Sex work is the trade of sexual services in exchange for money or other goods of value. In the context of Indigenous Australia, sex work often produces narratives of victimisation and oppression ...reinforcing the patriarchal power and colonial dominance that is rife in Australia over Indigenous women’s bodies and behaviours. Drawing from interviews with Indigenous women who are engaged with sex work, this paper challenges these narratives by examining the motivation and meanings that shape Indigenous women’s decisions to undertake sex work, offering a compelling counter-narrative that discusses how Indigenous women seek and enact agency, sexuality, and sovereignty through the pussy power of sex work.
Integrative and conjugative elements (ICEs) are ubiquitous mobile genetic elements present as “genomic islands” within bacterial chromosomes. Symbiosis islands are ICEs that convert nonsymbiotic ...mesorhizobia into symbionts of legumes. Here we report the discovery of symbiosis ICEs that exist as three separate chromosomal regions when integrated in their hosts, but through recombination assemble as a single circular ICE for conjugative transfer. Whole-genome comparisons revealed exconjugants derived from nonsymbiotic mesorhizobia received three separate chromosomal regions from the donor Mesorhizobium ciceri WSM1271. The three regions were each bordered by two nonhomologous integrase attachment (att) sites, which together comprised three homologous pairs of attL and attR sites. Sequential recombination between each attL and attR pair produced corresponding attP and attB sites and joined the three fragments to produce a single circular ICE, ICEMcSym1271. A plasmid carrying the three attP sites was used to recreate the process of tripartite ICE integration and to confirm the role of integrase genes intS, intM, and intG in this process. Nine additional tripartite ICEs were identified in diverse mesorhizobia and transfer was demonstrated for three of them. The transfer of tripartite ICEs to nonsymbiotic mesorhizobia explains the evolution of competitive but suboptimal N₂-fixing strains found in Western Australian soils. The unheralded existence of tripartite ICEs raises the possibility that multipartite elements reside in other organisms, but have been overlooked because of their unusual biology. These discoveries reveal mechanisms by which integrases dramatically manipulate bacterial genomes to allow cotransfer of disparate chromosomal regions.
Atoms and their different arrangements into molecules are nature's building blocks. In a regime of strong coupling, matter hybridizes with light to modify physical and chemical properties, hence ...creating new building blocks that can be used for avant-garde technologies. However, this regime relies on the strong confinement of the optical field, which is technically challenging to achieve, especially at terahertz frequencies in the far-infrared region. Here we demonstrate several schemes of electromagnetic field confinement aimed at facilitating the collective coupling of a localized terahertz photonic mode to molecular vibrations. We observe an enhanced vacuum Rabi splitting of 200 GHz from a hybrid cavity architecture consisting of a plasmonic metasurface, coupled to glucose, and interfaced with a planar mirror. This enhanced light-matter interaction is found to emerge from the modified intracavity field of the cavity, leading to an enhanced zero-point electric field amplitude. Our study provides key insight into the design of polaritonic platforms with organic molecules to harvest the unique properties of hybrid light-matter states.
This is the introductory article for the special issue "Indigenous peoples, digital leisure, and popular culture". Following the 2016 issue of 'AlterNative' edited by Michelle Harris and Bronwyn ...Carlson "Indigenous people, popular pleasure and the everyday", this article comments on the continued influence of the former issue and offers some new commentary on Indigenous popular and digital leisure today.
We documented the effects of acidic atmospheric deposition and soil acidification on the canopy health, basal area increment, and regeneration of sugar maple (SM) trees across the Adirondack region ...of New York State, in the northeastern United States, where SM are plentiful but not well studied and where widespread depletion of soil calcium (Ca) has been documented. Sugar maple is a dominant canopy species in the Adirondack Mountain ecoregion, and it has a high demand for Ca. Trees in this region growing on soils with poor acid–base chemistry (low exchangeable Ca and % base saturation BS) that receive relatively high levels of atmospheric sulfur and nitrogen deposition exhibited a near absence of SM seedling regeneration and lower crown vigor compared with study plots with relatively high exchangeable Ca and BS and lower levels of acidic deposition. Basal area increment averaged over the 20th century was correlated (p < 0.1) with acid–base chemistry of the Oa, A, and upper B soil horizons. A lack of Adirondack SM regeneration, reduced canopy condition, and possibly decreased basal area growth over recent decades are associated with low concentrations of nutrient base cations in this region that has undergone soil Ca depletion from acidic deposition.
Background
Diets high in n‐3 long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (LCPUFA) may modulate the development of IgE‐mediated allergic disease and have been proposed as a possible allergy prevention ...strategy. The aim of this study was to determine whether n‐3 LCPUFA supplementation of pregnant women reduces IgE‐mediated allergic disease in their children.
Methods
Follow‐up of children (n = 706) at hereditary risk of allergic disease in the Docosahexaenoic Acid to Optimise Mother Infant Outcome randomized controlled trial. The intervention group (n = 368) was randomly allocated to receive fish oil capsules (providing 900 mg of n‐3 LCPUFA daily) from 21 weeks' gestation until birth; the control group (n = 338) received matched vegetable oil capsules without n‐3 LCPUFA. The diagnosis of allergic disease was made during medical assessments at 1 and 3 years of age.
Results
No differences were seen in the overall percentage of children with IgE‐mediated allergic disease in the first 3 years of life between the n‐3 LCPUFA and control groups (64/368 (17.3%) vs 76/338 (22.6%); adjusted relative risk 0.78; 95% CI 0.58–1.06; P = 0.11). Eczema was the most common allergic disease; 13.8% of children in the n‐3 LCPUFA group had eczema with sensitization compared with 19.0% in the control group (adjusted relative risk 0.75; 95% CI 0.53–1.05; P = 0.10).
Conclusions
Overall, n‐3 LCPUFA supplementation during pregnancy did not significantly reduce IgE‐associated allergic disease in the first 3 years of life. Further studies should examine whether the nonsignificant reductions in IgE‐associated allergies are of clinical and public health significance.
Coastal regions are susceptible to multiple complex dynamic and chemical mechanisms and emission sources that lead to frequently observed large
tropospheric ozone variations. These large ozone ...variations occur on a mesoscale and have proven to be arduous to simulate using chemical
transport models (CTMs). We present a clustering analysis of multi-dimensional measurements from ozone lidar in
conjunction with both an offline GEOS-Chem chemical-transport model (CTM) simulation and the online GEOS-Chem simulation GEOS-CF, to investigate the vertical and temporal
variability of coastal ozone during three recent air quality campaigns: 2017 Ozone Water-Land Environmental Transition Study (OWLETS)-1, 2018
OWLETS-2, and 2018 Long Island Sound Tropospheric Ozone Study (LISTOS). We developed and tested a clustering method that resulted in five ozone profile
curtain clusters. The established five clusters all varied significantly in ozone magnitude vertically and temporally, which allowed us to characterize
the coastal ozone behavior. The lidar clusters provided a simplified way to evaluate the two CTMs for their performance of diverse coastal ozone
cases. An overall evaluation of the models reveals good agreement (R≈0.70) in the low-level altitude range (0 to 2000 m), with a
low and unsystematic bias for GEOS-Chem and a high systemic positive bias for GEOS-CF. The mid-level (2000–4000 m) performances show a high
systematic negative bias for GEOS-Chem and an overall low unsystematic bias for GEOS-CF and a generally weak agreement to the lidar observations
(R=0.12 and 0.22, respectively). Evaluating cluster-by-cluster model performance reveals additional model insight that is overlooked in the
overall model performance. Utilizing the full vertical and diurnal ozone distribution information specific to lidar measurements, this work provides
new insights on model proficiency in complex coastal regions.
Aim
To establish the antibacterial efficacy of low concentrations of sodium hypochlorite with and without Er,Cr:YSGG laser activation on Enterococcus faecalis biofilms in extracted teeth.
Methodology
...The root canals of 96 decoronated single‐rooted extracted human teeth were prepared to a size 40, 0.06 taper 1 mm beyond the apex. They were mounted within a flow cell, which was sterilized before pumping a nutrient media through the root canals. The flow cell was inoculated with E. faecalis (ATCC 700802) and cultivated for 4 weeks. The root‐ends were sealed, and the roots were then subjected to one of six treatment groups: group 1: syringe irrigation (SI) with saline (control) using a 27 ‐gauge Monoject needle 1 mm from the apex for 2 min; group 2: as for group 1 but with 1% NaOCl; group 3: as for group 1 but with 4% NaOCl; group 4: 0.5% NaOCl irrigation for 15 s followed by laser‐activated irrigation (LAI) with four 15‐s cycles replenishing the irrigant between cycles; group 5: as for group 4 but with 1% NaOCl as the irrigant; group 6: as for group 4 but with 4% NaOCl as the irrigant. Following treatment, teeth were crushed and viable bacteria were quantitated by serial dilution and plating. The colony‐forming unit values were compared between groups using one‐way anova and Tukey‐adjusted post hoc tests. A two‐tailed P value of <0.05 was considered statistically significant.
Results
The mean number of cells recovered from the 1% NaOCl SI group was significantly higher than that from the 4% NaOCl LAI group (P = 0.02).
Conclusion
Within the limitations of this laboratory study, low‐powered (0.5 W) Er,Cr:YSGG laser activation did not improve the antibacterial effect of low concentrations of sodium hypochlorite.
A recent trial showed that high-dose docosahexaenoic acid (high-DHA) supplementation of infants born <29 weeks' gestation improves intelligence quotient (IQ) at five years' corrected age. However, ...this finding has not been detected by other trials of DHA, which either did not measure IQ or included more mature infants. We analyzed the subgroup of 204 infants born <29 weeks' from our earlier randomized trial of high-DHA (∼1 % total fatty acids) or standard-DHA (∼ 0.3 % total fatty acids). Participants were assessed for cognition at 18 months, and IQ and behavior at seven years' corrected age. No group differences were detected for mean cognitive, IQ or behavior scores. At 18 months, 18.8 % of children in the high-DHA group had a cognitive score <85, compared with 31.1 % of children in the standard-DHA group, but at seven years there was no difference. Although an underpowered post-hoc subgroup analysis, this study provides limited support to recommendations that infants born <29 weeks' gestation require supplemental DHA.
In the present work of the PIENU experiment, heavy neutrinos were sought in pion decays π+→μ+ν at rest by examining the observed muon energy spectrum for extra peaks in addition to the expected peak ...for a light neutrino. No evidence for heavy neutrinos was observed. Upper limits were set on the neutrino mixing matrix |Uμi|2 in the neutrino mass region of 15.7–33.8 MeV/c2, improving on previous results by an order of magnitude.
PDF
