The scholars behind this project, associated with a Wayne State University Humanities Center working group on the fairy tale, have brought forward the fruits of diligent archival work and translation ...to showcase women writers who are often neglected when scholars tell the history of the fairy tale. The editors state that the sort of subversion they see in these texts is broad and multi-faceted, including critiques on feminine passivity, marriage, and even racial relations (time-period limitations are acknowledged appropriately). If one intends to teach from this anthology, careful selection of excerpts is recommended.
Late endocrine effects of childhood cancer Rose, Susan R; Horne, Vincent E; Howell, Jonathan ...
Nature reviews. Endocrinology,
06/2016, Letnik:
12, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The cure rate for paediatric malignancies is increasing, and most patients who have cancer during childhood survive and enter adulthood. Surveillance for late endocrine effects after childhood cancer ...is required to ensure early diagnosis and treatment and to optimize physical, cognitive and psychosocial health. The degree of risk of endocrine deficiency is related to the child's sex and their age at the time the tumour is diagnosed, as well as to tumour location and characteristics and the therapies used (surgery, chemotherapy or radiation therapy). Potential endocrine problems can include growth hormone deficiency, hypothyroidism (primary or central), adrenocorticotropin deficiency, hyperprolactinaemia, precocious puberty, hypogonadism (primary or central), altered fertility and/or sexual function, low BMD, the metabolic syndrome and hypothalamic obesity. Optimal endocrine care for survivors of childhood cancer should be delivered in a multidisciplinary setting, providing continuity from acute cancer treatment to long-term follow-up of late endocrine effects throughout the lifespan. Endocrine therapies are important to improve long-term quality of life for survivors of childhood cancer.
This article reflects on the deliberately situated and continuously evolving decolonizing strategies I have used to teach Andrea Levy's The Long Song in the decade since its first publication in ...2010. I suggest some of the ways in which teachers and educators can include both Levy's novel and the 2018 three-part BBC television adaptation in their teaching. Key to my pedagogical approach is enacting critical reflexivity and teaching students to read contrapuntally or "against the grain" using a Caribbean archive of historiographical intertexts to the novel, sources which Levy herself used while writing The Long Song. The article suggests teaching approaches that not only allow for an aesthetic appreciation of The Long Song as a literary text but also facilitate wider political discussions of race, difference, and "history" and a critically informed response to wider transnational contexts—such as Britain's often occluded colonial and black Atlantic history or Canada's reassessment of its history of "polite racism." On one level, Levy's final novel can be read as a compelling neo-slave narrative, a historiographic metafiction that playfully and self-consciously probes the nature of narrative and how H/history is constructed. However, it is also important to read the novel within a Caribbean and black Atlantic context, rather than simply as historical fiction or as an example of postmodern playfulness. I examine how looking at the novel's contexts and intertexts can shape an understanding of the novel as a response to a wider archive of white colonial writers as well as other important—though less privileged—sources, such as slave narratives. These, I argue, are key to a wider understanding of the novel and its focus on the nature of textuality, the different valencies of oral and written storytelling, and the crucial question of how history is written.
As native bee populations decrease, there is a need to better understand their nutritional requirements to sustain healthy pollinator populations. A common native bee to eastern North America is the ...small carpenter bee, Ceratina calcarata. Previous studies have shown that the primary pollen sources for C. calcarata consist of clover and rose.
The aim of this study is to compare the effects of diet composition on body size, development and survival. Artificial pollen diets were created using five different ratios of commercially available clover and rose pollen.
Diets containing higher ratios of clover pollen produced larger individuals with increased survival rates and faster development times. To examine this further, the macronutrient profiles of clover and rose pollen were characterised comparing: protein, sugar, fatty acid, and amino acid content. Results indicated that rose pollen contained significantly higher protein and sugar content, while clover pollen had higher concentrations of essential amino acids. These are crucial to bee health and development, which helps to explain the increased survivorship observed on high clover diet treatments.
Taken together, these results show that clover pollen provides a higher quality diet for larval development and survival of the native small carpenter bee. This research indicates that diet has a significant effect on the health of the native pollinator community and more research is needed to further explore the balance between pollen quality and availability, including essential macronutrients and the availability of these floral sources for wild bees.
As native bee populations decrease, there is a need to better understand their nutritional requirements to sustain healthy pollinator populations.
The aim of this study is to compare the effects of diet composition on body size, development and survival in a common wild bee.
Clover pollen contained significantly higher concentrations of essential amino acids, which provided a higher quality diet for larval development, survival and is a recommended cover crop for wild bee sustainability.
Ceratina calcarata raised on multifloral control diets had significantly higher survival and growth indicating that a diverse diet is needed for healthy development.
By manipulating resources or dispersal opportunities, mothers can force offspring to remain at the nest to help raise siblings, creating a division of labor. In the subsocial bee
, mothers manipulate ...the quantity and quality of pollen provided to the first female offspring, producing a dwarf eldest daughter that is physically smaller and behaviorally subordinate. This daughter forages for her siblings and forgoes her own reproduction. To understand how the mother's manipulation of pollen affects the physiology and behavior of her offspring, we manipulated the amount of pollen provided to offspring and measured the effects of pollen quantity on offspring development, adult body size and behavior. We found that by experimentally manipulating pollen quantities we could recreate the dwarf eldest daughter phenotype, demonstrating how nutrient deficiency alone can lead to the development of a worker-like daughter. Specifically, by reducing the pollen and nutrition to offspring, we significantly reduced adult body size and lipid stores, creating significantly less aggressive, subordinate individuals. Worker behavior in an otherwise solitary bee begins to explain how maternal manipulation of resources could lead to the development of social organization and reproductive hierarchies, a major step in the transition to highly social behaviors.
Mothers play a key role in determining the body size, behavior, and fitness of offspring. Mothers of the small carpenter bee, Ceratina calcarata, provide smaller pollen balls to their first female ...offspring resulting in the development of a smaller female. This smaller female, known as the dwarf eldest daughter, is coerced to stay at the nest to forage and feed siblings as a worker. In order to better understand how this maternal manipulation leads to the physiological and behavioral differences observed in dwarf eldest daughters, we characterized and compared the quality of the pollen balls fed to theses females vs. other offspring. Our results confirm earlier studies reporting that there is a female-biased sex allocation in the first brood cell position and these daughters received mass provisions significantly smaller than other daughters. In addition to the smaller quantities of pollen provisioned, we found evidence for maternal control of the quality of pollen invested in the dwarf eldest daughters. Late brood cells receive pollen balls with significantly less floral diversity than early brood cells. This difference in floral diversity affects the protein content of the pollen balls; in that, older offspring receive less protein than their younger siblings. These results reveal that C. calcarata mothers manipulate not only the quantity but also the quality of the provision provided to her first offspring to create a small worker she is able to coerce to remain at the nest to help raise her siblings. This overlapping of generations and division of labor between mother and dwarf eldest daughter may represent the first steps in the evolution of highly social groups. One of the major transitions to the formation of highly social groups is division of labor. By manipulating resource availability to offspring, parents can force offspring to remain at the nest to serve as a worker leading to a division of labor between parent and offspring. In the small carpenter bee, C. calcarata, mothers provide their eldest daughter with less food resulting in a smaller adult body size. This dwarf eldest daughter (DED) does not have the opportunity to reproduce and serves only as a worker for the colony. In addition to overall reduced investment, we found that mothers also provide a different variety of pollen to her DED. By exploring the factors and mechanisms that influence maternal manipulation in a non-eusocial bee, we can begin to understand one of the major transitions in social group formation.
Aphids have long been recognized as good phytochemists. They are small sap-feeding plant herbivores with complex life cycles that can involve cyclical parthenogenesis and seasonal host plant ...alternation, and most are plant specialists. Aphids have distinctive traits for identifying and exploiting their host plants, including the expression of polyphenisms, a form of discrete phenotypic plasticity characteristic of insects, but taken to extreme in aphids. In a relatively small number of species, a social polyphenism occurs, involving sub-adult “soldiers” that are behaviorally or morphologically specialized to defend their nestmates from predators. Soldiers are sterile in many species, constituting a form of eusociality and reproductive division of labor that bears striking resemblances with other social insects. Despite a wealth of knowledge about the chemical ecology of non-social aphids and their phytophagous lifestyles, the molecular and chemoecological mechanisms involved in social polyphenisms in aphids are poorly understood. We provide a brief primer on aspects of aphid life cycles and chemical ecology for the non-specialists, and an overview of the social biology of aphids, with special attention to chemoecological perspectives. We discuss some of our own efforts to characterize how host plant chemistry may shape social traits in aphids. As good phytochemists, social aphids provide a bridge between the study of insect social evolution sociality, and the chemical ecology of plant-insect interactions. Aphids provide many promising opportunities for the study of sociality in insects, and to understand both the convergent and novel traits that characterize complex sociality on plants.
•Serotonin 1B agonist challenge induces deficits in sociability and preference for social novelty in a rodent test of autism-related behavior.•Serotonin 1B agonist challenge reduces average rearing ...duration in the open field, a putative measure of non-selective attention in mice.•Oxytocin, a drug used to treat the social deficits in autism, reverses serotonin 1B agonist-induced deficits in social novelty-seeking.•Oxytocin attenuates serotonin 1B agonist-induced deficits in sociability and reductions in average rearing duration.
Social impairments in autism remain poorly understood and without approved pharmacotherapies. Novel animals models are needed to elucidate mechanisms and evaluate novel treatments for the social deficits in autism. Recently, serotonin 1B receptor (5-HT1B) agonist challenge in mice was shown to induce autism-like behaviors including perseveration, reduced prepulse inhibition, and delayed alternation deficits. However, the effects of 5-HT1B agonists on autism-related social behaviors in mice remain unknown. Here, we examine the effects of 5-HT1B agonist challenge on sociability and preference for social novelty in mice. We also examine the effects of 5-HT1B agonist treatment on average rearing duration, a putative rodent measure of non-selective attention. Non-selective attention is an associated feature of autism that is also not well understood. We show that 5-HT1B receptor activation reduces sociability, preference for social novelty, and rearing in mice. In addition, we examine the ability of oxytocin, an off-label treatment for the social impairments in autism, to reverse 5-HT1B agonist-induced social and attention deficits in mice. We show that oxytocin restores social novelty preference in mice treated with a 5-HT1B agonist. We also show that oxytocin attenuates 5-HT1B agonist-induced sociability and rearing deficits in mice. Our results suggest that 5-HT1B agonist challenge provides a useful pharmacological mouse model for aspects of autism, and implicate 5-HT1B in autism social and attention deficits. Moreover, our findings suggest that oxytocin may treat the social deficits in autism through a mechanism involving 5-HT1B.
The Death of an Author Saroukhani, Henghameh; Welsh, Sarah Lawson; Perfect, Michael
Ariel,
2023, 2023-01-00, 20230101, Letnik:
54, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
In Barthes' seminal essay, the "death of the author" refers to a figurative event that, as he sees it, allows readers to escape the "tyranny" of authorial intention and thus become creators rather ...than merely passive receivers of meaning (143). ...authors are not just constructs; they are also human beings for whom death is a very real event. Henghameh Saroukhani Henghameh Saroukhani is Assistant Professor in Black British Literature at Durham University.
Adverse drug events (ADEs) during hospitalization are common. Insulin-related events, specifically, are frequent and preventable. At a tertiary children's hospital, we sought to reduce ...insulin-related ADEs by decreasing the median event rate of hyper- and hypoglycemia over a 12-month period.
Using Lean 6 σ methodology, we instituted a house-wide process change from a single-order ordering process to a pro re nata (PRN) standing order process. The standardized process included parameters for administration and intervention, enabling physician and nursing providers to practice at top of licensure. Automated technology during dose calculation promoted patient safety during dual verification processes. Control charts tracked rates of insulin-related ADEs, defined as hyperglycemia (glucose level >250 mg/dL) or hypoglycemia (glucose level <65 mg/dL). Events were standardized according to use rates of insulin on each nursing unit. The rates of appropriately timed insulin doses (within 30 minutes of a blood sugar check) were assessed.
Baseline median house-wide frequencies of hyperglycemic and hypoglycemic episodes were 55 and 6.9 events (per 100 rapid-acting insulin days), respectively. The median time to insulin administration was 32 minutes. The implementation of the PRN process reduced the median frequencies of hyperglycemic and hypoglycemic episodes to 45 and 3.8 events, respectively. The median time to insulin administration decreased to 18 minutes.
A PRN ordering process and education decreased insulin-associated ADEs and the time to insulin dosing compared with single-entry processes. Engaging bedside providers was instrumental in reducing insulin-related ADEs. Strategies that decrease the time from patient assessment to drug administration should be studied for other high-risk drugs.
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