Mixed messages: Resistance and reappropriation in rave culture

Mixed messages

Mixed messages

plants are cloaked in hundreds of tiny projections, known as trichomes. These structures vary in function, shape, size and spacing from species to species, and it’s not known whether similar cellular differentiation programs are responsible for making trichomes in different plants. Trichomes are clearly visible in the scanning electron micrograph of a wild-type Nicotiana tabacum seedling above ...

NPY's mixed messages

According to a study on page 1575, cellular debris might help trigger the autoimmune disease systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Vollmer and colleagues show that endogenous complexes of RNA and protein, often released from dying cells, engage activating receptors in dendritic cells (DCs). The activated DCs then launch an inappropriate immune response against these self-complexes, thus triggerin...

The Reappropriation of Technology

Ideas about purity and contagion appear over and over again in the history of cultures. Indeed, they seem to be so pervasive that we might rightly consider them as a basic organizing principle of human action. They lurk behind primitive dietary rules and laws of ritual avoidance (Douglas 1978), and they underlie our present respect for hygiene and distaste for uncleanliness in bodily and other ...

BMJ Mixed messages Medical myths