On the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in northwest South Australia, an environmental health worker salvages discarded washing machines to reinstall remote community homes. Tracking fate of and householder well-being, this essay traces militarized genealogies running contemporary settler colonial occupation Australia. We are particularly interested how colonizing project decan...

In the recent past, when bank statements contained errors or the telephone network broke down, the general public usually blamed "the computer," making no distinction between hardware and software. However, high-profile disasters and the ensuing debates in the press are alerting more people to the crucial nature of software quality in their everyday lives. Before long, we can expect increasing ...

IGnAz SEmmElWEIS – HAnD WASHInG PIonEEr Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (July 1, 1818 – August 13, 1865) was the Hungarian – Austrian physician who demonstrated that puerperal fever (also known as “childbed fever”) was contagious and that its incidence could be drastically reduced by enforcing appropriate hand washing by medical care-givers. He made this discovery in 1847 while head of the Maternity D...

BACKGROUND Intravaginal practices including vaginal washing have been associated with HIV-1 acquisition. This association may be mediated by mucosal disruption, changes in vaginal flora or genital tract inflammatory responses. Reducing vaginal washing could lower women's risk of HIV-1 acquisition. METHODS 23 HIV-1 seronegative women who reported current vaginal washing were recruited from a p...

The relevance of the mean retention time (MRT) of particles through the gastrointestinal tract (GIT) is well understood and MRT(particle)GIT is an important parameter in digestion models. Solute markers have been used to estimate MRT(solute)GIT (or 'fluid passage') in animals, but the relevance of this measure is less evident and is usually sought in its relation to MRT(particle)GIT. The ratio ...

Beclin 1 is a crucial regulator of autophagy. It forms a complex with ATG14L, VPS34 or the class III phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase AMBRA1 to control autophagosome formation. A study in this issue of The EMBO Journal (Xia et al, 2013) reports that WASH, a protein known to regulate endosomal sorting, hampers autophagy by inhibiting the AMBRA1-dependent polyubiquitylation of Beclin 1. This modific...