'Thou glorious kingdome, thou chiefe of empires': Persia in seventeenth-century travel literature

This article discusses a series of texts by or about travellers to Safavid Persia in the early seventeenth century, and in particular the literature surrounding the Sherley brothers. It looks at the ways in which, in order to encourage support for the voyages they described, English travel writers emphasised the potential for closer Anglo-Persian relations. In doing so, such narratives took advantage of a developing awareness of sectarian division within Islam in order to differentiate Persia from the Ottoman Empire. The article then examines how The Travailes of the Three English Brothers (1607) by Day, Rowley and Wilkins, built on the possibilities suggested by the travel writings, and specifically their recognition of Islamic sectarian division, to develop an idealised model of how relations between Persia and England might function. More broadly, these texts demonstrate travellers’ interest in looking for potential correlation between Christian and Muslim identities during this period.

Effect of hypobaric hypoxia, simulating conditions during long-haul air travel, on coagulation, fibrinolysis, platelet function, and endothelial activation

CONTEXT: The link between long-haul air travel and venous thromboembolism is the subject of continuing debate. It remains unclear whether the reduced cabin pressure and oxygen tension in the airplane cabin create an increased risk compared with seated immobility at ground level. OBJECTIVE: To determine whether hypobaric hypoxia, which may be encountered during air travel, activates hemostasis. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS: A single-blind, crossover study, performed in a hypobaric chamber, to assess the effect of an 8-hour seated exposure to hypobaric hypoxia on hemostasis in 73 healthy volunteers, which was conducted in the United Kingdom from September 2003 to November 2005. Participants were screened for factor V Leiden G1691A and prothrombin G20210A mutation and were excluded if they tested positive. Blood was drawn before and after exposure to assess activation of hemostasis. INTERVENTIONS: Individuals were exposed alternately (> or =1 week apart) to hypobaric hypoxia, similar to the conditions of reduced cabin pressure during commercial air travel (equivalent to atmospheric pressure at an altitude of 2438 m), and normobaric normoxia (control condition; equivalent to atmospheric conditions at ground level, circa 70 m above sea level). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Comparative changes in markers of coagulation activation, fibrinolysis, platelet activation, and endothelial cell activation. RESULTS: Changes were observed in some hemostatic markers during the normobaric exposure, attributed to prolonged sitting and circadian variation. However, there were no significant differences between the changes in the hypobaric and the normobaric exposures. For example, the median difference in change between the hypobaric and normobaric exposure was 0 ng/mL for thrombin-antithrombin complex (95% CI, -0.30 to 0.30 ng/mL); -0.02 [corrected] nmol/L for prothrombin fragment 1 + 2 (95% CI, -0.03 to 0.01 nmol/L); 1.38 ng/mL for D-dimer (95% CI, -3.63 to 9.72 ng/mL); and -2.00% for endogenous thrombin potential (95% CI, -4.00% to 1.00%). CONCLUSION: Our findings do not support the hypothesis that hypobaric hypoxia, of the degree that might be encountered during long-haul air travel, is associated with prothrombotic alterations in the hemostatic system in healthy individuals at low risk of venous thromboembolism.

Foreign credit: travel writing and authenticity in the dutch translation of The memoirs and travels of Mauritius Augustus, Count de Benyowsky (1790)

This article explores the translation and reception of the Memoirs and Travels (1790) of Count Mauritius Augustus Benyowsky (1746-86) in the Netherlands, and examines the complications, tensions and problems that transfer between a major and a more minor European language involves. I analyse how the Dutch translator Petrus Loosjes Adriaanszoon positioned himself as a mediator between these very different source and target cultures and ask how he dealt with the problems of plausibility and ‘credit’ which had beleaguered the reception of the Memoirs and Travels from the outset. In this article I am concerned to restore minority languages to the discussion of how travel literature circulated in Western Europe at the close of the eighteenth century and to demonstrate how major/minor language translation was central to the construction of Dutch-language culture in the Low Countries in this period.

Outward bound: women translators and scientific travel writing, 1780–1800

As the Enlightenment drew to a close, translation had gradually acquired an increasingly important role in the international circulation and transmission of scientific knowledge. Yet comparatively little attention has been paid to the translators responsible for making such accounts accessible in other languages, some of whom were women. In this article I explore how European women cast themselves as intellectually enquiring, knowledgeable and authoritative figures in their translations. Focusing specifically on the genre of scientific travel writing, I investigate the narrative strategies deployed by women translators to mark their involvement in the process of scientific knowledge-making. These strategies ranged from rhetorical near-invisibility, driven by women's modest marginalization of their own public engagement in science, to the active advertisement of themselves as intellectually curious consumers of scientific knowledge. A detailed study of Elizabeth Helme's translation of the French ornithologist Françoise le Vaillant's Voyage dans l'intérieur de l'Afrique [Voyage into the Interior of Africa] (1790) allows me to explore how her reworking of the original text for an Anglophone reading public enabled her to engage cautiously – or sometimes more openly – with questions regarding how scientific knowledge was constructed, for whom and with which aims in mind.

Consciousness minus retrospective mental time travel

In this paper we apply the concept of mental time travel to introduce the basic features of full-blown conscious experiences (encapsulation in mental models and recollection). We discuss the perspective that Lamme`s `Level 3` experiences can be considered as part of the scope of phenomenological consciousness, in relation to which we emphasize the necessity to consider the different degrees of consciousness and how a particular situation compares to the conscious experiences present in resting states of wakefulness.