Miniaturization during a Silurian environmental crisis generated the modern brittle star body plan

Pivotal anatomical innovations often seem to appear by chance when viewed through the lens of the fossil record. As a consequence, specific driving forces behind the origination of major organismal clades generally remain speculative. Here, we present a rare exception to this axiom by constraining the appearance of a diverse animal group (the living Ophiuroidea) to a single speciation event rather than hypothetical ancestors. Fossils belonging to a new pair of temporally consecutive species of brittle stars (Ophiopetagno paicei gen. et sp. nov. and Muldaster haakei gen. et sp. nov.) from the Silurian (444–419 Mya) of Sweden reveal a process of miniaturization that temporally coincides with a global extinction and environmental perturbation known as the Mulde Event. The reduction in size from O. paicei to M. haakei forced a structural simplification of the ophiuroid skeleton through ontogenetic retention of juvenile traits, thereby generating the modern brittle star bauplan.

“A consummate actress, hampered by beauty”

The chapter explores the archival record of Vivien Leigh’s stage and screen craft. It considers how the archive illuminates her struggle to position her performative talent and craft in the “right” way relative to her status as glamourous star body. The chapter interrogates material in her archive at the V&A, her papers at the British Library, and connected archives of those performers and directors with whom she worked. Key case studies include her written correspondence with Laurence Olivier during the filming of Gone with the Wind, which illuminates her approach to male mentorship more broadly across her career. The chapter also focusses on two key aspects of her stage and screen craft often singled out for criticism in the reception of her performances: her voice and physical stamina.

Sonority, Difference and the Schwarzenegger Star Body

Discussions of the exilic body in Hollywood cinema have tended to focus on the personal trajectories of émigré actors in the context of the broader history of the industry in which they achieved star status. Significant work has been done in particular on the fate of European women stars in Hollywood but what has been rarely addressed, however, is the way in which Hollywood films imagine the exilic experience via the narratives built around specific stars. This article focuses on Arnold Schwarzenegger as one of the dominant stars of the 1980s–1990s, whose foreignness, accent and body are used in a remarkably consistent set of aesthetic, generic and narrative practices. The article uses Jean-Luc Nancy's concept of sonority to argue that the sonorous presence of the foreign other in the “host” space produces a new space; it produces the space of the host anew as one in which the foreign other is present despite the discursive denial of the possibility of that presence whilst at the same time producing a new self as distinct from the self before displacement. The article's aim is to highlight the ways in which Hollywood films produce and reproduce foreignness as an impossibility, a presence that cannot be. The use of the foreign star, I argue, is to perform the permeability of the boundary between outside and inside, while also policing it.

Animation and the Star Body

Animation has employed film stars throughout its long history; however, there have been few studies that have examined the relationship between film stardom and animation. This article explores the fantasy and illusion that is present through individual film stars and the medium of animation by investigating one particular example of the employment of a film star image within animation, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in Moana (Ron Clements and John Musker, 2016), and with a particular focus on the human and animated body.

Star Bodies with Completely Symmetric Sections

We say that a star body $K$ is completely symmetric if it has centroid at the origin and its symmetry group $G$ forces any ellipsoid whose symmetry group contains $G$, to be a ball. In this short note, we prove that if all central sections of a star body $L$ are completely symmetric, then $L$ has to be a ball. A special case of our result states that if all sections of $L$ are origin symmetric and 1-symmetric, then $L$ has to be a Euclidean ball. This answers a question from [12]. Our result is a consequence of a general theorem that we establish, stating that if the restrictions to almost all equators of a real function $f$ defined on the sphere, are isotropic functions, then $f$ is constant a.e. In the last section of this note, applications, improvements, and related open problems are discussed, and two additional open questions from [11] and [12] are answered.

On the critical determinants of certain star bodies

In a classic paper [14], W.G. Spohn established the to-date sharpest estimates from below for the simultaneous Diophantine approximation constants for three and more real numbers. As a by-result of his method which used Blichfeldt’s Theorem and the calculus of variations, he derived a bound for the critical determinant of the star body|x1|(|x1|3 + |x2|3 + |x3|3 ≤ 1.In this little note, after a brief exposition of the basics of the geometry of numbers and its significance for Diophantine approximation, this latter result is improved and extended to the star body|x1|(|x1|3 + |x22 + x32)3/2≤ 1.