Black Hair Research Articles

毛囊植换术治疗毛囊型白癜风的临床效果观察

目的：探讨毛囊植换术治疗毛囊型白癜风的疗效。方法：采用FuE技术提取白色毛囊后把单根毛囊或毛囊单位移植于白癜风毛囊内，观察色素恢复情况和黑发生长情况。结果：12例患者，黑发生长 + 色素覆盖6例(50%)；单纯黑发生长2例(16.6%)；单纯色素覆盖1例(8.3%)3例无效(25%)，有效率75%。讨论：毛囊植换治疗毛囊型白癜风具有临床研究意义。 Objective: To investigate the effective of the hair follicle transplant with FuE to treat hair vitiligo. Methods: FuE technique was adopted to extract white hair follicle and the single root hair follicle or hair follicle unit was placed in leucoderma hair follicle. The recovery condition of pigment and the growing condition of black hair were observed. Results: Among 12 patients, there were 6 cases with black hair growing + pigment covering (50%), 2 cases with simple black hair growing (16.6%), 1 case with simple pigment covering (8.3%) and 3 cases invalid (25%). Effective rate was 75%. Conclusion: To the hair vitiligo, the treatment was proved to be effective.

Wonder Tale

Wonder Tale Rochelle Smith (bio) A decade ago my younger sister Natalie sent me an email message titled, “A Black Princess.” It was about a woman named Angela Brown who had married Maximilian of Liechtenstein and become Her Serene Highness Princess Angela, the only princess of African descent in a reigning European dynasty. I still have the email. Natalie, my pajama-clad co-spectator when Charles and Diana had wed, forwarded to me with no message appended; apparently, its significance was so clear that comment was unnecessary. There was a link to a picture of the bride and groom leaving the church in which they’d been married: she was wearing a gown she had designed herself and a tiara previously worn by several other royal brides in the family. She was from Panama originally, like my old college roommate, and was a few days shy of forty-two. Looking at this picture I felt happy, obscurely buoyed. Princesses. Real or imaginary, why should they matter to me? Snow White, Maid Maleen, the Sleeping Beauty, the Goose Girl—I doted on these stories long before I knew Disney versions existed. I read them as a child in the Ladybird books that were published in England and sold in Trinidad, with their red-backed cardboard covers and their simple layouts: text on the left page, illustration on the right. I remember marveling that someone could paint satin, as on Cinderella’s three gowns, that looked so liquid and so real. I can still see the sticky shine of gold on Rumpelstiltskin’s bobbins. When I was eight a cousin handed me down a yellow gauze dress. It was 1976, and folkloric styles were popular: the dress had long full sleeves that gathered into embroidered cuffs, with matching embroidery at the neck and waist. This dress was an immediate favorite. I especially loved wearing it when I was sewing. My grandmother had taught me to hand-sew years before, and I would make myself floppy-necked cotton bears with button eyes and then make little gingham dresses for them. As I sat sewing I pretended I was Snow White’s mother. The scene was sparkling clear in my mind: she at the ebony-framed window looking pensively down at the snow outside the castle, in her inattention letting the needle slip and pierce her finger. What had she been making? She wished for a child of black, white, red. She never specified white skin, black hair, red lips. In that liminal moment before the turning of the page anything could have been, the three colors shuffled any number of ways. Ebony skin, white fingernail tips, red—what? The story is surreally unclear. She could have come out checkerboard, or plaid. They could have been meant symbolically—they were the colors of the Trinidad and Tobago flag, my flag, black for strength, red for warmth, white for purity and the cradling sea. For that one paragraph, that eyelash’s weight of time before the next page’s image of the young princess is revealed, everything is possible. [End Page 531] This then, is about pictures as much as words. Few of us since the 1800s have had the privilege of forming fairy tales entirely in our own minds. Someone steps in to supply the pictures for us: Arthur Rackham, Wanda Gág, Eric Winter, Trina Schart Hyman, countless unknown artists. The descriptive minimalism of folk and fairy tales is well known: they will say that a queen is beautiful, that a castle is old, that a wet girl is given twenty mattresses and twenty featherbeds to sleep on. But it is the pictures that manifest the crumbling stone walls, the bed linens heaped to the ceiling, the pale skin that such beauty means. African folktales have been compiled and published in the West for well over a hundred years. “Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters,” for example, a retelling of a Kind and Unkind Girls tale from Zimbabwe originally collected by George Theal in his 1882 Kaffir Folk-Lore, has been hugely popular since it was first published in picture book form in 1987. But despite this trove of stories from which to draw, writers...

What Harry Taught Me

For a butcher, Harry was a classic dresser in the traditional European sense. He was in his late forties when we met and was just a kid. Harry had been in Australia for only a handful of years when we began working together in 1965. He was the first Latvian I'd ever met and he captivated me with his style and old fashioned mannerisms. He was so different Mike, a fourth-generation Australian and the shop manager, and nothing at all like Frank, a little Cockney bloke who spent most of his time on the counter, charming the ladies with his rhyming slang and clever use of language. Dick and Terry were the backroom butchers, both a couple of knock-abouts, more likely to read a newspaper than a novel. Harry always wore a crisp white shirt with a black bow tie under his white butcher's coat and striped apron. His jet black hair was slicked down and he had a pencil-line moustache that looked as though it had been drawn on. was fifteen and a half but I'd never seen anyone who looked like Harry, except perhaps in a black and white movie. He had a really heavy accent and within minutes of meeting me nicknamed me Sviveldash.I asked him why he chose to call me that. What did it mean?Don' vurry vai, he said, from now on, yoo are Sviveldash, en zat iz all zere iz to it. Now get mi a rump en za clin tray Sviveldash. Don' muk aroun. tri to tich yoo sumsing.Mike had told me earlier that afternoon that was to be Harry's gofer. It was only on Thursday nights that Harry and would work together, during a preliminary introduction to late-night shopping in outer suburban Adelaide. worked for Turner's Butchers at the Clovercrest Shopping Centre in Modbury, a newly developed suburb of mainly first-home buyers with double-income households, but with quite a few pram pushers too. The trial proved to be a great success and Turner's was as busy as a tin full of worms every Thursday night. There were six of us working the shop through the week but on that one night we had another seven butchers working the floor until nine o'clock. Turner's had around a dozen shops scattered around Adelaide and the extra blokes would come in by six a variety of different locations. A couple of them would always stop off and belt a few quick pints down before arriving, often lobbing in a little unsteady on their feet. And the peppermints they chewed on gave them right away. Behind the counter with a few beers under their belt, their chatter with the ladies sometimes got overly risque, their innuendo far too strong. After a few weeks, one young woman's husband arced up and Mike had to tell both blokes to pull up on their drinking or they'd be off the roster. Harry laughed his head off when he heard Mike had given them a serve. He said, Zay are clowns. Hev no respek for anysmg or anyvun. Moments later he told me, I alvays vait til get home en zen hev mi Vodka. Meeting people like Harry sure made me think about how different my culture was his. …

The Blues: Where Love Ends Badly

The Blues:Where Love Ends Badly Gerald Williams (bio) In paris of the 1960s, Mae Mercer reigned at the Blues Bar—one of Maurice Girodias’s four restaurants, neighboring his notorious Olympia Press on rue Saint-Séverin. Her fans were legion. The Beatles often came to hear her. Her thump&throb delivery of the blues was like no other. It was the real thing. It was sometimes inaccurately described as “gutwrenching.” It probably soared, though, from her thighs to her Rubenesque hips, then syncopated there briefly before launching itself full-force to her at-the-ready larynx. The resulting sonorous growl, its rapturous profundity, cautioned as well as excited—and still does on CD and You-Tube. For most audiences, attending her performance was a transformative adventure. Danger excites. At the risk of losing all things morally dear, the trespassing listener felt compelled, nonetheless, to proceed—to remain in league with the inherent threat of Mercer’s spell until the song’s finish. The journey dared by some or many could be likened to a quest for truth—one that stuns while quelling recessive pain—an aural opioid whose effect on the affected might well have seemed everlasting. She was beautiful. Broad-hipped and very broad-shouldered, back straight as a caryatid’s, she must have been nearly six feet. Her black hair—shiny, banged—was worn like a helmet: Louise Brooks, sort of. Her presence was undeniably commanding. It ordered you to watch and listen . . . and you did. She died on October 29, 2008, in Northridge, California—a great distance from Battleboro, North Carolina, where she was born June 12, 1932, and ran away from at age fifteen. I met her in Paris when I was the editor at the Olympia Press. I’d been hired after translating The Bedside Odyssey from French. Maurice Girodias, my employer (and, later, a good friend for over thirty years), was dating Mae Mercer and, possibly at or around the same time, Marpessa Dawn, of the Cannes-winning film Black Orpheus. Mae and Marpessa probably knew of each other; expat Paris is a small town. Whether or not they knew that they were being two-timed is anyone’s guess. [End Page 645] I’d sometimes run into Mae when she stopped by the office. Something always clicks on some level when one black person meets another, maybe even more so in a foreign land. I was then in my twenties—an insecure eager beaver, desirous of making good because at that age it was the thing to do. She was nice to me. We small-talked. Athough her speaking voice was shylike, I could discern a husky, defensive undertone. I can’t say that I knew her well, but rather that I got to know of her through Girodias, her boss and suitor. The late basketball legend Wilt “The Stilt” Chamberlain, also vying for her affection, referred to his rival as Girodi-ASS, sometimes to his face. Eventually Mae dropped The Stilt to become Girodias’s main squeeze. He was her boss, after all. Through him, she could do what she loved doing most: sing the blues. And with Mae filling the Blues Bar night after night, Girodias was able to segue from illiquidity (caused by Olympia Press debts and lawsuits) to bona fide solvency (for a while, anyway). Mae was good for Girodias sexually, and definitely good for business. (Payday for press staffers like me had finally ceased to be illusory.) He was good for her, too—at least where her career was concerned. “While i was putting on my tuxedo, I kept telling Mae to hurry or we’d be late. She was still taking a bath,” Girodias to me, one night after work. “She mocked me, then when I went to the bathroom to further insist that she dry herself and get dressed, she grabbed my lapels and yanked me down into the tub. Her stamina is remarkable!” Girodias loved this sort of thing—a show of uncharacteristic behavior. Perhaps not so much, though, on that night where La Mercer attempted to slaughter him with the spike heel of her shoe. They’d had a serious...

Onward Christian Soldier: Reverend Phillip Martin's Road to Redemption in Ernest J. Gaines's In My Father's House

Onward Christian Soldier:Reverend Phillip Martin's Road to Redemption in Ernest J. Gaines's In My Father's House Lillie Anne Brown (bio) If you want to know the end, look at the beginning. —African proverb From the omniscient point of view, Ernest J. Gaines opens his 1978 In My Father's House with a reference to the Reverend Phillip Martin, the charismatic preacher and community activist in the St. Adrienne parish of Bayonne, the principal site of Gaines's fictional works. As the voice of the community's disenfranchised, he enjoys a heightened esteem created in equal parts by the community and himself. His influence extends beyond the province of the community, and he has the establishment's ear on issues of social, economic, and political progress. As a man of the cloth, he believes it is his duty to offer his expert advice to the community on issues impactful to their lives. His communal position, he surmises, is to save souls and preserve the distinction of the residents in all matters of respectability. In full ownership of his social and political standing in the St. Adrienne community, he relishes his position as the community's most revered black male figure. As pastor of the Solid Rock Baptist Church, the most prominent religious institution in the parish, he advocates vociferously on behalf of the oppressed and disenfranchised and is quick to assume the political engagements brought forth by its members. In constructing Phillip in the role of minister and assigning him the last name "Martin," Gaines evokes the social politics and noble endeavors of civil rights leader Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. "King Martin," as Phillip is referenced throughout the parish, is a commanding dignitary among his constituents (In My Father's House 30). In one of the novel's opening scenes, in which he takes center stage during a political gathering at his home, Phillip relishes his guests' hero worship. Their fawning reaches a crescendo: "The people had begun to applaud Phillip, and he raised his hands for silence. . . . The people [End Page 17] would not stop applauding him" (In My Father's House 35). The scene not only accentuates his significance in the community, it captures his flair, elegance, and aesthetic contribution to the community, providing him a propitious moment to grandstand as the physical representation of wealth, success, and prosperity: Phillip Martin wore a black pinstriped suit, a light gray shirt, and a red polka-dot tie. He was sixty years old, just over six feet tall, and he weighed around two hundred pounds. His thick black hair and thick well-trimmed mustache were just beginning to show some gray. Phillip was a very handsome dark-brown-skinned man, admired by women, black and white. The black women spoke openly of their admiration for him, the white women said it around people they could trust. . . . He was very much respected by most of the people who knew him. (34) While his standing in the community frames his identity, an enigmatic past creates the foundation required for a resolution of a haunting, former life. To the degree that the novel is centered upon the emotional and psychological disconnect between a father and son, a motif which governs the Gaines canon, the work is also a narrative whose structure rests upon the dependence of external figures who help set the stage for the central character's transformation. Phillip must lend himself to an exterior surrogacy if self-evolution and personal growth are the desired result. While communal allegiance, in the form of familial servants and constituents, serves Phillip admirably, it does not resolve his inner conflict. Exterior figures help consign him to an affecting space necessary for healing to occur. Phillip's introduction in the novel and the rogue staging of Robert X, the son he abandoned, are significant in two respects: they foreshadow a catastrophic reunion between the two men and ascribe Phillip's abandonment and neglect of Robert, according to Gaines, to the historical legacy of slavery, wherein families in general—and fathers and sons in particular—were separated and have been unable, since that time, to sustain meaningful relationships. Robert X's adoption of...

#TeamNatural: Black Hair and the Politics of Community in Digital Media

Perhaps no aspect of black women’s corporality is more contested and debated than their hair. Social-media personalities of the self-described natural-hair community mediate complex and often contentious conversations about black women’s bodies and lives in the twenty-first century. Based on my previous research on black women and the politics of beauty culture in the twentieth century, I examine the ways that online natural-hair communities provide a rich archive for those who wish to take seriously the concerns of black women. Specifically, this essay discusses the ways in which community is defined, cultivated, and contested in the world of digital beauty, from my perspective as both a historian of black beauty culture and a participant in these online communities.

Going where the science matters.

Not long ago, I was a tenured professor on a sabbatical at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. One winter morning, reflecting on why we scientists work as hard as we do, I identified three primary drivers: curiosity, ambition, and idealism. We chase interesting problems, wherever they lead. We're a competitive lot, with career advancement an important incentive. And we're compelled by a desire to benefit society. Later that week, an old friend sent a photo taken in the Adirondack Mountains during my first summer's fieldwork as a Ph.D. student. Looking at my 24-year-old face, framed by long black hair and a dreadful orange sweater, I asked myself, “What was on that young fellow's mind?” Clearly, he wanted to satisfy his curiosity about how climate change affected ecological communities. He was idealistic, with notions of applying his training to the cause of conservation. In his naivete, he viewed personal career advancement as unimportant, even contradictory to the greater good. ![Figure][1] ILLUSTRATION: ROBERT NEUBECKER > “What would he think of my grayer self … some 30 years later?” What would he think of my grayer self, sitting in my Oxford chambers some 30 years later? Though I hadn't answered all the questions that gripped him, he'd be pleased that I'd learned a lot about climate change and ecology. He'd probably be happy that I'd had a successful career—though I expect he'd ask whether I hadn't been co-opted by “the system.” And he'd be wondering in exactly what ways I had contributed to conserving the natural world. My honest answer: “Not many, beyond haranguing students, giving public lectures, and writing academic papers.” Not long after these reflections, some colleagues suggested that I look into a job opening at a federal science agency to lead a program aimed at bridging the gap between the climate-change research and the natural-resource management communities. My knee-jerk reaction was to say no. I was comfortably tenured, enjoying the honors and perks of an established academic career. But tugging at my coat sleeve was my younger self, asking me why I shouldn't reinvest my knowledge and experience into benefiting the environment. With no good answers for him, and a reawakening idealism, I applied for the job. It's now been 3 years since I assumed directorship of the Southwest Climate Science Center in Tucson, Arizona. I've worked harder than I ever did as a professor. I've had to acquire new skills, and I'm still struggling to understand all the dimensions of my new field. But the work has been interesting and rewarding in countless ways. I am fostering partnerships between researchers and managers to address a variety of urgent conservation challenges: How will sea-level rise affect vulnerability of coastal marshes to storm surges? What forest management practices are most effective for increasing drought resilience? What are the best ways for researchers and managers to engage? Do I miss anything from my days as a professor? Certainly teaching, but I still mentor graduate students and younger colleagues. I continue doing research, but I've redirected much of my effort from paleoecology to conservation. I still get paid to satisfy my curiosity, but now I'm doing so in the center's rich environment of multiple academic disciplines and professional cultures, and with the view to solve compelling real-world problems. Is my job perfect? Certainly not. As in any administrative job, some tasks are neither interesting nor enjoyable, and government administration has unique aggravations. But on the positive side, I no longer suffer the exhausting high-passion, low-stakes squabbles that can arise among university faculty members. And, most importantly, I enjoy the added satisfaction of knowing that my center is having a real impact on conservation. So, looking again at that old photo, I wonder whether the grin on my face came from knowing that, one day, I would inform and influence conservation in a direct and tangible way. [1]: pending:yes

Cytotoxic and genotoxic effects of two hair dyes used in the formulation of black color

According to the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), some hair dyes are considered mutagenic and carcinogenic in in vitro assays and exposed human populations. Epidemiological studies indicate that hairdressers occupationally exposed to hair dyes have a higher risk of developing bladder cancer. In Brazil, 26% of the adults use hair dye. In this study, we investigated the toxic effects of two hair dyes, Basic Red 51 (BR51) and Basic Brown 17 (BB17), which are temporary dyes of the azo group (R–N=N–R′), used in the composition of the black hair dye. To this end, MTT and trypan blue assays (cytotoxicity), comet and micronucleus assay (genotoxicity) were applied, with HepG2 cells. For cytotoxic assessment, dyes were tested in serial dilutions, being the highest concentrations those used in the commercial formula for hair dyes. For genotoxic assessment concentrations were selected according to cell viability. Results showed that both dyes induced significant cytotoxic and genotoxic effects in the cells, in concentrations much lower than those used in the commercial formula. Genotoxic effects could be related to the azo structure present in the composition of the dyes, which is known as mutagenic and carcinogenic. These results point to the hazard of the hair dye exposure to human health.

Insights into properties of activated carbons prepared from different raw precursors by pyrophosphoric acid activation

Low-cost activated carbons (ACs) were prepared from four kinds of solid wastes: petroleum coke, Enteromorpha prolifera, lignin from papermaking black liquid and hair, by pyrophosphoric acid (H4P2O7) activation. Thermo-gravimetric analysis of the pyrolysis of H4P2O7-precursor mixtures implied that H4P2O7 had different influences on the pyrolysis behavior of the four raw materials. N2 adsorption/desorption isotherms, scanning electron microscopy, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and adsorption capacities for dyes were used to characterize the prepared activated carbons. AC derived from E. prolifera exhibited the highest surface area (1094m2/g) and maximum monolayer adsorption capacity for malachite green (1250mg/g). Kinetic studies showed that the experimental data were in agreement with the pseudo-second-order model. The adsorption isotherms were well described by the Langmuir isotherm model, indicating the adsorption of dye onto the ACs proceeded by monolayers.

On the Shoulder of a Giant: an Inuit Folktale by N. Christopher

Christopher, Neil. On the Shoulder of a Giant: an Inuit Folktale. Iqualuit: Inhabit Media, 2015. Print.This is another in a series of works designed by Neil Christopher, one of the founders of Inhabit Media, to preserve traditional Inuit stories. In this book he retells a story, which is known in various forms all across the Arctic, of a giant who adopts a hunter as his son. This giant, named Inukpak, is one of the inukpasugjuit or “great giants” of Inuit stories. Inukpak is so big that he can walk across the Arctic in “just a few days” and when he stands in the sea the water "never come[s] up past his knees". He is so big that he thinks that the hunter is a lost child, so he adopts him and carries him on his shoulder.This is a simple retelling, designed to teach about the mythical giants and to explain why the story is found in many cultures across the Canadian Arctic. However, it also models a big person/small person relationship in which small people do not correct or talk back to big people. Children will relate to the hunter, who is treated as a child and because the story is told from the hunter's perspective. The giant sometimes doesn't recognize the impact of his own actions. For example when he runs back to shore, he creates waves that swamp the hunter, but the giant thinks the hunter has been playing in the water. "The hunter wanted to tell the giant that he had not been playing in the water. He also wanted to explain to Inukpak that he had caught a bowhead whale, not a sculpin. But, once again, the little hunter did not want to argue with a giant, so he just said, 'Okay.' "This is mainly a picture book. The illustrations run over two-page spreads with text over-printed on them. Jim Nelson does a good job of presenting the difference in size between the giant and the human. Inukpak is presented as a happy fellow, with black shaggy hair and a full beard. Children will be amused by the giant picking up a polar bear by the scruff of its neck, like a kitten. The images are realistic and the backgrounds are lovely representations of Arctic landscapes. Overall, this is an enjoyable and high-quality work that should be included in elementary school libraries, public libraries and libraries specializing in Arctic children’s books.Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Sandy CampbellSandy is a Health Sciences Librarian at the University of Alberta, who has written hundreds of book reviews across many disciplines. Sandy thinks that sharing books with children is one of the greatest gifts anyone can give.

Heritability and Genome-Wide Association Studies for Hair Color in a Dutch Twin Family Based Sample.

Hair color is one of the most visible and heritable traits in humans. Here, we estimated heritability by structural equation modeling (N = 20,142), and performed a genome wide association (GWA) analysis (N = 7091) and a GCTA study (N = 3340) on hair color within a large cohort of twins, their parents and siblings from the Netherlands Twin Register (NTR). Self-reported hair color was analyzed as five binary phenotypes, namely “blond versus non-blond”, “red versus non-red”, “brown versus non-brown”, “black versus non-black”, and “light versus dark”. The broad-sense heritability of hair color was estimated between 73% and 99% and the genetic component included non-additive genetic variance. Assortative mating for hair color was significant, except for red and black hair color. From GCTA analyses, at most 24.6% of the additive genetic variance in hair color was explained by 1000G well-imputed SNPs. Genome-wide association analysis for each hair color showed that SNPs in the MC1R region were significantly associated with red, brown and black hair, and also with light versus dark hair color. Five other known genes (HERC2, TPCN2, SLC24A4, IRF4, and KITLG) gave genome-wide significant hits for blond, brown and light versus dark hair color. We did not find and replicate any new loci for hair color.

Exploration of SNP variants affecting hair colour prediction in Europeans.

DNA profiling is a key tool for forensic analysis; however, current methods identify a suspect either by direct comparison or from DNA database searches. In cases with unidentified suspects, prediction of visible physical traits e.g. pigmentation or hair distribution of the DNA donors can provide important probative information. This study aimed to explore single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) variants for their effect on hair colour prediction. A discovery panel of 63 SNPs consisting of already established hair colour markers from the HIrisPlex hair colour phenotyping assay as well as additional markers for which associations to human pigmentation traits were previously identified was used to develop multiplex assays based on SNaPshot single-base extension technology. A genotyping study was performed on a range of European populations (n = 605). Hair colour phenotyping was accomplished by matching donor's hair to a graded colour category system of reference shades and photography. Since multiple SNPs in combination contribute in varying degrees to hair colour predictability in Europeans, we aimed to compile a compact marker set that could provide a reliable hair colour inference from the fewest SNPs. The predictive approach developed uses a naïve Bayes classifier to provide hair colour assignment probabilities for the SNP profiles of the key SNPs and was embedded into the Snipper online SNP classifier ( http://mathgene.usc.es/snipper/ ). Results indicate that red, blond, brown and black hair colours are predictable with informative probabilities in a high proportion of cases. Our study resulted in the identification of 12 most strongly associated SNPs to hair pigmentation variation in six genes.

Symmetry inheritance of scalar fields

Matter fields do not necessarily have to share the symmetries with the spacetime they live in. When this happens, we speak of the symmetry inheritance of fields. In this paper we classify the obstructions of symmetry inheritance by the scalar fields, both real and complex, and look more closely at the special cases of stationary and axially symmetric spacetimes. Since the symmetry noninheritance is present in the scalar fields of boson stars and may enable the existence of the black hole scalar hair, our results narrow the possible classes of such solutions. Finally, we define and analyse the symmetry noninheritance contributions to the Komar mass and angular momentum of the black hole scalar hair.

Development and validation of an UPLC–MS/MS method for the quantification of tamoxifen and its main metabolites in human scalp hair

The aim of this study was to validate an earlier developed high-performance highly sensitive ultra performance liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry (UPLC–MS/MS) method for quantification of tamoxifen and its three main metabolites (N-desmethyl-tamoxifen, 4-hydroxy-tamoxifen and 4-hydroxy-N-desmethyl-tamoxifen) in scalp hair. This non-invasive method might, by segmental analysis of hair, be useful in the determination of the concentration of drugs and its metabolites over time, which can be used to study a wide variety of clinical relevant questions. Hair samples (150–300 hair strands, cut as close to the scalp as possible from the posterior vertex region of the head) were collected from female patients taking tamoxifen 20mg daily (n=19). The analytes were extracted using a liquid–liquid extraction procedure with carbonate buffer at pH 8.8 and a mixture of n-hexane/isopropranol method, followed by UPLC–MS/MS chromatography, based on an earlier validated method. The calibration curves were linear in the range of 1.00–200pmol for tamoxifen and N-desmethyl-tamoxifen, with lower limit of quantitation of 1.00pmol and 0.100–20.0pmol with lower limit of quantitation of 0.100pmol for endoxifen and 4-hydroxy-tamoxifen. Assay performance was fair with a within-run and between-run variability less than 9.24 at the three quality control samples and less than 15.7 for the lower limit of quantitation. Importantly, a steep linear decline was observed from distal to proximal hair segments. Probably, this is due to UV exposure as we showed degradation of tamoxifen and its metabolites after exposure to UV-light. Furthermore, higher concentrations of tamoxifen were found in black hair samples compared to blond and brown hair samples. We conclude that measurement of the concentration of tamoxifen and its main metabolites in hair is possible, with the selective, sensitive, accurate and precise UPLC–MS/MS method. However, for tamoxifen, it seems not possible to determine exposure over time with segmental analysis of hair, probably largely due to the effect of UV irradiation. Further research should therefore focus on quantification of other anticancer drugs, in segmented scalp hair, that are less sensitive to UV irradiation.

Reflections: Neurology And The Humanities. Silvia's blessing.

The first thing I noticed was Silvia's rocking. Back and forth, back and forth, the faux leather of the chair squeaking with each forward thrust of her diminutive, skinny frame. Then her huge sunglasses, much too big for her face, framing long black hair. And her teeth—white and protruding, but too large for her slender face and small mouth. She looked to be 12 or 13, but I wasn't sure.

Human Nature

Laura Aguilar’s Nature Self Portraits treat the human body as another feature in landscapes. In the series, Aguilar positions herself in the center of her photographs, nude, often with her back to the camera. The curve of her back echoes the rocks, her black hair in the wind recalls the thin fingers of desert trees. The photographs are at once playful and beautiful, peaceful and provocative. This photo essay includes work from Aguilar’s series, plus a similar work by California photographer Judy Dater, which influenced Aguilar.

Towards a characterization of fields leading to black hole hair

In the present work, it is shown that an asymptotically flat spherical black hole can have a nontrivial signature of any field, for an exterior observer, if the energy–momentum tensor of the corresponding field is either trace-free or if the trace falls off at least as rapidly as the inverse cube of the radial distance. In the absence of a general ‘No Hair Theorem’, this result can provide a characterization of the fields leading to a black hole hair.

Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston by Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinge, and: Taming Lust: Crimes Against Nature in the Early Republic by Doron S. Ben-Atar and Richard D. Brown (review)

Reviewed by: Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston by Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinge, and: Taming Lust: Crimes Against Nature in the Early Republic by Doron S. Ben-Atar and Richard D. Brown Thomas J. Humphrey (bio) Keywords Microhistories, Poor relief, Crime in early U.S., Early U.S. legal system Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston. By Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp. 272. Cloth, $34.95.) Taming Lust: Crimes Against Nature in the Early Republic. By Doron S. Ben-Atar and Richard D. Brown. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp. 216. Cloth, $34.95.) Over the past forty years, historians have produced a veritable mountain of studies that may best be described as microhistories. When writing microhistories, historians often invoke a specific moment, or a few moments, from a subject’s life to reach some broader conclusions of that subject’s community.1 Two recent books provide excellent examples of microhistory. In Robert Love’s Warnings, Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger study the copybooks and warnings issued by Robert Love to investigate the region’s mobile working population. In doing so, they uncover Boston’s civic, legal, social, and civil community in the last decade of the colonial period. In Taming Lust, Doron S. Ben-Atar and Richard D. Brown examine the lives of Gideon Washburn and John Farrell, two elderly men who, in the 1790s, were accused and convicted of bestiality. The trials and their aftermath reveal a New England in flux as residents struggled to reconcile their cultural and political traditions with the new realities of a post-Revolutionary United States. Both books use their specific subjects as windows to explore and explain the wider world these men inhabited. While Dayton and Salinger expertly detail the changes Boston’s mobile working class faced as the imperial crisis [End Page 313] intensified, Ben-Atar and Brown show us a New England in turmoil as the region’s residents tried to make sense of their new, post-Revolutionary world. Dayton and Salinger introduce readers to Love’s world by taking us on a walk. This is, however, no ordinary walk. Love was appointed to issue warnings to non-residents in Boston, a job he held from January 1765 until he died in April 1774. Thus, for roughly nine years, Robert Love spent approximately three days per week walking the streets of Boston, looking for people he needed to question. If the people he interrogated had no prospects for work or a place to live, he warned them that they had to leave the city in fourteen days. Few people saw transient and working-class people more regularly, or more closely, than did Robert Love. Love’s story of warning out is part of a larger English culture that colonists carried with them when they crossed the Atlantic. In the seventeenth century, England’s Parliament began passing a series of acts collectively termed the Poor Law that determined who was eligible for poor relief and how officials should provide it. People removed from town were ultimately sent back to their hometowns, where they might legally obtain some aid. In eighteenth-century Massachusetts, nonresidents could be warned and, if necessary, removed after authorities acquired a court order. While less onerous than the practice in England, Massachusetts used warning out as a way to minimize or eliminate the amount of poor relief paid to strangers. By the time Robert Love issued his warnings in 1765, Massachusetts officials were using warnings more as a way to keep track of people than as a way to get rid of the poor. Love kept track of his interactions in a series of notebooks, which Dayton and Salinger use to reveal the people who lived and worked in Boston in the last ten years of the colonial period. Because he relied on visual cues to remind him whom he had warned, Love often described people’s faces, hair, clothes, and accents. One man he described as middle aged with his ''own black Hair'' (60). Another was a sailor who had apparently deserted a British...

Kundry and the Jewish Voice: Anti-antisemitism and Musical Transcendence in Wagner's Parsifal

For Angela Maraventano Kundry, the only female character in Richard Wagner's last opera, Parsifal (1882), is also the only character to make an overwhelming impression on us with the raw power and extreme versatility of her singing voice. The most arresting vocal gesture of the opera, for example, comes from her mouth at the work's epicenter in the middle of Act II (example 1). As a preternatural calm descends over the sonic landscape, (1) grounded by the distant but ponderous tread of the timpani in mm. 1175-77, we are transported outside the time and place of the opera to a remote primal scene: Golgotha, the site of Christ's crucifixion. (2) In mm. 1177-78, a theme swells up in the orchestra that we have come to associate with the Holy Grail and its original contents, the blood of the suffering Christ (see example 26 for the complete theme). Kundry now hesitantly sings--"I saw ... Him ... Him"--and the revelation of "His" identity in mm. 1179-80 is aligned precisely with a dissonant, paroxysmal orchestral idea heard here for only the second time in the opera. (3) The strings' hairpin crescendo and spasmodic triplet figure, convulsing onto the leaden harmony on the third beat of the bar, (4) suggest the dense throbbing of Christ's imponderable, intractable pain. The Grail theme picks up where it left off in m. 1181, and as it dies away, Kundry begins to re-enact her shocking response to the sight of Christ on the cross: she laughed. (5) Her bold ridicule of Christ is "voiced" not only by the orchestral music that betrays her laughter, but also by her singing voice. First, tonally-ambiguous triplet chords ripple in the woodwinds in mm. 1181-82, building in intensity until the precipitous descending melodic motif that usually signifies Kundry's caustic laughter bursts forth irrepressibly in the first violins. In mm. 1182-83, the laughter motif tumbles headlong onto what we now hear as the dominant in D minor, clarifying the winds' earlier tonal function and setting up the extraordinary vocal outburst that follows. Now, in the middle of m. 1183, Kundry suddenly hits a high B[natural] on the first syllable of the word "laughed [lach-te]," ushered in by the flutes and given an extra punch by the bassoons, horns, and a violent string pizzicato. The B[natural], a formidable feat for any dramatic mezzo, is also the highest sung note in the opera. (6) If that weren't stunning enough, Kundry's B[natural] brazenly exceeds the Bb called for by the reigning D-minor tonality. (7) The glaring major-mode brightness of the high note adds an extra dose of impudence and brash mockery to Kundry's shriek of laughter. She ends the word unaccompanied on a low C[sharp], opening up a yawning vocal chasm that reverberates acoustically and psychologically in the vast silence that follows. (8) This voice, Kundry's voice, is clearly a force to be reckoned with. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A bit of dramatic context can help us appreciate the full impact and importance of this moment in Parsifal. Shortly after the curtain rises on Act I, Kundry hurtles onto the stage like a wild animal, with her coarse robe and unkempt black hair, in order to deliver comforting balsam to Amfortas, the mortally wounded king of the knights of Montsalvat who preserve the Holy Grail. After Amfortas had been seduced by "a terribly beautiful woman [ein furchtbar schones Weib]," he dropped the Holy Spear that once pierced Christ's flesh. Klingsor, a former knight turned evil sorcerer, seized the Spear and stabbed Amfortas with it. Now the king languishes with the unending pain of a wound that perpetually reminds him of his sin and prevents him from fulfilling his duty to uncover the Grail during Communion, the ritual that gives eternal life to the knights of his order. We will discover that Kundry was Amfortas's temptress (acting partly as Klingsor's reluctant slave), although at the moment this is hardly imaginable, given Kundry's ungainly manner, disheveled appearance, and guttural musical utterances. …

Scanning electron microscopy analysis of hair index on Karachi's population for social and professional appearance enhancement.

Hair texture, appearance and pigment play an important role in social and professional communication and maintaining an overall appearance. This study was especially designed for morphological assessment of hair damage caused to Karachi's population due to natural factors and cosmetic treatments using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) technique. Hair samples under the study of synthetic factor's effect were given several cosmetic treatments (hot straightened, bleached, synthetic dyed and henna dyed) whereas samples under natural factor's effect (variation in gender, age and pigmentation) were left untreated. Morphological assessment was performed using SEM technique. Results obtained were statistically analysed using minitab 16 and spss 18 softwares. Scanning electron microscopy images revealed less number of cuticular scales in males than females of same age although size of cuticular scales was found to be larger in males than in females. Mean hair index of white hair was greater than black hair of the same head as it is comparatively newly originated. Tukey's method revealed that among cosmetic treatments, bleaching and synthetic henna caused most of the damage to the hair. Statistical evaluation of results obtained from SEM analysis revealed that human scalp hair index show morphological variation with respect to age, gender, hair pigmentation, chemical and physical treatments. Individuals opting for cosmetic treatments could clearly visualize the extent of hair damage these may cause in long run.