Future innovations in anti-platelet therapies

Platelets have long been recognized to be of central importance in haemostasis, but their participation in pathological conditions such as thrombosis, atherosclerosis and inflammation is now also well established. The platelet has therefore become a key target in therapies to combat cardiovascular disease. Anti-platelet therapies are used widely, but current approaches lack efficacy in a proportion of patients, and are associated with side effects including problem bleeding. In the last decade, substantial progress has been made in understanding the regulation of platelet function, including the characterization of new ligands, platelet-specific receptors and cell signalling pathways. It is anticipated this progress will impact positively on the future innovations towards more effective and safer anti-platelet agents. In this review, the mechanisms of platelet regulation and current anti-platelet therapies are introduced, and strong, and some more speculative, potential candidate target molecules for future anti-platelet drug development are discussed.

Relaxation of surface tension in the free-surface boundary layers of simple Lennard-Jones liquids

In this paper we use molecular dynamics to answer a classical question: how does the surface tension on a liquid/gas interface appear? After defining surface tension from the first principles and performing several consistency checks, we perform a dynamic experiment with a single simple liquid nanodroplet. At time zero, we remove all molecules of the interfacial layer of molecules, creating a fresh bare interface with the bulk arrangement of molecules. After that the system evolves towards equilibrium, and the expected surface tension is re-established. We found that the system relaxation consists of three distinct stages. First, the mechanical balance is quickly re-established. During this process the notion of surface tension is meaningless. In the second stage, the surface tension equilibrates, and the density profile broadens to a value which we call “intrinsic” interfacial width. During the third stage, the density profile continues to broaden due to capillary wave excitations, which does not however affect the surface tension.We have observed this scenario for monatomic Lennard-Jones (LJ) liquid as well as for binary LJ mixtures at different temperatures, monitoring a wide range of physical observables.

Provincialism and the modern diaspora: T.S. Eliot and David Jones

This article considers how T. S. Eliot's promotion of the work of the Anglo-Welsh poet David Jones after the Second World War further involved him in a process of considering the resonances of the local and familiar as operative within the displacements of modernity. This promotion therefore retrospectively prioritized an aspect of Eliot's poetics which had been present, but occluded, all along. Conversely, the article considers how similar resonances in Jones's own work were enhanced by his encounter with Eliot's translation of the Francophone Caribbean poet St-John Perse's Anabase, an encounter which enabled Jones to establish an idiom responsive to the divergent cultural affinities inherent in ‘our situation’.

Relaxation of surface tension in the liquid-solid interfaces of Lennard-Jones liquids

We have established the surface tension relaxation time in the liquid-solid interfaces of Lennard-Jones (LJ) liquids by means of direct measurements in molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. The main result is that the relaxation time is found to be almost independent of the molecular structures and viscosity of the liquids (at seventy-fold change) used in our study and lies in such a range that in slow hydrodynamic motion the interfaces are expected to be at equilibrium. The implications of our results for the modelling of dynamic wetting processes and interpretation of dynamic contact angle data are discussed.