundary, such that elements of the ensemble at a larger internuclear separation are assumed to be photodissociated. The vibrational populations predicted by the QCM are compared to recent quantum simulations (Niederhausen and Thumm 2008 Phys. Rev. A 77 013404), and a remarkable agreement has been found. The applicability of this model to femtosecond and attosecond time-scale experiments is discussed and the relation to established femtochemistry and coherent control techniques are explored.

Lack of Association Between the Trp719Arg Polymorphism in Kinesin-Like Protein-6 and Coronary Artery Disease in 19 Case-Control Studies

Objectives: We sought to replicate the association between the kinesin-like protein 6 (KIF6) Trp719Arg polymorphism (rs20455), and clinical coronary artery disease (CAD).
Background: Recent prospective studies suggest that carriers of the 719Arg allele in KIF6 are at increased risk of clinical CAD compared with noncarriers.
Methods: The KIF6 Trp719Arg polymorphism (rs20455) was genotyped in 19 case-control studies of nonfatal CAD either as part of a genome-wide association study or in a formal attempt to replicate the initial positive reports.
Results: A total of 17,000 cases and 39,369 controls of European descent as well as a modest number of South Asians, African Americans, Hispanics, East Asians, and admixed cases and controls were successfully genotyped. None of the 19 studies demonstrated an increased risk of CAD in carriers of the 719Arg allele compared with noncarriers. Regression analyses and fixed-effects meta-analyses ruled out with high degree of confidence an increase of <2% in the risk of CAD among European 719Arg carriers. We also observed no increase in the risk of CAD among 719Arg carriers in the subset of Europeans with early-onset disease (younger than 50 years of age for men and younger than 60 years of age for women) compared with similarly aged controls as well as all non-European subgroups.
Conclusions: The KIF6 Trp719Arg polymorphism was not associated with the risk of clinical CAD in this large replication study.

Travelling Images, Images of Travel in Nicolas Bouvier's L'Usage du monde

Sketches and photographs are a familiar tool of the traveller-writer, who commonly draws on them when transforming experience into a textual narrative. The verbal thus displaces the visual — the latter retained, if at all, as mere illustration — in ways that echo James Heffernan's definition of ekphrasis as the ‘verbal description of visual representation’. Yet Nicolas Bouvier's 1963 travel narrative L'Usage du monde challenges conventional conceptions of ekphrasis. Juxtaposing the stark ink drawings of Thierry Vernet — Bouvier's travelling companion — with Bouvier's textual narrative, L'Usage du monde shifts representation away from a hierarchical relationship between verbal and visual; it offers instead an account of other cultures that is grounded in polyphony and exchange. This article applies Bouvier's own image of travel as a mosaic to the dual narrative form (or ‘iconotext’, to use Michael Nerlich's term) in order to consider a range of fluid relationships between Bouvier's text and Vernet's drawings. In examining these relationships of amplification, reduction, and absence, the article argues that the plurality of the narrative prompts a rethinking of conventional, binary paradigms of intercultural contact. Ultimately, the iconotextual nature of L'Usage du monde can be interpreted as a metaphor for the processes of cultural translation and transculturation that are central to Bouvier's travelling ethos.

Large-scale association analysis identifies 13 new susceptibility loci for coronary artery disease

We performed a meta-analysis of 14 genome-wide association studies of coronary artery disease (CAD) comprising 22,233 individuals with CAD (cases) and 64,762 controls of European descent followed by genotyping of top association signals in 56,682 additional individuals. This analysis identified 13 loci newly associated with CAD at P < 5 x 10(-8) and confirmed the association of 10 of 12 previously reported CAD loci. The 13 new loci showed risk allele frequencies ranging from 0.13 to 0.91 and were associated with a 6% to 17% increase in the risk of CAD per allele. Notably, only three of the new loci showed significant association with traditional CAD risk factors and the majority lie in gene regions not previously implicated in the pathogenesis of CAD. Finally, five of the new CAD risk loci appear to have pleiotropic effects, showing strong association with various other human diseases or traits.

Redistribution of vibrational population in a molecular ion with nonresonant strong-field laser pulses

We present an experimental demonstration of nonresonant manipulation of vibrational states in a molecule by an intense ultrashort laser pulse. A vibrational wave packet is generated in D-2(+) through tunnel ionization of D-2 by a few-cycle pump pulse. A similar control pulse is applied as the wave packet begins to dephase so that the dynamic Stark effect distorts the electronic environment of the nuclei, transferring vibrational population. The time evolution of the modified wave packet is probed via the D-2(+) photodissociation yield that results from the application of an intense probe pulse. Comparing the measured yield with a quasiclassical trajectory model allows us to determine the redistribution of vibrational population caused by the control pulse. ©

Genome-wide association of early-onset myocardial infarction with single nucleotide polymorphisms and copy number variants

We conducted a genome-wide association study testing single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and copy number variants (CNVs) for association with early-onset myocardial infarction in 2,967 cases and 3,075 controls. We carried out replication in an independent sample with an effective sample size of up to 19,492. SNPs at nine loci reached genome-wide significance: three are newly identified (21q22 near MRPS6-SLC5A3-KCNE2, 6p24 in PHACTR1 and 2q33 in WDR12) and six replicated prior observations1-4 (9p21, 1p13 near CELSR2-PSRC1-SORT1, 10q11 near CXCL12, 1q41 in MIA3, 19p13 near LDLR and 1p32 near PCSK9). We tested 554 common copy number polymorphisms (>1% allele frequency) and none met the pre-specified threshold for replication (P < 10-3). We identified 8,065 rare CNVs but did not detect a greater CNV burden in cases compared to controls, in genes compared to the genome as a whole, or at any individual locus. SNPs at nine loci were reproducibly associated with myocardial infarction, but tests of common and rare CNVs failed to identify additional associations with myocardial infarction risk.

The anonymity of the hunt: A critique of hunting as sharing

Hunter-gatherers are often ascribed a “monistic” worldview at odds with the nature-society dichotomy. The centerpiece of this claim is that they view hunting as similar to sharing within the band and prey animals as part of a common sphere of sociality. This article challenges this thesis. An examination of the work of its main proponents shows that it conflates two different senses of “animal”—the flesh-and-blood animals of the hunt and the animal Spirit that is said to control the animals. The sharing motif in hunting makes sense with respect to the anthropomorphic Spirit but not to the animals hunted. The conditions of the hunt as a spatiotemporal event provide further grounds for skepticism toward the idea of hunting-as-sharing. Drawing on biologist Robert Hinde’s model of relationships, I argue that hunting represents an anonymous one-off interaction that cannot develop into a personal relationship, in stark contrast to the durable forms of personalized sociality associated with the hunter-gatherer band. This is not to deny the possibility of human-animal cosociality in the form of personal relationships but rather to redirect the search away from the hunt to the interface with domesticated animals.

Controlled redistribution of vibrational population by few-cycle strong-field laser pulses

The use of strong-field (i.e. intensities in excess of 10(13) Wcm(-2)) few-cycle ultrafast (durations of 10 femtoseconds or less) laser pulses to create, manipulate and image vibrational wavepackets is investigated. Quasi-classical modelling of the initial superposition through tunnel ionization, wavepacket modification by nonadiabatically altering the nuclear environment via the transition dipole and the Stark effect, and measuring the control outcome by fragmenting the molecule is detailed. The influence of the laser intensity on strong-field ultrafast wavepacket control is discussed in detail: by modifying the distribution of laser intensities imaged, we show that focal conditions can be created that give preference to this three-pulse technique above processes induced by the pulses alone. An experimental demonstration is presented, and the nuclear dynamics inferred by the quasi-classical model discussed. Finally, we present the results of a systematic investigation of a dual-control pulse scheme, indicating that single vibrational states should be observable with high fidelity, and the populated state defined by varying the arrival time of the two control pulses. The relevance of such strong-field coherent control methods to the manipulation of electron localization and attosecond science is discussed.

Structure of the Plasmodium falciparum M17 aminopeptidase and significance for the design of drugs targeting the neutral exopeptidases

Current therapeutics and prophylactics for malaria are under severe challenge as a result of the rapid emergence of drug-resistant parasites. The human malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum expresses two neutral aminopeptidases, PfA-M1 and PfA-M17, which function in regulating the intracellular pool of amino acids required for growth and development inside the red blood cell. These enzymes are essential for parasite viability and are validated therapeutic targets. We previously reported the x-ray crystal structure of the monomeric PfA-M1 and proposed a mechanism for substrate entry and free amino acid release from the active site. Here, we present the x-ray crystal structure of the hexameric leucine aminopeptidase, PfA-M17, alone and in complex with two inhibitors with antimalarial activity. The six active sites of the PfA-M17 hexamer are arranged in a disc-like fashion so that they are orientated inwards to form a central catalytic cavity; flexible loops that sit at each of the six entrances to the catalytic cavern function to regulate substrate access. In stark contrast to PfA-M1, PfA-M17 has a narrow and hydrophobic primary specificity pocket which accounts for its highly restricted substrate specificity. We also explicate the essential roles for the metal-binding centers in these enzymes (two in PfA-M17 and one in PfA-M1) in both substrate and drug binding. Our detailed understanding of the PfA-M1 and PfA- M17 active sites now permits a rational approach in the development of a unique class of two-target and/or combination antimalarial therapy.