Light Streaks Research Articles

Negative and positive dysphotopsia

Dysphotopsia are responsible for complaints of that small percentage of pseudophakic subjects who are not satisfied with their vision. They are divided into negative and positive. Positive dysphotopsia (PD) are described by patients as glare, light streaks, light arcs, flashes of light, and starbursts produced by an external light source, whereas negative dysphotopsia (ND) is a dark temporal peripheral arc‐shaped shadow or line.PD are related to the nature of the inserted intraocular lens (IOL). The incidence rate of PD at 1 year after cataract surgery is 0.2–2.2%, and there have been no reports of PD in intraocular surgeries other than cataract surgery to date. The cause of ND is unknown, and many concepts trying to explain its pathophysiology were proposed, including a small pupil, an axial space behind the iris, and a sharp optic edge, the increased angle kappa, the nasal location of the pupil relative to the optical axis, with in‐the‐bag IOLs (and not in ciliary sulcus‐, anterior chamber‐, or scleral suture‐fixated IOLs), and a correlation with coverage of the anterior capsule edge, interaction between the anterior capsulorhexis with the intraocular lens, shorter eyes and a higher implanted IOL power, position of the haptic, and neuroadaptive component.

Dysphotopsias or Unwanted Visual Phenomena after Cataract Surgery.

Dysphotopsias are unwanted visual phenomena that occur after cataract surgery. They represent some of the most common reasons for patient dissatisfaction after uncomplicated surgery for cataract phacoemulsification with in-the-bag intraocular lens (IOL) implantation. Depending on the form of the optical phenomenon and the effect it poses on vision, dysphotopsias are divided into positive and negative type. Positive dysphotopsias are usually described by patients as glare, light streaks, starbursts, light arcs, rings, haloes, or flashes of light. Negative dysphotopsias are manifested as an arc-shaped shadow or line usually located in the temporal part of the visual field, similar to a temporal scotoma. In addition to their different clinical manifestations, positive and negative dysphotopsia also have different risk factors. Even though up to 67% of patients may experience positive dysphotopsia immediately after surgery, only 2.2% of the cases have persistent symptoms up to a year postoperatively. Surgical intervention may be indicated in 0.07% of cases. The incidence of negative dysphotopsias is up to 26% of all patients; however, by one year postoperatively, the symptoms usually persist in 0.13 to 3% of patients. For both types of dysphotopsia, preoperative patients' education, accurate preoperative diagnostics, and use of an appropriate IOL design and material is mandatory. Despite all these measures, dysphotopsias may occur, and when noninvasive measures fail to improve symptoms, a surgical approach may be considered.

Prototype of automatic satellite streak detection, identification and initial orbit determination pipeline from optical observation

We present a working prototype of automatic satellite streak detection, identification and initial orbit determination pipeline from optical telescope images based on python. The pipeline process calibrated and plate-solved astronomical images in fits format. We utilized Hough transform-based feature detection to detect the light streaks and extract the equatorial position based on the image header information. The streaks were then identified by comparing their center position with the calculated SGP4 based satellite position from available TLE data. The corresponding initial orbit is calculated by utilizing the Laplacian method by interpolating the streak position and time. We test the pipeline by using 85 blind-survey 10 cm telescope images around the celestial equator. The pipeline correctly detects 123 lines with 0.85 sensitivity, automatically identify 92 detected satellites unambiguously and determine the initial orbit of 118 streaks.

Handling Outliers by Robust M-Estimation in Blind Image Deblurring

The major task of traditional motion deblurring methods is to estimate the blur kernel and restore the latent image. In low-light conditions, the pointolite is likely to produce saturated light streaks in captured blurred images. The light streaks are usually double-edged swords—outliers to the deconvolution, but a cue to kernel estimation. In this paper, we propose a novel blind motion deblurring method for blurred images including light streaks. The main idea is to model the non-linear blur caused by outliers as the Huber's M-estimation in blind deconvolution and take the shape of the light streak as a cue to estimate the blur kernel. Specifically, the optimal light streak patch is selected automatically according to the characteristics of light streaks and the blur kernel. This simple yet effective selection strategy solves the problems of false detection of candidate light streaks and optimal light streak in existing methods. Then, the optimal light streak patch is parameterized as a prior and is combined with other regularizers to estimate the blur kernel. Compared with the state-of-the-art kernel estimation methods, the proposed algorithm reduces the influence of outliers on deconvolution and utilizes more information. Thus, the restored image is more accurate. Experimental results on both synthetic and real images demonstrate the high accuracy of our algorithm.

Description of a xanthochroic House Finch (Haemorhous mexicanus) from Jalisco, Mexico

Plumage coloration is important to birds for communication, camouflage, physiological processes, and mate selection. In rare individuals the coloration is disrupted, which provides opportunities to scrutinize the processes that normally produce it. Male House Finches (Haemorhous mexicanus) normally sport a red head and chest, a brown back, and whitish underparts with light brown streaks. We captured a House Finch with disruptions in both melanin and carotenoid pigmentation in an urban park in Guadalajara, a city in west-central Mexico. The bird was largely orange with little eumelanin pigmentation. This is the first record of which we are aware of a hypomelanistic House Finch with carotenoids that are abnormally distributed and with an overexpression of carotenoid pigments or pheomelanins or both.

A Thousand Natural Shocks: Selected Stories by Richard Burgin

Reviewed by: A Thousand Natural Shocks: Selected Stories by Richard Burgin Frank Wilson (bio) Richard Burgin, A Thousand Natural Shocks: Selected Stories (Goliad Press, 2018), 412 pp. Whether it be Katherine Anne Porter or John Cheever, O. Henry or John O'Hara, the best short story writers have one thing in common: The stories they write are the kind only they write. What accounts for this is the singular voice of the storyteller. If we regard the novella as the short story writer's long form, then the opening sentence of Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider can be said to demonstrate this: "Her heart was a stone lying upon her breast outside of her; her pulses lagged and paused, and she knew that something strange was going to happen, even as the early morning winds were cool through the lattice, the streaks of light were dark blue and the whole house was snoring in its sleep." Now consider this opening paragraph of Richard Burgin's story "The Spirit of New York": I scare people, usually women, I admit. I don't hurt them, or even wish to; I simply jump out at them, or suddenly appear from a corner or doorway or from behind a parked car or tree. After they gasp or scream I apologize profusely and try to calm them down. I do it so they think it could have been an accident. Almost immediately I feel remorse and hope they forgive me, but it's also true I feel tremendous pleasure. Porter's sentence and Burgin's paragraph are completely unalike except for one thing: The tone of the telling compels one to keep on reading. The 25 stories gathered in A Thousand Natural Shocks: Selected Stories by Richard Burgin provide ample evidence that Burgin deserves to be numbered among the masters of the short story. Together they offer an interior view of contemporary life, since what the stories are mostly about is what [End Page 302] is going on inside the heads of the protagonists. "The Urn" is told in the second person. Barry's mother has recently died and left him a fortune. He goes to London and then Madrid, where he begins carrying the urn bearing his mother's ashes around with him, "in part to share what was beautiful in the city, in part just for the company." That's when the second-person singular kicks in: You remember that you started talking to yourself in your mind, then, the way you are now in New York, never calling yourself "Barry" but addressing yourself in the second person instead. Between talking to yourself and talking to your mother it got pretty complicated sometimes. . . . You were afraid to be away from the urn . . . and carried it everywhere with you, once even to a bar. Then you worried that you'd drink too much and leave it in the bar or else on the metro. This is all passing strange, of course, and things get stranger and scarier as the story continues, but Barry's quasi-rational matter-of-factness will proceed at an even tempo throughout, which makes everything just creepier. Speaking of creepy, Barry reappears in Burgin's novel Rivers Last Longer, where he malevolently blossoms into probably the creepiest character in American fiction since Charles Anthony Bruno in Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train. Not all of the stories are grim or weird. "Vivian and Sid in Maui" is a quirkily touching tale of the love that bonds the title characters in spite of their differences—as Vivian puts it, Sid is "a kind of permanent nontenured lecturer at the same university in Boston where I got tenure nine years ago." And "Caesar" moves from an angry encounter with a cab driver to a scary encounter in a hotel room to an act of charity that leaves the title character feeling "good . . . in a peaceful sort of way, like sitting next to a fireplace would feel, he imagined, where your thoughts finally settle and slowly melt"—a consummation devoutly wished, it would seem, by many of Burgin's characters. All of the stories are grounded in the insight that many...

Morphological Characterization of Diaphragm in Common Squirrel Monkey (Saimiri sciureus).

The wall of the diaphragm can be affected by congenital or acquired alterations which allow the passage of viscera between the abdominal and chest cavities, allowing the formation of a diaphragmatic hernia. We characterized morphology and performed biometrics of the diaphragm in the common squirrel monkey Saimiri sciureus. After fixation, muscle fragments were collected and processed for optical microscopy. In this species the diaphragm muscle is attached to the lung by phrenopericardial ligament. It is also connected to the liver via the coronary and falciform ligaments. The muscle is composed of three segments in total: 1) sternal; 2) costal, and 3) a segment consisting of right and left diaphragmatic pillars. The anatomical structures analyzed were similar to those reported for other mammals. Histological analysis revealed stable, organized muscle fibers with alternation of light and dark streaks, indicating transverse striation.

Observations of a streak texture in the hybrid-aligned smectic-C phase.

A novel structure was observed below the smectic-A-smectic-C phase transition in a very thin open cell having an air interface above and enforced planar anchoring at the substrate below. The structure appears as periodic dark and light streaks running perpendicular to the oily streaks, which are present in the smectic-A phase [D. Coursault et al., Soft Matter, 2016, 12, 678]. These new streaks, which we call "soapy streaks", form by extending from one oily streak to the next in discrete steps, eliminating optical evidence at visible wavelengths of the oily streaks. At lower temperatures the streaks can undulate and exhibit a sawtooth-like structure; such a structure is chiral in two dimensions. A possible scenario for the origin of these streaks is presented.

Deblurring Low-Light Images with Light Streaks

Images acquired in low-light conditions with handheld cameras are often blurry, so steady poses and long exposure time are required to alleviate this problem. Although significant advances have been made in image deblurring, state-of-the-art approaches often fail on low-light images, as a sufficient number of salient features cannot be extracted for blur kernel estimation. On the other hand, light streaks are common phenomena in low-light images that have not been extensively explored in existing approaches. In this work, we propose an algorithm that utilizes light streaks to facilitate deblurring low-light images. The light streaks, which commonly exist in the low-light blurry images, contain rich information regarding camera motion and blur kernels. A method is developed in this work to detect light streaks for kernel estimation. We introduce a non-linear blur model that explicitly takes light streaks and corresponding light sources into account, and pose them as constraints for estimating the blur kernel in an optimization framework. For practical applications, the proposed algorithm is extended to handle images undergoing non-uniform blur. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods on deblurring real-world low-light images.

Evaluation of ceramic marker for the treatment of ocular melanoma with proton therapy

BioMarc SecureTM, a fiducial marker with ceramic core (zirconium oxide) and carbon coating, was evaluated for use in the localization and alignment of ocular melanoma targets using proton pencil beam scanning (PBS). Measurements and Monte Carlo (MC) simulations were performed to estimate the dose attenuation behind the marker. Imaging tests were performed to evaluate the visibility of marker for x-ray based alignment. An anthropomorphic phantom with implanted fiducial marker was scanned to obtain two-dimensional kilo-voltage (kV) x-ray and three-dimensional computed tomographic (CT) images. For dose shadow measurements, an in-house phantom was constructed using solid water, Styrofoam and EBT3 gafchromic film. Dose attenuation behind the marker was measured at multiple depths and for three cardinal orientations: parallel, perpendicular, and transverse. The measurements were performed at the proton pencil beam gantry at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance Proton Therapy center. A beam model for pencil beam gantry was created in the validated MC simulation toolkit GATE (GEANT4 Applications for Tomographic Emission). MC simulations were set up to mimic the measurement geometry and dose attenuation behind the marker was studied for a single layer PBS beam. Additional simulations were performed in water using the clinical relevant spread out Bragg peak (SOBP) beam. Qualitative analysis of the planar kV images showed excellent visibility of marker. Reconstruction artifacts in the form of light and dark streaks were present on the CT images. The film and MC simulations showed significant dose attenuation behind the marker that worsened when marker was placed close to the distal edge. Dose shadows of up to 45% and range loss of up to 1.1 mm were seen behind the marker. The transverse marker orientation in the clinical SOBP beam showed dose reduction of up to 61% and range pull-back of 2.4 mm. The dose attenuation was found to be a function of marker orientation and location within the SOBP. The analysis showed that small volumes behind the marker can see severe under-dosing. This effect should be taken into account during the planning of treatment. Comparing the results of this study to published results for tantalum marker, the BioMarc Secure marker was found to be inferior due to its greater dose attenuation and extended dose shadow on larger underlying volume. Furthermore, its bigger physical size may mean more discomfort to patient.

Direct Self-Sustained Fragmentation Cascade of Reactive Droplets.

A traditional hand-held firework generates light streaks similar to branched pine needles, with ever smaller ramifications. These streaks are the trajectories of incandescent reactive liquid droplets bursting from a melted powder. We have uncovered the detailed sequence of events, which involve a chemical reaction with the oxygen of air, thermal decomposition of metastable compounds in the melt, gas bubble nucleation and bursting, liquid ligaments and droplets formation, all occurring in a sequential fashion. We have also evidenced a rare instance in nature of a spontaneous fragmentation process involving a direct cascade from big to smaller droplets. Here, the self-sustained direct cascade is shown to proceed over up to eight generations, with well-defined time and length scales, thus answering a century old question, and enriching, with a new example, the phenomenology of comminution.

Lake Surface Full of Clouds, and: Quiet, and: Two Robins in Summer

Lake Surface Full of Clouds, and: Quiet, and: Two Robins in Summer Joseph Duemer Note from the Editors: It is with sadness that we report the passing away of Joseph Duemer, at the age of 66, on June 27, 2017. Joe served as Poetry Editor of The Wallace Stevens Journal for twenty years, from 1990 to 2010. He was Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Clarkson University, where he had taught courses in creative writing, literature, popular music, and Buddhism. He published numerous books of poetry, including The Light of Common Day, Customs, Static, and Magical Thinking, and coedited Dog Music: Poetry about Dogs. His poems and criticism appeared in more than seventy-five literary journals. His latest volume of poetry, which he was preparing for publication under the title River with Birds, contains several poems that testify to Stevens’s inspiration on him. We have decided to start our usual selection of poems by reproducing three of these works in celebration of Joe’s poetic career and his longtime service to the Journal. We express our sincere condolences to Joe’s wife, Carole Mathey, and thank her for granting permission to publish the following poems. Lake Surface Full of Clouds In this July evening in the mountains the lake lies within its stone perimeter & light presses against its surface. Wind shapes it & clouds print their exact images on the water, moving. The scent of jack pine fills the air, & the cry of a phoebe, two long notes repeated: thing & song [End Page 278] in their wild fullness full. The world is plainspoken; full of evening light, it is there before me. I lack the perfect mind of an animal, such that I can see myself seeing this. I know myself. I have the stupid human trick of language & a bright penny in my pocket. The tyrant kingbird swerves kit-kit-kit out over the lake’s edge & glances down so that one imagines the lake bottom as conceived from flight. The geography of the lakebed flickers with bronze coins consisting of light & the teal transparency of old glass, the blue iridescence of a trout’s fin in the sunlit shallows swept by shadows. But there is no book of the world—not the night sky’s constellations nor another’s body that we touch with our open hands—neither book nor mirror. We must content ourselves in ourselves in our desolation with the print of a mink’s forepaws on brown sand— left there when [End Page 279] he bent to lick a few streaks of light from the tensed lake. Note: Previously published in American Literary Review; “Lake Surface Full of Clouds” was the winner of the journal’s annual award for best poem in 2012. Quiet “One grows used to the weather.” —Stevens, “The American Sublime” I have always lived here without knowing anything much about anything much, except this slanting light & mild weather, mostly sunny & lulling me to sleep I now see that the light on the bright island is not as I had thought, not without precedent. It has alwaysbeen an exile’slight, trembling. Quiet. Quiet. My phonemes obey the island’s laws of limited motion— short & clear & as careful as needles scoring birdsong on precise devices. Or they will buzz slightly & blur [End Page 280] into the damaged music of language. I have listened but for too long without attention. It has alwaysbeen an exile’slight, trembling. Quiet. Quiet. Light shifts, singing only empty space. A flicker of ultraviolet shivers in the night sky. It is as dry as these dry stalks & shadows of dry stalks askew in soil long given over to waiting—some fleck of water glinting on the faucet’s lip. That will be enough, or almost enough. Light shifts . . . It has alwaysbeen an exile’s light, tense & trembling. Quiet. Quiet. . . . a sharp breeze shifts direction, adjusting leaves & stirring unbroken branches. Waking, the weather veers predictably enough toward beauty (which must be acknowledged) & loneliness (now devoid of the sublime) but I drift in & out of [End Page 281] shadows cast by stately cumulus. Here I am. It has alwaysbeen an exile’slight, trembling. Quiet. Quiet...

Image deblurring based on light streak shape

Deblurring images captured from low-illumination conditions is a challenging task, because these images contain few useful structures for kernel estimation. However, these images usually contain some light streaks, which are beneficial for estimating the blur kernel. One of our key observations is that these light streaks can provide a good initial value for a nonconvex problem in kernel estimation. The other one is that they record the track of the blur kernel at the moment when images are taken. Therefore, we propose a new prior for kernel estimation based on light streaks in this paper. Moreover, in order to ensure the shape of the blur kernel to be similar to that of light streaks during the updating, a new method is proposed to refine the shape of light streaks. With the help of the refined shape, our kernel estimation process does not require heuristic coarse-to-fine strategy, which is widely used in image deblurring methods. Quantitative experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method. In addition, we also demonstrate that the proposed method can be applied to the existing deblurring methods to achieve better performance.

FIRST REPORT OF BEAN YELLOW MOSAIC VIRUS IN ALPINIA GALANGA IN INDIA

Alpinia galanga (family Zingiberaceae), commonly called greater galangal or blue ginger, is a rhizomatous herb distributed in various parts of India and throughout Southeast Asia. In a garden of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (New Delhi), 90% of the plants exhibited spindle-shaped yellow or light green streaks in the interveinal tissues and midribs. Based on symptoms and leaf dip preparations that revealed flexuous filamentous particle of ca. 750×12 nm, infection by the potyvirus Banana bract mosaic virus (BBrMV) was suspected. Antigen- coated plate (ACP)-ELISA with a general potyvirus antiserum (DSMZ, Germany) reacted positively, whereas there was no reaction with an antiserum to BBrMV raised at ICAR-National Research Centre for Banana (Tiruchirappalli). Total RNA extracted from symptomatic and healthy leaf tissues using a RNeasy plant mini kit (Qiagen, USA) was tested by RT-PCR, using Chen et al. (2001) degenerate potyvirus-specific primers that amplify a ca.1.7 kb fragment from the 3' genome end (FP: 5' GGNAAYAAYAGYGGNCARCC 3; RP: 5' GTTTTCCCAGTCACGAC(T)15 3’). A product of 1.649 kb was amplified from symptomatic but not from healthy plants, which was cloned and sequenced (GenBank accession No. KM198742), revealing 87-94% and 91-94% identity at the nucleotide and amino acid level, respectively, with Bean yellow mosaic virus (BYMV) isolates from various crops. In ACP- ELISA using a polyclonal antiserum to BYMV (NBPGR, New Delhi), 10 infected leaf samples tested positive, whereas healthy sample were negative. Thus, the symptoms observed in A. galanga, which resemble those elicited by BBrMV in A. purpurata in Hawaii (Wang et al., 2010) are caused by BYMV. To the best of our knowledge this is the first report of the natural occurrence of BYMV in A. galanga in India.

Sustainable Free: Lessons Learned from the Launch of a Free Service Supporting Publishing in Art History

Hilary Ballon and Mariet Westermann, writing about the struggles of publishing in art history noted that “It is a paradox of the digital revolution that it has never been easier to produce and circulate a reproductive image, and never harder to publish one.” If publishing in general is in crisis because of the seismic re-ordering in a digital world, the field of art history is the extreme tail of the spectrum; rights holders are accustomed to licensing image content for limited edition print runs. Given this particularly challenging corner of the publishing work, a project initiated by the Metropolitan Museum offers some hope of a collaborative way forward. What sociological re-engineering enabled progress on this problem? It is possible that there are other lessons here too, that might throw at least streaks of light on other process re-engineering provoked by digital innovation in publishing? This paper reviews how a leading repository of art (The Metropolitan Museum of Art) and a non-profit intermediary (ARTstor) created an alternative pathway to provide primary source content in support of image-intensive publishing. This venture is framed in the context of a publishing system moving toward greater freedom and an aim to bring about ever lower (or no) fees to readers.In general, providing academic content for free requires a re-structuring of a public release process – either of processed content or less processed content. To the extent that processing adds value, it might be worth paying for. This case study argues that there are places where community wide interests align, describes what it takes to keep them aligned, and explores what we did collectively to facilitate re-structuring. The conclusion explores whether there are lessons for open access publishing more generally in the example of cross-subsidization among mission (and not only marketing) driven organizations.

Flickering Light: A History of Neon by Christoph Ribbat (review)

Reviewed by: Flickering Light: A History of Neon by Christoph Ribbat David E. Nye (bio) Flickering Light: A History of Neon. By Christoph Ribbat, trans. Anthony Mathews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. 208. $30. A quarter-century ago I realized that there was no good scholarly study of neon lighting. Christoph Ribbat’s Flickering Light: A History of Neon begins to fill this gap, but a small-format book of 168 well-illustrated pages cannot be a definitive study. Ribbat is professor of American studies at the University of Paderborn and this work is a translation of Flackernde Moderne: Die Geschichte des Neonlichts (Franz Steiner Verlag, 2011). He provides good examples from Germany, Britain, and France, although the [End Page 502] focus remains on the United States. Ribbat is particularly interested in “writers, musicians and artists captivated by neon” who “mostly did not fall for the temptation of seeing the city as disembodied and post-human” but rather were concerned with “the losers of modernity, the underprivileged inhabitants of troubled inner-city areas.” If neon lights at first lent a sparkle to the central city, he argues, by 1940 “they became a symbol of urban decay” (p. 21). He is not concerned with the views or experiences of planners, lighting engineers, or electrical utilities, and one will learn little here about patents, zoning, regulation of neon, or the economics of different forms of lighting display. Such matters remain for future researchers. Ribbat briefly recounts William Ramsay’s discovery of the “noble gases” of argon, krypton, and neon, the spread of incandescent lighting in central cities, Georges Claude’s commercial development of neon lighting in Paris in 1910 and its dissemination around the world, the craftsmen who developed expertise in manufacturing the tubes, and the emergence of Times Square as the center of neon lighting (pp. 23–51). After establishing this historical background, he examines Chicago as a neon wilderness, where in the 1940s neon served novelist Nelson Algren “as a dramatic metaphor underlining the struggle for survival in the urban jungle” (p. 56). In contrast, artist László Moholy-Nagy saw Chicago’s urban space as a canvas for experimentation with visual effects and took night “photographs that recorded the visual chaos of the cityscape” in blurs and streaks of light that “were as frenetic as the city itself” (pp. 60–61). Yet during the 1950s, businesses turned away from neon to plastic signs. Neon became “a metaphor for the rusting, declining city” (p. 68), often identified with skid row, notably in John D. MacDonald’s The Neon Jungle (1953) and in Otto Preminger’s distorted film version of Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm (novel 1949; film 1955). In Las Vegas, however, neon enjoyed a renaissance, creating “an edgy, dynamic urban environment” where the “buildings themselves seemed to be shining, flashing, flickering” (p. 79). This rich material defies brief summary, as these brazen lights became the subject of novels (Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne), films, the new journalism (Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe), and Robert Venturi’s architecture classic, Learning from Las Vegas (1972). The next chapter, while it includes Austrian poetry, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), Harlem, and Jack Kerouac, focuses on Times Square and the artistic fascination with its erotic quality. Close contacts between different social strata are explored, for example in Denis Belloc’s 1991 French novel Néons or in Jane Dickson’s paintings. This was before multinationals retrofitted Times Square in the late 1980s, removing sex-related businesses and converting it into a family-friendly theme park. There followed nostalgia for “the disappearing ‘intensified’ city.” To exemplify this change, Ribbat cites Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner, which, he argues, “desexualizes the urban wilderness” (p. 119). [End Page 503] If only the short sections on neon in Asian cities (pp. 119–22) and in “the flickering DDR” (pp. 122–25) had been expanded into a study of how neon’s use and meaning vary from one culture to another. But this book says little about such differences. Accordingly, the chapters on neon in art (pp. 127–49) and as a subject of popular song (pp. 151–68) move from one artist...

First Nesting Information on the Enigmatic Black Bushbird (Neoctantes niger)

We present the first nesting information for the Black Bushbird (Neoctantes niger), an enigmatic and poorly known member of the family Thamnophilidae. A hanging bulky cup nest was found in September 2011, in the buffer zone of Manu National Park, Peru. The nest contained a single white egg with scattered dark maroon spots and light streaks and was being attended by a male. The general shape of the nest resembled the deep pouch-shaped nests of other antbirds (e.g., Hypocnemis, Myrmotherula) but with clear differences in overall dimensions, thickness and amount of nesting material. More information is needed on nest architecture and breeding behavior for the Black Bushbird and all of its possible close relatives.

Eugene O'Neill's Exorcism

Eugene O'Neill's <i>Exorcism</i>

Disease distribution and characterisation of a new macluravirus associated with chirke disease of large cardamom

AbstractLarge cardamom (Amomum subulatum), an important spice crop grown in eastern sub‐Himalayan mountains of India, is affected by a viral disease commonly known as ‘chirke’, which is characterised by light and dark green streaks on the leaf lamina. Although chirke has been known to affect large cardamom for over 50 years, its distribution in large cardamom growing regions and aetiology have remained unaddressed. In this study for the first time, distribution of chirke in the major large cardamom growing regions in India has been determined. North Sikkim and eastern region of Darjeeling hills were endemic region with average disease incidence of 19.2–35%, whereas, Mirik region of Darjeeling hills were free from the disease. Suckers, the commonly used planting material, were the major source for spread of the disease. The virus was sap transmissible to the popular large cardamom cultivars Golsey, Ramsey, Swaney and Varlangey and vectored by Rhopalosiphum maidis and Myzus persicae in a non‐persistent manner. Flexuous virus particles measuring 625–650 × 12.5 nm were observed consistently associated with the diseased samples. Polyclonal antiserum to the purified virus showed serological affinity with a macluravirus, cardamom mosaic virus (CdMV) associated with a similar disease known as katte disease of small cardamom (Elettaria cardamomum) occurring in southern India. The 3′ terminal genome sequence (1776 nucleotides) of the virus was determined, which revealed a close sequence identity and phylogenetic relationships with the members of the genus Macluravirus. The deduced amino acid sequence of putative coat protein (CP) gene showed maximum similarity of 65.7% with the CdMV. Phylogenetic analysis based on CP and 3′ UTR showed that the virus was closer to Alpinia mosaic virus, CdMV and Chinese yam necrotic mosaic virus subclade. The results suggest that the virus associated with the chirke disease of large cardamom is a new species under the genus Macluravirus in the family Potyviridae for which the name large cardamom chirke virus (LCCV) is proposed.

An unusual pattern of idiopathic choroidal folds

Choroidal folds are parallel grooves or striae in the fundus, which may be idiopathic or associated with a variety of conditions. They are seen ophthalmoscopically and on angiography as alternating light and dark streaks oriented horizontally at the posterior pole. Less commonly vertical, oblique, or irregular alignment may be seen. [1] We describe an unusual pattern of bilateral idiopathic choroidal folds present circumferentially around the posterior pole.