Idiopathic menstrual disorders in airline stewardesses. A possible origin from solar radiation of heavy magnetic particles

Observed menstrual disturbances in airline stewardesses which have no obvious cause are suggested possibly to be due to a new type of heavy magnetic particle which may be present in cosmic radiation from the sun. The existence of cosmic radiation of this type is implied by experimental observations of antigen-antibody reactions at magnetic electrodes. This radiation may consist of magnetoelectric dipole or monopole particles, for which some theoretical and experimental physical evidence has been reported.     

Creole: a contested,polysemous term

In this paper, we critically examine the polysemous term, creole, used at different times and various geographical areas to describe diverse identities, languages, peoples, ethnicities, racial heritages, and cultural artefacts. Our objective is twofold: (1) to describe the historically contested nature of the term and its connection to broader trends in defining race in the United States and (2) to suggest that a deeper understanding of racially situated terms such as creole can help to highlight the contextualized character of racial/ethnic divisions, trends, and labels. Our analysis shows that in many ways the Creole people of the United States Gulf Coast Region truly represent the “melting pot” mantra in espoused American ideology and exemplify a direct challenge to bygone racial ideologues which espoused the idea that mixing produces hybridized, impudent, weak, and sickly offspring.     

Site fidelity and range size of wintering Barnacle Geese Branta leucopsis

CapsuleBarnacle Geese restrict their movements to relatively few key sites and exhibit considerable variation in ranging behaviour.

Aims To examine individual and seasonal variation in site fidelity, habitat use, range size and foraging strategies of Barnacle Geese Branta leucopsis.

Methods The movements of 18 male Barnacle Geese tagged in two discrete areas were tracked for 3–6 months from late autumn until departure on the spring migration.

Results Tagged geese concentrated their feeding in a relatively small proportion of apparently suitable habitat. Geese moved increasingly further afield in midwinter, and there was a clear predeparture shift to the largest area of relatively undisturbed, and possibly more nitrogen-rich, saltmarsh on the Solway. Birds from one of the two capture sites tended to be more sedentary and have smaller home ranges.

Conclusion There is considerable between-site and inter-individual variation in the degree of site-faithfulness of Barnacle Geese.     

Nuclear magnetic resonance chemical shifts of potassium ions (39K) on ion exchange resins and in muscle

Chemical shifts of potassium (39K) were calculated from frequencies of beat patterns measured by a pulsed NMR method. This method indicates large chemical shifts for 3 molar KNO3 and 6 molal KI in good quantitative agreement with the steady state NMR measurements of previous investigators. 39K on two wet ion exchange resins and 39K in fresh muscle show insignificant chemical shifts relative to 0.1 M KCl solution. Previous studies showed marked shortening of NMR relaxation times (T1 and T2) for 39K in ion exchange resins and in muscle compared to free solution. These results seem to indicate that even though potassium on resins and in muscle experiences high electric field gradients, these have relatively little effect on the chemical shift of potassium, which may be correlated with the low pK values of the anionic groups in the resins and muscle.     

A pheromone bouquet controls the reproductive behaviour of the male shore crab,Carcinus maenas

Aquatic Ecology - The reproduction of many brachyuran crustaceans involves the formation of mating pairs often around the time of the female moult with attraction of a sexual partner and mating...     

Dying enterocytes downregulate signaling pathways converging on Ras: rescue by protease inhibition

Organ and cellcultures of the small intestine serve as excellent in vitro models forprogrammed cell death (PCD). Cells cultured in serum-free, minimalmedium rapidly died, as evidenced by histological changes,internucleosomal DNA cleavage, and TdT-mediated dUTP nick end labeling.Cell death was pervasive, although nonepithelial cells within thefibrovascular villus core were spared. PCD did not require a functionalp53 gene. Serine and cysteine protease inhibitors, but not FCS,suppressed it. Relative to structural and functional proteins, dyingenterocytes rapidly downregulated Ras-convergent proteins,including epidermal growth factor receptor, Erb-B2, and the son ofsevenless guanine nucleotide exchangers. Reductions in the steady-statelevels of both protein and mRNA were observed. These reductions wereprevented by a combination of death-defying serine and caspaseinhibitors, indicating a requirement for the initiation of death. Thus,during catastrophic PCD, intestinal epithelial cells delete cellsurface signaling pathways responsible for Ras activation.

     

Modeling Liquid Association

Summary In 2002, Ker–Chau Li introduced the liquid association measure to characterize three‐way interactions between genes, and developed a computationally efficient estimator that can be used to screen gene expression microarray data for such interactions. That study, and others published since then, have established the biological validity of the method, and clearly demonstrated it to be a useful tool for the analysis of genomic data sets. To build on this work, we have sought a parametric family of multivariate distributions with the flexibility to model the full range of trivariate dependencies encompassed by liquid association. Such a model could situate liquid association within a formal inferential theory. In this article, we describe such a family of distributions, a trivariate, conditional normal model having Gaussian univariate marginal distributions, and in fact including the trivariate Gaussian family as a special case. Perhaps the most interesting feature of the distribution is that the parameterization naturally parses the three‐way dependence structure into a number of distinct, interpretable components. One of these components is very closely aligned to liquid association, and is developed as a measure we call modified liquid association. We develop two methods for estimating this quantity, and propose statistical tests for the existence of this type of dependence. We evaluate these inferential methods in a set of simulations and illustrate their use in the analysis of publicly available experimental data.