Toxoplasma Gondi Infection in Mice Essay Example for Free

Toxoplasma Gondi Infection in Mice Essay GI (Gastro-Intestinal) inflammation from Toxoplasma gondii and wheat glutens contribute to schizophrenia, autism and bipolar disorder. It has been suggested that GI inflammation, allows natural microbiota and neuroactive exorphins to enter the blood steam, cross the blood brain barrier and attach to the opioid receptors. In this study exposure to Toxoplasma gondii increased anti-gluten IgG in all the mice who were inoculated. The mice were infected in three different ways, IP (injection into the peritoneal cavity), PO (fed food inoculated with the pathogen) and prenatally (injected). When the female mice were Infected IP, they were more likely to die than males. The mock group of females injected IP, had an increased gluten IgGs, while the males did not. The female immune system responded to stress. When both male and female mice received the pathogen PO, females displayed a larger anti-gluten response. When the females were injected prenatally, the offspring produced, were seropositive to T. gondii and displayed increased gluten IgG levels. Clq levels of the offspring were also elevated (Clq plays a role in synaptic pruning). I picked an article from PLOS (Public Library of Science),created by Dr.  Patrick Brown, a biochemist at Stanford University and Dr. Michael Eisen, a computational biologist at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. They wanted to speed up progress in science and medicine by creating a nonprofit-open access, to scientific journals and literature under an open content license called the Creative Commons â€Å"attribution† license. This allowed any person to reproduce and distribute information from the website. This allows all people to learn/share knowledge, repeat tests and add more information to current studies. This site is peer reviewed and respected as a reliable source of information. My article has many authors and sources, but in order to keep my critique to two pages I picked the first three people on the works cited. Dr. Emily Severance, received her B. S. in Zoology in 1983. She received her Ph. D. from the University of South Florida and did a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (It was ranked the 13th in the nation in 2013) where she studied neurological disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Stanley Division of Developmental Neurovirology. Her research is well documented and her publications continue to grow. I feel that she has extensive education and experience in this field of study and see her as being well qualified. Geetha Kannan was the second person cited and there was not much information on her. She was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins at the time this article was published and she has been a research assistant in at least one other study, Gene-environment interactions influence psychiatric disorders, headed by Mikhail V. Pletnikov , M. D. , Ph. D. She was an assistant and therefore I did not consider her to be a qualified source. Thirdly, is Kristin L Gressitt. Attended Salisbury University and received a B. A. in microbiology, before going to Johns Hopkins, where she is currently working as a research specialist. As a research specialist, Kristin’s job is to work under the project manager, performing administrative and operational duties. This is often a junior level position for students, or recent graduates. I can only assume that Kristin is competent, due to the fact that she has been employed at Johns Hopkins for the last three years and has contributed to four published studies. The major purpose of this research was to prove that co-associations between T. gondii and antibodies to wheat gluten cause an inflammatory immune response that in return, result in neuropsychiatric diseases. During my research one bias that I encountered was, the website that published this research project, makes its income by charging publishing fees. This could cause a conflict of interests. Another bias was the lack of data concerning the high mortality of female mice from IP injections. There were no post mortem toxicology or cytology reports. I think that the target audience was set by the website. Since it is established as scholarly, this increases the likely hood that science and medical students will use this website for research. The scholarly reputation will also draw in practicing researchers, doctors and scientists who want to reference the peer reviewed articles and journals. Since this website is full access, you can get the latest findings more timely than most of the conventional research sites. The articles presentation was professional. Bold letters stated the topic and the Abstract really pulled me in, however I do feel that the numerical findings could have been omitted from this paragraph to avoid redundancy. All the materials and methods were well documented. The same testing materials and techniques were used throughout the duration of the study. Graphs were used and it was easy to discriminate which text went to each graph. The introduction, analyses, results and discussion were very easy to follow and understand. As far as I can discern, the scientific method was followed.

First Impressions about George and Lennies Relationship in Of Mice and Men :: essays research papers

Our first impressions of George are that he is fairly normal. He is quite small but still broad and strong. ‘He is small and quick with sharp strong features’. We also get the impression that he is smart as well because ‘quick’ suggests that he is quick thinking as well as fast. He is a lot more sensible than Lennie and has a lot more self discipline. It must be very frustrating for a man with such good physical and mental health to be dragged down by a friend like he is but he is so kind and therefore he would never let Lennie get into trouble and a couple of times he even risks his life to help him out. Steinbeck makes is obvious from the first moment that Lennie is mentally retarded. Many times he is referred to as animal like and having animal like features. He is like a big baby, he is huge and clearly very strong but he has the mind of a small child. Lennie's personality and life seem based on three things: soft things, devotion to George and his dream of one day owning a farm. It is quite sad and Steinbeck makes you feel really sorry for him be exaggerating his simplicity and his innocence. Lennie is absent-minded for a good portion of the novel. He is unaware of what he's doing sometimes until he has done it. For example, he enjoyed to pet soft objects. But we find out that while living in Weed, he decided to ’pet’ a woman’s dress but she thought that he was raping her so she screamed and he almost got himself killed. He is greatly forgetful and needs a lot of looking after otherwise he would never be able so survive and quite often this can come between his relationship with George. Lennie is completely incapable of living on his own because of his disability but because George is such a good man, he has almost given up his life and devoted it to helping Lennie. He mentions that he made a promise to Lennie’s auntie but it is also because he is such a good man and he would never let such an innocent man go just because of a disability. Their relationship is very similar to that of a parent and a child, the child (Lennie) needs the parent (George) to look after them otherwise they wouldn’t be able to survive.

Digital Fortress Chapter 4

The crypto door beeped once, waking Susan from her depressing reverie. The door had rotated past its fully open position and would be closed again in five seconds, having made a complete 360-degree rotation. Susan gathered her thoughts and stepped through the opening. A computer made note of her entry. Although she had practically lived in Crypto since its completion three years ago, the sight of it still amazed her. The main room was an enormous circular chamber that rose five stories. Its transparent, domed ceiling towered 120 feet at its central peak. The Plexiglas cupola was embedded with a polycarbonate mesh-a protective web capable of withstanding a two-megaton blast. The screen filtered the sunlight into delicate lacework across the walls. Tiny particles of dust drifted upward in wide unsuspecting spirals-captives of the dome's powerful deionizing system. The room's sloping sides arched broadly at the top and then became almost vertical as they approached eye level. Then they became subtly translucent and graduated to an opaque black as they reached the floor-a shimmering expanse of polished black tile that shone with an eerie luster, giving one the unsettling sensation that the floor was transparent. Black ice. Pushing through the center of the floor like the tip of a colossal torpedo was the machine for which the dome had been built. Its sleek black contour arched twenty-three feet in the air before plunging back into the floor below. Curved and smooth, it was as if an enormous killer whale had been frozen mid breach in a frigid sea. This was TRANSLTR, the single most expensive piece of computing equipment in the world-a machine the NSA swore did not exist. Like an iceberg, the machine hid 90 percent of its mass and power deep beneath the surface. Its secret was locked in a ceramic silo that went six stories straight down-a rocketlike hull surrounded by a winding maze of catwalks, cables, and hissing exhaust from the freon cooling system. The power generators at the bottom droned in a perpetual low-frequency hum that gave the acoustics in Crypto a dead, ghostlike quality. TRANSLTR, like all great technological advancements, had been a child of necessity. During the 1980s, the NSA witnessed a revolution in telecommunications that would change the world of intelligence reconnaissance forever-public access to the Internet. More specifically, the arrival of E-mail. Criminals, terrorists, and spies had grown tired of having their phones tapped and immediately embraced this new means of global communication. E-mail had the security of conventional mail and the speed of the telephone. Since the transfers traveled through underground fiber-optic lines and were never transmitted into the airwaves, they were entirely intercept-proof-at least that was the perception. In reality, intercepting E-mail as it zipped across the Internet was child's play for the NSA's techno-gurus. The Internet was not the new home computer revelation that most believed. It had been created by the Department of Defense three decades earlier-an enormous network of computers designed to provide secure government communication in the event of nuclear war. The eyes and ears of the NSA were old Internet pros. People conducting illegal business via E-mail quickly learned their secrets were not as private as they'd thought. The FBI, DEA, IRS, and other U.S. law enforcement agencies-aided by the NSA's staff of wily hackers-enjoyed a tidal wave of arrests and convictions. Of course, when the computer users of the world found out the U.S. government had open access to their E-mail communications, a cry of outrage went up. Even pen pals, using E-mail for nothing more than recreational correspondence, found the lack of privacy unsettling. Across the globe, entrepreneurial programmers began working on a way to keep E-mail more secure. They quickly found one and public-key encryption was born. Public-key encryption was a concept as simple as it was brilliant. It consisted of easy-to-use, home-computer software that scrambled personal E-mail messages in such a way that they were totally unreadable. A user could write a letter and run it through the encryption software, and the text would come out the other side looking like random nonsense-totally illegible-a code. Anyone intercepting the transmission found only an unreadable garble on the screen. The only way to unscramble the message was to enter the sender's â€Å"pass-key†-a secret series of characters that functioned much like a PIN number at an automatic teller. The pass-keys were generally quite long and complex; they carried all the information necessary to instruct the encryption algorithm exactly what mathematical operations to follow tore-create the original message. A user could now send E-mail in confidence. Even if the transmission was intercepted, only those who were given the key could ever decipher it. The NSA felt the crunch immediately. The codes they were facing were no longer simple substitution ciphers crackable with pencil and graph paper-they were computer-generated hash functions that employed chaos theory and multiple symbolic alphabets to scramble messages into seemingly hopeless randomness. At first, the pass-keys being used were short enough for the NSA's computers to â€Å"guess.† If a desired pass-key had ten digits, a computer was programmed to try every possibility between 0000000000 and 9999999999. Sooner or later the computer hit the correct sequence. This method of trial-and-error guessing was known as â€Å"brute force attack.† It was time-consuming but mathematically guaranteed to work. As the world got wise to the power of brute-force code-breaking, the pass-keys started getting longer and longer. The computer time needed to â€Å"guess† the correct key grew from weeks to months and finally to years. By the 1990s, pass-keys were over fifty characters long and employed the full 256-character ASCII alphabet of letters, numbers, and symbols. The number of different possibilities was in the neighborhood of 10120-ten with 120 zeros after it. Correctly guessing a pass-key was as mathematically unlikely as choosing the correct grain of sand from a three-mile beach. It was estimated that a successful brute-force attack on a standard sixty-four-bit key would take the NSA's fastest computer-the top-secret Cray/Josephson II-over nineteen years to break. By the time the computer guessed the key and broke the code, the contents of the message would be irrelevant. Caught in a virtual intelligence blackout, the NSA passed a top-secret directive that was endorsed by the President of the United States. Buoyed by federal funds and a carte blanche to do whatever was necessary to solve the problem, the NSA set out to build the impossible: the world's first universal code-breaking machine. Despite the opinion of many engineers that the newly proposed code-breaking computer was impossible to build, the NSA lived by its motto: Everything is possible. The impossible just takes longer. Five years, half a million man-hours, and $1.9 billion later, the NSA proved it once again. The last of the three million, stamp-size processors was hand-soldered in place, the final internal programming was finished, and the ceramic shell was welded shut. TRANSLTR had been born. Although the secret internal workings of TRANSLTR were the product of many minds and were not fully understood by any one individual, its basic principle was simple: Many hands make light work. Its three million processors would all work in parallel-counting upward at blinding speed, trying every new permutation as they went. The hope was that even codes with unthinkably colossal pass-keys would not be safe from TRANSLTR's tenacity. This multibillion-dollar masterpiece would use the power of parallel processing as well as some highly classified advances in clear text assessment to guess pass-keys and break codes. It would derive its power not only from its staggering number of processors but also from new advances in quantum computing-an emerging technology that allowed information to be stored as quantum-mechanical states rather than solely as binary data. The moment of truth came on a blustery Thursday morning in October. The first live test. Despite uncertainty about how fast the machine would be, there was one thing on which the engineers agreed-if the processors all functioned in parallel, TRANSLTR would be powerful. The question was how powerful. The answer came twelve minutes later. There was a stunned silence from the handful in attendance when the printout sprang to life and delivered the cleartext-the broken code. TRANSLTR had just located a sixty-four-character key in a little over ten minutes, almost a million times faster than the two decades it would have taken the NSA's second-fastest computer. Led by the deputy director of operations, Commander Trevor J. Strathmore, the NSA's Office of Production had triumphed. TRANSLTR was a success. In the interest of keeping their success a secret, Commander Strathmore immediately leaked information that the project had been a complete failure. All the activity in the Crypto wing was supposedly an attempt to salvage their $2 billion fiasco. Only the NSA elite knew the truth-TRANSLTR was cracking hundreds of codes every day. With word on the street that computer-encrypted codes were entirely unbreakable-even by the all-powerful NSA-the secrets poured in. Drug lords, terrorists, and embezzlers alike-weary of having their cellular phone transmissions intercepted-were turning to the exciting new medium of encrypted E-mail for instantaneous global communications. Never again would they have to face a grand jury and hear their own voice rolling off tape, proof of some long-forgotten cellular phone conversation plucked from the air by an NSA satellite. Intelligence gathering had never been easier. Codes intercepted by the NSA entered TRANSLTR as totally illegible ciphers and were spit out minutes later as perfectly readable cleartext. No more secrets. To make their charade of incompetence complete, the NSA lobbied fiercely against all new computer encryption software, insisting it crippled them and made it impossible for lawmakers to catch and prosecute the criminals. Civil rights groups rejoiced, insisting the NSA shouldn't be reading their mail anyway. Encryption software kept rolling off the presses. The NSA had lost the battle-exactly as it had planned. The entire electronic global community had been fooled†¦ or so it seemed.

The Canterbury Tales Wife of Bath - 870 Words

The Canterbury Tales: Wife of Bath In the Hollywood blockbuster Basic Instinct, Sharon Stone plays a devious, manipulative, sex-driven woman who gets whatever she wants through her ploys for control. Stones portrayal of this character is unforgettable and makes the movie. In book or film, the most memorable female characters are those who break out of the stereotypical good wife mold. When an author or actress uses this technique effectively, the woman often carries the story. In Geoffrey Chaucers Canterbury Tales, he portrays the Wife of Bath, Alison, as a woman who bucks the tradition of her times with her brashness and desire for control to present a womans point of view and to evoke some sympathy for her. In the authors†¦show more content†¦And after he gives her control, we hadde never debat (P828). She has won this battle of wits, but it seems as though Jankyn has none. One way or another, Alison has made her puppets dance, completely under her dominion. Her tale backs up her philosophy, as the main point is that Wommen desire to have sovereinetee/As wel over hir housbonde and hir love,/And for to been in maistrye him above(T1044). The Tale backs up the Prologue and pleads for the emancipation of women. Alison is her own ideal of what a woman should be. By gaining sovereignty, she has the power. Chaucer has presented us with a fresh view of women, uncharacteristic of his time. The Wife of Bath is unique, and her defining qualities allow what the author thinks of women to reveal itself clearly. She is an immoral woman who has done whatever she has needed to do to get what she wants, and the author makes noShow MoreRelatedThe Wife Of Bath Tales And Chaucers The Canterbury Tales791 Words   |  4 Pagesbody did not feel the spade and the sewer as [her] live body felt the fire† (92). Shakespeare depicts Joan, in Henry VI, as â€Å"a ‘troll,’ ‘witch,’ ‘strumpet,’ ‘foul fiend of France’ (qtd. in Sarawsat 90). Likewise, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales represents the ‘wife of Bath Tale’ as bawdy. The protagonist Alison â€Å"still submits to the rule of patriarchal world†, she suffers because she is oppressed to the bone. She â€Å"struggles for respect in her own household†. That is why; s he needs an inner upheavalRead MoreChaucers Canterbury Tales: The Wife of Bath Essay837 Words   |  4 Pagesweaves together tales of twenty nine different people on their common journey to Canterbury. Through their time on the road, these characters explore the diverse lives of those traveling together, narrated by the host of the group. Each character in the ensemble is entitled to a prologue, explaining his or her life and the reasons for the tale, as well as the actual story, meant to have moral implications or simply to entertain. One narrative in particular, that of the Wife of Bath, serves both purposes:Read More Wife of Bath in Chaecers Canterbury Tales Essay912 Words   |  4 Pages In the Canterbury Tales written by Geoffrey Chaucer the story tells about men and women going on pilgrimages, among them the Wife of Bath in search of her 6th husband, who go on a journey to pay their respect to Sir Thomas à ¡ Becket. During the story the Wife of Bath strongly expresses hers elf as a very strong woman and knows what she expects with the men shes with. As well as this, with all her beauty and respect she was given in life the Wife of Bath displays herself highly. Finally, she idealsRead More Canterbury Tales - Comparing Chaucers The Clerks Tale and The Wife of Bath Tale1963 Words   |  8 Pages In The Clerks Tale and The Wife of Baths Tale from Geoffrey Chaucers The Canterbury Tales, characters are demanding, powerful and manipulating in order to gain obedience from others. From all of The Canterbury Tales, The Clerks Tale and The Wife of Baths Tale are the two most similar tales. These tales relate to each other in the terms of obedience and the treatment of women. The Wife of Bath Tale consists of one woman who has complete controlRead More Chaucers Canterbury Tales Essay - The Strong Wife of Bath1112 Words   |  5 PagesThe Strong Wife of Bath       Alison of Bath as a battered wife may seem all wrong, but her fifth husband, Jankyn, did torment her and knock her down, if not out, deafening her somewhat in the process. Nevertheless, the Wife of Bath got the upper hand in this marriage as she had done in the other four and as she would probably do in the sixth, which she declared herself ready to welcome. Alison certainly ranks high among women able to gain control over their mates.    The Wife of BathsRead More Canterbury Tales Essay - Sexuality in The Wife of Bath and the Pardoner1711 Words   |  7 PagesSexuality in The Wife of Bath and the Pardoner In Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, an eclectic mix of people gathers together at Tabard Inn to begin a pilgrimage to Canterbury. In the General Prologue, the readers are introduced to each of these characters. Among the pilgrims are the provocative Wife of Bath and the meek Pardoner. These two characters both demonstrate sexuality, in very different ways. Chaucer uses the Wife and the Pardoner to examine sexuality in the medieval periodRead More Character Analysis of The Wife of Bath of Chaucers Canterbury Tales1623 Words   |  7 Pages Character Analysis of The Wife of Bath of Chaucers Canterbury Tales The Canterbury Tales is Geoffrey Chaucers greatest and most memorable work. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer uses a fictitious pilgrimage [to Canterbury] as a framing device for a number of stories (Norton 79). In The General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer describes in detail the pilgrims he meets in the inn on their way to Canterbury. Chaucer is the author, but also a character and the narrator, and acts likeRead More Chaucers Canterbury Tales Essay - The Powerful Wife of Bath1099 Words   |  5 PagesThe Powerful Wife of Bath   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   In Geoffrey Chacers The Canterbury Tales we are introduced to 29 people who are going on a pilgrimage to St. Thomas a Becket in Canterbury. Each person is represented to fit a unique type of behavior as shown by people during the medieval ages.   My attention was drawn to the Wife of Bath through which Chaucer notes the gender inequalities.   Predominantly, women could either choose to marry and become a childbearing wife or go intoRead MoreChaucer s Canterbury Tales And The Wife Of Bath s Tale1167 Words   |  5 Pagesalways tries to improve a part of society in a moral basis. The reason it targets a part of society is because didactic literature has an audience of origin that the moral applies to. For example, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: â€Å"The Wife of Bath s Prologue† and â€Å"The Wife of Bath s Tale† , which is written by Geoffrey Chaucer, takes place during the late 5th and early 6th century during King Arthur’s reign of Great Britain. During this era, society was structured in a totally different manner thanRead More Chaucers Canterbury Tales Essay - Women in The Wife of Bath1433 Words   |  6 PagesWomen in Chaucers The Wife of Bath Chaucers The Wife of Baths Prologue and Tale is a medieval legend that paints a portrait of strong women finding love and themselves in the direst of situations. It is presented to the modern day reader as an early tale of feminism showcasing the ways a female character gains power within a repressive, patriarchal society. Underneath the simplistic plot of female empowerment lies an underbelly of anti-feminism. Sometimes this is presented blatantly