Presence Of Ghosts Research Articles

The Ghostly Presence of the Hong Kong Subject in Rey Chow’s Postcolonial Critique

Hong Kong, the ex-British colony where postcolonial critic Rey Chow grew up and was educated, is merely a ghostly presence in her postcolonial critiques though it is always being made reference to. By no means can one say that the port city is relatively absent or it just occupies a minor place in Chow’s discursive space. It is only that its presence or referentiality has been bracketed, and sometimes dismantled from the categorization of geopolitical determinant or particularism. In a way, ‘Hong Kong’ is more a sign that constitutes a certain alterity from within the bounds of subordination, thus creating room for radical theorization. Chow’s discourse always attempts to find its own political position in between the appropriation of Western theory and the particularistic assertion of local, history-bound and culturally unique difference which is often understood as a kind of resistance to the former. As a result, the certitude of the particular identity of Hong Kong cannot be easily established. However, a spectral presence is produced and it urges us to reflect upon. The act of disavowing, however, may point to not only the subtle form of violence inherent in a system of representation that is historically intertwined with domination and exploitation, but also the lack of (temporal and ontological) self-coincidence in theoretical discourse itself. This essay examines the ambivalence or indeterminacy of ‘Hong Kong’ as a thing to be theorized in the postcolonial theory of Chow’s writing.

Gothic Domesticity in Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms

Gothic Domesticity in Eugene O'Neill's <i>Desire Under the Elms</i>

Ghostbusting Transgenerational Processes

Transgenerational processes contribute to organizing and disorganizing attachment. The past (in all its forms and potentialities) lives on in the present, influencing the affective field of the parent–child intersubjective matrix. In a child's construction of self, he or she may run up against the confounding presence of ghosts: the dissociated, and thereby unreflected upon past of their parents. This implicitly felt, yet explicitly unknown transmission interferes in the processing of emergent experience and impedes the child's development. Attachment theory, informed by psychoanalysis, and nonlinear dynamic systems theory, is the main theoretical underpinning of this paper's examination of the mechanisms involved in the transfer of dissociated dynamics from parent to child. The child's symptoms grow out of an incoherent affective field that defies representational mapping into a flexible usable theory of mind. Through play a child therapist finds openings to enter the attachment system, reflecting on how a child's experience is being felt, yet unthought about by both child and parents. A parent's recognition process, thereby making what was implicitly felt explicit and consequently more coherent, supports the child in his or her efforts to reorganize aspects of the attachment relationship. Both clinical experience and quotations from literary works are woven into this paper in an attempt to convey the texture, emotional depth, and universality of the subject under discussion.

Seeing Is Digesting: Labyrinths of Historical Ruin in Stanley Kubrick’s &lt;i&gt;The Shining&lt;/i&gt;

Seeing Is DigestingLabyrinths of Historical Ruin in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining Amy Nolan (bio) The world we live in is a mistake, a clumsy parody. Mirrors and fatherhood, because they multiply and confirm the parody, are abominations. Revulsion is the cardinal virtue. Two ways may lead us there: abstinence or the orgy, excess of the flesh or its denial. —Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones The stomach is a place almost as private as the grave. —Maud Ellmann, The Hunger Artists Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film, The Shining, based on Stephen King’s 1977 novel, makes apparent the power of horror to represent the coexistence of surface and depth, inner and outer, word and image, mind and body. The film’s dramatic presentation of a 1970s nuclear American family—Jack (Jack Nicholson), Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and their son, Danny (Danny Lloyd)—plays out upon the surface of modern problems: domestic abuse, alcoholism, and failed communication. Underneath these problems lie the deeper labyrinth of American history and the collective “ghosts” of its power ideologies. What may draw some viewers to Kubrick’s films is that they repeatedly present thresholds: places where one may identify with the apparent intellectual distance his films afford, yet at the same time feel an ache, or a pull, at the pit of the stomach. As one of the “body genres,” the horror film in Kubrick’s vision transforms the structure of narrative into a series of still photographs, which, like the ghosts that inhabit the Overlook, materialize and are revealed to have “touchable” bodies. The horror film in particular elicits a “digestive” response from the viewer: for example, one may say of such a film, “It scared the shit out of me,” or “It made [End Page 180] me want to throw up.” Indeed, as critic Bridget Peucker has claimed, The Shining is clearly “haunted by photography, [which] resurfaces as an aspect of the film’s imaginary, as a return of the repressed—a ‘return of the dead’” (666). In Kubrick’s film, photographs are palpable ghosts. In response to critics’ views that the film is pessimistic, Kubrick has said that the presence of ghosts actually signifies an optimistic view of the future: “If ghosts exist, then they are a clue that there is indeed an afterlife” (A Life in Pictures). Besides functioning as a surface upon which history can be glimpsed, if not understood, photography also functions as a catalyst for seeing and internalizing what one sees: as a means for representing an “inner” vision, or the personal experience that undermines the surface presentation of photographs that populate the hotel and barely conceal its bloody history, just as the surface of banal conversation between the Torrance family members barely conceals the rage and fear beneath the surface. This essay explores how Kubrick’s horror film presents a narrative of digestion: the revelation of hidden depths seen by the mind and not necessarily the eye alone. As a result, the deceptively simple narrative of The Shining gives the viewer a rich bodily experience, in that viewers comprehend Kubrick’s vision of American history through the intimate lens of largely nonverbal, lived, imagined, and felt moments. Throughout the essay, I link these moments to the film’s labyrinthine presentation: the winding road through the mountains at the opening of the film, the interior of the hotel, the hedge maze on its property, Jack’s mind, and Kubrick’s reading of American history. Kubrick’s vision of history includes the notion that human beings have always been engaged in battle, and that the future is unknowable. His view of human nature was very bleak, without pity; his films consistently tell us about ourselves as we really are, rather than as we wish we were. What distinguishes Kubrick’s filmic vision is the act of dissection: he looks unflinchingly at the things from which we want to recoil and seems to ask, “In such a world, are hope and virtue possible?” In a 1960s radio interview, Kubrick stated that, in an age of increasing cynicism, largely due to the growing popularity of television, films need to be made with more sincerity and daring—that, in fact, television has made...

159 Ghost of Infected Leads: A New Criterion Associated with the Diagnosis of Cardiac Device-Related Infective Endocarditis

Objectives We sought to determine the incidence, diagnostic value and outcome of intracardiac masses observed by echocardiography after device removal. We hypothesized that these “ghosts” of leads could be associated with the diagnosis of cardiac device-related infective endocarditis (CDRIE). Background Echocardiographic appearance of residual floating masses in the right atrium has recently been described after removal of permanent pacemakers (PPM) and implantable cardiovertor defibrillators (ICD). Methods The preoperative clinical, microbiological and echocardiographic conditions, the indication and the type of removal technique were analysed in a retrospective cohort including all consecutive patients who underwent percutaneous lead removal at our institution. Three groups were formed according to the final diagnosis: CDRIE, local device infection (LDI), and non-infective indications. Incidence of ghosts was compared between the three groups. All predefined clinical and technical factors were studied for their association with ghosts. All patients with ghost were followed after hospitalization. Results Two hundred and twelve patients underwent lead removal. Ghosts were observed in 17 patients (8% incidence), including 14 (82%) of 88 patients with CDRIE and 3 (5%) of 59 patients with LDI. Ghosts were never observed among the remaining 65 non infected patients. A significant association was found between CDRIE and the presence of ghost (OR=7.63, 95%; CI 2.12-27.45, p=0.001). At three months, 2 patients with ghost died from sudden death, 2 underwent surgery and one had a pulmonary embolism. Conclusions Ghost is a newly described echocardiographic finding observed after percutaneous device extraction. Its presence is highly suggestive of device infection and might represent a new criterion for the diagnosis of CRDIE. The prognostic significance of such finding needs further investigations.

The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature (review)

Reviewed by: The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature Maram Epstein The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature BY Judith T. Zeitlin. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2007. Pp. xiv + 296. $57.00. The seventeenth-century Chinese literati imagination swarmed with ghosts. These beings and their phantom sisters-souls, fox spirits, dreams, painted images, and mirror reflections-are the ultimate border crossers; they regularly dissolve the boundaries that delineate time, place, reason, body, consciousness, and life itself. As cultural constructs, since their only function is to represent absence and yearning, they are free from the burden of the mimetic. Ghosts are intimately related to changing beliefs about the connections between body, mind, and identity. They are also linked to the rich culture of death and mourning in traditional China. Indeed, Judith Zeitlin's ambitious exploration in The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature demonstrates that ghosts are neither marginal nor liminal; they are seen and heard everywhere in Chinese culture. The passionate interest of the Chinese in ghosts continues into the twenty-first century, as seen by the phantom images that haunt contemporary East Asian media productions. In The Phantom Heroine, Zeitlin argues that, during the seventeenth century, ghosts, even as projections of a living person's imagination, took on a life of their own as agents in the production of new identities and cultural meanings; deeply coded as yin, they became an idealized expression of the feminine. They became the ultimate embodiment of qing 情 (a term that carried such a broad range of meanings during the late imperial period that it is notoriously difficult to translate; its most common meanings include emotion, passion, sentiment, and a fascination with the subjective), as both the expression of emotion and a means to induce corresponding feelings in others. As revenants of the past, they enabled a dramatization of the themes of memory, nostalgia, and the work of mourning. During this golden age of Chinese theater, the presence of ghosts on stage posed a metatheatrical commentary on questions of performativity. In addition, as disembodied forces that exist to voice the unresolved emotions of a life that ended in grief, [End Page 214] ghosts had long held a recognized place in the development of lyric poetry. In short, the figure of the ghost is so deeply interwoven with so many facets of Chinese cultural production that a study of the spectral could take us in any number of significant directions. Zeitlin's goal in this monograph is to move beyond the traditional academic cataloguing of ghosts and the basic questions about Chinese belief in the supernatural. Although characters in fictional texts frequently question the existence of ghosts and other supernatural beings, their skeptical gestures are themselves formulaic and playful, since they inevitably launch an encounter with the same supernatural whose existence had just been called into question. It is not really the existence of the spectral per se that was of interest to the writers and audiences of this period, but how spectral figures were deployed. After all, the existence of ghosts and other disembodied beings is fully consistent with a cosmology that was composed of yinyang energies and recognized the persistence of powerful emotions in the form of energy that could live on even after the death of the corporeal heart/mind (xin) which had once breathed life into them. In order to analyze the representation and meaning of the spectral in literary texts, The Phantom Heroine provides a richly textured and interdisciplinary description of the polyvalent meanings of ghosts in the seventeenth century. It builds a context for understanding the literary representations of ghosts by drawing connections to the history of medicine, burial practices, psychology (especially the fields of memory, mourning, and trauma), visual culture, and performance theory. The Phantom Heroine is historically nuanced in its mapping of the evolution of understandings and representations of ghosts that culminated in the seventeenth century. As Zeitlin argues, the "long" seventeenth century (ca. 1580-1700) spans a number of key cultural and historical events that fueled an expanded interest in ghosts. Among them was the rapid growth of the publishing industry during...

Galileon as a local modification of gravity

In the Dvali-Gabadadze-Porrati (DGP) model, the ``self-accelerating'' solution is plagued by a ghost instability, which makes the solution untenable. This fact, as well as all interesting departures from general relativity (GR), are fully captured by a four-dimensional effective Lagrangian, valid at distances smaller than the present Hubble scale. The 4D effective theory involves a relativistic scalar $\ensuremath{\pi}$, universally coupled to matter and with peculiar derivative self-interactions. In this paper, we study the connection between self-acceleration and the presence of ghosts for a quite generic class of theories that modify gravity in the infrared. These theories are defined as those that at distances shorter than cosmological, reduce to a certain generalization of the DGP 4D effective theory. We argue that for infrared modifications of GR locally due to a universally coupled scalar, our generalization is the only one that allows for a robust implementation of the Vainshtein effect---the decoupling of the scalar from matter in gravitationally bound systems---necessary to recover agreement with solar-system tests. Our generalization involves an internal Galilean invariance, under which $\ensuremath{\pi}$'s gradient shifts by a constant. This symmetry constrains the structure of the $\ensuremath{\pi}$ Lagrangian so much so that in 4D there exist only five terms that can yield sizable nonlinearities without introducing ghosts. We show that for such theories in fact there are ``self-accelerating'' de Sitter solutions with no ghostlike instabilities. In the presence of compact sources, these solutions can support spherically symmetric, Vainshtein-like nonlinear perturbations that are also stable against small fluctuations. We investigate a possible infrared completion of these theories at scales of order of the Hubble horizon, and larger. There are however some features of our theories that may constitute a problem at the theoretical or phenomenological level: the presence of superluminal excitations; the extreme subluminality of other excitations, which makes the quasistatic approximation for certain solar-system observables unreliable due to Cherenkov emission; the very low strong-interaction scale for $\ensuremath{\pi}\ensuremath{\pi}$ scatterings.

RUÍDOS NO SILÊNCIO: A PRESENÇA DOS FANTASMAS NA LITERATURA BRASILEIRA

The English literature has, present in its canon, a great variety of histories in which the themes are established round the presence of ghosts. Such beings can appear characterized in diverse forms: sometimes, they are a diffuse presence, ethereal, other times they are beings with definite traces, whose characteristics, generally, reveal the faces of terror or horror. The ghosts, however, belong to a human imaginary that is, direct or indirect, connected to the idea of death that has been constructed through the years , that is why they do not constitute exclusivity of a locality only; their presence is registered in art, in history and in the culture of practically all nations. Although there is a kind of silence in the literary studies area about the image of ghosts in the Brazilian literature, they are present in it, both as part of a haunted memory, connected to a certain past or place, as well as apparitions that integrate certain scenes or carry out some narratives. This paper intends to verify in which ways some of these narrative of the XIX century and beginning of the XX century incorporate in its plots the phantasmagoric image, integrating or not to what is commonly called fantastic literature.

Commentary on Paper by Françoise Davoine

Françoise Davoine sees madness as a research project involving the uncanny presence of ghosts arising from the realm of the transference as well as the “big” history of wider social catastrophes across the generations, in effect “cut-out” pieces of the unconscious. Madness is a rupture in the social link that needs repairing. The therapist is a coresearcher with the individual whose madness tells a story embedded in the heart of madness itself. Davoine presents her work with a woman who has a history of multiple psychiatric hospitalizations. She invites her patient to link up with and speak of that which formerly resided in the Lacanian Real, that is, the unsymbolized haunting absence of her mother who was tragically murdered by the Nazis. The therapist's dream becomes a bridge to this world of ghosts for both patient and therapist. The dream ushers in an enactment and a transference interpretation by the therapist, which leads to a disappearance of madness from the analytic stage. I attempt to apply the theories of Post Kleinians, as well as Harold Searles and Gaetano Benedetti, to help illuminate the processes of therapeutic action. Contemporary psychoanalytic approaches to dreams and a relational view of madness are also addressed.

A Journey Backwards: History Through Style in Children’s Fiction

A & C Black’s Flashbacks series invites its readers to “Read a Flashback...take a journey backwards in time”. There are several ways in which children’s fiction has encouraged its readers to engage with and care about history: through the presence of ghosts, through frame stories, time travel, or simply setting the narrative in the past. However, modern critical theory has questioned the validity of traditional modes of the genre. This paper defends historical fiction for children by arguing that, whatever narrative strategy is used, such writing stands or falls through its evocation of a historical sensibility—or what Raymond Williams calls a ‘structure of feeling’. This is achieved through elements of style, both in the representation of dialogue and thought. Pastiche, sometimes thought of as an unsatisfactory feature of contemporary culture, can often perform a similar evocative function. The paper is based on close readings of Alan Garner’s The Stone Book from 1976, and 21st century fiction by Kevin Crossley-Holland, Kate Pennington and Paul Bajoria. If these books do not overtly use the techniques of “historiographic metafiction”, it may be because awareness of historiography is implicit in the very texture of their writing.

Self-accelerating warped braneworlds

Braneworld models with induced gravity have the potential to replace dark energy as the explanation for the current accelerating expansion of the Universe. The original model of Dvali, Gabadadze, and Porrati (DGP) demonstrated the existence of a ``self-accelerating'' branch of background solutions, but suffered from the presence of ghosts. We present a new large class of braneworld models which generalize the DGP model. Our models have negative curvature in the bulk, allow a second brane, and have general brane tensions and localized curvature terms. We exhibit three different kinds of ghosts, associated to the graviton zero mode, the radion, and the longitudinal components of massive graviton modes. The latter two species occur in the DGP model, for negative and positive brane tension, respectively. In our models, we find that the two kinds of DGP ghosts are tightly correlated with each other, but are not always linked to the feature of self-acceleration. Our models are a promising laboratory for understanding the origins and physical meaning of braneworld ghosts, and perhaps for eliminating them altogether.

Werewolves, Witches, and Wandering Spirits: Traditional Belief and Folklore in Early Modern Europe (review)

Werewolves, Witches, and Wandering Spirits: Traditional Belief and Folklore in Early Modern Europe. Edited by Kathryn A. Edwards. [Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies, Vol. 62.] (Kirksville, Missouri: Truman State University Press. 2002. Pp. xxii, 226. $44.95.) The essays in this eclectic collection highlight early modern beliefs about a wide variety of supernatural phenomena, analyzing popular culture at its broadest. Edwards explains in a thoughtful introduction that historians dealing with witchcraft have often tended to marginalize the folklore and supernatural aspects of popular belief in their attempts to synthesize witchcraft practices; the ten essays brought together here are meant to correct this oversight by bringing some of the more peripheral cases to the forefront. The work also serves to complicate ideas of confessionalization, illustrating that the boundaries between popular and elite culture were always rather blurry. For example, Sarah Ferber argues in her very persuasive essay that cults of possession and exorcism in early modern France were at the heart of Catholic reform. Her analysis of possession cases shows that elites participated in these cults and that the use of the body and holy objects-central in possession and exorcism-are crucial to understanding what Catholic reform meant in the reforming era. David Lederer shows that ghosts did not disappear with the confessional era either; the Bavarian trial records he examines make it clear that people of all levels of society believed in the presence of ghosts in everyday life. Robin Briggs studies witchcraft trials in Lorraine and discovers that werewolves and other shapeshifters were considered commonplace by both the witnesses in the trials and by the judges. Ulrike Krampl argues that witches in eighteenth-century Paris were transformed through the legal system into the less harmful but ever-present fortune-tellers, alchemists, and talisman peddlers. The police called them false witches and treated them as a threat to public order, although not as individuals truly able to channel demonic power. The aforementioned authors rely heavily on trial and police records, but three others use texts to highlight a more elite view of folkloric practices. Nicole Jacques-Lefevre examines the usefulness of werewolves as a symbol in three sixteenth-century French texts, and Bruce Gordon analyzes the views of Heinrich Bullinger, chief minister of the Zurich Reformed church in the late sixteenth century, on the role of the devil and demons in everyday life. …

Stimulation of prothrombinase activity by the nonapeptide Thr-Trp-Ala-Arg-Asn-Ser-Tyr-Asn-Val, a segment of a plant thionin

Pyrularia thionin (PT) is a basic 47 amino acid peptide isolated from the nuts of Pyrularia pubera. Its structure and properties have been studied in some detail. Its receptor site is a domain of membrane phosphatidyl serine (PS), where it binds with a relatively high specificity. A segment of its covalent structure, the nonapeptide Thr-Trp-Ala-Arg-Asn-Ser-Tyr-Asn-Val, designated serine nonapeptide (SNP), corresponds to amino acids 7–15 of the thionin, except for the position 12 (Ser), which substitutes for Cys, to give stability. This peptide represents what we consider to be the active site of the thionin, and it also binds to PS domains, but less tightly than thionin does. The peptide has an effect on the prothrombinase assay using the chromophore S2238 to measure the thrombin produced by the prothrombinase complex. It is shown that SNP stimulates the prothrombinase complex activity, instead of inhibiting it, as would be expected if it simply covered the PS sites on the membrane of erythrocyte ghosts, used in the prothrombinase assay. SNP appears to substitute for Va in the prothrombinase complex reaction, in a Ca 2+ independent manner, being even more effective in the absence than in the presence of ghosts. In the clotting system, SNP can also substitute for Factor Va.

The influence of various small plasticisers and malto-oligosaccharides on the retrogradation of (partly) gelatinised starch

Ageing of gelatinised and partly gelatinised potato starch and wheat starch were investigated in the presence of plasticisers with increasing size and number of OH groups (ethylene glycol, glycerol, threitol, xylitol, glucose, and for potato starch also maltose). The influences of these plasticisers and of granular remnants (ghosts) on recrystallisation were determined by using X-ray diffraction. Recrystallisation of potato starch samples in the presence of plasticisers resulted in crystallinity indices of ∼0.5. The largest reduction in potato starch recrystallisation is found for threitol (4 OH) and xylitol (5 OH). In the plasticiser range examined, the crystallisation inducing effect of granular potato starch remnants is reduced better when the plasticiser contains more OH groups. Wheat starch recrystallises to a lesser extent than potato starch, resulting in crystallinity indices of ∼0.4. The results for wheat starch do not show clear trends for the influences of plasticiser size and of ghosts. The difference in behaviour of the two starches is probably caused by wheat starch having shorter amylopectin chains. Resulting from these shorter amylopectin chains, the remaining structure in wheat starch ghosts may resemble A-type crystallinity, making it more difficult to form B-type crystals. Alternatively, the trends as found for potato starch may occur, but are less manifest for wheat starch, due to the lower total extent of recrystallisation. Solid state CP/MAS NMR spectra of the wheat starch samples containing ethylene glycol were obtained, in order to compare completely and partly gelatinised systems. The spectra were identical, confirming that the ghost structures do not influence wheat starch recrystallisation. Apparently, wheat starch ghosts do not act as nuclei for crystallisation. Similarly, the influence of various malto-oligosaccharides in combination with granular remnants (ghosts) was investigated on wheat starch ageing. Gelatinised and partly gelatinised wheat starch were plasticised with maltose, maltotriose, maltotetraose, maltopentaose or maltohexaose. This resulted in crystallinity indices of ∼0.2, with the largest reduction in recrystallisation for maltotriose and maltotetraose. No trend was found for the influence of ghosts. The presence of ghosts did not influence the 13C solid state HP/DEC NMR spectra. Less recrystallisation took place than with the previously mentioned smaller plasticisers that resulted in crystallinity indices of ∼0.4. The finding that maltose was able to reduce retrogradation better than glucose could be of practical importance.

A comment on brane bending and ghosts in theories with infinite extra dimensions

Theories with infinite volume extra dimensions open exciting opportunities for particle physics. We argued recently that along with attractive features there are phenomenological difficulties in this class of models. In fact, there is no graviton zero-mode in this case and 4D gravity is obtained by means of continuum bulk modes. These modes have additional degrees of freedom which do not decouple at low energies and lead to inconsistent predictions for light bending and the precession of Mercury's perihelion. In recent papers, [hep-th/0003020] and [hep-th/0003045], the authors made use of brane bending in order to cancel the unwanted physical polarization of gravitons. In this note we point out that this mechanism does not solve the problem since it uses a ghost which cancels the extra degrees of freedom. In order to have a consistent model the ghost should be eliminated. As soon as this is done, 4D gravity becomes unconventional and contradicts General Relativity. New mechanisms are needed to cure these models. We also comment on the possible decoupling of the ghost at large distances due to an apparent flat-5D nature of space-time and on the link between the presence of ghosts and the violation of positive-energy conditions.

Characteristics and application of an electrochemical concentration modulator in correlation chromatography: Part 2. Computational aspects, modelling and application

An electrochemical cell was used as an injection device in correlation chromatography. The use of a conventional injection control signal combined with a conventional deconvolution method leads to the appearance of ghost peaks in the correlogram. Several methods to suppress or correct for the presence of ghost peaks in the correlogram were studied, taking into account the electrochemical cell characteristics determined in the first part of this paper. An overview is given of existing time-domain deconvolution methods with emphasis on the shape of the virtual injection. Fourier-domain deconvolution methods are discussed and compared with time-domain methods. An improved model for the modulation process taking place in the electrochemical cell is used to calculate the real injection pattern. Three alternative methods to diminish the ghost peak phenomenon have been compared. First, deconvolution of the detector signal with a calculated or experimentally determined input pattern was examined. Secondly, intrinsic correction properties of correlation chromatography were used to remove the ghost peaks. Finally, the effect of adjusting the signal used to control the potentiostat was tested. The latter method proved to be the best solution. Calibration curves were measured to test the linearity of the method.

Solitary necrotic nodule of the liver: parasitic origin?

To report further cases of solitary necrotic nodule of the liver and to study its nature. Seven nodules were retrieved from 4000 necropsy and surgical liver specimens coming to light over the past five years. All of them satisfied the diagnostic criteria of solitary necrotic nodule: a solid lesion with a central necrotic core and a hyalinised fibrotic capsule containing elastic fibres. Their clinicopathological features were reviewed. The nodules were incidental findings at surgery or necropsy in four men and three women whose ages ranged from 48 to 79 years (mean 63.7 years). Four were found in the right lobe and three in the left. Six were subcapsular and only one deep in the parenchyma, with sizes ranging from 0.3-2.5 cm. Each of them was solitary, well demarcated, and round to oval with a firm, whitish rim and a core of yellowish white cheese-like to solid material. In addition to the basic architecture, there were a number of common and undescribed histological features: presence of varying numbers of small mural vessels with intimal fibrosis and obliteration, presence of cholesterol clefts and foamy cells among necrotic material, and sparsity of inflammatory cells. In the two cases where ghosts of degenerated cells and partially preserved liver reticulin pattern were noted, worms were identified, one being Clonorchis sinensis. The entity is believed to be a "burnt-out phase" of a variety of benign lesions. Parasitic infestation is another possible cause, and presence of ghosts of degenerate cells, partially preserved liver reticulin pattern, cholesterol clefts and foamy cells among necrotic material are auxiliary features pointing to such an aetiology. The variation in morphological fine details reflects both the lesion's diverse pathogenesis and the fact that it can be of varying duration.

Dark interaction of 5-methoxypsoralen and 8-methoxypsoralen with erythrocyte ghosts: a fluorescence and circular dichroism study

The dark interaction of 5-methoxypsoralen (5-MOP) and 8-methoxypsoralen (8-MOP) with plasma membranes was studied using human erythrocyte ghosts as a model. In the presence of ghosts, modifications of the fluorescence characteristics of 5-MOP were observed, together with a quenching of the fluorescence of the tryptophan (Trp) residues of membrane proteins (up to 25%). Moreover, the appearance of an induced circular dichroism indicates that 5-MOP is located in a chiral environment. In contrast, only slight effects were observed in the case of 8-MOP. It is concluded that 5-MOP molecules are located partly within chiral protein sites of the membrane in such a way that a Förster energy transfer can occur from the Trp residues to the psoralen molecules.

Blood platelets are concentrated near the wall and red blood cells, in the center in flowing blood.

Hematocrit and vessel wall shear rate are important factors in the transport and subsequent adherence of platelets to vessel wall subendothelium. When mass transport theory is applied to platelets in flowing blood, the blood is usually considered to be a fluid with platelet and red cell wall concentrations similar to the average tube concentration. With the laser-Doppler technique, we found how red blood cell ghosts and platelets were distributed radially for various hematocrits and wall shear rates. Red cell ghosts are crowded near the axis of the tube, with a local hematocrit higher than the average tube hematocrit, and they decrease steadily toward the wall. In the absence of ghosts, platelets exhibit the 'tubular pinch' effect (rigid particles crowding at 0.6 x tube radius). In the presence of ghosts, the platelets are expelled toward the wall region. This high concentration at the wall increases with higher average tube hematocrit and wall shear rates. Increasing the average tube platelet concentration 10 times causes the wall concentration to increase only three times. The increase in platelet adherence observed with increasing hematocrit and increasing wall shear rate can be partially ascribed to increased platelet concentration near the wall. The observation that the increased platelet concentration does not fully explain the platelet adherence data suggests that platelet transport may also be enhanced by a shear rate-dependent rotary motion.

Short-range interactions in gravitational theories with torsion and quadratic lagrangian

Considering a nine-parameter lagrangian quadratic in torsion and curvature, we derive the general condition which must be satisfied by the parameters in order to obtain, in the weak field limit, a Yukawa-type correction to the static Newton potential. This condition is shown to be in general not incompatible with a different set of restrictions needed to avoid the presence of ghosts and tachyons.