VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Investigations on the role of haemocytes in drosophila host defence

Innate immunity in Drosophila is mediated via two major responses, humoral and cellular immunity. Induction of the former is characterised by the production of antimicrobial peptides (AMP) via the Toll and Imd pathway. The cellular response is mediated via the haemocytes (blood cells), which engage in phagocytosis and the melanisation cascade. In parallel to the mammalian system, the possibility of haemocytes bridging the gap between pathogen recognition in the haemolymph and AMP gene induction in fat body cells was explored. To analyse their role, the haemocytes were ablated and various parameters for AMP gene expression were defined. The reduction in haemocytes was found to reduce AMP gene expression quantitatively as well causing a spatial restriction in the spreading of AMP expression in the fat body. To determine whether cytokine signals such as Spaetzle (Spz) or unpaired3 (upd3) were involved in transducing the signal, they were knocked down in the haemocytes via RNA interference. The transcriptional reduction of Spz, the ligand for the Toll receptor, was shown to quantitatively reduce the expression of AMP while the reduction of upd3, the cytokine ligand for the JAK/STAT pathway, resulted in the same spatial restriction as larvae with reduced haemocyte counts. The reduction of upd3 in the haemocytes also caused a reduction to signalling in the JNK pathway. The results here show that the haemocytes relay signal(s) to the fat body through the use of cytokines, a process surprisingly similar to the mammalian system.
Properties and applications of polymer support fluids in geotechnical engineering

Synthetic polymer fluids have been used as an alternative to conventional bentonite slurries for the excavation of foundation elements over the last two decades. Thus far their use has excited polarised views in the industry – some construction professionals avoid using them after hearing ‘horror stories’ about past failures whereas others believe that they are the future of support fluids because of the many benefits that they can offer. This situation has been found to be mainly due to a lack of understanding of what polymers really are and their properties. To address this issue, the various polymer products currently available in the market have been categorised based on their intended functions, and the fundamental properties of some of them have been characterised. The research showed that significant difference exists between polymers even of the same chemical family. Based on a series of rheological experiments, it was found that the properties of polymer fluids are highly dependent on the governing shear rate, time, and a range of site dependent factors. The research also showed that the current procedure for the interpretation of viscosity data is incorrect. After an analysis of the properties of currently available polymers, the latter part of the thesis describes a field trial carried out at a site in Stratford, East London. The aims of the trial were twofold: to compare the performance between piles constructed using bentonite and polymer fluids, and to assess the effect of extended pile bore open time for pile bores supported by polymers. From the results, it was found that the polymer piles showed much stiffer load–settlement response than the bentonite pile, and that a pile bore open time of up to 26 h had no adverse effect on the pile performance. The load test results have been carefully back-analysed using a range of methods. It was found that, compared to their bentonite counterparts, polymer fluids can improve the interface shearing resistance with Thanet Sand and the shear modulus of the Lambeth clay.
Prayers for remembering in the Psalms

The Hebrew language of remembering is complex and theologically interesting. The effective, relational, actualising aspects of zkr are particularly evident in language of prayer, especially in Psalm texts. Prayer is a remembering of God, a reminding of God, and a call to remember the pray-er herself, and such performative illocutions are addressed to both human and divine audience alike. The texts become not only present acts of remembering, but also means by which future acts of remembering are to be performed.
Questions in Psalms criticism, of public or private Sitz-im-Leben, of form classification, and the ongoing debate about which critical methods to bring to Psalms scholarship, are brought together in an attempt to answer how remembering in prayer works in the Psalms. By employing hermeneutics informed by linguistics, not only the semantic field of zkr may be studied, but also pragmatic questions appropriately tackled. Thus the potential contributions of speech-act theory and discourse analysis when applied to the Psalms are indicated, alongside what comparable work has already been done by others in Psalms scholarship in these areas. Further linguistic insights which have not previously been applied to Psalms study, such as Audience Design, are then also brought to bear. Broader areas such as the theological nexus of memory, prayer, place and time, are then explored.
Memory is thus seen to be an important constituent of Psalmic prayer at all levels of analysis, as a tool by which prayers are passed down and God and his people remain in relationship. Connections between remembering, didactic, and Wisdom are noted. The centrality of memory in the performance of prayer is viewed as a prototype for New Testament prayers, culminating in the Eucharist and evident for instance also in the Lord’s Prayer. Memory, in prayer texts and in their hermeneutics, both enshrines the past, and makes an ever-relevant present anticipate the future.
Examining institutional entrepreneurship at early moments: the case of mobile health in England and Finland

If you have an idea about applying a proven technology to improve the processes in a new area of society, what does it take to implement it in a way that it has wide impact and endures? This is a relevant question particularly now, at the dawn of the age of 'big data', as information and communication technologies are adopted in many areas to harness the ability to collect, retrieve and analyse large amounts of information, and be made available at the level of individual users. Extraordinarily powerful devices developed in recent years offer much promise, but as many examples, such as Betamax, WAP-technology, HD DVD and netbooks, show that even potent technologies may fail to gain predominance and survive. The concept of institutional entrepreneurship is a useful framework to analyse these complex issues as it embodies a comprehensive analytical perspective, combining attention to the institutional environment as well as to the efforts by interested and re-sourced actors. I use this concept to I investigate the efforts to introduce mobile technology into health care in England and Finland. I employ a distinct research strategy that avoids a retrospective bias, through the collection and analysis of qualitative data before known outcomes, from a wide range of technology, care, regulatory and intermediary organisations. I uncover some of the difficulties to technology adoption and develop arguments about the types of efforts and the impact of context at the early moment stage that contribute to the further development of the concept of institutional entrepreneurship.
Human curiosities in contemporary art and their relationship to the history of exhibiting monstrous bodies

This thesis analyses the representation of so-called human curiosities in recent visual art, by drawing a connection to historical practices of exhibiting 'monstrous' and deformed bodies within institutions such as freak shows, anatomical collections and medical museums. The last two decades have witnessed a surge of scholarly interest in the histories of these institutions, particularly through the work of Robert Bogdan, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Rachel Adams, Richard Sandell and Samuel J.M.M Alberti, whose research can be situated in interdisciplinary humanities fields such as disability studies, museology, history of science and literary and visual studies. Concurrently, a remarkable number of contemporary artists have also turned to the history and imagery of these spaces to explore the politics of display in exhibitions of non-normative bodies. This study addresses the critical gap between these two parallel domains of inquiry, drawing upon recent studies concerning historical exhibitions of monstrous bodies to analyse how contemporary artists have simultaneously confronted and extended these traditions through their artworks. In order to show that the very notion of 'monstrous bodies' is inextricably bound up in the curious display practices that frame them, I analyse the representation of human curiosities in the work of Zoe Leonard, Joanna Ebenstein, Diane Arbus, Mat Fraser, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Marc Quinn and John Isaacs. Each chapter examines a distinct institutional context – the anatomical collection, the freak show, the art gallery, and the contemporary medical museum – to investigate how these artists challenge the meanings conferred upon extraordinary bodies within each space, bestowing new significance upon these forms within the context of their various art practices. I argue that, by doing so, artists themselves can take on roles like curious collectors, freak show talkers and teratologists, revealing the potential for 'art' to act as yet another display framework that imposes a particular set of meanings onto anomalous bodies.
Mathematical modelling of the effects of hepatic radiofrequency ablation

Liver cancer is a major cause of death worldwide and the impact that it has is set to increase in the coming decades. More than half a million cases are diagnosed each year and it is likely many more sufferers are dying unidentified in parts of the world with poor healthcare. Survival rates for untreated cases after diagnosis are low with few patients living beyond one year. A key cause for low survival rates being that the standard treatment is surgical resection; fewer than one quarter of patients are suitable for invasive surgery and five year survival rates rarely exceeds 66 %.
RadioFrequency Ablation (RFA) is a minimally invasive technique which utilises the electrically resistive property of tissue to deposit heat energy locally in the vicinity of the tips of an RFA needle. Heat is transferred away through the tissue by conduction, convection of large blood vessels, and bulk flow of blood in smaller vessels. Liver cells, both cancerous and benign, when exposed to the resultant abnormally high temperatures die considerably more rapidly than in cases of natural hyperthermia. It is thus the radiotherapist’s objective to place the RFA needle in a position that maximises destruction of tumour cells, but minimises the collateral damage of surrounding healthy cells. The learning curve of this nontrivial task is reflected unfavourably in the statistics that relate patient survival rate to clinician experience.
In this thesis two mathematical models are presented that could be combined into a ‘global’ model of the effects of RFA. To predict cell death in these conditions under RFA, the O’NeillModel is presented in which cells are accounted for by one of three states: alive, vulnerable, and dead. A mechanistic interpretation of the O’Neill Model is attained through comparison to a model from the literature. A known, but little investigated occurrence of tissue swelling in the annular region peripheral to the ablation volume is modelled in a novel way through equations from the literature that track ion transport across the cell membrane; the O’Neill Model for cell death is also incorporated into this model of oedema.
Pétain’s Jewish children: French Jewish youth and the Vichy Regime

Focusing on the period 1940–1942, this thesis investigates the nature of the relationship between the Vichy regime and Jews of French citizenship who found themselves under its control. Despite Vichy’s implication in the Holocaust, this study examines the possibility for convergence, however partial and temporary, between Vichy’s plans for regeneration and Jewish ambitions to participate in the New Order. This investigation aims to explain the seemingly contradictory circumstances in which a French Jew could be at once persecuted under Vichy’s anti-Semitic legislation, and rewarded for the promotion of certain French values by the government’s programme of National Revolution. This unstudied dilemma is explored in this thesis through an examination of French Jewish youth. An analysis of this social category provides a point of entry into the ambivalences of Vichy’s policies. While Vichy enacted legislation in order to marginalise Jewish participation in the national community, the regime was also emphatically in favour of French Jewish youth contributing to the National Revolution.
Methodologically this study moves away from the long-established categories of resistance, rescue and persecution. Rather than merely examining Jewish youth’s activities during the establishment of the Vichy regime as a period of formation and preparation for later resistance or rescue activity, this study seeks to investigate the ways in which, from 1940–1942, the Vichy regime and French Jewish youth sought to coexist. This aspect of the war years has almost entirely disappeared from France’s collective memory and from the historiographical debates over Vichy and the Jews.
ATM/ATR-dependent responses to dysfunctional telomeres at the G2/M transition

Mammalian telomeres are nucleoprotein complexes at the end of chromosomes containing a specific protein complex, called shelterin. Shelterin protects chromosome ends from the DNA damage response (DDR), by facilitating the formation of a telomeric capping structure, called the T-loop. During their elongation in S phase, telomeres become transiently uncapped and can be sensed as DNA damage in G2 phase. This leads to the recruitment of DDR factors, such as phosphorylated histone H2AX (γH2AX), to the telomeres forming the so-called, telomere dysfunction-induced foci (TIFs). My PhD work described here, indicates that DNA damage occurring during interphase can persist after entry into mitosis, indicated by the detection of γH2AX at a subset of mitotic telomeres in human and mouse cells. This accumulation of γH2AX to mitotic telomeres is ATM-dependent and the γH2AX-labelled uncapped telomeres that persist, are shorter than the average telomere length for the entire cell population.
Most importantly, my work suggests that telomere uncapping, naturally occurring or artificially induced, is detected by two parallel ATM/ATR-dependent pathways at the G2/M transition: a p53/p21-dependent pathway through the ATM/ATR-mediated phosphorylation of p53 at Ser15 and a CHK1/CHK2-dependent pathway that acts through negative regulation of CDC25 phosphatases. In particular, telomere uncapping triggered by TRF2 depletion leads to CHK2-dependent CDC25A degradation, while POT1 depletion results in CHK1-mediated CDC25A and CDC25C degradation. Both pathways act as sensors of unprotected telomeres at the G2/M transition and block cell cycle progression through inhibition of CDK1/Cyclin B complex, allowing telomere re-capping before entry into mitosis. This mechanism protects telomere integrity by the maintenance of a cell cycle stage conducive for capping reactions and thereby prevents genomic instability induced by telomere dysfunction.
Finally, I studied the cellular functions of 3 poorly characterised shelterin components, TRF1, RAP1 and TPP1, in telomere protection. TRF1 and to a lesser extent RAP1 were shown to be important for telomere protection by suppressing DDR at the telomeres, while TPP1 was shown to be mainly responsible for the recruitment of the catalytic subunit of telomerase, TERT , to the chromatin, contributing to telomere maintenance.
In conclusion, my work on both human and mouse models, reveals an important part of the DDR pathways activated by dysfunctional telomeres, as well as the molecular mechanisms underlying the cell cycle specific regulation of telomere capping, which ensures that only cells with intact telomeres enter mitosis.
The Palaeolithic occupation of the Thar Desert

This thesis presents a comprehensive characterisation of the Palaeolithic occupation of the Thar Desert, which is located in western India and south-western Pakistan. This is achieved through a combination of extensive syntheses of existing palaeoenvironmental and archaeological evidence and the development of new, interdisciplinary evidence for Upper Pleistocene hominin occupation in the Thar Desert through surface survey and excavation. Patterns of environmental variability in the Thar Desert are described to identify when and where the Thar Desert may have been habitable to hominin populations. Evidence for over 900 Palaeolithic sites is synthesised to identify existing spatial, typological and chronological patterns in the Thar Desert. Typo-technological descriptions of new Palaeolithic assemblages are described, and placed within chronological and environmental contexts based upon associations with previously studied sediment formations. The results of chronological, environmental and archaeological analyses from a new excavated site, Katoati, are described, which presents a significant new benchmark for Palaeolithic studies, both for the Thar Desert and southern Asia. The excavated assemblages from Katoati indicate a Middle Palaeolithic occupation of the Thar Desert during episodes of enhanced humidity >91ka, and a further Middle Palaeolithic occupation 65-55ka. These Middle Palaeolithic assemblages indicate considerable cultural continuity and offer a chronometric framework for the results of the surface survey. The identification of a number of technologically and typologically distinct artefacts in both excavated and surface contexts indicate significant similarities with Middle Stone Age assemblages from Arabia and the Sahara and Middle Palaeolithic sites in South Asia. As a result, the Thar Desert can be identified as a pivotal location for investigating major changes in Upper Pleistocene hominin demography between Africa and across southern Asia.
The buckling of capillaries in tumours

Capillaries in tumours are often severely buckled (in a plane perpendicular to the axis) and / or chaotic in their direction. We develop a model of these phenomena using nonlinear solid mechanics. Our model focusses on the immediate surrounding of a capillary. The vessel and surrounding tissue are modelled as concentric annulii. The growth is dependent on the concentration of a nutrient (oxygen) diffusing from the vessel into the tumour interstitium. The stress is modelled using a multiplicative decomposition of the deformation gradient F=F_e F_g. The stress is determined by substituting the elastic deformation gradient F_e (which gives the deformation gradient from the hypothetical configuration to the current configuration) into a hyperelastic constitutive model as per classical solid mechanics. We use a Blatz-Ko model, parameterised using uniaxial compression experiments. The entire system is in quasi-static equilibrium, with the divergence of the stress tensor equal to zero. We determine the onset of buckling using a linear stability analysis. We then investigate the postbuckling behaviour by introducing higher order perturbations in the deformation and growth before using the Fredholm Alternative to obtain the magnitude of the buckle.
Our results demonstrate that the growth-induced stresses are sufficient for the capillary to buckle in the absence of external loading and / or constraints. Planar buckling usually occurs after 2-5 times the cellular proliferation timescale. Buckles with axial variation almost always go unstable after planar buckles. Buckles of fine wavelength are initially preferred by the system, but over time buckles of large wavelength become energetically more favourable. The tumoural hoop stress T_{ThetaTheta} is the most invariant (Eulerian) variable at the time of buckling: it is typically of the order of the tumoural Young's Modulus when this occurs.
Future, conditional and autonomous morphology in Occitan

Occitan presents a complex inflectional paradigm together with extensive regional variation, thus offering a rich source of morphological data; as the present study demonstrates, these data are of significant value both to morphological theory and to comparative Romance linguistics.
The study is concerned with the form and meaning of two categories within the Occitan verb paradigm, the ‘synthetic future’ (SF) and ‘synthetic conditional’ (SC) derived from the Latin periphrastic constructions CANTARE HABEO and CANTARE HABEBAM respectively. In Romance languages which present this type of future and conditional, SF and SC typically share a stem: due to their parallel origin, it is often assumed that this identity of stem is unremarkable, and that it diagrams a common semantic value, usually that of temporal futurity. However, careful examination of the Occitan data reveals that both these assumptions are overly simplistic.
While the semantic values associated with SF and SC in varieties of Occitan certainly overlap to some extent, this functional commonality is not absolute, nor does the distribution of semantic values map exactly to the distribution of stems within the paradigm. Furthermore, while in the majority of cases SF and SC do share a stem, Occitan also presents a phenomenon which may be unique within Romance, that of ‘asymmetrical’ stem distribution, in which the stems of the SF and SC are distinct from one another. The distribution of stems between SF and SC in Occitan can only be adequately explained by appealing both to semantic motivations and to the purely formal motivations of autonomous morphology.
The phenomena discussed here show that autonomous morphology can interact with extramorphological factors, and, as a consequence, that an autonomously morphological element may be present even in morphological phenomena which prima facie appear extramorphologically motivated.