"They shall not grow old" and "Mimesis: African soldier"

This paper will examine and compare two recent visual explorations of the experience of soldiers in World War I. Director Peter Jackson’s documentary They Shall Not Grow Old has been called an immersive, haunting and often transcendent experience that’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. By using modern digital film technology, he has restored the visuals and added sounds and speech via Automatic Dialogue Replacement, colorized, changed the speed, and brought 3D depth to the old footage from the Imperial War Museum. Jackson has either, using the terminology of William Guynn (Unspeakable Histories: Film and the Experience of Catastrophe), employed this technology to trigger “moments of heightened awareness in which the reality of the past may be recovered in its material being”. Or, do these computer generated technological affects, “….stand in for the ‘truth’ and obscure just how constructed the ‘history’ Jackson is telling actually is?” John Akomfrah’s video/sound three screen performance/display installation Mimesis: African Soldier uses silent actors, archive film and photographs, ethnographic sound recordings, new filmed footage with and without actors, and a sound track by Trevor Mathison, to document the experience of those, among many, left out of Jackson’s film: colonial subjects as soldiers. Akomfrah “does not put colour back in the cheeks of the dead”, but rather warns the viewer that remembrance can come in many forms, some of them unrealiable. All of this leads to a conclusion, as Avishai Margalit put it in Ethics of Memory, that “memory…is knowledge from the past. It is not necessarily knowledge about the past.”

γ-Valerolactone as Bio-Based Solvent for Nanofiltration Membrane Preparation

γ-Valerolactone (GVL) was selected as a renewable green solvent to prepare membranes via the process of phase inversion. Water and ethanol were screened as sustainable non-solvents to prepare membranes for nanofiltration (NF). Scanning electron microscopy was applied to check the membrane morphology, while aqueous rose Bengal (RB) and magnesium sulphate (MgSO4) feed solutions were used to screen performance. Cellulose acetate (CA), polyimide (PI), cellulose triacetate (CTA), polyethersulfone (PES) and polysulfone (PSU) membranes were fine-tuned as materials for preparation of NF-membranes, either by selecting a suitable non-solvent for phase inversion or by increasing the polymer concentration in the casting solution. The best membranes were prepared with CTA in GVL using water as non-solvent: with increasing CTA concentration (10 wt% to 17.5 wt%) in the casting solution, permeance decreased from 15.9 to 5.5 L/m2·h·bar while RB rejection remained higher than 94%. The polymer solubilities in GVL were rationalized using Hansen solubility parameters, while membrane performances and morphologies were linked to viscosity measurements and cloudpoint determination of the casting solutions to better understand the kinetic and thermodynamic aspects of the phase inversion process.

What Europe and the US could learn from the Covid Crisis

The European Economy is underperforming in the Covid Crisis, as it did in the Financial Crisis. If economic strength is measured by growth of GDP, Europe’s recovery in 2021 will be two percentage points below the loss in 2020, while the US will enjoy a net gain of 2 percentage points in these two crisis years. To the benefit of Europe, the paper finds that fatal causalities relative to population due to Covid were lower in Europe, and we therefore conclude that Europe chose a different tradeoff between economic and health goals. We report differences in fiscal and monetary response, but also in structural policy, governance and the political process in the two regions. Decisions in the US, once a problem has been recognized as important, are quicker; more resources can be shifted, even if the public debt is already very high. Finally, we screen performance for sustainability and life expectancy, which shows advantages for Europe that could be extended in the recovery programs.

Parallel CRISPR-Cas9 screens clarify impacts of p53 on screen performance

CRISPR-Cas9 genome engineering has revolutionised high-throughput functional genomic screens. However, recent work has raised concerns regarding the performance of CRISPR-Cas9 screens using TP53 wild-type human cells due to a p53-mediated DNA damage response (DDR) limiting the efficiency of generating viable edited cells. To directly assess the impact of cellular p53 status on CRISPR-Cas9 screen performance, we carried out parallel CRISPR-Cas9 screens in wild-type and TP53 knockout human retinal pigment epithelial cells using a focused dual guide RNA library targeting 852 DDR-associated genes. Our work demonstrates that although functional p53 status negatively affects identification of significantly depleted genes, optimal screen design can nevertheless enable robust screen performance. Through analysis of our own and published screen data, we highlight key factors for successful screens in both wild-type and p53-deficient cells.