Chiang Mai (literally, “new city”) suffered badly in the 1997 Asian financial crisis as the Northern Thai real estate bubble collapsed along with the Thai baht, crushing dreams of a renaissance of ...Northern prosperity. Years later, the ruins of the excesses of the 1990s still stain the skyline. In Ghosts of the New City, Andrew Alan Johnson shows how the trauma of the crash, brought back vividly by the political crisis of 2006, haunts efforts to remake the city. For many Chiang Mai residents, new developments harbor the seeds of the crash, which manifest themselves in anxious stories of ghosts and criminals who conceal themselves behind the city’s progressive veneer. Hopes for rebirth and fears of decline have their roots in Thai conceptions of progress, which draw from Buddhist and animist ideas of power and sacrality. Cities, Johnson argues, were centers where the charismatic power of kings and animist spirits were grounded; these entities assured progress by imbuing the space with sacred power that would avert disaster. Johnson traces such magico-religious conceptions of potency and space from historical records through present-day popular religious practice and draws parallels between these and secular attempts at urban revitalization. Through a detailed ethnography of the contested ways in which academics, urban activists, spirit mediums, and architects seek to revitalize the flagging economy and infrastructure of Chiang Mai, Johnson finds that alongside the hope for progress there exists a discourse about urban ghosts, deadly construction sites, and the lurking anxiety of another possible crash, a discourse that calls into question history’s upward trajectory. In this way, Ghosts of the New City draws new connections between urban history and popular religion that have implications far beyond Southeast Asia.
Human tumors exhibit plasticity and evolving capacity over time. It is difficult to study the mechanisms of how tumors change over time in human patients, in particular during the early stages when a ...few oncogenic cells are barely detectable. Here, we used a
tumor model caused by loss of
(
), a highly conserved apicobasal cell polarity gene, to investigate the spatial-temporal dynamics of early tumorigenesis events. The fly
mutant tumors have been successfully used to model many aspects of tumorigenesis processes. However, it is still unknown whether
mutant tumors exhibit plasticity and evolvability along the temporal axis. We found that
mutant tumors displayed different growth rates and cell cycle profiles over time, indicative of a growth arrest-to-proliferation transition as the
mutant tumors progress. Longitudinal bulk and single-cell transcriptomic analysis of
mutant tumors revealed that the MAPK pathway, including JNK and ERK signaling activities, showed quantitative changes over time. We found that high JNK signaling activity caused G2/M cell cycle arrest in early
mutant tumors. In addition, JNK signaling activity displayed a radial polarity with the JNK
cells located at the periphery of
mutant tumors, providing an inherent mechanism that leads to an overall decrease in JNK signaling activity over time. We also found that ERK signaling activity, in contrast to JNK activity, increased over time and promoted growth in late-stage
mutant tumors. Furthermore, high JNK signaling activity repressed ERK signaling activity in early
mutant tumors. Together, these data demonstrate that dynamic MAPK signaling activity, fueled by intratumor heterogeneity derived from tissue topological differences, drives a growth arrest-to-proliferation transition in
mutant tumors.This article has an associated First Person interview with the joint first authors of the paper.
The wall shear stress （WSS） that a moving fluid exerts on a surface affects many processes including those relating to vascular function. WSS plays an important role in normal physiology （e.g. ...angiogenesis） and affects the microvasculature＇s primary function of molecular transport. Points of fluctuating WSS show abnormalities in a number of diseases; however, there is no established technique for measuring WSS directly in physiological systems. All current methods rely on estimates obtained from measured velocity gradients in bulk flow data. In this work, we report a nanosensor that can directly measure WSS in microfluidic chambers with sub-micron spatial resolution by using a specific type of virus, the bacteriophage M13, which has been fluorescently labeled and anchored to a surface. It is demonstrated that the nanosensor can be calibrated and adapted for biological tissue, revealing WSS in micro-domains of cells that cannot be calculated accurately from bulk flow measurements. This method lends itself to a platform applicable to many applications in biology and microfluidics.
The aim of this paper is to examine the influence of Hungarian folk music on Kodaly's Sonata for Solo Cello, Op. 8. Part one of the paper examines some basic characteristics of Hungarian folk music. ...The focus is on the so-called "old style" folk songs, which, according to Kodaly and Bartok, represent the true Hungarian music. Fundamental properties of old style songs - pentatonic tonality, descending fifth structure, strophic phraseology, parlando-rubato style, instrumentation and ornamentation are discussed. Certain aspects of the "new style," including the rise of "verbunkos" and gypsy influence, are also viewed, with regard to its relevance to the Solo Cello Sonata, Op. 8. Part two of the paper examines the sonata and the incorporation of folk music characteristics. This portion of the paper is divided into sections dealing with each of the sonata's three movements. Included in these sections are diagrams of the form and in depth analyses regarding folk music elements and tonal and harmonic considerations. Examination of the sonata finds that the first two movements contain many elements which suggest the influence of old style folk songs, whereas the more instrumental third movement evokes aspects of gypsy and verbunkos style.
Background Agricultural production is often limited by low phosphorus (P) availability. In developing countries, which have limited access to P fertiliser, there is a need to develop plants that are ...more efficient at low soil P. In fertilised and intensive systems, P-efficient plants are required to minimise inefficient use of P-inputs and to reduce potential for loss of P to the environment. Scope Three strategies by which plants and microorganisms may improve P-use efficiency are outlined: (i) Root-foraging strategies that improve P acquisition by lowering the critical P requirement of plant growth and allowing agriculture to operate at lower levels of soil P; (ii) P-mining strategies to enhance the desorption, solubilisation or mineralisation of P from sparingly-available sources in soil using root exudates (organic anions, phosphatases), and (iii) improving internal P-utilisation efficiency through the use of plants that yield more per unit of P uptake.
Coral reefs provide ecosystem goods and services for millions of people in the tropics, but reef conditions are declining worldwide. Effective solutions to the crisis facing coral reefs depend in ...part on understanding the context under which different types of conservation benefits can be maximized. Our global analysis of nearly 1,800 tropical reefs reveals how the intensity of human impacts in the surrounding seascape, measured as a function of human population size and accessibility to reefs (“gravity”), diminishes the effectiveness of marine reserves at sustaining reef fish biomass and the presence of top predators, even where compliance with reserve rules is high. Critically, fish biomass in high-compliance marine reserves located where human impacts were intensive tended to be less than a quarter that of reserves where human impacts were low. Similarly, the probability of encountering top predators on reefs with high human impacts was close to zero, even in high-compliance marine reserves. However, we find that the relative difference between openly fished sites and reserves (what we refer to as conservation gains) are highest for fish biomass (excluding predators) where human impacts are moderate and for top predators where human impacts are low. Our results illustrate critical ecological trade-offs in meeting key conservation objectives: reserves placed where there are moderate-to-high human impacts can provide substantial conservation gains for fish biomass, yet they are unlikely to support key ecosystem functions like higher-order predation, which is more prevalent in reserve locations with low human impacts.
Cultivated strawberry emerged from the hybridization of two wild octoploid species, both descendants from the merger of four diploid progenitor species into a single nucleus more than 1 million years ...ago. Here we report a near-complete chromosome-scale assembly for cultivated octoploid strawberry (Fragaria × ananassa) and uncovered the origin and evolutionary processes that shaped this complex allopolyploid. We identified the extant relatives of each diploid progenitor species and provide support for the North American origin of octoploid strawberry. We examined the dynamics among the four subgenomes in octoploid strawberry and uncovered the presence of a single dominant subgenome with significantly greater gene content, gene expression abundance, and biased exchanges between homoeologous chromosomes, as compared with the other subgenomes. Pathway analysis showed that certain metabolomic and disease-resistance traits are largely controlled by the dominant subgenome. These findings and the reference genome should serve as a powerful platform for future evolutionary studies and enable molecular breeding in strawberry.
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