The 1919-21 influenza pandemic in Greenland.

In Alaska, the 1918-20 influenza pandemic was devastating, with mortality rates up to 90% of the population, while in other arctic regions in northern Sweden and Norway mortality was considerably lower. We investigated the timing and age-patterns in excess mortality in Greenland during the period 1918-21 and compare these to other epidemics and the 1889-92 pandemic. We accessed the Greenlandic National Archives and transcribed all deaths from 1880 to 1921 by age, geography, and cause of death. We estimated monthly excess mortality and studied the spatial-temporal patterns of the pandemics and compared them to other mortality crises in the 40-year period. The 1918-21 influenza pandemic arrived in Greenland in the summer of 1919, one year delayed due to ship traffic interruptions during the winter months. We found that 5.2% of the Greenland population died of the pandemic with substantial variability between counties (range, 0.1% to 11%). We did not see the typical pandemic age-pattern of high young-adult mortality, possibly due to high baseline mortality in this age-group or remoteness. However, despite substantial mortality, the mortality impact was not standing out relative to other mortality crises, or of similar devastation reported in Alaskan populations.

'This wretched state': Robert Burns's illness and the daybook of Charles Fleeming.

While now known globally as Scotland's national poet, in November 1781 the daybook of surgeon Charles Fleeming simply records him as 'Robert Burns, Lint Dresser'. Discovered in the 1950s, the daybook documents Fleeming's treatment of Burns during a period of illness which would have a profound impact on the poet's life and creative output. The book's discovery added to the theories about the nature of Burns's illness, often at odds with Burns's own later descriptions. This paper presents a fresh examination of Burns's treatment, challenging those theories by considering Fleeming's prescriptions in the context of key medical authorities of the time. In considering Burns's entry in the daybook in its entirety, the wider value of Fleeming's daybook as a private record of medical practice at the time is highlighted, pointing to the potential value of this and other such volumes as underappreciated archival research material.

Society for the History of Psychology News and Notes.

Cheiron's Young Scholar Award Committee is pleased to announce that Matthew Soleiman, a PhD candidate in the Department of History and Science Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego, has been chosen to receive the 2023 award for his paper "Recerebrated: The rise of the clinic in the twentieth-century science of pain." Using published and archival sources, Soleiman's paper examines two key developments in early- to mid-20th-century pain research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Archives and amazons: A quilters guide to the lesbian archive.

This article offers a critical reflection on my creative engagement with the figure of the Amazon in the quilted artworks for my exhibition Archives and Amazons: quilting the lesbian archive which took place at HOME, Manchester in 2021. This exhibition was created in response to archival research at the only accredited museum in the UK dedicated to women, Glasgow Women's Library (GWL), which holds the remnants of the now disbanded Lesbian Archive and Information Centre (LAIC) (1984-1995). I engage specifically with two representations of Amazons, from two very disparate and politically opposed lesbian publications: firstly the illustrated cover of the LAIC newsletter, and a photographic series by the artist Tessa Boffin (1960-1993). Through auto-ethnography I articulate some of the pleasures and complexities in encountering, and re-visioning the Amazons that ride within the remaining fragments of the LAIC collection. I propose the quilt as a reparative strategy for engaging with the Amazon, one that refuses to disassemble and disassociate from the difficulties of lesbian history, re-assembling the pieces through a contemporary lesbian lens.

A text mining and network analysis of topics and trends in major nursing research journals.

AIM: This study is set to determine the main topics of the nursing field and to show the changing perspectives over time by analysing the abstracts of several major nursing research journals using text mining methodology. DESIGN: Text mining and network analysis. METHODS: Text analysis combines automatic and manual operations to identify patterns in unstructured data. Detailed searches covering 1998-2021 were conducted in PubMed archives to collect articles from six nursing journals: Journal of Advanced Nursing, International Journal of Nursing Studies, Western Journal of Nursing Research, Nursing Research, Journal of Nursing Scholarship and Research in Nursing and Health. This study uses a four-phase text mining and network approach, gathering text data and cleaning, preprocessing, text analysis and advanced analyses. Analyses and data visualization were performed using Endnote, JMP, Microsoft Excel, Tableau and VOSviewer versions. From six journals, 17,581 references in PubMed were combined into one EndNote file. Due to missing abstract information, 2496 references were excluded from the study. The remaining references (n = 15,085) were used for the text mining analyses. RESULTS: Eighteen subjects were determined into two main groups; research method topics and nursing research topics. The most striking topics are qualitative research, concept analysis, advanced practice in the downtrend, and literature search, statistical analysis, randomized control trials, quantitative research, nurse practice environment, risk assessment and nursing science. According to the network analysis results, nursing satisfaction and burnout and nursing practice environment are highly correlated and represent 10% of the total corpus. This study contributes in various ways to the field of nursing research enhanced by text mining. The study findings shed light on researchers becoming more aware of the latest research status, sub-fields and trends over the years, identifying gaps and planning future research agendas. No patient or public contribution.

The unusual gene architecture of polyubiquitin is created by dual-specific splice sites.

BACKGROUND: The removal of introns occurs through the splicing of a 5' splice site (5'ss) with a 3' splice site (3'ss). These two elements are recognized by distinct components of the spliceosome. However, introns in higher eukaryotes contain many matches to the 5' and 3' splice-site motifs that are presumed not to be used. RESULTS: Here, we find that many of these sites can be used. We also find occurrences of the AGGT motif that can function as either a 5'ss or a 3'ss-previously referred to as dual-specific splice sites (DSSs)-within introns. Analysis of the Sequence Read Archive reveals a 3.1-fold enrichment of DSSs relative to expectation, implying synergy between the ability to function as a 5'ss and 3'ss. Despite this suggested mechanistic advantage, DSSs are 2.7- and 4.7-fold underrepresented in annotated 5' and 3' splice sites. A curious exception is the polyubiquitin gene UBC, which contains a tandem array of DSSs that precisely delimit the boundary of each ubiquitin monomer. The resulting isoforms splice stochastically to include a variable number of ubiquitin monomers. We found no evidence of tissue-specific or feedback regulation but note the 8.4-fold enrichment of DSS-spliced introns in tandem repeat genes suggests a driving role in the evolution of genes like UBC. CONCLUSIONS: We find an excess of unannotated splice sites and the utilization of DSSs in tandem repeats supports the role of splicing in gene evolution. These findings enhance our understanding of the diverse and complex nature of the splicing process.

(Un)making labor invisible: A syllabus.

From industrial psychology and occupational therapy to the laboratory bench and scenes of "heroic" fieldwork, there are important connections between the science of labor and the labor of science. Participants in the 2022 Gordon Cain Conference explored how greater attention to these connections might deepen historical understanding of what constitutes "science" and what counts as "labor." Our conversations circled around themes of vulnerability (of systems, individual bodies, historical testimony), affect (pertaining to historical actors and ourselves), and interdependence (e.g. across human groups, species, political boundaries, and time). For the members of this group, which grew out of a panel discussion, these themes and motivations coalesced around a topical focus on invisibility, which helped us to articulate - in the form of a co-created syllabus - research questions about science and labor from multiple angles pertaining to practice, archival preservation, and scholarly representation. This syllabus is organized into six thematic modules that aim to challenge and historicize the concept of invisible labor by facilitating comparisons across geographic, temporal, conceptual, and disciplinary boundaries. The goals of this collaborative syllabus, in sum, are manifold: we seek to facilitate more inclusive histories of science through critical engagement with "invisibility" and thereby promote a more expansive understanding of what constitutes scientific labor; to highlight the constitutive role of gendered labor practices in the scientific enterprise; to draw attention to interdependencies that make all forms of production (knowledge or material) possible; to elucidate systems of remuneration for scientific labor over the longue durée and through pointed comparisons; and, finally, to promote self-reflexivity about the methods we use to narrate the history of science and make sense of our own labors.

A machine learning-enabled open biodata resource inventory from the scientific literature.

Modern biological research depends on data resources. These resources archive difficult-to-reproduce data and provide added-value aggregation, curation, and analyses. Collectively, they constitute a global infrastructure of biodata resources. While the organic proliferation of biodata resources has enabled incredible research, sustained support for the individual resources that make up this distributed infrastructure is a challenge. The Global Biodata Coalition (GBC) was established by research funders in part to aid in developing sustainable funding strategies for biodata resources. An important component of this work is understanding the scope of the resource infrastructure; how many biodata resources there are, where they are, and how they are supported. Existing registries require self-registration and/or extensive curation, and we sought to develop a method for assembling a global inventory of biodata resources that could be periodically updated with minimal human intervention. The approach we developed identifies biodata resources using open data from the scientific literature. Specifically, we used a machine learning-enabled natural language processing approach to identify biodata resources from titles and abstracts of life sciences publications contained in Europe PMC. Pretrained BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) models were fine-tuned to classify publications as describing a biodata resource or not and to predict the resource name using named entity recognition. To improve the quality of the resulting inventory, low-confidence predictions and potential duplicates were manually reviewed. Further information about the resources were then obtained using article metadata, such as funder and geolocation information. These efforts yielded an inventory of 3112 unique biodata resources based on articles published from 2011-2021. The code was developed to facilitate reuse and includes automated pipelines. All products of this effort are released under permissive licensing, including the biodata resource inventory itself (CC0) and all associated code (BSD/MIT).

[Traces of epidemics in the fringes of pain: memory of Spanish flu from a local history perspective, Botucatu (São Paulo state), 1918]. / Rastros epidêmicos nas fímbrias da dor: a memória da gripe espanhola na perspectiva da história local, Botucatu (SP), 1918.

This article takes a local history perspective to scrutinize how the memory of suffering that surrounded the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 in Botucatu, São Paulo state, has been evoked, challenged, and transmuted over time, producing representations in strategies and practices, and understandings that end up constituting a meaning-making social reality. In this historiographic endeavor, historical vestiges were brought together from a variety of the city's archives between September and October 2021 in a bid to reveal the historical processes that were accreted and deposited in the social fabric and fibers, and which, under the processes of time, were changed and reworked, bringing forth the ineffable mark of Spanish flu.

O artigo perscruta sob a perspectiva da história local de que forma a memória do sofrimento que cercou a epidemia de gripe espanhola de 1918 em Botucatu (interior paulista) foi reconvocada, tensionada e transmutada ao longo do processo histórico, produzindo representações em estratégias e práticas, e apreensões como constituintes de uma realidade social que produz sentidos. Para essa operação historiográfica, coligiram-se vestígios históricos em diversos arquivos botucatuenses, entre setembro e outubro de 2021, buscando desvelar processos históricos aglutinados e depositados entre as fibras e fímbrias sociais e que, sob afecção da temporalidade, se movimentam, se reelaboram e trazem à tona a inefável marca da gripe espanhola.

[Fleeing nazism: Alejandro Lipschütz and the cases of Alfons Nehring and Käte Pariser]. / Huir del nazismo: Alejandro Lipschütz y los casos de Alfons Nehring y Käte Pariser.

This paper studies a shelter network for Jewish scientists displaced by nazism from the archive of Alexander Lipschütz, a physiologist who lived in Chile since 1926. From the context of the anti-Semitic persecution and the way in which it affected German science and their universities, we have analyzed letters sent to and from Lipschütz between 1935 and 1936, with special attention to people who contacted him to flee Germany and considered Latin America as a possibility to live. We suggest this was a network of personal agencies, charged with subjectivities and intimacy, which had to take into account local anti-Semitism and academic xenophobia.

Este trabajo estudia una red de acogida para científicos judíos desplazados por el nazismo a partir del archivo de Alejandro Lipschütz, fisiólogo que vivió en Chile desde 1926. A partir del contexto de la persecución antisemita y la forma en que afectó a la ciencia y a la universidad alemanas se analizan las cartas remitidas hacia y desde Lipschütz entre 1935 y 1936, con especial atención a personas que lo contactaron para huir de Alemania y que veían en América Latina una posibilidad. Proponemos que se trata de una red de agencias personales, cargada de subjetividades e intimidad, que debía tener en cuenta el antisemitismo y la xenofobia académica local.

Society for the History of Psychology: News and notes.

In this News and Notes column, information about eligibility and how to apply for The David B. Baker Fellowship in the History of Psychology--which supports student research at the Archives of the History of American Psychology--is provided; recent publications and presentations are noted; and P. Croce, Stetson University, briefly describes their visit to Greece and shares a photo of Cheiron, an ancient Greek god. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

GenArk: towards a million UCSC genome browsers.

Interactive graphical genome browsers are essential tools in genomics, but they do not contain all the recent genome assemblies. We create Genome Archive (GenArk) collection of UCSC Genome Browsers from NCBI assemblies. Built on our established track hub system, this enables fast visualization of annotations. Assemblies come with gene models, repeat masks, BLAT, and in silico PCR. Users can add annotations via track hubs and custom tracks. We can bulk-import third-party resources, demonstrated with TOGA and Ensembl gene models for hundreds of assemblies.Three thousand two hundred sixty-nine GenArk assemblies are listed at https://hgdownload.soe.ucsc.edu/hubs/ and can be searched for on the Genome Browser gateway page.