Original Event Research Articles

Adversarial Attack for Asynchronous Event-Based Data

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial examples that are carefully designed to cause the deep learning model to make mistakes. Adversarial examples of 2D images and 3D point clouds have been extensively studied, but studies on event-based data are limited. Event-based data can be an alternative to a 2D image under high-speed movements, such as autonomous driving. However, the given adversarial events make the current deep learning model vulnerable to safety issues. In this work, we generate adversarial examples and then train the robust models for event-based data, for the first time. Our algorithm shifts the time of the original events and generates additional adversarial events. Additional adversarial events are generated in two stages. First, null events are added to the event-based data to generate additional adversarial events. The perturbation size can be controlled with the number of null events. Second, the location and time of additional adversarial events are set to mislead DNNs in a gradient-based attack. Our algorithm achieves an attack success rate of 97.95% on the N-Caltech101 dataset. Furthermore, the adversarial training model improves robustness on the adversarial event data compared to the original model.

A recursive matched-filter to systematically explore volcanic long-period earthquake swarms

SummaryThe matched-filter technique is an effective way to detect repeats, or near-repeats, of a seismic source, but prior identification of an event from that source to use as a template is required. We propose a recursive matched-filter approach to systematically explore earthquake swarms, here applied to a swarm of volcanic long-period seismicity beneath Mount Sidley in Antarctica. We start with a single visually chosen template event with a high signal-to-noise ratio. We then extend our template database by selecting new templates to use in a subsequent matched-filter search from the newly detected set of events, allowing us to recursively expand the number of templates. We demonstrate that each iteration of the matched-filter search progressively extends the spatial coverage of our set of templates away from the original template event. In such a way, our proposed method overcomes the matched-filter search’s strictest constraint: that an event must already be identified to detect other similar events. Our recursive matched-filtering approach is well suited for the systematic exploration of earthquake swarms in both volcanic and tectonic contexts.

Abstract 6312: The adverse events atlas, towards a strategy to predict synergistic adverse events of combination therapies

Abstract The current gold-standard of estimating adverse events of a drug are clinical trials. However, these trials fail to represent real-life practice where patients have additional diseases (comorbidities) and commonly use numerous drugs when entering the clinic. Therefore, there is a rise of interest in combinational therapies, also because effective combinations are expected to prevent therapy resistance. At this moment it is not feasible to predict the adverse events of new combination therapies due to lack of available information both from a dimensionality (i.e., number of adverse events recorded per patient) as well as from a patient-number perspective. When available, this information allows to choose combinational therapies with acceptable adverse events. In this study we developed a preliminary method to predict adverse events of drug combinations in order to select combinations with a mild adverse event profile. We used the FAERS, an FDA post-marketing adverse events registry as data source containing 15 million adverse-event records. First, we developed a method to visualize the adverse events profiles of monotherapy and combination therapy using dimension reduction to accurately represent the relation between adverse events over many patients. These adverse-event profiles are then fed to a convolutional neural network (CNN) to generate an explainable prediction-model for adverse events occurring in combination therapies. The CNN trained on monotherapy is able to learn from the data and recognize adverse event patterns. The learned pattern information, as stored in the so-called latent space, can be converted back onto the original adverse event profiles. This showed a high similarity to the original data, also for unseen combination therapy effects. Furthermore, a t-SNE analysis on the latent space of the CNN is able to separate additive and synergistic adverse event patterns in combination therapy. Our CNN model can successfully learn complex adverse-event patterns for single drugs and their combinations, which are all encoded in the latent space. The developed method is therefore applicable to determine the combinatorial effects of highly complex adverse event profiles. Citation Format: Asli Kucukosmanoglu, Silvia Scoarta, Thomas Wijnands, George Kanev, Bart Westerman, Bert Kiewit, David Noske, Tom Wurdinger. The adverse events atlas, towards a strategy to predict synergistic adverse events of combination therapies [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2022; 2022 Apr 8-13. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2022;82(12_Suppl):Abstract nr 6312.

Repräsentation und Reenactment. Spätmittelalterliche Frömmigkeit verstehen by Volker Leppin

Reviewed by: Repräsentation und Reenactment. Spätmittelalterliche Frömmigkeit verstehen by Volker Leppin Robert Kolb Repräsentation und Reenactment. Spätmittelalterliche Frömmigkeit verstehen. By Volker Leppin. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021. x + 272 pp. Volker Leppin recently moved from the University of Tübingen to Yale Divinity School and is shifting his research focus from Reformation studies to the Middle Ages, reversing both the [End Page 196] geographical and thematic journeys of Heiko Oberman (who, of course, left Harvard for Tübingen, then later returned to the U.S.) a generation ago. Leppin has been one of the most sensitive advocates for accenting the continuities of medieval church life and thought with the Reformation while at the same time identifying what made Luther Luther and not just one more late medieval professor. In this volume he lays the groundwork for further assessment of an oft-neglected aspect integral to Luther's understanding of history and time although this study analyzes only late medieval ecclesiastical life. This book focuses on late medieval thought at both the theological and the popular levels. It examines thinking on the relationship of the past and the present within the framework of the presence of the Transcendent in the midst of life on earth. Recent discussions of representation and reenactment provide a fresh angle for the interpretation that Leppin and Berndt Hamm have pursued concerning attempts to bring the distant God of heaven nearer to the daily life of fifteenth-century German believers struggling with the challenges of their world. Various modes of representation of God's past actions transmitted his presence into the lives of the faithful, and reenactment of key elements in the story of salvation drew these believers into God's past actions as those actions affected them in their own day. The relationship between heaven and earth in ancient and in present contexts was mediated and actualized through the dramatic reenactment of Christ's suffering and death in passion plays and through altar pieces and their relics that sought to cross the divide between the historical then of the lives of Christ or the saints and the contemporary now. Pious exercises of many kinds also heightened the sense that the suffering Christ shared the miseries of medieval believers and provided relief. Pilgrimages ushered the faithful into spaces distinct from everyday life and into a variety of sacred realms. Such holy spaces provided ways of remembering the past and appropriating the benefits of holy people gone before. Especially the signs of the sacraments provided liturgical reenactment that aimed to re-present events of the past and abolish the distance between the original event and the contemporary participants who were drawn [End Page 197] into it through this re-presentation. For example, the sacrament of penance associated penitents with the sinners, Adam and Eve, just as these primeval parents embodied the penance performed by the pious of the fifteenth century. Its practice featured ever-increasing use of indulgences; the church responded to its crisis of pastoral care with ever more imaginative presentation and pricing of the satisfactions that delivered relief from purgatory. Above all, the Mass functioned as a reenactment of the crucifixion of Jesus. The allegorical method of biblical interpretation facilitated this bridging of past and present (17–19). Leppin demonstrates that concepts of God's presence in daily life played an essential role in the piety of the period, and he shows how artistic and liturgical vehicles (from altarpieces, relics, and shrines, to sacramental actions) transported believers back to events fifteen hundred years earlier. Such objects and activities conveyed those events into the village church, into the interactions of Christian folk with the sacred places and practices of their own environment and way of life. With incense for the nose, bread for the tongue, liturgical garments and drama for the eye, and the chanting of the liturgy as well as the reading of texts from Scripture and the lives of the saints for the ear, the presence of God invaded the individual believer's consciousness and suspended the actual historical gap of a millennium and a half, drawing Christians into participation in the sacred activities of the Savior and the...

The Persistence of Violence: Colombian Popular Culture by Toby Miller

Reviewed by: The Persistence of Violence: Colombian Popular Culture by Toby Miller Ligia S. Aldana Miller, Toby. The Persistence of Violence: Colombian Popular Culture. Rutgers UP, 2020. 223 pp. Through the analysis of four main themes—football, tourism, journalism, and the environment—Toby Miller and coauthors Alfredo Sabbagh Fajardo, Olga Lucía Sorzano, Anamaría Tamayo-Duque, Marta Milena Barrios, and Jesús Arroyave examine violence and its tenacious presence in Colombia's popular culture, pointing to the country's paradoxical situation: a perceived proclivity towards violence in Latin America's oldest democracy. Miller frames the text following Gabriel García Márquez's series of proposed dualisms regarding the country's reality and aligns each chapter's critical objectives with the writer's assessment of the Colombian worldview. Many scholars both in Colombia and [End Page 314] abroad have attempted and continue to hack at the mammoth task of explaining Colombia's situation, derived from the violence that has come to define the country. Miller's text succeeds in the process. The triumph of the book's critical enterprise is tied to the connections it proposes between various elements that effectively come together to prove its argument: War, and the capitalist system that generates it, rests at the core of Colombia's violent reality. In his introduction, Miller offers an encompassing summary of the role violence has played in Colombia by examining the country's history. To that effect, Miller points to the massacre of the Muisca people in the sixteenth century during Spain's invasion and colonization as the original violent event. Miller then moves to the realm of culture to show how politics are reflected in language, as illustrated in idiomatic expressions that exemplify how rampant corruption is in the country: "Hecha la ley, hecha la trampa" (When you pass a law, you create a loophole) (3), an adage that resurfaces in each chapter explicitly or implicitly. Miller argues for a multidirectional definition of violence and underlines its causes—arriving at war, and the "warfare/welfare mentality" (10)—and proposes that violence needs to be examined from a gendered perspective, given the perverseness of a "male militarism" (12) that breathes war. Chapter One (authored by Miller and Sabbagh Fajardo) is a well-researched examination of the alignment of football with militarism and drug trafficking and their place in the universe of the national popular. The effort in this chapter is to expose football, and by association the creative and recreational industries, as tools of para-states to dominate the masses and keep the State in check. The chapter delves into the period from the 1980s through the '90s, when the strengthening of guerrilla and paramilitary forces—and the consolidation of the narcotraficantes/mafia—emerged as the pillars of parapolitics, coopting football as a vehicle to display power and control on the national and international stages. George Orwell's definition of sports as "war minus the shooting" (47) helps to underline the relationship between violence and imperialism This chapter also addresses hooligan culture and hypermasculinity to show how the football match becomes a stage for displaying masculine hubris in need of affirmation. As a result, there is no place for women in football, except in domestic violence statistics, which sharply increased during the World Cup. Ultimately, the text recognizes the important role football continues to play as a central part of Colombia's popular culture while it struggles to pull away from both real and symbolic violence (67). In Chapter Two (authored by Miller, Sorzano and Tamayo-Duque), tourism is the central theme. A clear choice in the study of the monetization of the Colombian cultural and physical landscape, the possibility of tourism to create a potential space for "an organic understanding between peoples, sans state interference" (68) is denounced by the authors as a central element of the current government's proposed economía naranja and as a driver of inequality. Fittingly, the city of Cartagena, a premier destination in the country and abroad, is the chapter's site of analysis. Miller and coauthors discuss the mechanisms utilized to monetize imperial grandeur and argue that tourism is a combination of the informal economy, romanticized/sexualized national imagery...

Neural signatures associated with temporal compression in the verbal retelling of past events

When we retell our past experiences, we aim to reproduce some version of the original events; this reproduced version is often temporally compressed relative to the original. However, it is currently unclear how this compression manifests in brain activity. One possibility is that a compressed retrieved memory manifests as a neural pattern which is more dissimilar to the original, relative to a more detailed or vivid memory. However, we argue that measuring raw dissimilarity alone is insufficient, as it confuses a variety of interesting and uninteresting changes. To address this problem, we examine brain pattern changes that are consistent across people. We show that temporal compression in individuals’ retelling of past events predicts systematic encoding-to-recall transformations in several higher associative regions. These findings elucidate how neural representations are not simply reactivated, but can also be transformed due to temporal compression during a universal form of human memory expression: verbal retelling.

A molecular phylogeny and phylogeography of Greek Aegean Island sand flies of the genus Phlebotomus (Diptera: Psychodidae)

The genus Phlebotomus (Diptera: Psychodidae: Phlebotominae) comprises a group of small winged insect species of medical importance. To date, ten species of Phlebotomus are known to be present in Greece; yet their evolutionary history is poorly studied due to the lack of comprehensive phylogenetic and phylogeographic studies. Herein, we aim to clarify the phylogenetic relationships amongst the local species collected from 12 Aegean Islands, Cyprus and Turkey; and to identify which of the palaeogeographic events may have influenced their biogeographic history. Our analyses revealed for the first time the presence of P. cf. major and P. sergenti in the Aegean Islands. All studied local species were retrieved as monophyletic and the mtDNA and nDNA phylogenetic trees indicated a plausible mitochondrial introgression between the closely related species of the P. major complex. From a palaeogeographic viewpoint, the major driving force that shaped the biogeographic history of the studied Phlebotomus species seems to be the dispersal that started in the Oligocene epoch, followed by several speciation events that occurred at the end of Miocene and the Plio-Pleistocene, including multiple dispersal events of Asiatic origin. The Messinian Salinity Crisis, the bimodal Mediterranean climate, and the glacial and interglacial periods were identified as key drivers for the diversification of the local species of Phlebotomus.

Protests in Postwar Societies: Grievances and Contentious Collective Action in Kosovo

AbstractMost research on protests has been conducted in peaceful societies, whereas we know far less about contentious collective action in postwar contexts. To fill this gap, we offer a theory that perceived ethnic grievances related to group security and group status are particularly likely to generate protest mobilization in postwar societies. To test this theory and alternative hypotheses, we investigate trends in protest behavior in postwar Kosovo using an original protest event dataset and existing survey data. We find that protest behavior in postwar Kosovo is significantly shaped by perceived ethnic grievances: the majority of protest grievances center around group security and group status concerns. Protests about economic justice or good governance demands are significantly rarer. Using data from existing surveys, we also investigate the determinants of variation in individual protest participation. Our analysis reveals that perceived ethnic discrimination is strongly associated with individual protest participation in Kosovo.

An Integral Emergency Alert System for Mexico

Mexico is a country prone to catastrophic events of seismic, vulcanological or meteorological origin, among others. For this reason, many organizations monitor in Mexico different areas to prevent catastrophes. The Emergency Alert Systems (EAS) advise about the advent of a possible catastrophic event to the population in general. This paper explores the EAS in Mexico in order to propose improvements. First, the characteristics of the existing Emergency Alert Systems in México are evaluated. As the broadcasting have traditionally been the main alert media for the population, the coverage of radio and television is studied in order to know whether it is enough to cover all the country. Finally, a new integral Emergency Alert System covering all the country is proposed.

SEISMIC MONITORING OF THE COAL MINING AREA ON SAKHALIN ISLAND USING TEMPORARY NETWORKS OF THE FRS GS RAS

In April – May 2021, in the Khabarovsk Territory and Sakhalin Region in the Far East Federal District of the Russian Federation, the Federal Research Center "Geophysical Survey RAS" deployed temporary networks as a part of Large-Scale Research Facilities – continuous seismic monitoring of the Russian Federation, adjacent areas and the world. The deployment of new stations provided a reliable integration of real-time seismic data into a centralized monitoring system for the Sakhalin Region. The seismic study has been performed in the Uglegorsk District, Sakhalin Region, where the Solntsevsky brown coal deposit – the most potential on the island – is located. There were presented the data on seismic events of different origin recorded since the stations had been brought into service. Emphasis has been placed on considerable improvements in epicenter location accuracy and enhancing possibilities of determining earthquakes and industrial explosions. There are shown the results of monitoring for earthquake mechanism studies. The monitoring system that is currently available allows recording the representative earthquake events with ML≥0.5 in the immediate vicinity of coal mines, thus providing the possibility of improving control of blasting work and of weak and potential induced seismicity caused by multiple anthropogenic impacts on subsoil.

Molecular Phylogeny and Historical Biogeography of Goodyera R. Br. (Orchidaceae): A Case of the Vicariance Between East Asia and North America.

Understanding of intercontinental distribution in the Northern Hemisphere has attracted a lot of attention from botanists. However, although Orchidaceae is the largest group of angiosperms, biogeographical studies on the disjunctive pattern have not been sufficient for this family. Goodyera R. Br. (tribe Cranichideae, subfamily Orchidoideae, family Orchidaceae) is widely distributed in temperate and tropical regions. Although the phylogenetic relationship of Goodyera inferred from both morphological and molecular data has been conducted, the sampled taxa were mainly distributed in Asia regions that resulted in non-monophyly of this genus. In this study, the complete plastid genomes of Goodyera, generated by next-generation sequencing (NGS) technique and sampled in East Asia and North America, were used to reconstruct phylogeny and explore the historical biogeography. A total of 18 Goodyera species including seven newly sequenced species were analyzed. Based on 79 protein-coding genes, the phylogenetic analysis revealed that Goodyera could be subdivided into four subclades with high support values. The polyphyletic relationships among Goodyera taxa were confirmed, and the unclear position of G. foliosa was also resolved. The datasets that are composed of the 14 coding sequences (CDS) (matK, atpF, ndhK, accD, cemA, clpP, rpoA, rpl22, ndhF, ccsA, ndhD, ndhI, ndhA, and ycf 1) showed the same topology derived from 79 protein-coding genes. Molecular dating analyses revealed the origin of Goodyera in the mid-Miocene (15.75 Mya). Nearctic clade of Goodyera was diverged at 10.88 Mya from their most recent common ancestor (MRCA). The biogeographical reconstruction suggests that subtropical or tropical Asia is the origin of Goodyera and it has subsequently spread to temperate Asia during the Miocene. In addition, Nearctic clade is derived from East Asian species through Bering Land Bridge (BLB) during the Miocene. The speciation of Goodyera is most likely to have occurred during Miocene, and climatic and geological changes are thought to have had a part in this diversification. Our findings propose both origin and vicariance events of Goodyera for the first time and add an example for the biogeographical history of the Northern Hemisphere.

Protest and Electoral Breakthrough: Challenger Party-Movement Interactions in Germany

This paper studies party-movement interactions in Germany, focusing on Die Linke and the AfD, the two most recent additions to Germany’s multi-party system. The electoral rise of both challenger parties went along with mass protests, opposition to Hartz IV in the mid-2000s and anti-Islamic PEGIDA mobilisation in the mid-2010s. We shift the emphasis from how social movements turn into political parties, including significant organisational and personal overlap, to more indirect ways of how protest and electoral politics interact. Specifically, we identify a process composed of two interrelated mechanisms: an external politicisation spiral and an intra-party innovation spiral. We show how mass protest triggers both discursive shifts in the public sphere and internal strategic realignment, providing an opportunity for parties to ride the wave, secure their competitive advantages, and mobilise on the protestors’ grievances in the electoral arena. In such a way, challenger parties can take advantage of street protests even when they do not directly emerge from a movement. Methodologically, the article is based on a paired comparison, relying on survey data and an original protest event analysis that provides novel data on anti-Hartz IV and PEGIDA protest mobilisation in Germany.

S2Snet: deep learning for low molecular weight RNA identification with nanopore.

Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is a pivotal nucleic acid that plays a crucial role in regulating many biological activities. Recently, one study utilized a machine learning algorithm to automatically classify RNA structural events generated by a Mycobacterium smegmatis porin A nanopore trap. Although it can achieve desirable classification results, compared with deep learning (DL) methods, this classic machine learning requires domain knowledge to manually extract features, which is sophisticated, labor-intensive and time-consuming. Meanwhile, the generated original RNA structural events are not strictly equal in length, which is incompatible with the input requirements of DL models. To alleviate this issue, we propose a sequence-to-sequence (S2S) module that transforms the unequal length sequence (UELS) to the equal length sequence. Furthermore, to automatically extract features from the RNA structural events, we propose a sequence-to-sequence neural network based on DL. In addition, we add an attention mechanism to capture vital information for classification, such as dwell time and blockage amplitude. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis, the experimental results have achieved about a 2% performance increase (accuracy) compared to the previous method. The proposed method can also be applied to other nanopore platforms, such as the famous Oxford nanopore. It is worth noting that the proposed method is not only aimed at pursuing state-of-the-art performance but also provides an overall idea to process nanopore data with UELS.

Reconstructing the Uncertain Past: Cracked Docudramas That Question Their Own Authority

Reconstructing the Uncertain Past: Cracked Docudramas That Question Their Own Authority

Fluid Inclusion, Isotopic, and Elemental Geochemistry Studies of Cave-Filling Calcite in the Lower–Middle Ordovician Yingshan Formation of Tahe Oilfield, NW China: Implication for Karstification in Non-exposed Limestone

Improving the recognition of paleo-fluid circulation history is of great significance to reconstruct pore evolution during carbonate diagenesis. Integrated petrography, fluid inclusion, isotopic and elemental geochemistry (laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry) studies, calcites generated in paleocaves, and fractures were investigated. This study aims to reveal the paleo-fluid origin and karstification event within the nonexposed limestone of the Lower–Middle Ordovician Yingshan Formation in the Tarim Basin. The only generation of blocky calcite growing along the karst paleocave and fracture walls [cave-filling calcite (CFC)] crosscuts burial stylolites. The secondary fluid inclusions obtained from CFC are characterized by the coexistence of liquid-only and liquid-dominated aqueous inclusions with low salinities values (0–2.4 wt%), suggesting that the CFC has experienced a low-temperature environment (<50°C). The depleted δ18O values (−15.32‰ to 12.45‰), seawater-like yttrium and rare earth element patterns, and low ΣREE (<0.65 ppm) have recorded the major episode of meteoric water leaching the Yingshan limestone. This view was further confirmed by the calculated δ18Owater values of parent fluids (−14.3‰ to 2.2‰). The relatively higher 87Sr/86Sr ratios (0.70942–0.70994) are interpreted as the result of meteoric water interacting with the overlying Silurian detrital rock when percolated downward. The geochemical evidence recorded by CFC indicates that the karstification event for Yingshan nonexposed limestone possibly took place in the Early Hercynian period during the late Devonian. Therefore, meteoric water percolating downward along the fractures penetrating insoluble strata and/or migrating laterally along the permeable strata is deemed responsible for the karstification event, although the overlying thick insoluble strata in the coverage area.

Hydrological modeling of hydrographic basin in the northeast semiarid region of Brazil

The use of hydrological models allows to understand, evaluate and anticipate events of natural or man-made origin in a simpler and more economical way for the quantity and quality of resources in a hydrographic basin. The present work aims to perform a hydrological modeling in the hydrographic basin in the semiarid, using the SWAT model, to verify the influence of the use and exploitation of water production on the land. For this, the SWAT hydrological model (Soil Water Assessment Tool) was used. A study area located in the Jacaré Curitiba Basin, in Poço Redondo-SE, a semi-arid region of the state, inserted in the Caatinga biome and in the lower São Francisco. The adopted methodology was used for bibliographic survey, field work, hydrological monitoring, chemical and physical medicine of soil and soil, survey of land use and exploration, calibration and validation of hydrological model. The SWAT model successfully simulated or hydrographed the flow for the period from Nov/2015 to Jul/2018, duly calibrated and validated. As simulations of different land use scenarios, the greatest production of water in agricultural areas stands out, which can cause greater generation of sediments. The calibrated and validated SWAT model means a possibility for future studies in non-semiarid watersheds and then contributes to studies on water and soil management.

A Single-Health System Case Series of New-Onset CNS Inflammatory Disorders Temporally Associated With mRNA-Based SARS-CoV-2 Vaccines.

BackgroundSince 2020, over 250 million doses of mRNA-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccines have been administered in the United States and hundreds of millions worldwide between the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. To date, there have been rare reports associating mRNA-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccines with episodes of inflammatory and autoimmune CNS disorders. We report a case series of five patients with new-onset neurological disorders of inflammatory or immunological origin temporally associated with these vaccines.MethodsA case-series of five patients within a single 23-hospital health system who developed new-onset CNS inflammatory disease within 2 weeks of receiving a dose of an mRNA-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccine.ResultsFive cases of post-vaccination CNS disorders of immune origin (fatal ADEM; n = 1, new-onset NMOSD; n = 2, new-clinical onset MS-like syndrome but with preexisting clinically silent mild demyelination; n = 1, meningoencephalitis; n = 1) observed within 2 weeks of inoculation with either the first or second dose of mRNA-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccines (Moderna = 3, Pfizer = 2).DiscussionTo our knowledge, these are among the emerging cases of CNS adverse events of immunological or inflammatory origin. These findings should be interpreted with great caution as they neither prove a mechanistic link nor imply a potential long-term increased risk in post-vaccination CNS autoimmunity. Larger prospective studies assessing the potential association between mRNA-based vaccination and the development of neurological adverse events of suspected immune origin, particularly among those with underlying CNS or systemic autoimmune disorders, are needed. The use of mRNA-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccines should continue to be strongly encouraged given their high efficacy in overcoming this pandemic.

Crystal structure and molecular mechanism of an E/F type bilin lyase-isomerase

Chromophore attachment of the light-harvesting apparatus represents one of the most important post-translational modifications in photosynthetic cyanobacteria. Extensive pigment diversity of cyanobacteria critically depends on bilin lyases that covalently attach chemically distinct chromophores to phycobiliproteins. However, how bilin lyases catalyze bilin ligation reactions and how some lyases acquire additional isomerase abilities remain elusive at the molecular level. Here, we report the crystal structure of a representative bilin lyase-isomerase MpeQ. This structure has revealed a "question-mark" protein architecture that unambiguously establishes the active site conserved among the E/F-type bilin lyases. Based on structural, mutational, and modeling data, we demonstrate that stereoselectivity of the active site plays a critical role in conferring the isomerase activity of MpeQ. We further advance a tyrosine-mediated reaction scheme unifying different types of bilin lyases. These results suggest that lyases and isomerase actions of bilin lyases arise from two coupled molecular events of distinct origin.

The Lord Mayor's Show for 1621 and 2021: Reconstructing a Triumph

In October 2021, the Beyond Shakespeare group performed the text of Thomas Middleton's Lord Mayor's Show of 1621, The Sun in Aries, at Bow Church in London's Cheapside. Lasting about half an hour, as opposed to the original all-day event, it featured music, child and adult performers, and minimal visual effects. The experiment showed that actors’ voices can be effective even in outdoor spaces (though less effective than music), but also that much of their language is unintelligible without its context. This, then, is what future experiments should attempt to provide.

A tale of two campaigns: understanding the role of short-term political context in Czech and Slovak counter/mobilizing on migration

ABSTRACT This paper explores protest mobilizations related to the 2015 migrant crisis in the post-communist Czech Republic and Slovakia. Despite dominating anti-refugee sentiments and similar historical and political background in the two countries, the mobilization patterns were fairly different in both scale and organization of migration-related mobilizations. To systematically explore and account for these variances, we investigate the short-term political conditions, focusing on 1) key features of the national political environment – discursive opportunities and political space, and 2) movement/countermovement dynamics. We build on the original protest event data during the most intense protests over migration in 2015. We show how a different political space and a different extent of openness of discursive opportunities in the Czech Republic and Slovakia and interactions between the anti-refugee movement and the solidarity countermovement played an important role in the timing and scale of protests and their organizers.