High-field fMRI reveals brain activation patterns underlying saccade execution in the human superior colliculus

Background The superior colliculus (SC) has been shown to play a crucial role in the initiation and coordination of eye- and head-movements. The knowledge about the function of this structure is mainly based on single-unit recordings in animals with relatively few neuroimaging studies investigating eye-movement related brain activity in humans. Methodology/Principal Findings The present study employed high-field (7 Tesla) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate SC responses during endogenously cued saccades in humans. In response to centrally presented instructional cues, subjects either performed saccades away from (centrifugal) or towards (centripetal) the center of straight gaze or maintained fixation at the center position. Compared to central fixation, the execution of saccades elicited hemodynamic activity within a network of cortical and subcortical areas that included the SC, lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), occipital cortex, striatum, and the pulvinar. Conclusions/Significance Activity in the SC was enhanced contralateral to the direction of the saccade (i.e., greater activity in the right as compared to left SC during leftward saccades and vice versa) during both centrifugal and centripetal saccades, thereby demonstrating that the contralateral predominance for saccade execution that has been shown to exist in animals is also present in the human SC. In addition, centrifugal saccades elicited greater activity in the SC than did centripetal saccades, while also being accompanied by an enhanced deactivation within the prefrontal default-mode network. This pattern of brain activity might reflect the reduced processing effort required to move the eyes toward as compared to away from the center of straight gaze, a position that might serve as a spatial baseline in which the retinotopic and craniotopic reference frames are aligned

Death by despair:Destroying health in Schiller's Die Räuber

With his first play Die Räuber (1781), Schiller offers the Sturm und Drang movement a tragedy about the impact of despair (Verzweiflung) on human health. Drawing on his early medical studies at the Karlsschule in Stuttgart, which had an interdisciplinary focus on philosophy and medicine, Schiller examines in the play how the spirit or soul interacts with the body. He conceptualizes despair as a condition of the spirit that makes the body ill and builds dramatic tension around the testing of the theory that the health of the body can be undermined and destroyed by the emotion despair. In the play Schiller demonstrates that the conditions for despair can be deliberately constructed and that despair can be used as an emotional weapon to torture the body via the spirit. Exploring how the conditions for despair arise and what their physical effects are, Schiller shows that the key characters of the play are driven to despair for different reasons, such as the loss of love, hope, purpose in the world, and religious skepticism. He details the physical symptoms and consequences for those who experience despair, such as the deterioration of health, convulsions, nightmares, madness, suicide, and death. Schiller uses his villain, Franz Moor, as an “inverted doctor” whose aim is not to heal, but to shorten life by bringing others to the point of despair. In a later essay, Schiller reflected further on despair stating that the criminal’s ability to feel remorse and condemn himself, even in a state of despair, is an example of the morally sublime and evidence that he has not rejected moral law. This paper considers the possibility that if the capacity to feel despair and condemn oneself indicates an incorruptible morality, and if the religious despair that Franz Moor experiences before he commits suicide is genuine, it is possible that he never fully abandons the moral law. His apocalyptic dreams indicate the surfacing of suppressed guilt that is subconscious remorse. Schiller stated in his preface to the play that the portrayal of a complete villain is inappropriate for the stage, but critics have struggled to find any redeeming characteristic in Franz Moor. If Schiller regards despair, remorse, and self-condemnation as indicators of an incorruptible moral core, then this opens the possibility that Franz Moor’s capacity for despair can be regarded as his redeeming characteristic

Translating Religion:German women translators of Robert Burns's 'The Cotter's Saturday Night' in the Nineteenth Century

Translating Robert Burns’s songs and ballads into German was a nineteenth-century phenomenon; it is not widely known, however, that women translated Burns, as their work has received little critical attention. This article analyses Emilie von Berlepsch’s (1802-04) and Emilie Fierlein’s (1841) German translations of Burns’s ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ (1785-86), and the original, in order to demonstrate that their personal religious sensitivities influenced their translation strategies in relation to the religious references in stanzas 12-18 of Burns’s poem. Furthermore, critics of ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ have overlooked the liturgical structure of the poem and also avoided examining its eschatological and apocalyptic themes, which were also problematic for the translators, von Berlepsch and Fierlein. The article breaks new ground in relation to the poem's religious thinking and structure, as well as in relation to how this caused problems for the German women translators. For example, the women translators were unwilling to allow Burns’s image of God as avenging and wrathful, his patriarchs of the Old Testament as sinful and ruthless, and his apocalyptic references to John of Patmos’s visions and the Book of Life to disrupt the rural idyll of the scene of family worship in the cottage. They made significant changes that emphasised the spiritual education of the heart and emotional worship, faith, prayer, and the theme of salvation

Accelerated Diffusion Spectrum Imaging with Compressed Sensing Using Adaptive Dictionaries

Diffusion Spectrum Imaging (DSI) offers detailed information on complex distributions of intravoxel fiber orientations at the expense of extremely long imaging times (~1 hour). It is possible to accelerate DSI by sub-Nyquist sampling of the q-space followed by nonlinear reconstruction to estimate the diffusion probability density functions (pdfs). Recent work by Menzel et al. imposed sparsity constraints on the pdfs under wavelet and Total Variation (TV) transforms. As the performance of Compressed Sensing (CS) reconstruction depends strongly on the level of sparsity in the selected transform space, a dictionary specifically tailored for sparse representation of diffusion pdfs can yield higher fidelity results. To our knowledge, this work is the first application of adaptive dictionaries in DSI, whereby we reduce the scan time of whole brain DSI acquisition from 50 to 17 min while retaining high image quality. In vivo experiments were conducted with the novel 3T Connectome MRI, whose strong gradients are particularly suited for DSI. The RMSE from the proposed reconstruction is up to 2 times lower than that of Menzel et al.’s method, and is actually comparable to that of the fully-sampled 50 minute scan. Further, we demonstrate that a dictionary trained using pdfs from a single slice of a particular subject generalizes well to other slices from the same subject, as well as to slices from another subject.National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (NIH R01 EB007942)National Institute for Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (U.S.) (NIBIB K99EB012107)National Institute for Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (U.S.) (NIBIB R01EB006847)National Institute for Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (U.S.) (K99/R00 EB008129)National Center for Research Resources (U.S.) (NCRR P41RR14075)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research U01MH093765)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (The Human Connectome project)Siemens Aktiengesellschaft (Siemens-MIT Alliance)Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (MIT-CIMIT Medical Engineering Fellowship

Bio-inspired artemether-loaded human serum albumin nanoparticles for effective control of malaria-infected erythrocytes

Aim: The intra-erythrocytic development of the malarial parasite is dependent on active uptake of nutrients, including human serum albumin (HSA), into parasitized red blood cells (pRBCs). We have designed HSA-based nanoparticles as a potential drug-delivery option for antimalarials. Methods: Artemether-loaded nanoparticles (AANs) were designed and antimalarial activity evaluated in vitro/in vivo using Plasmodium falciparum/Plasmodium berghei species, respectively. Results: Selective internalization of AAN into Plasmodium-infected RBCs in preference to healthy erythrocytes was observed using confocal imaging. In vitro studies showed 50% dose reduction for AAN as compared with drug-only controls to achieve IC50 levels of inhibition. The nanoparticles exhibited twofold higher peak drug concentrations in RBCs with antimalarial activity at 50% of therapeutic doses in P. bergei infected mice. Conclusion: Novel HSA-based nanoparticles offer safe and effective approach for selective targeting of antimalarial drugs

Some new observations on the cytopathology of fin erosion disease in winter flounder \u3cem\u3ePseudopleuronectes americanus\u3c/em\u3e

A light and electron microscopic study was conducted on dorsal fin tissues adjacent to acute fin erosion lesions in winter flounder from 2 polluted sites (New York Bight region and New Haven Harbor) on the northeast Atlantic Coast. The objective of this work was to evaluate these minimally affected, lesion-associated tissues which may precede the acute or severe stages of the disease. The following 4 types of pathological conditions were found in the epidermis of diseased fish from the 2 polluted sites: (1) epithelial cell hyperplasia; (2) mucous cell hyperplasia and hypertrophy; (3) spongiosis; and (4) focal necrosis. The latter 2 types of lesions have not been previously reported for fin erosion in this species. Changes in the dermis associated with these lesions included fibrosis, abnormal distribution of melanocytes, hyperemia and sclerosis of blood vessels, and hemorrhage. The possibility that hypoxia may play a role in the observed pathology is considered

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Ziel der vorliegenden Arbeit ist die Untersuchung der Acetyl-CoenzymA: a-GlucosaminidN- Acetyltransferase (AT) in humanen lysosomalen Membranen. 1.) Mit tritiummarkiertem Acetyl-Coenzym A soll die AT in affini