Late 1980s Research Articles

Walter Brendel and the dawn of transplantation research in Germany

Walter Brendel was a physiologist who headed the Institut of Experimental Surgery at the University of Munich (LMU) from 1961 until 1989. His legendary career began with the development of an anti-human lymphocyte globulin (ALG) at his Institute during the late 1960s. The initial successful treatment of a small number of patients culminated in the co-treatment of the first successfully heart-transplanted patient in Capetown, South Africa (successful reversal with ALG of an acute allograft rejection). Walter Brendel was a pioneering personality whose work has laid a wide platform for the promotion of interdisciplinarily conducted innovative research programs in various domains of translational science and medicine. Among the many innovative achievements, the most notable are: discovery of involvement of the alternative pathway of complement activation in hyperacute xenograft rejection; induction of immunological tolerance to horse IgG as a means to prevent anaphylactic reactions during ALG therapy; development and clinical implementation of the extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy for extracorporeal destruction of renal and ureteral calculi. The legacy of Brendel continues with the foundation of the Walter-Brendel Kolleg für Transplantationsmedizin (i.e., the German Transplant School for Transplantation Medicine), which has been held annually since 1994.

The Question of Blanchot in Beckett’s Three Dialogues and The Unnamable

Abstract While the possible influence of the French writer Maurice Blanchot on Samuel Beckett’s writing has long been one of the more vexing questions in Beckett scholarship, textual echoes, thematic correspondences and circumstantial clues now make it likelier than not that Beckett encountered Blanchot’s writing in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The personal documents of Georges Duthuit—Beckett’s close friend in this period, during the writing of both Three Dialogues (1949) and the ‘Trilogy’ of novels (1951–1953)—shed further light on this connection. They suggest that Three Dialogues is a continuation of Beckett’s decades-long thought on habit, as first articulated in Proust (1930), and that Duthuit (re)introduced Beckett to Blanchot’s work at the time of writing Three Dialogues. This article explores connections between Blanchot’s Thomas l’obscur (1941) and ‘De l’angoisse au langage’ (1943), and published and manuscript versions of Beckett’s Three Dialogues and L’Innommable, as well as between the problematics posed by the latter two texts. Finally, it suggests that L’Innommable is not a reflection but a radicalization of Blanchot’s thought, such that Blanchot missed the full extent of its radicality in his own review of the novel.

The Early Formation of the Moscow School of Landscape Painting. Landscape Class of the Moscow School of Painting and Sculpture (MUZHV), 1844–1857

The article delves into the formative years of the landscape class at the Moscow School of Painting and Sculpture (MUZHV), whose growth parallels the advancement of the landscape genre in Russia during the latter half of the 1 9th century. It explores the pioneering efforts of Karl Ivanovich Rabus, the inaugural head of the class, and evaluates his instructional techniques in landscape painting. His methods introduced academic traditions of landscape painting to the School, thereby laying the groundwork for its future development. Additionally, the article delineates the challenges encountered by the nascent landscape painting tradition, attributable to a range of internal and external factors.Drawing from archival records and periodical sources, the author endeavors to reconstruct a detailed portrayal of the class's early years (1844-1857), emphasizing the pivotal role of students in the evolution of artistic life and the formation of the art market in Moscow. The research enhances scholarly knowledge by bringing into focus the identities of the class's students, most of whom are lesser-known artists, alongside their artistic creations, enriching our comprehension of Russian landscape painting during the late 1800s.

The politics of the anti-politics machine of agricultural commercialization: Uganda and Tanzania in the Longue Durée

ABSTRACT Powered by global financial institutions, philanthrocapitalists and development agencies, agricultural commercialization is once again at the forefront of development discourse and policies, especially since the late 2000s. The cornerstone of this development approach is that by investing in raising agricultural productivity, supporting infrastructure, and introducing climate-smart agricultural systems, with private sector investments all along the food value chain, Africa will transform into a breadbasket for the world. In the last decade, Uganda and Tanzania have enthusiastically embraced agricultural modernization discourses, becoming test beds of new ‘frontier’ blueprints: ‘responsible’ agricultural commercialization projects, ‘inclusive’ business models and ‘sustainable’ contract farming schemes. This paper takes issue with the de-politicizing discourse of the value chain paradigm by exploring diachronically the genealogies of agricultural commercialization in Uganda and Tanzania from colonial times, across post-independence state-led modernizations, to the present neoliberal reforms. It argues that mainstream development narratives tagged to commercialization projects have worked as an ‘anti-politics machine’ making invisible to the public eye the widespread land dispossession, rural pauperization and social conflicts it entails.

THE UN ACTIVITIES ON FACILITATING THE APPLICATION OF INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY FOR THE PURPOSES OF DEVELOPMENT IN THE 1990S

In the early 3rd decade in the 21st century, the information and communications technology (hereinafter referred to as ICT) is regarded as an inalienable factor of the international development. This article presents the analysis of the events related to the outset of the UN involvement in this factor promotion at the turn of the 1980s and further until the late 90s. It marks out the most important measures initiated at the UN main and subsidiary bodies aiming at the ICT study as a development factor and the international community’s political will mobilisation on the ICT’s broadest possible adoption and application. Within the period under consideration, three stages marking the expansion of the UN involvement in the ICT issues, from attracting general attention to their importance in the development towards the drafting of recommendations for the international community on bridging the digital divide, are proposed by us. The article finds out that these recommendations just as other UN activities in the development field worked in favour of the globalisation and evidently reflected the neoliberal paradigm. However, in the meantime they counterbalanced market fundamentalists and provided the grounds for the need of planning the international aid for developing nations and guaranteeing social focus in the national ICT policies.

The transnational entanglements of James Liberty Tadd’s drawing curriculum: a curious chapter in the history of human potential

ABSTRACT In 1928 the Yugoslav journal Radna Škola put forward the perplexing claim that James Liberty Tadd (1853–1917) was one of the most significant and influential American educators. Why was this otherwise unknown art educator put into transnational circulation as responsible for the perceived success of education in the United States? Following the 1898 publication of his magnum opus, New Methods in Education, Tadd enjoyed a modest international reputation, but he is little known today. Adopting an “entanglement” approach to global histories of education, this article focuses on the messy tangling together of different actors, devices, discourses, and practices involved in this transnational transit. The article argues that the most salient aspect of Tadd’s introduction to a Yugoslav educational public in the late 1920s is an educational approach that purported to be transformational in how it unlocked human potential. This is to view “potential” as an object that circulates in the world and to suggest that histories of education should include study of the ways that the uppermost possibility spaces of human experience have been understood in relation to education in different times and spaces.

Beyond the panel: cinematism and affective responses in Itō Junji’s Tomie

ABSTRACT Itō Junji has been a renowned horror author since his work Tomie was released in the late 1980s. Tomie tells the story of an eponymous vengeful entity who, after being killed by her classmates on a school trip, leads men she encounters to madness and to her assassination which leads to her multiplying and being reborn again. Previous studies have focused on gender-based readings of the violence and body-horror elements in Tomie, yet little attention has been given to how this latter works in tandem with other elements as affective devices. By drawing upon several concepts related to affect, this paper analyzes the use of horror manga to evoke affective and somatic responses in readers. It shows that the manga’s use of panelling and composition techniques associated with cinema plays an essential role in the creation of dread and anticipation. Additionally, the exploration of abjection and body horror reveals how these contribute to the reader’s responses which oscillate between sympathy and somatic empathy. Ultimately, this study highlights how horror manga, as a visual medium with cinematic traits, can elicit responses in readers similar to horror cinema and offers a potential theoretical framework for the broader study of horror manga.

The rise of Porto artist collectives and the birth of democratic collaboration over fifteen years of daily art practice

ABSTRACT This article documents and analyses a phenomenon of collectivisation involving approximately forty artist collectives that emerged in Porto, Portugal between the late 1990s and 2013, with a particular focus on how horizontal collectivism led in turn to new models of citizenship and participatory democracy. I present an overview of historical precedents concerning certain aspects of this phenomenon, especially in relation to Portugal’s relatively recent (1974) end to forty-eight years of dictatorial rule. Artists came to play an important role in developing and spreading the democratic values that were subsequently enshrined in the Portuguese constitution of 1976. Recently, the Covid-19 pandemic came to prove that the revolution’s legacy is still alive, and the constitutional principles are still orienting the Portuguese artists. Today’s growing neoliberalisation of democracy raises the question of how the Portuguese constitution remains the main guarantor of the citizen’s most fundamental right to participatory democracy and to be more active citizens.

Steric and Electronic Influence of Excited-State Decay in Cu(I) MLCT Chromophores.

ConspectusFor the past 11 years, a dedicated effort in our research group focused on fundamentally advancing the photophysical properties of cuprous bis-phenanthroline-based metal-to-ligand charge transfer (MLCT) excited states. We rationalized that, by gaining control over the numerous factors limiting the more widespread use of CuI MLCT photosensitizers, they would be readily adopted in numerous light-activated applications given the earth-abundance of copper and the extensive library of 1,10-phenanthrolines developed over the last century. Significant progress has been achieved by recognizing valuable structure-property concepts developed by other researchers in tandem with detailed ultrafast and conventional time-scale investigations, in-silico-inspired molecular designs to predict spectroscopic properties, and applying novel synthetic methodologies. Ultimately, we achieved a plateau in exerting cooperative steric influence to control CuI MLCT excited state decay. This led to combining sterics with π-conjugation and/or inductive electronic effects to further exert control over molecular photophysical properties. The lessons gleaned from our studies of homoleptic complexes were recently extended to heteroleptic bis(phenanthrolines) featuring enhanced visible light absorption properties and long-lived room-temperature photoluminescence. This Account navigates the reader through our intellectual journey of decision-making, molecular and experimental design, and data interpretation in parallel with appropriate background information related to the quantitative characterization of molecular photophysics using CuI MLCT chromophores as prototypical examples.Initially, CuI MLCT excited states, their energetics, and relevant structural conformation changes implicated in their photophysical decay processes are described. This is followed by a discussion of the literature that motivated our research in this area. This led to our first molecular design in 2013, achieving a 7-fold increase in excited state lifetime relative to the current state-of-the-art. The lifetime and photophysical property enhancement resulted from using 2,9-branched alkyl groups in conjunction with flanking 3,8-methyl substituents, a strategy we adapted from the McMillin group, which was initially described in the late 1990s. Applications of this newly conceived chromophore are presented in solar hydrogen-producing photocatalysis, photochemical upconversion, and photosensitization of [4 + 4] anthracene dimerization of potential interest in thermal storage of solar energy in metastable intermediates. Ultrafast transient absorption and fluorescence upconversion spectroscopic characterization of this and related CuI molecules inform the resultant photophysical properties and vice versa, so the most comprehensive structure-property understanding becomes realized when these experimental tools are collectively utilized to investigate the same series of molecules. Computationally guided structural designs generated newly conceived molecules featuring visible light-harvesting and 2,9-cycloalkane substituted complexes. The latter eventually produced record-setting excited state lifetimes in molecules leveraging both cooperative steric influence and electronic inductive effects. Using photoluminescence data from structurally homologous CuI MLCT excited states collected over 44 years, an energy gap correlation successfully modeled the data spanning a 0.3 eV emission energy range. Finally, a new research direction is revealed detailing structure-photophysical property relationships in heteroleptic CuI phenanthroline chromophores that are photoluminescent at room temperature.

Parallel reaction monitoring targeted mass spectrometry as a fast and sensitive alternative to antibody-based protein detection

The reliable, accurate and quantitative targeted detection of proteins is a key technology in molecular and cell biology and molecular diagnostics. The current golden standard for targeted protein detection in complex mixtures such as complete cell lysates or body fluids is immunoblotting, a technology that was developed in the late 1970s and has not undergone major changes since. Although widespread, this methodology suffers from several disadvantages, such as the inability to detect low-abundant proteins or specific posttranslational modifications, the requirement for highly specific antibodies, the lack of quantitative power and the often-tedious practical procedures. Mass spectrometry (MS) based targeted protein detection is an alternative technology that could circumvent these caveats. Here, we compare immunoblotting with targeted protein mass spectrometry using a parallel reaction monitoring (PRM) regime on the Orbitrap mass spectrometer. We show that PRM based MS has superior sensitivity and quantitative accuracy over immunoblotting. The limit of detection for proteolytic peptides of a purified target protein was found to be in the mid- to low-attomole range and approximately one order of magnitude higher when embedded in a complex biological matrix. The incorporation of synthetic heavy isotope labeled (AQUA) peptides as internal calibrants into the PRM workflow allows for even higher accuracy for both the relative and absolute quantitation of tryptic target peptides. In conclusion, PRM is a versatile and sensitive technology, which can overcome the shortcomings of immunoblotting. We argue that PRM based MS could become the method of choice for the targeted detection of proteins in complex cellular matrices or body fluids and may eventually replace standard methods such as Western blotting and ELISA in biomedical research and in the clinic.

THE VERTEBRATE FAUNA OF THE LOWER PLIOCENE CONTINENTAL DEPOSITS IN THE EBRO DELTA (BAIX EBRE BASIN, NE SPAIN)

The Pliocene faunas of the northeastern Iberian Peninsula are poorly known due to the scarcity of deposits from this interval. In this context, the site of Sant Nofre-Campredó (Baix Ebre, Catalonia, Spain), comprising two contemporaneous outcrops belonging to geologically correlated sections (Sant Nofre and Campredó-Via Fèrria), makes a significant contribution to the study of Pliocene faunas in this region. The first vertebrate remains were recovered in the late 1970s in clay deposits close to the Sant Nofre Hill. Later, intensive sampling in the 1980s at the Campredó-Via Fèrria outcrop led to the recovery of more than a hundred fossil specimens, including small vertebrates and large mammals. Here, we revise these collections to expand and update the vertebrate list, better constrain the age of the continental deposits, and characterize the environment and climate around the mouth of the Ebro River during the formation of the site. Up to 24 vertebrate species have been identified at Sant Nofre-Campredó, including amphibians, reptiles, and mammals. The presence of the rodents Paraethomys baeticus Piñero & Verzi, 2020, Apocricetus barrierei (Mein & Michaux 1970), and Occitanomys brailloni Michaux, 1969 implies an early Ruscinian age (MN14 unit) for the two outcrops. Biostratigraphic correlations with other well-dated sites in the Iberian Peninsula refine the estimated age of Sant Nofre-Campredó to approximately 4.6 Ma. The ecological affinities of the identified fauna reveal a landscape dominated by woodland habitats in the surroundings of the site during the Early Pliocene, with presence of open humid meadows and water bodies under warm and moist climatic conditions.

‘Providing a Layman's Guide to the Scheme’: Museum Computing, Professional Personas and Documentary Labour in the United Kingdom, 1967–1983

Abstract Between the 1960s and early-1980s the museum sector in the United Kingdom (UK) was rapidly professionalised and systematised. A crucial moment in this transition was the creation in 1967 of the Information Retrieval Group of the Museums Association (IRGMA), and the subsequent launch of its system for the machine encoding and communication of museum catalogue records. The rise of IRGMA marked an inflection point in museological practice and the normalisation of computerised work within the UK museum profession, a moment when the desire for a ‘layman's guide to the scheme’ began to give way to new professional personas and forms of documentary labour. This article asks how cultures of museology and professional labour shifted in response to IRGMA. It argues that between the late 1960s and mid-1980s both the implementation of and the debate around computerised cataloguing disrupted the function of UK museums and how museum professionals imagined their labour. And by tracing the emergence of these cultures and their intersections with professional identity and labour practices, this article seeks to tease out the ways museum history can resonate with wider narratives of labour, expertise and technological innovation in contemporary British history.

Preserving insulin function in diabetes: a case report

BackgroundThis case report explores the long-term dynamics of insulin secretion and glycemic control in two patients with diabetes mellitus type 2 over 20 years. The observations underscore the impact of lifestyle interventions, including weight loss and calorie restriction, on insulin secretion patterns and glucose levels during 75 g oral glucose tolerance tests. Additionally, the role of hemoglobin A1c fluctuations, influenced by various factors such as body weight, exercise, and pharmacological interventions, is investigated.Case presentationCase 1 involves a Japanese woman now in her late 70s who successfully maintained her hemoglobin A1c below 7% for over two decades through sustained weight loss and lifestyle changes. Despite a gradual decline in the homeostasis model assessment of β cell function, the patient exhibited remarkable preservation of insulin secretion patterns over the 20-year follow-up. In case 2, a Japanese woman, now in her early 70s, experienced an improvement in hemoglobin A1c to 6.3% after a period of calorie limitation due to a wrist fracture in 2018. This incident seemed to trigger a temporary rescue of pancreatic β cell function, emphasizing the dynamic nature of insulin secretion. Both cases highlight the potential for pancreatic β cell rescue and underscore the persistence of insulin secretion over the 20-year follow-up. Additionally, we have briefly discussed three additional cases with follow-ups ranging from 10 to 17 years, demonstrating similar trends in glucose and insulin ratios.ConclusionsLong-term lifestyle interventions, such as weight loss and calorie restriction, can preserve pancreatic β cell function and maintain glycemic control in type 2 diabetes patients over 20 years. Two patients showed stable or improved insulin secretion and favorable hemoglobin A1c levels, challenging the traditional view of irreversible β cell decline. The findings highlight the importance of personalized, nonpharmacological approaches, suggesting that sustained lifestyle changes can significantly impact diabetes management and potentially rescue β cell function.

Rhythm, noise and action: decoding R.D. Burman’s soundtracks of Bombay cinema

ABSTRACT The sustained use of ‘Western’ style orchestration in Bombay film music can be attributed to the trajectory of two kinds of musical practices, one tethered to the leisure economies developed by the colonial rule from the 19th century onwards, and second, the robust and frequent presence of travelling jazz bands from the early twentieth century. As a period of intense transformation, the decade of the 1940s saw musicians from different parts of the subcontinent move to Bombay to find work in the film industry. This process often involved adapting to new performance contexts, genres and instruments. Studios in the Bombay film industry became fecund spaces where musicians and arrangers trained in Western classical music came in heady contact with the jazz men of Bombay’s nightclubss. Focusing on the late 1960s as another transitional moment, this article traces R.D. Burman’s affective encounters with these ‘mobile musicking bodies.’ Biographies of his key musicians give us detailed accounts of their training and involvement in diverse sites of musical performance, before they arrived in the Bombay film industry. This detour informs my analysis of R.D. Burman and his team’s innovative film scores, underlining vocal effects, side rhythms and inclusion of edgy off-key sounds. Moving away from a song-driven approach, I focus on title tracks, background scores and extended instrumental set-pieces of crime and action genres that are now getting recirculated on the internet by R.D. Burman’s fans. Through a methodology that will combine textual analysis, internet ethnography and close listening, the article will argue that these new soundscapes carried the inscriptions of global music cultures and ‘extra-musical’ noise.

Personalized Temporomandibular Joint Total Alloplastic Replacement as a Solution to Help Patients with Non-Osteosynthesizable Comminuted Mandibular Head Fractures.

Background: Treatment methods for mandibular head fractures are controversial, although effective techniques for open reduction and rigid fixation (ORIF) have been known since the late 1990s. Notably, some forms of posttraumatic comminution of the mandibular head can be reduced or fixed. Methods: This study presents a personalized treatment to cure patients with nonreduced comminuted fractures of the mandibular head: total temporomandibular joint alloplastic replacement (18 patients). The reference group included patients who underwent ORIF (11 patients). Results: Personalized alloplastic joint replacements resulted in a more stable mandibular ramus after three months compared with ORIF. Conclusions: The authors recommend not performing osteosynthesis when the height of the mandibular ramus cannot be stably restored or when periosteal elevation from most of the mandibular head is necessary for ORIF. Personalized TMJ replacement should be considered in such patients. Personalized medicine allows patients to maintain a normal mandibular ramus height for a long period of time.

Anthropogenic and climatic impacts on historic sediment, carbon, and phosphorus accumulation rates using 210Pbex and 137Cs in a sub-watershed linked to Zarivar Lake, Iran

To estimate a watershed’s response to climate change, it is crucial to understand how human activities and climatic extremes have interacted over time. Over the last century, the Zarivar Lake watershed, Iran, has been subjected to various anthropogenic activates, including deforestation and inappropriate land-management practices alongside the implementation of conservation measures like check dams. To understand the effects of these changes on the magnitude of sediment, organic carbon (OC), and phosphorus supplies in a small sub-watershed connected to the lake over the last century, a lake sediment core was dated using 210Pbex and 137Cs as geochronometers. The average mass accumulation rate (MAR), organic carbon accumulation rates (OCAR), and particulate phosphorus accumulation rates (PPAR) of the sediment core were determined to be 6498 ± 2475, 205 ± 85, and 8.9 ± 3.3 g m−2 year−1, respectively. Between the late 1970s and early 1980s, accumulation rates were significantly higher than their averages at 7940 ± 3120, 220 ± 60, and 12.0 ± 2.8 g m−2 year−1 respectively. During this period, the watershed underwent extensive deforestation (12%) on steep slopes, coinciding with higher mean annual precipitations (more than double). Conversely, after 2009, when check dams were installed in the sub-watershed, the sediment load to the lake became negligible. The results of this research indicate that anthropogenic activities had a pronounced effect on MAR, OCAR, and PPAR, causing them to fluctuate from negligible amounts to values twice the averages over the last century, amplified by climatic factors. These results imply that implementing climate-smart watershed management strategies, such as constructing additional check dams and terraces, reinforcing restrictions on deforestation, and minimum tillage practices, can facilitate protection of lacustrine ecosystems under accelerating climate change conditions.Graphical

“An Era More than Bleak”

AbstractFerenc Farkas, a remarkable twentieth-century Hungarian composer, was one of the most influential professors of composition throughout the history of the Liszt Academy of Music, Budapest. A less known chapter of his life is his involvement in the ethnicist and anti-Semitic political movements of Hungary, during the late 1930s and early 1940s. In 1940, he was among three musicians who elaborated a proposal to establish, in line with the rise of corporatism, a Hungarian Music Chamber. One of the main aims of the new organization would have been a total exclusion of Jewish musicians from all branches of Hungarian musical culture. The Chamber was never actually founded. In 1941, Farkas left Budapest for the Transylvanian city Kolozsvár (Cluj), where he was appointed professor of composition at the Conservatory. One of his first students was György Ligeti, a native Transylvanian, born into a Hungarian family suffering under the anti-Semitic legislation of the Hungarian state. As Ligeti recollected, Farkas “wanted to teach me everything he had learned from his teacher Ottorino Respighi.” Based on archival sources, this study offers new insights into the personal and professional connection between Ligeti and Farkas during the 1940s, and also follows Farkas's post-war path from relative isolation and marginalization to the elite of state socialist music culture.

The Actualité of Philosophy and its History: Michel Foucault’s Legacy on a Philosophy of the Present

From the late 1970s, and particularly in the last years of his life, Michel Foucault repeatedly returned to the status of philosophical reflection as an ontology of the present, of actualité, or an ontology of ourselves. However, the impact of these famous theoretical syntagms around a philosophy of the present or of actualité – one of Foucault's most precious legacies 40 years after his death – is not fully intelligible without considering that they were already at the heart of Foucault's reflections on the status of philosophy from the mid-1960s onwards. Today, with the recent publication of the essay Le Discours philosophique, we can better understand how the concept of actualité shaped, within an archaeological framework of analysis, the highly complex elaboration of the status of philosophy as a discourse aimed at providing a diagnosis of our actualité. The theoretical density of this latter term reveals a rich panorama of philosophical references (sometimes explicit, sometimes more implicit) that are essential for grasping both the historical-conceptual stakes of this term and the way in which it is, for the first time, inscribed at the heart of the status of philosophy, giving rise also to the very possibility of making it an object of historicization that at the time was still only archaeological. The aim of this contribution is to show how Le Discours philosophique broadens our understanding of what Foucault would later take up in a wider horizon of analysis, in which actualité would mark a renewed space of historical analysis of the contingent relationship between philosophy and its present, by redefining philosophical reflection as a practico-reflexive mode that Foucault will designate as “attitude” (and “critical attitude”).

Offshore Tech Evolves for Deeper Waters, Deeper Reservoirs

_ Since the late 1930s, the offshore industry has moved from installing the first offshore platform in 14 ft of water to the ultradeepwater 20K era. Advances in seismic, drilling, and development technologies all helped move the industry from shallow waters to ultradeepwaters, from lower-pressure reservoirs to high-pressure/high-temperature (HP/HT) reservoirs, and beyond known hydrocarbon areas like the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) into frontier regions, like Guyana. Brent Gros, vice president of Chevron’s GOM business unit, told JPT there is a stark difference between the GOM of today and how it was when he first started working in the area 26 years ago. Now, he said, operating further from land in water depths of 4,000 to 7,000 ft is the norm. “We’re not really taking crew boats to those platforms, given the distance from shore. We operate as well at much higher pressures,” he said. Jayme Meier, ExxonMobil’s vice president of deepwater project delivery, echoed that sentiment. At the dawn of the offshore era, “anything that was in any amount of water was, by definition, deep water, because it was as far as you could go,” she told JPT. “And we are now at the stage where we are routinely doing things that are in 2000 m (6,560 ft) of water or more, and we continue to press boundaries and technical limits to be able to move further out in water depth.” As such, she said, the fundamental definition of deep water has shifted in the past quarter century. Where To Drill? “To find oil and gas resources, we rely on seismic, and we’ve seen huge advancements in seismic over the past 25 years,” Gros said. 3D seismic technology, pioneered half a century ago, sharpened the view into the world’s reservoirs, and new seismic processing methods have helped identify new opportunities. “Now we have ocean-bottom node surveys, which essentially take a lot of the noise out of surveys, allowing us to image deeper with a clearer image. We also have four-dimensional seismic, which helps us understand the performance of reservoirs through time,” he said. “If you compare the seismic capability today to what we had in the past, it’s like seeing the world with a new pair of glasses, and it really helps us understand potential prospects in a more-complex geological setting and pursue those opportunities in deeper water and deeper horizons than we previously would have been able to.” Deepwater Challenges Moving into ever deeper waters requires more tech and more-capable drilling rigs. It also requires precision, Meier noted. “Technology allows us to position a floating rig on the surface of the ocean. It’s got to be able to drill at very precise angles and precise locations, and significant extensions of technology were needed to enable that to happen. We’re at the point now where we’re even doing multizone completions on our wells in deep water,” she said. point now where we’re even doing multizone completions on our wells in deep water,” she said. She called deepwater “by far the most exciting space” to work in. It requires planning and designing for facilities that must withstand intense, harsh, and constantly changing conditions throughout its lifetime.

Effects of Platelet-Activating Factor (PAF) on the Mechanical Activities of Lower Urinary Tract and Genital Smooth Muscles.

Since its first discovery as a bioactive phospholipid inducing potent platelet aggregation, platelet-activating factor (PAF) has been shown to be involved in a wide variety of inflammatory and allergic disease states. Many pharmacological studies in the 1980s and 1990s also showed that PAF induces endothelium-dependent vascular relaxation and contraction of various smooth muscles (SMs), including those in the airway, gastrointestinal organs, and uterus. However, since the late 1990s, there have been few reports on the SM contractions induced by PAF. The lower urinary tract (LUT), particularly the urinary bladder (UB) has attracted recent attention in SM pharmacology research because patients with LUT dysfunctions including overactive bladder are increasing as the population ages. In addition, recent clinical studies have implicated the substantial role of PAF in the inflammatory state in LUT because its production increases with smoking and with cancer. However, the effects of PAF on mechanical activities of LUT SMs including UBSM have not been investigated to date. Recently, we found that PAF very strongly increased mechanical activities of UBSM in guinea pigs and mice, and partly elucidated the possible mechanisms underlying these actions of PAF. In this review, we describe the effects of PAF on LUT SMs by introducing our recent findings obtained in isolated UBSMs and discuss the physiological and pathophysiological significance. We also introduce our data showing the effects of PAF on the SM mechanical activities of genital tissues (prostate and vas deferens).