Stuff Of Nightmares Research Articles

The good, the bad, and the ugly: From planarians to parasites.

Platyhelminthes can perhaps rightly be described as a phylum of the good, the bad, and the ugly: remarkable free-living worms that colonize land, river, and sea, which are often rife with color and can display extraordinary regenerative ability; parasitic worms like schistosomes that cause devastating disease and suffering; and monstrous tapeworms that are the stuff of nightmares. In this chapter, we will explore how our research expanded beyond free-living planarians to their gruesome parasitic cousins. We start with Schistosoma mansoni, which is not a new model; however, approaching these parasites from a developmental perspective required a reinvention that may hold generalizable lessons to basic biologists interested in pivoting to disease models. We then turn to our (re)establishment of the rat tapeworm Hymenolepis diminuta, a once-favorite model that had been largely forgotten by the molecular biology revolution. Here we tell our stories in three, first-person narratives in order to convey personal views of our experiences. Welcome to the dark side.

Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note

Shifting Design Paradigms: Why Tomorrow's International Economic Law May Look More Like the Tax Regime than the WTO

Rampant unilateralism, insistence on national sovereignty, a wariness of multilateral institutions and third-party adjudication — for international trade lawyers, this is the stuff of nightmares. For international tax lawyers, these are the normal operating parameters of the international tax regime. In fact, the same forces that are currently unraveling the World Trade Organization (WTO) are simultaneously enabling pragmatic and creative reforms of international tax law. Ruth Mason's account of the Transformation of International Tax invites us to draw broader lessons on how international economic law could adapt to survive and even thrive in a political environment increasingly hostile towards WTO-style multilateral-ism.

Horror, apocalypse and world politics

Abstract World politics generates a long list of anxiety-inspiring scenarios that threaten to unravel everyday life with sudden and violent destruction. From total war and the concentration camps, through nuclear firestorms, global pandemics and climate disaster, the diabolical violence of the recent past and conceivable future is the stuff of nightmares. Yet International Relations scholars and practitioners are often criticized for being disconnected from the human realities of international calamity. The challenge for both is to engage world politics in a way that foregrounds the human consequences of extreme violence and depravation. In this article, we explore these difficult experiences through popular culture representations of the apocalypse, a subject of intense interest for researchers in a discipline where global destruction is a distinct possibility. However, we take a different route by engaging the apocalypse through the horror genre, the one place where human suffering is explicitly accentuated. We argue that the horror genre is at once an access point for ethical engagement with the human consequences of extreme violence and a complex terrain where dark imaginings can be politically loaded, culturally specific and ethically ambiguous.

Shifting Design Paradigms: Why Tomorrow's International Economic Law May Look More Like the Tax Regime than the WTO

Rampant unilateralism, insistence on national sovereignty, a wariness of multilateral institutions and third-party adjudication—for international trade lawyers, this is the stuff of nightmares. For international tax lawyers, these are the normal operating parameters of the international tax regime. In fact, the same forces that are currently unraveling the World Trade Organization (WTO) are simultaneously enabling pragmatic and creative reforms of international tax law. Ruth Mason's account of the Transformation of International Tax invites us to draw broader lessons on how international economic law could adapt to survive and even thrive in a political environment increasingly hostile towards WTO-style multilateralism.

Insects that stink and hatch in sync

![Graphic][1] If you're the kind of person who enjoys watching the perfectly choreographed singing of the von Trapp children in The Sound of Music, then the sight of translucent stink bugs crawling forth simultaneously from their eggs might be the stuff of nightmares. Other people, such as

Virtual reality therapy set for a real renaissance

As the technology becomes cheaper and more accessible, and as research on its effectiveness matures, virtual reality is treating an array of vexing mental ailments. A war veteran fits a virtual-reality headset over his eyes then lowers a pair of noise-cancelling headphones over his ears. After a moment of near-silent darkness, he finds himself bathed in harsh sunlight, standing on a rocky outcrop in Afghanistan. He turns to the left and right: there’s nothing in sight but barren hills. He glances up: a helicopter is passing over. The war seems distant. Suddenly, a fountain of rock and dirt erupts down in the valley: a mortar round. A few seconds pass, and another round hits farther up the hillside. Then another. He watches helplessly as the explosions approach. Closer, until the world vanishes in a roar of light and sound…. Fig. 1. First created 14 years ago, Bravemind , a virtual reality system for helping veterans confront horrific battlefield experiences, has recently undergone upgrades that could greatly expand its reach. Image courtesy of University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies. It is a heart-thumping experience for anyone. But for veterans of the real thing, immersion in this virtual Afghanistan can be the stuff of nightmares—literally. This is Bravemind , a virtual reality (VR) system created 14 years ago to help veterans confront and overcome horrific experiences that left them with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). More precisely, this is a version of Bravemind that’s been liberated from its original hardware, a head-mounted display that cost $3,000, and ported to an $800 HTC Vive: one of a new generation of lightweight, consumer-oriented VR headsets originally developed to supercharge online gaming. These new headsets are being hailed as potential game changers for VR-based mental health applications across the board. They have rebooted interest …

Smart Toys that are the Stuff of Nightmares [Editorial

Hello Barbie tries to engage with children in intelligible and freeflowing conversation by asking and responding to questions, as well as being able to learn about its users over time [4). As Mattel's website says [1): “Just like a real friend, Hello Barbie doll listens and adapts to the user's likes and dislikes” [5). ToyTalk does recognize that “no security measures are perfect” and that no method of data transmission can ever be “guaranteed against any interception or other type of misuse.”

A basic guide to hospitalising snakes

In small animal first opinion practice we occasionally see patients of the furless and legless variety. Often portrayed as the ‘stuff of nightmares’ our serpent friends have a bad reputation, and, formost, are not at the top of the list of our favourite animals. Unfortunately, the majority of the reptilian patients that grace our surgeries have fallen foul of poor basic husbandry, which is left for us to discover and fix. This article aims to give a basic guide to hospitalising some of the more common reptile species seen in veterinary practice and addresses the essential questions that need to be asked on admission as taking a detailed history of the husbandry is an essential part of the diagnostic process. .

Crushing snakes kill by blood constriction, not suffocation

Death by suffocation seems like an awfully protracted way to go and death by suffocation in the grip of a boa constrictor’s coils is the stuff of nightmares. Yet Scott Boback from Dickinson College, USA, wasn’t so sure that suffocation was all there was to the boa constrictor’s technique. ‘It looks like the [prey] animals are gasping for air’, says Boback, but in 1994, Boback's colleague, Dave Hardy, had proposed an alternative. ‘What Hardy saw was the speed at which the animals were dying… they were dying way too quickly for it to be suffocation. He suspected that it was circulatory or cardiac arrest because of the speed at which death was occurring’, says Boback. But there were few data to support Hardy's suggestion and, although hard-core members of the herpetology community were aware of the possibility, the rest of us were left clinging to the old-wives’ tale that boa constrictors kill by suffocation: until Boback put the crushers to the test.‘We have been studying constriction for a number of years,’ says Boback, explaining that he had measured the pressure exerted by snakes crushing dead rats in earlier experiments. However, to find out what was really going on inside the snake's victims, he had to measure blood pressure in living anaesthetised rodents as they were squeezed. ‘It was not something that we took lightly and we wanted to make sure that the animals [rats] did not experience pain or suffer’, says Boback. Having anaesthetised a rat, Boback and his colleagues, Emmet Blankenship and Charles Zwemer – backed up by undergraduate researchers, Katie McCann, Kevin Wood and Patrick McNeal – inserted ECG electrodes and blood pressure catheters into the rodent's body before offering the sedated animal to a hungry boa constrictor.Fortunately for Boback, the snake struck, aiming a bite at the rat's head and coiling its body around the rodent as it began to squeeze. And, as the team watched the blood pressure and heart rate data stream onto the computer, they were amazed to see the rat's blood circulation shut down in a matter of seconds. ‘I remember being in the room and the students were looking at the data in disbelief that it happened that fast. We could see the arterial pressure go down, the venous pressure go up and we could see this right when the snake was doing it [squeezing]’, says Boback. And, as soon as the rat's circulation stopped and the oxygen supply was cut off, the team could also see the rat's heart beating more and more irregularly. Boback suspects that without blood flow to the brain, any animal caught in the snake's coils probably passes out in a matter of seconds, before other critical organs begin to fail.Boback also suggests that the boas provide a glimpse into the evolution of crushing behaviour in snakes. He explains that ancient snake species that had not evolved constriction were probably restricted to capturing small meals that they could subdue easily. However, once the earliest boas had developed their quicker constriction technique for despatching victims, they were free to scale up the size of meals, sometimes tackling animals that are even larger than themselves. ‘By understanding the mechanisms of how constriction kills, we gain a greater appreciation for the efficiency of this behaviour and the benefit it provided early snakes’, says Boback.

Wordsworth and the "Great Terror" of 1803-05

Previous articleNext article No AccessWordsworth and the "Great Terror" of 1803-05Richard MatlakRichard Matlak Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 46, Number 1Winter 2015 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24888099 Views: 19Total views on this site © 2015 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Eternal City or the Stuff of Nightmares? The Characterisation of Rome in Portrait of a Lady and Middlemarch

Both Henry James and George Eliot make graphic use of realistic locations within their novels. This practice provides a plausible socio-historical context for their characters and contributes to the development of the genre of “realisms” in the nineteenth century novel. The use of specific identifiable locations also indicates, through their character’s engagement with their geographical setting, how place and time help construct the identity of the characters themselves. My paper addresses this aspect of the realist novel of the nineteenth century, through the pens of two diverse authors. It explores how the differing narrative strategies of Eliot and James, broadly delineated as a blend of overt and covert narrative voice, are expressed through the response of two young brides to Rome. It notes the recurring use in both novels of a metaphor of marriage as constituting a confining cul de sac, in which the idealism of both Dorothea and Isabel is crushed and their autonomy suppressed. This is contextualised by the physical labyrinths, antique artefacts and material culture of the classical city which both young women visit and come to know while they come to know their husbands. Their disillusionment and increasing insight about the nature of their marriages is ironically juxtaposed to their sightseeing of a classical civilisation which teaches them how their predecessors in the city lived, through their own eyes and those of various guides. It notes how within Rome, Casaubon and Osborne view their wives as extensions to their collections of classical urban artefacts/provider of secretarial skills rather than as women in their own right. The paper suggests that the physical and emotional journeys of these two young women are experienced in tandem, and that their response to the foreign material world to which their husbands transplant them echoes their own sense of alienation from their husbands. Their temporal distance from the ancient Roman culture mimics their sense of emotional dislocation.

The Devil's Children. From Spirit Possession to Witchcraft: New Allegations That Affect Children (review)

Reviewed by: The Devil's Children. From Spirit Possession to Witchcraft: New Allegations That Affect Children Richard Jenkins Keywords children, witchcraft, possession, Africa, persecution Jean La Fontaine , ed. The Devil's Children. From Spirit Possession to Witchcraft: New Allegations That Affect Children. Farnham and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2009. Pp. xvi + 204. Children and young people are a disturbing presence in supernatural beliefs and in scares about witchcraft or other forms of supernatural aggression. They often figure as supposed victims: struck down by maleficium or the evil eye, sacrificed at the sabbat or ritually abused by shadowy occult conspiracies, taken by the fairies or possessed by demons. Their vulnerability has frequently put children in a position to accuse, too: notoriously during the Salem witch hunt, but also in many other episodes, throughout Europe, and not only during the early modern persecutions. Finally, and much more rarely, vulnerability and victimhood may become transformed in another sense—particularly in cases of possession and similar states—and the tables turned on all concerned, child and adult alike. The image of the child or young person as a powerful supernatural force is the stuff of nightmares which has become a staple of horror as a modern narrative genre: who can forget Carrie or The Omen? This collection of papers addresses a recent and disturbing variation on that last theme: the increasing numbers of children, particularly but by no means exclusively in Africa and the global African diaspora, who have the great misfortune to be diagnosed as possessed or, worse again, labeled as a witch. The results can vary along a continuum from relatively mild exorcism by prayer and worship to stigmatization, ostracism, and expulsion from home to violent exorcism and, in some cases, death. This is clearly a matter that is of more than academic interest. The contributions in this volume indicate that broad concern, coming from social scientists, people of various faiths, and child protection specialists. Following introductions by the Director and Deputy Director of Inform, the LSE-based [End Page 107] information service about new religious movements and cults that sponsored the meeting of which these papers are the outcome, the book is divided into three sections: "The Meaning of Possession," "Possession as Contact with the Divine," and "Children Accused." The first section includes substantive papers on possession beliefs and practices in British Pentacostalism, the Bangladeshi community in London's East End, and Haitian Vodou. In the second section, two papers by religious practitioners explore personal experiences of possession, in Wicca and in the Nigerian Celestial Church of Christ. The latter paper—by a practicing psychiatric social worker who is also a Prophet in the Celestial Church—comes perilously close in places to justifying beliefs that children can sometimes be witches, who should be exorcised. This paper would have benefited from a self-critical reflection on the tensions between the author's beliefs and her profession. As it is, it sits uncomfortably alongside the rest of the papers. The third section, on accused children, is the most uncomfortable to read, and the most important part of the book. La Fontaine's account of African communities in London, de Boeck's study of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Stobart's abridged version of her UK government-commissioned report on child abuse and accusations of possession and witchcraft, in particular, go some way to filling the considerable empirical gaps left by superficial press reports, grisly rumors, and sensationalism. They are essential reading if you are interested in the topic. Other chapters deal with professional child abuse issues. This is the section of the book that breaks something approximating new ground. This is a curate's egg of a book in terms of the quality and depth of the papers, and it also offers an odd mix of perspectives. The papers on the accusation of children are at its heart; the others, at best, offer context. It is nonetheless a valuable publication: it paves the way for the possible opening up of this topic to further research and it challenges us to think critically about issues that are difficult and painful. The centrality of children and young people to supernatural beliefs, and to the...

The Freshness of Wonder

The Freshness of Wonder Dawn Potter (bio) A Broom of One’s Own: Words on Writing, Housecleaning and Life, by Nancy Peacock (Harper Perennial, 2008. 208 pages. $13.95 pb) One evening, near the end of a literary festival, the novelist Nancy Peacock fell into conversation with a fellow writer: “Good reading,” he said. “But why did you tell them you’d never been to college? And why did you tell them you worked in a grocery store and cleaned houses for a living?” “Because it’s true,” I said. . . . “You shouldn’t tell people that,” he said. “But it’s the truth.” He pursed his lips and spoke slowly, as if to a child. “What I am trying to tell you is that no one is interested.” For many artists outside the academy, such conversations are the stuff of nightmares. At issue isn’t necessarily the disconnect between those of us who work with our hands and those of us who work with our heads. Numerous university artists and intellectuals also weed their own gardens, and some of them repair their own leaky roofs. It’s one thing to be a middle-aged published writer with a graduate degree who splits her own firewood, but it’s another thing entirely to be a middle-aged published writer without any degree who earns six dollars an hour by splitting other people’s firewood. There’s an uneasy rift between these camps, one that stretches beyond problems of aesthetic quality or sophistication of knowledge to the question of how “real” writers choose to earn their keep. Nancy Peacock’s memoir, A Broom of One’s Own, bravely addresses this rift—specifically the condescension that “no one is interested” in how the menial unromantic labors of a paid housecleaner might intersect with a writer’s imaginative freedom and habits of literary production. I say [End Page xx] bravely because there are few public models to encourage a thinking, feeling woman who also gets paid to scrub grape jelly off the floor. Yet, though she acknowledges that the job of housecleaner is particularly fraught for poor, undereducated, overburdened women, her book is not a feminist call to arms. Nor, despite her anecdotal style, does she rehash “the comic trials of a housewife” genre once so popular in syndicated columns and the Reader’s Digest. She attempts instead to explicate the link between the dull repetitions of physical work and a mind’s ability to open its attention to what Keats calls those “nothings which are made Great and dignified by an ardent pursuit.” “Often writing is not thinking, it’s noticing,” Peacock tells us, “and by working a job that allowed me to use my body and be in solitude and quiet, I had opened my life to noticing. I never planned it that way. It just happened.” Though she has published two reasonably successful novels, Peacock does not portray herself as a sophisticated reader. Yet, unexpectedly, her literary and intellectual innocence is one of the memoir’s most attractive aspects. She modestly shows us what she has discovered about labor and imagination; and, even when her observations are not particularly new or acute, she conveys the freshness of her wonder. Always she is astute about the moral chasms that yawn between employers and servants. We meet Dr. Ages, “a mean-spirited, tight power-tripper who uses his money as a relationship tool” but can’t be bothered to flush his toilet. We meet Mrs. Krueger, who “mined the path of my cleaning day with yellow sticky notes. On a desk, ‘Polish this.’ On a mirror, ‘Clean this.’” The writer clearly wants us to hate this kind of behavior, yet she doesn’t deny her collusion in it. She finds selfish satisfaction in her ability to acquire such vivid material: “I think there are two things writers love more than anything else. One is solitude and the other is gossip. . . . If my clients were home the best I could hope for was that they would stay out of my way, and failing that, I hoped they had a good story to tell me.” These good stories are the highlights of Peacock’s book...

Bodies: Sex, Violence, Disease, and Death in Contemporary Legend

Because they are so often told as news, contemporary legends force us to reevaluate life as we know it. They confront us with macabre, fantastic, horrific, or hilarious characters and events that seem to come straight out of myths and folktales, but are presented as present day events. The difficulty is that it is not at all easy to decide whether these often disturbing stories should be treated as reliable or dismissed as fantasy. The legends explored in this book are some of the most bizarre, gruesome, and politically sensitive stories in the contemporary legend canon. At any moment a body may be invaded by noxious creatures, deliberately infected with deadly disease, or raided to provide donor organs for sick foreigners. These are winter's tales, the stuff of nightmares. In this book Gillian Bennett traces the cultural history of six legends, well-known in Europe and America from medieval times to the present day. Appearing in broadsides, ballads, myths, ancient and modern legends, novels, plays, films, television shows, and stories told in the oral tradition, these legends are not just silly tales which can be dismissed as trivial and untrue. They reveal much about the concerns and fears of everyday life and demonstrate the limits of knowledge and power in the modern world. Gillian Bennett is the author of Alas, Poor Ghost!: Traditions of Belief in Story and Discourse and Traditions of Belief: Women and the Supernatural and coauthor of the standard legend bibliography and reader. She lives in Stockport, United Kingdom.

Into the Dark: An Echo Falls Mystery (review)

Reviewed by: Into the Dark: An Echo Falls Mystery Karen Coats Abrahams, Peter; Into the Dark: An Echo Falls Mystery;.Geringer/HarperCollins, 2008; [304p] Library ed. ISBN 978-0-06-073709-2 $16.89 Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-06-073708-5 $15.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 5-8 Echo Falls' youngest detective has her work cut out for her when a conservation officer turns up dead on her grandfather's farm, and Grampy is arrested for his murder. Although Ingrid has honed her talents uncovering other nefarious crimes in her small town (see Down the Rabbit Hole, BCCB 4/05, Behind the Curtain, 9/06), she knows the stakes are higher this time, as Grampy refuses to provide an alibi, and she herself will be called upon to testify to threats she witnessed her grandfather making against the officer. She takes to rereading her well-thumbed and prolifically highlighted volume of Sherlock Holmes stories in an attempt to channel the detecting powers of her hero. As in the other two books, Abrahams has selected a play for Ingrid's community theater that provides emotional context for Ingrid's dilemma: this time it's "Hansel and Gretel," and the fear of being alone in the woods and at the mercy of a witch both haunts Ingrid's dreams and finds a real analogue in an action-filled conclusion that is itself the stuff of nightmares. Readers familiar with Ingrid's previous adventures will be happy to see her friendship with Joey warming nicely, and they will empathize with her complex and demanding relationship with the curmudgeonly Grampy. Clues are sufficiently well laid that alert readers will be half a step ahead of Ingrid but no more, and the climax has that old-fashioned, Nancy Drew appeal of real danger at the hands of creepy villains. Ingrid might not be as smooth or quick on the uptake as Nancy, but she's certainly just as resourceful and a good deal more credible for modern readers. Copyright © 2008 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Book of a Thousand Days (review)

Reviewed by: Full House: 10 Stories about Poker Elizabeth Bush Hautman, Pete , ed. Full House: 10 Stories about Poker. Putnam, 2007 [176p] ISBN 978-0-399-24528-2$17.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 8-10 Dashti, a poor, orphaned peasant girl with healing powers, is offered a choice on her first day as maid to Lady Saren: she can return to her life as a peasant, or she can agree to accompany Lady Saren on a seven-year imprisonment in a tower. Dazzled by the opportunity to serve one of the fabled Ancestors, Dashti chooses the tower, and the two women are walled up and left to their fate. Lady Saren's crimes include refusing to marry the vicious and foul Lord Khasar and making a clandestine engagement with Khan Tegus instead. Both men visit the tower, but Lady Saren refuses to speak to them, ordering Dashti to impersonate her. Dashti is mystified, but her conversations with Khan Tegus become too enticing to give up, and she ends up falling in love with her mistress' khan. After two years, the women manage to find a way out only to discover that Lord Khasar has laid waste to Lady Saren's city, and he is advancing on Khan Tegus'. Ever enterprising and determined despite the inexplicable passivity of her mistress, Dashti manages to get them into Khan Tegus' house as servants and eventually, through a blend of meek obedience and fatalistic courage, finds a way to defeat Lord Khasar and attain her heart's desire. Hale handily revises the Grimm brothers' "Maid Maleen" to create her own compelling story of a hard-working girl who gets what she deserves. The narrative is told through Dashti's illustrated journals, where her naïve virtue is immediately apparent and her wit, warmth, and good sense continue to charm readers as her story becomes more harrowing and suspenseful. Lord Khasar is revealed to be the stuff of nightmares, but Khan Tegus is straight out of a young girl's dreams, so readers will be drawn to the romance as well as the adventure. Copyright © 2007 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Lessons to be learnt from the Victoria Climbié inquiry.

On 28 Janua ry, the long-awaited report of the inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the tragic life and death of 8-year old Victoria Climbie was made public (Laming, 2003). The report is clear in its condemnation of public sector workers, and their managers, who failed in their duty to ensure that this child was sa fegua rded from harm. It is of concern that such workers include hospital-based nurses who failed to document suspicious injuries (including bite marks, belt buckle marks and bruising) that they ob erved in the process of providing ca re to Victoria. Such a finding is just one example of a multitude of missed opportunities to rescue Victoria from what Alan Milburn, the Secretary of State for Hea lth, has rightly described as ‘the worst cruelty … the stuff of nightmares’.

Financial Management Stuttard Alan Woodhall Geoffrey Financial Management 85pp Macmillan Press 9780333593691 0333593693.

This book drives home just how much change has taken place in health services over the past couple of years. The first chapter is dated and misleading for those who are not up to speed with the latest structural change, but don't let this put you off. The remaining chapters offer a rich and clear insight into what for many is the stuff of nightmares - budgets and finance.

'The stuff of nightmares'

'The stuff of nightmares'