Validation in the Wild

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/109916/1/drev10290.pd

The orange messiah and other stories

"The Orange Messiah," a collection of seven stories, is integrated through a commonality of structure, alternating voices, setting and character. This fictionalized family saga begins with a prologue that introduces the main narrator who, in tum, explains that most of the seven stories occur in a twenty year flashback. These begin in 1952 when Carla, a young Hispanic woman, attempts to find her Anglo husband in America. She gives birth to fraternal twins, Ramona and Carlos. The father, Ray Parker, then offers his view of what occurred between he and Carla and their two children. The chronicle proceeds to Los Angeles �and San Felipe, Mexico, where the principal story unfolds in 1972. This is a "coming of age" story, a "roadtrip" story, a telling of transformation in the lives of a twenty-year-old half-Hispanic brother and sister and their mutual friend, an Anglo named Jonah. It is a story of odd but profound characters: an architect who sells clams for a living, a boy who commits murder in an attempt to salvage his family honor, the first Chicana hippie in L.A., and a self-professed Jewish orphan who befriends them all, only to narrowly avoid being drowned by a Spanish-speaking horse.California State University, Northridge. Department of English

Investigating the mechanical properties of GeSn nanowires.

Germanium tin (GeSn) has been proposed as a promising material for electronic and optical applications due to the formation of a direct band-gap at a Sn content >7 at%. Furthermore, the ability to manipulate the properties of GeSn at the nanoscale will further permit the realisation of advanced mechanical devices. Here we report for the first time the mechanical properties of GeSn nanowires (7.1–9.7 at% Sn) and assess their suitability as nanoelectromechanical (NEM) switches. Electron microscopy analysis showed the nanowires to be single crystalline, with surfaces covered by a thin native amorphous oxide layer. Mechanical resonance and bending tests at different boundary conditions were used to obtain size-dependent Young's moduli and to relate the mechanical characteristics of the alloy nanowires to geometry and Sn incorporation. The mechanical properties of the GeSn nanowires make them highly promising for applications in next generation NEM devices

N-Terminal Phosphorylation of the Dopamine Transporter Is Required for Amphetamine-Induced Efflux

Amphetamine (AMPH) elicits its behavioral effects by acting on the dopamine (DA) transporter (DAT) to induce DA efflux into the synaptic cleft. We previously demonstrated that a human DAT construct in which the first 22 amino acids were truncated was not phosphorylated by activation of protein kinase C, in contrast to wild-type (WT) DAT, which was phosphorylated. Nonetheless, in all functions tested to date, which include uptake, inhibitor binding, oligomerization, and redistribution away from the cell surface in response to protein kinase C activation, the truncated DAT was indistinguishable from the full-length WT DAT. Here, however, we show that in HEK-293 cells stably expressing an N-terminal-truncated DAT (del-22 DAT), AMPH-induced DA efflux is reduced by approximately 80%, whether measured by superfusion of a population of cells or by amperometry combined with the patch-clamp technique in the whole cell configuration. We further demonstrate in a full-length DAT construct that simultaneous mutation of the five N-terminal serine residues to alanine (S/A) produces the same phenotype as del-22—normal uptake but dramatically impaired efflux. In contrast, simultaneous mutation of these same five serines to aspartate (S/D) to simulate phosphorylation results in normal AMPH-induced DA efflux and uptake. In the S/A background, the single mutation to Asp of residue 7 or residue 12 restored a significant fraction of WT efflux, whereas mutation to Asp of residues 2, 4, or 13 was without significant effect on efflux. We propose that phosphorylation of one or more serines in the N-terminus of human DAT, most likely Ser7 or Ser12, is essential for AMPH-induced DAT-mediated DA efflux. Quite surprisingly, N-terminal phosphorylation shifts DAT from a “reluctant” state to a “willing” state for AMPH-induced DA efflux, without affecting inward transport. These data raise the therapeutic possibility of interfering selectively with AMPH-induced DA efflux without altering physiological DA uptake

A pilot study investigating the potential of stable isotope research of 13th-18th century human remains from the St. Catherine's church in Eindhoven, the Netherlands

Projectnr.: 2009-2