Commentary on Henrician Proclamation 1538:A Proclamation Prohibiting Unlicensed Printing of Scripture (1538)

Royal Proclamation prohibiting the printing and publishing of ecclesiastical and other books without prior licence, as well as the importation, sale and publication of English language texts printed on the continent. This Proclamation established the precedent for the pre-publication licensing of literary works in England.
The commentary describes the background to the Proclamation, in particular the significance of the English Reformation, and Henry VIII's increasing interest in regulating and censuring the press. The commentary suggests that while this early instance of press intervention influenced governmental attitudes to censorship throughout the next 150 years, one of the crucial differences between this and later models of ideological control was that the 1538 Proclamation sought to censure print materials in a manner that was decoupled from the economic ownership and exploitation of such works.

Commentary on early Tudor printing privileges 1553: Totell's Printing Patent (1553)

One of the earliest examples of work printed by Richard Pynson, the King's Printer between 1508 and 1530, to make reference to the fact that the work in question was printed under the protection of the King. The royal printing privilege provided one of two different models for preventing the unauthorised reproduction of works after publication which prefigured the introduction of statutory copyright in the early eighteenth century.
The commentary describes the early attitudes of the monarchy towards the regulation of the printing trade within England, and the exercise of the royal prerogative in granting printing privileges not just to the royal printer, but to other favoured subjects both in relation to individual works as well as to entire classes of work (with the latter more often referred to as printing patents).

Commentary on early Tudor printing privileges 1559: Day's privilege for The Cosmographical Glass

An early example of a printing privilege granted to protect the printing of an individual work, in this case William Conningham's The Cosmographical Glass. The commentary describes the early attitudes of the monarchy towards the regulation of the printing trade within England, and the exercise of the royal prerogative in granting printing privileges not just to the royal printer, but to other favoured subjects both in relation to individual works as well as to entire classes of work (with the latter more often referred to as printing patents).

Experimental evaluation of the response of micro-channel plate detector to ions with 10s of MeV energies

The absolute calibration of a microchannel plate (MCP) assembly using a Thomson spectrometer for laser-driven ion beams is described. In order to obtain the response of the whole detection system to the particles’ impact, a slotted solid state nuclear track detector (CR-39) was installed in front of the MCP to record the ions simultaneously on both detectors. The response of the MCP (counts/particles) was measured for 5–58 MeV carbon ions and for protons in the energy range2–17.3 MeV. The response of the MCP detector is non-trivial when the stopping range of particles becomes larger than the thickness of the detector. Protons with energiesE>~ 10 MeV are energetic enough that they can pass through the MCP detector. Quantitative analysis of the pits formed in CR-39 and the signal generated in the MCP allowed to determine the MCP response to particles in this energy range. Moreover, a theoretical model allows to predict the response of MCP at even higher proton energies. This suggests that in this regime the MCP response is a slowly decreasing function of energy, consistently with the decrease of the deposited energy. These calibration data will enable particle spectra to be obtained in absolute terms over a broad energy range.

Eating from the same plate? Revisiting the role of labile carbon inputs in the soil food web

An increasing number of empirical studies are challenging the central fundamentals on which the classical soil food web model is built. This model assumes that bacteria consume labile substrates twice as fast as fungi, and that mycorrhizal fungi do not decompose organic matter. Here, we build on emerging evidence that points to significant consumption of labile C by fungi, and to the ability of ectomycorrhizal fungi to decompose organic matter, to show that labile C constitutes a major and presently underrated source of C for the soil food web. We use a simple model describing the dynamics of a recalcitrant and a labile C pool and their consumption by fungi and bacteria to show that fungal and bacterial populations can coexist in a stable state with large inputs into the labile C pool and a high fungal use of labile C. We propose a new conceptual model for the bottom trophic level of the soil food web, with organic C consisting of a continuous pool rather than two or three distinct pools, and saprotrophic fungi using substantial amounts of labile C. Incorporation of these concepts will increase our understanding of soil food web dynamics and functioning under changing conditions.