Precious Cargo Research Articles

Precious Cargo: The Role of Polymeric Nanoparticles in the Delivery of Covalent Drugs

Covalent drugs can offer significant advantages over non-covalent drugs in terms of pharmacodynamics (i.e., target-binding properties). However, the development of covalent drugs is sometimes hampered by pharmacokinetic limitations (e.g., low bioavailability, rapid metabolism and toxicity due to off-target binding). Polymeric nanoparticles offer a potential solution to these limitations. Delivering covalent drugs via polymeric nanoparticles provides myriad benefits in terms of drug solubility, permeability, lifetime, selectivity, controlled release and the opportunity for synergistic administration alongside other drugs. In this short review, we examine each of these benefits in turn, illustrated through multiple case studies.

Hadits-Hadits Tentang Pendidikan

Is very important in shaping the nature and character of man to be perfect man is education. Through education, be it family, school, or neighborhood, people can open mind for instance that there is nothing in the universe, there are a lot of science. From the start that there is in humanity itself up space that is difficult to reach by the senses and in the end thinking that the universe is the creator and owner.amongthe rule was one of a child's education should be noted that education in childhood that will affect the character of the child as an adult later. Education of children is not only done when they are still small. But, carried in the womb until he grew up. Hadith as part of the essential teachings of islam have so many precious cargo that can be used as a foothold in the education of children of this discourse. Therefore, the authors will describe some of the hadith related to the education of children.The purpose of this study was to examine and analyze verses relating to the concept of child education in the Qur'an and its implementation in the family. The research method used in this research is qualitative research through literature review using a maudhui interpretation approach. This study concludes that there are six terms for children in the Qur'an, including ghulam, walad, dzurriyah, ibn, tifl, and shabiy, each of which has a correlation with the concept of children's education. The concept of child education states that in educating children, parents are the first milestone in educating children, in this case the family plays an important role in the education process. In addition, in the concept of educating children there are also methods that must be considered. Among these methods are: 1) the exemplary method, 2) Habituation Method, 3) The method of advice, and 4) monitoring methods. This study recommends that more in-depth research and analysis be carried out with more applicable theories

A Tale of Two Port Cities. Al-Mahdiyya, Palermo, and the Timber Trade of the Medieval Mediterranean

Although the timber trade was essential in the tenth century to the global ambitions of the North African Fatimid Caliphate, environmental and political obstacles compelled the Fatimids to obtain most of their precious cargo from Sicily. This article discusses timber’s essential importance to the Fatimids and how they procured this commodity, shedding light on the historical developments that occurred at the ports of al-Mahdiyya and Palermo under the Fatimids as a result of continuous trade between Ifrīqiya and Sicily. Applying a multidisciplinary analysis of Fatimid chancellery documents, historical texts, material culture, environmental history, and history of art, this article considers the role of the timber trade in the urban development of these two port cities. Specifically, it looks closely at the direct role of Ustādh Jūdhar, a tenth-century Fatimid official, in the procurement of timber. The result is a nuanced picture of the complexities of trade in the medieval Islamic Mediterranean world.

Biomedicine in the COVID Age: Opportunities, Responses, and Challenges

According to one of the earliest definitions, biomedicine means “clinical medicine based on the principles of physiology and biochemistry.” Clinicians for quite some time preferred the use of the term medical research to describe what they considered the clinical findings pertaining to various issues related to clinical studies. Since the time when the basic molecules of life, deoxyribonucleic acids, were characterized and the genetic code elucidated, there has been great excitement, anticipation, and promise for the development of precision and personalized medicine. However, the progress has been considerably slow and at times disappointing. The unprecedented coronavirus disease created a worldwide panic and exposed all our weaknesses and unpreparedness. It also demonstrated a global demand for better public health infrastructure and preparedness to combat future pandemics. This unprecedented public health crisis acted as a great stimulus for putting together a concerted effort to develop vaccines. According to the experts, the time was right and within 48 hours after the information on the SARS-CoV-2 genome was posted, Moderna scientists had on paper a workable mRNA, which would code for the spike protein. The immune engineers at Moderna as well as BioNTech were able to put together a lipid nanoparticle delivery system for safe delivery of this precious cargo to the appropriate cells. Professor Cody Meissner at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston says, “It is absolutely astonishing that this happened [COVID Vaccine development] in such a short time—to me, it is equivalent to putting a person on the Moon.” It is indeed a great achievement, and it demonstrated the power of basic science and emerging technologies. The extraordinary success of mRNA vaccines has opened new avenues for mRNA-based therapies. mRNAs, siRNAs, and non-coding miRNAs will play a very important role as novel therapeutics soon. Furthermore, this success has acted as a catalyst for ongoing work on the use of small RNAs for therapeutic purposes. Having said that, I must say that there are a great many challenges that need to be addressed.

Precious Cargo: for Covid-19 Vaccines, the Global Supply Chain Delivers

Precious Cargo: for Covid-19 Vaccines, the Global Supply Chain Delivers

Toward “One Tulsa” (an excerpt)

Toward “One Tulsa” (an excerpt) by Hannibal B. Johnson A few short years ago, the touchstone phrases of what is widely considered to be the modern civil rights crusade—“Black lives matter.” “I can’t breathe.” “Say my name.”— did not resonate. In 2021 America, these phrases define the mission of advocates, activists, and allies aiming to expand social justice, transform law enforcement, and eradicate structural systemic racism. Tulsa’s historical racial trauma stands not in isolation, but as part of a long arc of oppression that has bedeviled Black Americans since our enslaved African ancestors arrived in the English colonies at Point Comfort, Virginia, in 1619. We can imagine those individuals—precious cargo on cramped slave ships—crying out in vain: “Black lives matter.” “I can’t breathe.” “Say my name.” Tulsa, 1921, is an arbitrary midpoint on the arc of oppression, somewhere between slavery and Freedom Summer. That long-ago fiery demise of Tulsa’s Black community revealed much about the trajectory of race relations in America. Connect the dots. The volatile ingredients that set Tulsa alight—white supremacy, ignorance, and fear—endure and threaten to ignite a national conflagration. Our cultural competence, individually and collectively, and our capacity to diffuse the landmines that mark our history around race will be our most reliable firewall . Diversity and the related concepts of equity and inclusion rest on the fundamental proposition that our shared humanity matters more than that which might otherwise separate and divide us. Editorial note: The full text of Johnson’s essay appears in the spring 2021 issue of Oklahoma Humanities. Visit www.okhumanities.org to read it. A Tulsa native and graduate of Harvard Law School, Hannibal B. Johnson is an attorney, author, and consultant. His latest book is Black Wall Street 100: An American City Grapples with Its Historical Racial Trauma (2020). He will deliver one of the plenary talks for “Reflecting on the Past, Facing the Future,” OU’s symposium devoted to the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre, on April 8–9. reason to be there. I realize now they only wanted to look. Something in me possessed me to look, too. No one in the car ever wanted to talk about the slope. I brought up Fiddler’s brother a couple of times, but the conversation went nowhere. After a few years, I pushed the idea of the photo existing out of my mind, moved across the country for college. No proof existed. But part of me knew, crossing under the overpass, slung low in the back seat, that the kids we passed on those drives—the legs, and necks, and hands that I caught pieces of—didn’t have relatives because of mine. Laurel’s street was still except for the swift rain beating down steadily against the Chrysler’s rooftop. Her house was a fixer-upper with a sagging porch. But her block was lined with beautiful single-family homes, more dignified than the housing where we grew up. I felt a sickness return to my stomach. For the first time that day, I thought of the work I was missing. And Ma. Sitting in my car, with the rain striking down, I started thinking. My grandfather in his work pants, crushed with dirt. His smile hollow and endless. His sea-green eyes, something like mine. I saw him every time I went to sleep. Sometimes I imagined the men behind him with their shovels and heard them whistling in the photo. Other times I saw my fingers smudging the prints. Since the funeral, my dreams were propelling me on this street and, with any luck, in a room with the only person I knew of who wanted to hear this story. And there I was. Parked and staring at Laurel’s entrance. With proof on the seat next to me. I could see myself, thirty-fiveyear -old me, opening the car door, getting soaked dashing toward her porch. Running up her rickety steps, made worse by the rain. Steps that I could plunge through at any moment. But let’s say I arrive on her doorstep in one piece. My knuckles rapping on the peeling wood. The sound of...

The Yin and Yang of the Genome

If viruses have killed their millions, they have blessed their millions, too. Scientists have uncovered striking instances in which these selfish parasites have in the end become genetically domesticated, donating precious genetic cargo to the host’s benefit. Anna Marie Skalka’s Discovering Retroviruses illustrates, among other things, the potential of retroviruses in treating genetic disease.

A grid as big as China

Wind rips across an isolated utility station in northwestern China's desolate Gansu Corridor. More than 2,000 years ago, Silk Road traders from Central Asia and Europe crossed this arid, narrow plain, threading between forbidding mountains to the south and the Gobi Desert to the north, bearing precious cargo bound for Imperial Beijing. Today the corridor carries a distinctly modern commodity: gigawatts of electricity destined for the megacities of eastern China. One waypoint on that journey is this ultrahigh-voltage (UHV) converter station outside the city of Jiuquan, in Gansu province.

Precious cargo: Modulation of the mesenteric lymph exosome payload after hemorrhagic shock.

Trauma/hemorrhagic shock (T/HS) causes a release of proinflammatory mediators into the mesenteric lymph (ML) that may trigger a systemic inflammatory response and subsequent organ failure. Recently, we showed that exosomes in postshock ML are biologically active mediators of this inflammation. Because the specific inflammatory mediators in postshock ML exosomes have yet to be characterized, we hypothesized that T/HS would lead to a distinct ML proinflammatory exosome phenotype that could be identified by proteomic analysis. We further hypothesized that their regulation by the neuroenteric axis via the vagus nerve would modify this proinflammatory profile. Male rats underwent an established T/HS model including 60 minutes of HS followed by resuscitation. Mesenteric lymph was collected before HS (preshock) and after resuscitation (postshock). A subset of animals underwent cervical vagus nerve electrical stimulation (VNS) after the HS phase. Liquid chromatography with tandem mass spectroscopy (LC-MS/MS) followed by protein identification, label free quantification, and bioinformatic analysis was performed on exosomes from the pre-shock and post-shock phases in the T/HS and T/HS + vagus nerve electrical stimulation groups. Biological activity of exosomes was evaluated using a monocyte nuclear factor kappa B (NF-κB) activity assay. ML exosomes express a distinct protein profile after T/HS with enrichment in pathways associated with cell signaling, cell death and survival, and the inflammatory response. Stimulation of the vagus nerve following injury attenuated the transition of ML exosomes to this T/HS-induced inflammatory phenotype with protein expression remaining similar to pre-shock. Monocyte NF-κB activity was increased after exposure to ML exosomes harvested after T/HS, while ML exosomes from preshock had no effect on monocyte NF-κB expression. Postshock ML exosomes carry a distinct, proinflammatory protein cargo. Stimulating the vagus nerve prevents the T/HS-induced changes in ML exosome protein payload and suggests a novel mechanism by which the neuroenteric axis may limit the systemic inflammatory response after injury.

HADIS-HADIS TENTANG PENDIDIKAN (Suatu Telaah tentang Pentingnya Pendidikan Anak)

It is very important in shaping the nature and character of man to be perfect man is education. Through education, be it family, school, or neighborhood, people can open mind for instance that there is nothing in the universe, there are a lot of science. From the start that there is in humanity itself up space that is difficult to reach by the senses and in the end thinking that the universe is the creator and owner.among the rule was one of a child's education should be noted that education in childhood that will affect the character of the child as an adult later. Education of children is not only done when they are still small. But, carried in the womb until he grew up. Hadith as part of the essential teachings of islam have so many precious cargo that can be used as a foothold in the education of children of this discourse. Therefore, the authors will describe some of the hadith related to the education of children

François Mitterrand’s Visit to Sarajevo, 28 June 1992

ABSTRACTAt 10:30 in the morning on 28 June 1992, a Dauphin helicopter landed at Sarajevo airport carrying a precious cargo: the French president, François Mitterrand. Since the beginning of the Bosnian War, Bosnian Serb forces had controlled the airport and restricted the delivery of humanitarian aid to the city’s destitute population, which formed an important cornerstone of their siege strategy. In reaching the airport, the president secured its re-opening and, with it, the commencement of one of the longest humanitarian airlifts in history. However, Mitterrand’s visit also had implications and significance beyond the Bosnian capital. The visit secured humanitarian intervention through the United Nations as the international community’s modus operandi for conflict resolution in Bosnia-Hercegovina. Through its permanent membership of the United Nations Security Council and enthusiastic engagement with humanitarian intervention, France would shape the intervention in Bosnia-Hercegovina and thus continue to justify its position amongst the world’s Great Powers.

A word about: Revisiting a theology of institutions

The author argues for a more robust commitment to a theology of institutions. Acknowledging the roots of such thinking and work that has already been done, the case is built for those who guide contemporary prophets and train the rising ones to be doing a more thorough job of grounding their work in the reality of fallen institutions in need of redemption. Likewise, he argues that administrators and boards need to be modeling such a redemptive approach in the way seminaries are organized and run. For too long, he says, “we have been sending out precious cargo in leaky boats. These are times that call on us to do a better job of building worthy institutional boats.”

The Unexpected Bioenergetic Function of Neuromelanin. Implications in the Biology of Learning and Memory

Progressive Recent Memory loss is the main complaint in Alzheimer’s disease patients. There is not a simple or congruous explanation yet due to highly complex mechanisms by which the Central Nervous System store and organize experiences every day, developed along 4 billion years of evolution; thereby learning and memory are poorly understood biological processes. The finding of the unsuspected intrinsic property of melanin to transforms light into chemical energy through water dissociation, as chlorophyll in plants; opens a new and wider horizon in the form in which the CNS generate and distribute chemical energy transporting it through molecular hydrogen produced by substantia nigra of mesencephalon and other pigmented structures. The mechanisms by which human modifies their behavior through learning and memory remain a mystery despite several decades of research. However, the unexpected role of melanin molecule bioenergetics of first order, very above the chlorophyll and glucose, indicates that the study of the fascinating processes involved in learning and memory several levels, needs to be started with the study of the generation and distribution of energy neuro-melanin-releasing to all the brain. In this article, we explain succinctly, the way hydrogen molecular (H2)-gas-, from the dissociation of water by the neuro melanin, moves from its source and permeates easily through the different structures of the Central Nervous System, as well as be the smaller atom, does not combine with water, moving through it in accordance with the laws of the simple diffusion. Molecular hydrogen is the main carrier of energy that nature uses in the entire universe, so that, once the neuro melanin separates it from the water, this displaces transporting its precious cargo of energy and its remarkable antioxidant capacity capable of reduce oxygen and form water.

Reversing ants navigate successfully

Scampering across the salt pans of Tunisia on their spindly legs, desert ants (Cataglyphis fortis) have a single-minded mission: locate food and get it back to the nest. Normally, individual raiders bear a tasty morsel in their mandibles and navigate home along the most direct return route, regardless of how tortuous the outbound journey was. However, their determination is often tested to the extreme when the robust animals stumble upon a particularly large piece of food – such as a dead spider or locust. Undaunted, the scavenger simply drags the feast backwards: ‘They are really awesome’, chuckles Matthias Wittlinger from the University of Ulm, Germany. However, how do the insects navigate while reversing? ‘All the cues are from the other direction’, says Wittlinger. Puzzled, Wittlinger and his colleagues Verena Wahl and Sarah Pfeffer travelled to their field site in the Tunisian desert to try to find out how the ants locate home while reversing with a heavy load.Having tempted ants from their nest with a nearby pile of alluring biscuit crumbs, the scientists set the enthusiastic foragers a challenge. Abducting individuals as they arrived at the feeder, the trio transported the ants to a long metal channel lying parallel to the direction that they would turn to return home and presented them with a colossal biscuit crumb, weighing 10 times more than the ant itself: ‘They say, “Wow, there is a large food item, let's get home”’, chuckles Wittlinger. While filming the ants as they heaved the large lunch, the team quickly realised that they were onto something unexpected. Instead of weaving rhythmically from side to side as they would if they were using their normal tripod gait – always keeping three legs in contact with the ground as the other three swing forward – the ants’ overall movement appeared less coordinated; they were not simply reversing their normal forward walking pattern. And when the ant reached the point at which they would expect to locate home in the metal channel, they performed a U-turn, indicating that they knew how far they had travelled, despite moving backwards. Their odometer was functioning regardless of their erratic walking style. Amazed, Wittlinger and Pfeffer began dissecting the fine details of the ants’ reversing technique.Pfeffer filmed the ants with a high-speed camera at 500 frames s−1 and saw that the reversing ants walked at about the same step rate as when they moved forward, about 10 strides s−1. However, she says, ‘Each leg was acting on its own’, adding that they had completely done away with the conventional three-legged walk. She also noticed that they had increased their contact with the ground, ‘They do it by faster swings and they often use leg combinations where more than three legs have ground contact to increase their static stability’ she says.Recalling the discovery, Wittlinger says, ‘we have been trying for years to make them walk in a non-tripod way’, in the hope of learning how they measure distances; now he had the perfect opportunity. ‘There are a couple of hypotheses of how a stride integrator [odometer] would work’, he says. ‘One is that they would use an efferent copy of the motor signals [and sum the signals to calculate a distance], and the other one would be that they actually use each single stride and measure each stride amplitude, or the length of the stride or the swing’. Because the ants were able to determine precisely how far they had travelled, even though each leg was moving individually, Wittlinger says, ‘The data suggest it is the second hypothesis’.But Wittlinger and Pfeffer were still none the wiser about how the reversing ants managed to navigate when all of the visual and odour cues that they use to locate home were in the wrong position. ‘We painted a white grid onto the desert floor and then we released the ant with a large food crumb [and] it walked towards the fictive nest site’, says Wittlinger, who manually tracked the ant's progress with Pfeffer. However, the duo was surprised that the reversing ant periodically put down its cargo and began searching in a loop, before returning to the morsel and resuming its homeward journey. ‘We think that this behaviour probably helps the ant to orientate. The early search loops are normally very short and often directed to the fictive nest site, and probably they scan the panorama searching for some cue’, says Pfeffer.So plucky Cataglyphis desert ants are able to navigate successfully while reversing, and now Wittlinger and Pfeffer are keen to learn more about how the animals use information gleaned during reconnaissance when they discard their precious cargo while reversing home.

Crunch time for the kilogram [News

K50 is going on a trip. Sometime soon, the golf-ball-size cylinder of platinum and iridium, which makes its home in Ottawa, will be carefully packed up and hand carried by a member of Canada's diplomatic corps on a plane to France, with special instructions that its case not be opened by customs or airport security. This precious cargo will join a small clutch of similar objects that will trickle into Paris in the coming weeks. Their destination: the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) just outside the city, where they'll be compared with one another to see just how well their estimated masses match up.

Playing Pregnancy: The Ludification and Gamification of Expectant Motherhood in Smartphone Apps

Like other forms of embodiment, pregnancy has increasingly become subject to representation and interpretation via digital technologies. Pregnancy and the unborn entity were largely private, and few people beyond the pregnant women herself had access to the foetus growing within her (Duden). Now pregnant and foetal bodies have become open to public portrayal and display (Lupton The Social Worlds of the Unborn). A plethora of online materials – websites depicting the unborn entity from the moment of conception, amateur YouTube videos of births, social media postings of ultrasounds and self-taken photos (‘selfies’) showing changes in pregnant bellies, and so on – now ensure the documentation of pregnant and unborn bodies in extensive detail, rendering them open to other people’s scrutiny. Other recent digital technologies directed at pregnancy include mobile software applications, or ‘apps’. In this article, we draw on our study involving a critical discourse analysis of a corpus of pregnancy-related apps offered in the two major app stores. In so doing, we discuss the ways in which pregnancy-related apps portray pregnant and unborn bodies. We place a particular focus on the ludification and gamification strategies employed to position pregnancy as a playful, creative and fulfilling experience that is frequently focused on consumption. As we will demonstrate, these strategies have wider implications for concepts of pregnant and foetal embodiment and subjectivity. It is important here to make a distinction between ludification and gamification. Ludification is a broader term than gamification. It is used in the academic literature on gaming (sometimes referred to as ‘ludology’) to refer to elements of games reaching into other aspects of life beyond leisure pursuits (Frissen et al. Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures; Raessens). Frissen et al. (Frissen et al. "Homo Ludens 2.0: Play, Media and Identity") for example, claim that even serious pursuits such as work, politics, education and warfare have been subjected to ludification. They note that digital technologies in general tend to incorporate ludic dimensions. Gamification has been described as ‘the use of game design elements in non-game contexts’ (Deterding et al. 9). The term originated in the digital media industry to describe the incorporation of features into digital technologies that not explicitly designed as games, such as competition, badges, rewards and fun that engaged and motivated users to make them more enjoyable to use. Gamification is now often used in literatures on marketing strategies, persuasive computing or behaviour modification. It is an important element of ‘nudge’, an approach to behaviour change that involves persuasion over coercion (Jones, Pykett and Whitehead). Gamification thus differs from ludification in that the former involves applying ludic principles for reasons other than the pleasures of enjoying the game for their own sake, often to achieve objectives set by actors and agencies other than the gamer. Indeed, this is why gamification software has been described by Bogost (Bogost) as ‘exploitationware’.

Successful transportation of precious cargo: becoming an expert neonatal transport nurse.

Successful transportation of precious cargo: becoming an expert neonatal transport nurse.

Defining the neighborhoods that escort the oocyte through its early life events and into a functional follicle.

The ovary functions to chaperone the most precious cargo for female individuals, the oocyte, thereby allowing the passage of genetic material to subsequent generations. Within the ovary, single oocytes are surrounded by a legion of granulosa cells inside each follicle. These two cell types depend upon one another to support follicle formation and oocyte survival. The infrastructure and events that work together to ultimately form these functional follicles within the ovary are unprecedented, given that the oocyte originates as a cell like all other neighboring cells within the embryo prior to gastrulation. This review discusses the journey of the germ cell in the context of the developing female mouse embryo, with a focus on specific signaling events and cell-cell interactions that escort the primordial germ cell as it is specified into the germ cell fate, migrates through the hindgut into the gonad, differentiates into an oocyte, and culminates upon formation of the primordial and then primary follicle.

The Case of the Missing Donut by Alison McGhee (review)

Reviewed by: The Case of the Missing Donut by Alison McGhee Deborah Stevenson McGhee, Alison . The Case of the Missing Donut; illus. by Isabel Roxas. Dial, 2013. [32p]. ISBN 978-0-8037-3925-3 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys R 5-8 yrs. The sheriff (small boy) and his deputy (scruffy dog) have a mission: "to bring a dozen donuts safely home." On the way home, concern leads the sheriff to check the contents, and upon finding one donut is "a little smushed," he does what we would all do—he neatens things up until there's no donut left. Much to his bafflement, however, everybody he meets along the city street seems to know his shameful secret ("How was that donut?" asks a neighbor); once he arrives home, his parents immediately know the truth as well, and when the boy looks in the mirror he sees why: a telltale powdered-sugar ring around his mouth. McGhee, co-author of the Bink and Gollie titles, has an enjoyably stagey flair to her text that will make it a readaloud treat ("Phew. All was well in donut world"), and many youngsters will understand the temptation and the responsibility of transporting such precious cargo. The digital art balances a big-eyed cartoonish sensibility with delicate linework and muted complex colors. The revealing powdered-sugar marks could be a little more visible, but the figures are a treat, with the protagonist a pint-sized, big-hatted sheriff and the canine deputy offering some stealthily skeptical expressions. This is a stylish Western-lite picture book with an enjoyable twang, and viewers will develop a powerful hankering for their own box of treats. Copyright © 2013 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The flight of the albatross

THE MALE ALBATROSS IS FINALLY BACK FROM his foraging, and now there is no time to lose. His mate has been patiently sitting on their nest awaiting his return, without food, for nearly a month, and we have to get to her before she flies off to forage for herself. · Our colleague, biologist Anna Nesterova, crawls slowly toward the bird. All of a sudden, she lunges: With her left hand she expertly grabs the 10-kilogram albatross by the beak, and with her right arm she hugs its body and lifts it off the nest and its precious cargo, a single egg. Together we then fix a GPS logger onto the feathers of the bird's back with adhesive tape and glue. · Soon after we release her, the mother albatross takes two or three steps into the furious wind, opens her 3-meter-wide wings, and takes flight. Four weeks from now, she'll return to this island in the southern Indian Ocean bearing a data log of where and how she flew-data that at last will put to the test our theories of how she stays aloft so long, almost never touching down, barely even flapping her long, elegant wings. If we could get our aerial robots to emulate that feat, they might someday orbit Earth for months, surfers of the winds of the uttermost sky.