Somatechnologies

2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 110-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanne Lettow ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Philosophy Of Technology ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Politics ◽  
Minor Role ◽  
Technological Means ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Body Technologies

Until now, the body has played only a minor role in the philosophy of technology. However, more elaborate reflections on the relation between technology and the body are needed because of the advent of somatechnologies – technologies intentionally geared toward modifying bodies and that use bodily substances as technological means. The article discusses some approaches within the philosophy of technology that prove to be fruitful in this context. The article argues thatsomatechnical modifications of bodies should be understood as elements of ‘body technologies’ and body politics in a broader sense. In such a perspective, concepts of the body developed by Judith Butler and Michel Foucault should be adopted by a praxeological philosophy of technology.

scholarly journals The Politics of Body in Bhisham Sahni's Madhavi: Rethinking the Mythical Performance

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 98-107
Author(s):  
Yog Raj Lamichhane
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Politics ◽  
Central Character ◽  
Textual Evidence

Madhavi, a blessed body with eternal virginity, is the central character of Bhisham Sahni's play Madhavi. This paper attempts to explore her boon of eternal virginity as a patriarchal scar inscribed by the society on her womb. How do her ultimate rejection of that scar and the final journey to actual eternity become the insightful performances to respond to the societal body politics? This is the major concern of the study. In this interpretation, mainly the concepts of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler regarding the body politics and the notions of Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Roberta Mock, and Richard Schechner concerning the body and its performance are synthesized as a theoretical framework to analyze the textual evidence and to observe the performance of the politically conditioned, condemned and trivialized body of Madhavi. Finally, the study ascertains that the perpetually subordinated body gradually comprehends the society and insightfully performs liberty against the hegemonic power bloc. In the play, the proactive proposal of Madhavi to Vishwamitra for lovemaking and her ultimate disappearance into nature in search of actual eternity can be a leading evidence of the insightful performances towards liberty.

scholarly journals Performatywne rozpoznania medialności polityki w myśli Judith Butler

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (55) ◽  
pp. 212-225
Author(s):  
Marcin Sanakiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Body ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Visibility Politics ◽  
A Performance

Judith Butler, an American philosopher and performance theorist, sees the transformations of public sphere and democracy in the possibilities of making visible the human bodies. Butler interprets a performance as a setting boundary for belonging to a community. Public appearance requires the existence of the body and media technologies. In this way, the performative nature of political activities acquires the characteristics of biopower, according to Michel Foucault: control over the coupling of social and biological existence of man, taking into account his public visibility. Politics, by merging with what is media, obtains a performative (discursive/event) character.

Mifepristone (RU 486), a blocker of type II glucocorticoid and progestin receptors, reverses a dietary form of obesity

1992 ◽  
Vol 262 (6) ◽  
pp. R1106-R1110 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Okada ◽  
D. A. York ◽  
G. A. Bray
Keyword(s):  
Body Weight ◽  
Glucocorticoid Receptors ◽  
Body Weight Gain ◽  
The Body ◽  
Receptor Activity ◽  
Minor Role ◽  
Type Ii ◽  
Fat Pad ◽  
Ru 486 ◽  
A Minor

The effect of mifepristone (RU 486), a blocker of type II glucocorticoid receptors on the development of obesity that follows the feeding of a high-fat (HF) diet to Osborne-Mendel (OM) rats, has been investigated. OM rats fed a HF diet gained more weight and had larger retroperitoneal and parametrial fat pads than OM rats fed a high-carbohydrate low-fat (LF) diet. RU 486 (30 mg.kg-1.day-1) for 14 days completely reversed the body weight gain and the increase in fat pad size of OM rats fed a HF diet. RU 486 had no effect on body weight of OM rats fed a LF diet, but did reduce fat pad weights. The data suggest that type II glucocorticoid receptor activity modulates body fat deposition and is essential for the development of obesity, although a minor role for progestin receptor activity cannot be ruled out.

scholarly journals Reciprocal Activation by Cyclin-Dependent Kinases 2 and 7 Is Directed by Substrate Specificity Determinants outside the T Loop

2001 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Garrett ◽  
William A. Barton ◽  
Ronald Knights ◽  
Pei Jin ◽  
David O. Morgan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Substrate Specificity ◽  
Protein Interactions ◽  
Phosphorylation Site ◽  
The Body ◽  
Regulatory Subunit ◽  
Minor Role ◽  
Protein Protein Interactions ◽  
Threonine Residue ◽  
A Minor

ABSTRACT Cyclin-dependent kinase 7 (CDK7) is the catalytic subunit of the metazoan CDK-activating kinase (CAK), which activates CDKs, such as CDC2 and CDK2, through phosphorylation of a conserved threonine residue in the T loop. Full activation of CDK7 requires association with a positive regulatory subunit, cyclin H, and phosphorylation of a conserved threonine residue at position 170 in its own T loop. We show that threonine-170 of CDK7 is phosphorylated in vitro by its targets, CDC2 and CDK2, which also phosphorylate serine-164 in the CDK7 T loop, a site that perfectly matches their consensus phosphorylation site. In contrast, neither CDK4 nor CDK7 itself can phosphorylate the CDK7 T loop in vitro. The ability of CDC2 or CDK2 and CDK7 to phosphorylate each other but not themselves implies that each kinase can discriminate among closely related sequences and can recognize a substrate site that diverges from its usual preferred site. To understand the basis for this paradoxical substrate specificity, we constructed a chimeric CDK with the T loop of CDK7 grafted onto the body of CDK2. Surprisingly, the hybrid enzyme, CDK2-7, was efficiently activated in cyclin A-dependent fashion by CDK7 but not at all by CDK2. CDK2-7, moreover, phosphorylated wild-type CDK7 but not CDK2. Our results suggest that the primary amino acid sequence of the T loop plays only a minor role, if any, in determining the specificity of cyclin-dependent CAKs for their CDK substrates and that protein-protein interactions involving sequences outside the T loop can influence substrate specificity both positively and negatively.

scholarly journals The high-level basis of body adaptation

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (6) ◽  
pp. 172103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin R. Brooks ◽  
Colin W. G. Clifford ◽  
Richard J. Stevenson ◽  
Jonathan Mond ◽  
Ian D. Stephen
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Minor Role ◽  
Low Level ◽  
Visual Exposure ◽  
Object Based ◽  
High Level ◽  
A Minor

Prolonged visual exposure, or ‘adaptation’, to thin (wide) bodies causes a perceptual aftereffect such that subsequently seen bodies appear wider (thinner) than they actually are. Here, we conducted two experiments investigating the effect of rotating the orientation of the test stimuli by 90° from that of the adaptor. Aftereffects were maximal when adapting and test bodies had the same orientation. When they differed, the axis of the perceived distortion changed with the orientation of the body. Experiment 1 demonstrated a 58% transfer of the aftereffect across orientations. Experiment 2 demonstrated an even greater degree of aftereffect transfer when the influence of low-level mechanisms was reduced further by using adaptation and test stimuli with different sizes. These results indicate that the body aftereffect is mediated primarily by high-level object-based processes, with low-level retinotopic mechanisms playing only a minor role. The influence of these low-level processes is further reduced when test stimuli differ in size from adaptation stimuli.

scholarly journals Impact of MR on mature adipocytes in high-fat/high-sucrose diet-induced obesity

2018 ◽  
Vol 239 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomoaki Hayakawa ◽  
Tomomi Minemura ◽  
Toshiharu Onodera ◽  
Jihoon Shin ◽  
Yosuke Okuno ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Liver Weight ◽  
The Body ◽  
Minor Role ◽  
High Fat ◽  
Diet Induced Obesity ◽  
Sucrose Diet ◽  
High Sucrose Diet ◽  
A Minor ◽  
High Sucrose

Active glucocorticoid levels are elevated in the adipose tissue of obesity due to the enzyme 11 beta-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase type 1. Glucocorticoids can bind and activate both glucocorticoid receptor (GR) and mineralocorticoid receptor (MR), and pharmacological blockades of MR prevent high-fat diet-induced obesity and glucose intolerance. To determine the significance of MR in adipocytes, we generated adipocyte-specific MR-knockout mice (AdipoMR-KO) and fed them high-fat/high-sucrose diet. We found that adipocyte-specific deletion of MR did not affect the body weight, fat weight, glucose tolerance or insulin sensitivity. While liver weight was slightly reduced in AdipoMR-KO, there were no significant differences in the mRNA expression levels of genes associated with lipogenesis, lipolysis, adipocytokines and oxidative stress in adipose tissues between the control and AdipoMR-KO mice. The results indicated that MR in mature adipocytes plays a minor role in the regulation of insulin resistance and inflammation in high-fat/high-sucrose diet-induced obese mice.

The Effect of Path Length and Display Size on Memory for Spatial Information

2012 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 147-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Guérard ◽  
Sébastien Tremblay
Keyword(s):  
Path Length ◽  
Potential Role ◽  
Spatial Information ◽  
Recall Performance ◽  
Minor Role ◽  
Length Effect ◽  
Serial Memory ◽  
Fixed Reference ◽  
A Minor

In serial memory for spatial information, some studies showed that recall performance suffers when the distance between successive locations increases relatively to the size of the display in which they are presented (the path length effect; e.g., Parmentier et al., 2005) but not when distance is increased by enlarging the size of the display (e.g., Smyth & Scholey, 1994). In the present study, we examined the effect of varying the absolute and relative distance between to-be-remembered items on memory for spatial information. We manipulated path length using small (15″) and large (64″) screens within the same design. In two experiments, we showed that distance was disruptive mainly when it is varied relatively to a fixed reference frame, though increasing the size of the display also had a small deleterious effect on recall. The insertion of a retention interval did not influence these effects, suggesting that rehearsal plays a minor role in mediating the effects of distance on serial spatial memory. We discuss the potential role of perceptual organization in light of the pattern of results.

Use of Different Tissue Thromboplastins in the Control of Anticoagulant-Therapy

1958 ◽  
Vol 02 (05/06) ◽  
pp. 462-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Verstraete ◽  
Patricia A. Clark ◽  
Irving S. Wright
Keyword(s):  
Prothrombin Time ◽  
Anticoagulant Therapy ◽  
Factor Vii ◽  
Rabbit Brain ◽  
Minor Role ◽  
Rabbit Lung ◽  
Coagulation Mechanism ◽  
Time Test ◽  
The One ◽  
A Minor

SummaryAn analysis of the results of prothrombin time tests with different types of thromboplastins sheds some light on the problem why the administration of coumarin is difficult to standardize in different centers. Our present ideas on the subject, based on experimental data may be summarized as follows.Several factors of the clotting mechanism are influenced by coumarin derivatives. The action of some of these factors is by-passed in the 1-stage prothrombin time test. The decrease of the prothrombin and factor VII levels may be evaluated in the 1-stage prothrombin time determination (Quick-test). The prolongation of the prothrombin times are, however, predominantly due to the decrease of factor VII activity, the prothrombin content remaining around 50 per cent of normal during an adequate anticoagulant therapy. It is unlikely that this degree of depression of prothrombin is of major significance in interfering with the coagulation mechanism in the protection against thromboembolism. It may, however, play a minor role, which has yet to be evaluated quantitatively. An exact evaluation of factor VII is, therefore, important for the guidance of anticoagulant therapy and the method of choice is the one which is most sensitive to changes in factor VII concentration. The 1-stage prothrombin time test with a rabbit lung thromboplastin seems the most suitable method because rabbit brain preparations exhibit a factor VII-like activity that is not present in rabbit lung preparations.

Produktivkraft als Versprechen

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (185) ◽  
pp. 621-638 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Siefkes
Keyword(s):  
Private Consumption ◽  
Minor Role ◽  
Progressive Reduction ◽  
Internal Forces ◽  
A Minor

The ‘Fragment on Machines’ from Marx’s Grundrisse is often cited as an argument that the internal forces of capitalism will lead to its doom. But the argument that the progressive reduction of labor must doom capitalism lacks a proper foundation, as a comparison with the ‘Schemes of Reproduction’ given in Capital II shows. The latter, however, aren’t fully convincing either. In reality, more depends on the private consumption of capitalists than either model recognizes. Ultimately, most can be made of the ‘Fragment on Machines’ by reading it not as an exposure of capitalism’s internal contractions, but as a discussion of a possible communist future where labor (or work) will play but a minor role.

Effects of Myo-inositol Alone and in Combination with Seleno-Lmethionine on Cadmium-Induced Testicular Damage in Mice

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 311-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Salvatore Benvenga ◽  
Antonio Micali ◽  
Giovanni Pallio ◽  
Roberto Vita ◽  
Consuelo Malta ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Structural Changes ◽  
Natural Antioxidants ◽  
Minor Role ◽  
Positive Role ◽  
Testosterone Levels ◽  
Tnf Α ◽  
Testicular Lesions ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Immunohistochemical Analyses

Background: Cadmium (Cd) impairs gametogenesis and damages the blood-testis barrier. Objective: As the primary mechanism of Cd-induced damage is oxidative stress, the effects of two natural antioxidants, myo-inositol (MI) and seleno-L-methionine (Se), were evaluated in mice testes. Methods: Eighty-four male C57 BL/6J mice were divided into twelve groups: 0.9% NaCl (vehicle; 1 ml/kg/day i.p.); Se (0.2 mg/kg/day per os); Se (0.4 mg/kg/day per os); MI (360 mg/kg/day per os); MI plus Se (0.2 mg/kg/day); MI plus Se (0.4 mg/kg/day); CdCl2 (2 mg/kg/day i.p.) plus vehicle; CdCl2 plus MI; CdCl2 plus Se (0.2 mg/kg/day); CdCl2 plus Se (0.4 mg/kg/day); CdCl2 plus MI plus Se (0.2 mg/kg/day); and CdCl2 plus MI plus Se (0.4 mg/kg/day). After 14 days, testes were processed for biochemical, structural and immunohistochemical analyses. Results: CdCl2 increased iNOS and TNF-α expression and Malondialdehyde (MDA) levels, lowered glutathione (GSH) and testosterone, induced testicular lesions, and almost eliminated claudin-11 immunoreactivity. Se administration at 0.2 or 0.4 mg/kg significantly reduced iNOS and TNF-α expression, maintained GSH, MDA and testosterone levels, structural changes and low claudin-11 immunoreactivity. MI alone or associated with Se at 0.2 or 0.4 mg/kg significantly reduced iNOS and TNF-α expression and MDA levels, increased GSH and testosterone levels, ameliorated structural organization and increased claudin-11 patches number. Conclusion: We demonstrated a protective effect of MI, a minor role of Se and an evident positive role of the association between MI and Se on Cd-induced damages of the testis. MI alone or associated with Se might protect testes in subjects exposed to toxicants, at least to those with behavior similar to Cd.

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