Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe

Sensation is the subject of a burgeoning field in the humanities. This volume examines its role in the religious changes and transformations of early modern Europe. Sensation was not only central to the doctrinal disputes of the Reformation, but also critical in shaping new or reformed devotional practices. From this vantage point the book explores the intersections between the world of religion and the spheres of art, music, and literature; food and smell; sacred things and spaces; ritual and community; science and medicine. Deployed in varying, often contested ways, the senses were essential pathways to the sacred. They permitted knowledge of the divine and the universe, triggered affective responses, shaped holy environments, and served to heal, guide, or discipline body and soul.

[Dysfunction of the chemical senses smell and taste]

Dysfunction of the senses of taste and smell may strongly affect our lives. During the last years reliable techniques for the standardized investigation of the 2 senses have been introduced to clinical routine. These techniques are highly standardized and can be easily used, for example, for quality control before and after surgery. Although there are proven therapeutic approaches to taste or smell loss, by far not all patients can be helped. New ideas need to tested within rigorous double-blind studies. The regenerative capacity within the chemical senses provides a major basis for hopes on therapeutic success.

Annotating discourse connectives by looking at their translation: The translation-spotting technique

The various meanings of discourse connectives like while and however are difficult to identify and annotate, even for trained human annotators. This problem is all the more important that connectives are salient textual markers of cohesion and need to be correctly interpreted for many NLP applications. In this paper, we suggest an alternative route to reach a reliable annotation of connectives, by making use of the information provided by their translation in large parallel corpora. This method thus replaces the difficult explicit reasoning involved in traditional sense annotation by an empirical clustering of the senses emerging from the translations. We argue that this method has the advantage of providing more reliable reference data than traditional sense annotation. In addition, its simplicity allows for the rapid constitution of large annotated datasets.

Personal experience with whole-body, low-dosage, digital X-ray scanning (LODOX-Statscan) in trauma

BACKGROUND: Lodox-Statscan is a whole-body, skeletal and soft-tissue, low-dose X-ray scanner Anterior-posterior and lateral thoraco-abdominal studies are obtained in 3-5 minutes with only about one-third of the radiation required for conventional radiography. Since its approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the USA, several trauma centers have incorporated this technology into their Advanced Trauma Life Support protocols. This review provides a brief overview of the system, and describes the authors' own experience with the system. METHODS: We performed a PubMed search to retrieve all references with 'Lodox' and 'Stat-scan' used as search terms. We furthermore used the google search engine to identify existing alternatives. To the best of our knowledge, this is the only FDA-approved device of its kind currently used in trauma. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: The intention of our review has been to sensitize the readership that such alternative devices exist. The key message is that low dosage full body radiography may be an alternative to conventional resuscitation room radiography which is usually a prelude to CT scanning (ATLS algorithm). The combination of both is radiation intensive and therefore we consider any reduction of radiation a success. But only the future will show whether LS will survive in the face of low-dose radiation CT scanners and magnetic resonance imaging devices that may eventually completely replace conventional radiography.

Focal Epilepsy: MR Imaging of Nonhemodynamic Field Effects by Using a Phase-cycled Stimulus-induced Rotary Saturation Approach with Spin-Lock Preparation.

Purpose To investigate whether nonhemodynamic resonant saturation effects can be detected in patients with focal epilepsy by using a phase-cycled stimulus-induced rotary saturation (PC-SIRS) approach with spin-lock (SL) preparation and whether they colocalize with the seizure onset zone and surface interictal epileptiform discharges (IED). Materials and Methods The study was approved by the local ethics committee, and all subjects gave written informed consent. Eight patients with focal epilepsy undergoing presurgical surface and intracranial electroencephalography (EEG) underwent magnetic resonance (MR) imaging at 3 T with a whole-brain PC-SIRS imaging sequence with alternating SL-on and SL-off and two-dimensional echo-planar readout. The power of the SL radiofrequency pulse was set to 120 Hz to sensitize the sequence to high gamma oscillations present in epileptogenic tissue. Phase cycling was applied to capture distributed current orientations. Voxel-wise subtraction of SL-off from SL-on images enabled the separation of T2* effects from rotary saturation effects. The topography of PC-SIRS effects was compared with the seizure onset zone at intracranial EEG and with surface IED-related potentials. Bayesian statistics were used to test whether prior PC-SIRS information could improve IED source reconstruction. Results Nonhemodynamic resonant saturation effects ipsilateral to the seizure onset zone were detected in six of eight patients (concordance rate, 0.75; 95% confidence interval: 0.40, 0.94) by means of the PC-SIRS technique. They were concordant with IED surface negativity in seven of eight patients (0.88; 95% confidence interval: 0.51, 1.00). Including PC-SIRS as prior information improved the evidence of the standard EEG source models compared with the use of uninformed reconstructions (exceedance probability, 0.77 vs 0.12; Wilcoxon test of model evidence, P < .05). Nonhemodynamic resonant saturation effects resolved in patients with favorable postsurgical outcomes, but persisted in patients with postsurgical seizure recurrence. Conclusion Nonhemodynamic resonant saturation effects are detectable during interictal periods with the PC-SIRS approach in patients with epilepsy. The method may be useful for MR imaging-based detection of neuronal currents in a clinical environment. (©) RSNA, 2016 Online supplemental material is available for this article.

The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England

Edited by Annette Kern-Stähler, Beatrix Busse, and Wietse de Boer The essays collected in The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England examine the interrelationships between sense perception and secular and Christian cultures in England from the medieval into the early modern periods. They address canonical texts and writers in the fields of poetry, drama, homiletics, martyrology and early scientific writing, and they espouse methods associated with the fields of corpus linguistics, disability studies, translation studies, art history and archaeology, as well as approaches derived from traditional literary studies. Together, these papers constitute a major contribution to the growing field of sensorial research that will be of interest to historians of perception and cognition as well as to historians with more generalist interests in medieval and early modern England.

Synergistic induction of cell death in liver tumor cells by TRAIL and chemotherapeutic drugs via the BH3-only proteins Bim and Bid

Although death receptors and chemotherapeutic drugs activate distinct apoptosis signaling cascades, crosstalk between the extrinsic and intrinsic apoptosis pathway has been recognized as an important amplification mechanism. Best known in this regard is the amplification of the Fas (CD95) signal in hepatocytes via caspase 8-mediated cleavage of Bid and activation of the mitochondrial apoptosis pathway. Recent evidence, however, indicates that activation of other BH3-only proteins may also be critical for the crosstalk between death receptors and mitochondrial triggers. In this study, we show that TNF-related apoptosis-inducing ligand (TRAIL) and chemotherapeutic drugs synergistically induce apoptosis in various transformed and untransformed liver-derived cell lines, as well as in primary human hepatocytes. Both, preincubation with TRAIL as well as chemotherapeutic drugs could sensitize cells for apoptosis induction by the other respective trigger. TRAIL induced a strong and long lasting activation of Jun kinase, and activation of the BH3-only protein Bim. Consequently, synergistic induction of apoptosis by TRAIL and chemotherapeutic drugs was dependent on Jun kinase activity, and expression of Bim and Bid. These findings confirm a previously defined role of TRAIL and Bim in the regulation of hepatocyte apoptosis, and demonstrate that the TRAIL-Jun kinase-Bim axis is a major and important apoptosis amplification pathway in primary hepatocytes and liver tumor cells.