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\"This exhibition catalog takes a fresh look at the art of Japan's Meiji era (1868-1912), through a vivid selection of approximately 175 objects drawn from early public and private collections across the United States, including newly discovered prints, photographs, textiles, paintings and craft objects. Featuring motifs such as the sea and nature, Buddhist deities, contemporary life and mythical animals, Meiji Modern highlights these themes and their transformation with the introduction of newly imported techniques and materials at the intersection of art, industry and society. The Meiji era was a complex period of unprecedented cultural and technological transition that played out in the context of intense global competition. The objects assembled in this stunning catalog also document the history of American collections of nineteenth-century Japanese art. Highlighting the active role of art in the construction of the Japanese nation-state, the works in a variety of mediums capture the hopes and aspirations of Japanese modernization along with its challenges. Building upon this perspective, essays emphasize modern Japanese artists' engagement with both European and Asian trends. With its focus on Japan's often overlooked non-Western modernity, this publication also addresses the role of art in both constructing and reflecting identity\"--Publisher's description.

In Selling the Future , Ryan Moran explains how the life insurance industry in Japan exploited its association with mutuality and community to commodify and govern lives. Covering the years from the start of the industry in 1881 through the end of World War II, Moran describes insurance companies and government officials working together to create a picture of the future as precarious and dangerous. Since it was impossible for individual consumers to deal with every contingency on their own, insurance industry administrators argued that their usage of statistical data enabled them to chart the predictable future for the aggregate. Through insurance, companies and the state thus offered consumers a means to a perfectible future in an era filled with repeated crises. Life insurance functioned as an important modernist technology within Japan and its colonies to instantiate expectations for responsibility, to reconfigure meanings of mutuality, and to normalize new social formations (such as the nuclear family) as essential to life. Life insurance thus offers an important vehicle for examining the confluence of modes of mobilizing and organizing bodies, the expropriation of financial resources, and the action of disciplining workers into a capitalist system.

The kinds of punishment used in a society have long been considered an important criterion in judging whether a society is civilized or barbaric, advanced or backward, modern or premodern. Focusing on Japan, and the dramatic revolution in punishments that occurred after the Meiji Restoration, Daniel Botsman asks how such distinctions have affected our understanding of the past and contributed, in turn, to the proliferation of new kinds of barbarity in the modern world. While there is no denying the ferocity of many of the penal practices in use during the Tokugawa period (1600-1868), this book begins by showing that these formed part of a sophisticated system of order that did have its limits. Botsman then demonstrates that although significant innovations occurred later in the period, they did not fit smoothly into the \"modernization\" process. Instead, he argues, the Western powers forced a break with the past by using the specter of Oriental barbarism to justify their own aggressive expansion into East Asia. The ensuing changes were not simply imposed from outside, however. The Meiji regime soon realized that the modern prison could serve not only as a symbol of Japan's international progress but also as a powerful domestic tool. The first English-language study of the history of punishment in Japan, the book concludes by examining how modern ideas about progress and civilization shaped penal practices in Japan's own colonial empire.

Monoclonal antibodies continue their march on the markets, optimized so-called biobetter versions of existing biologics are also gaining ground, but the rate of biosimilar approvals has seen a dramatic slowdown in recent years.

Recombinant virus-like particle-based vaccines are composed of viral structural proteins and mimic authentic native viruses but are devoid of viral genetic materials. They are the active components in highly safe and effective vaccines for the prevention of infectious diseases. Several expression systems have been used for virus-like particle production, ranging from Escherichia coli to mammalian cell lines. The prokaryotic expression system, especially Escherichia coli , is the preferred expression host for producing vaccines for global use. Hecolin, the first licensed virus-like particle vaccine derived from Escherichia coli , has been demonstrated to possess good safety and high efficacy. In this review, we focus on Escherichia coli -derived virus-like particle based vaccines and vaccine candidates that are used for prevention (immunization against microbial pathogens) or disease treatment (directed against cancer or non-infectious diseases). The native-like spatial or higher-order structure is essential for the function of virus-like particles. Thus, the tool box for analyzing the key physicochemical, biochemical and functional attributes of purified virus-like particles will also be discussed. In summary, the Escherichia coli expression system has great potentials for producing a range of proteins with self-assembling properties to be used as vaccine antigens given the proper epitopes were preserved when compared to those in the native pathogens or disease-related target molecules.

The usefulness of live attenuated virus vaccines has been limited by suboptimal immunogenicity, safety concerns or cumbersome manufacturing processes and techniques. Here we describe the generation of a live attenuated influenza A virus vaccine using proteolysis-targeting chimeric (PROTAC) technology to degrade viral proteins via the endogenous ubiquitin–proteasome system of host cells. We engineered the genome of influenza A viruses in stable cell lines engineered for virus production to introduce a conditionally removable proteasome-targeting domain, generating fully infective PROTAC viruses that were live attenuated by the host protein degradation machinery upon infection. In mouse and ferret models, PROTAC viruses were highly attenuated and able to elicit robust and broad humoral, mucosal and cellular immunity against homologous and heterologous virus challenges. PROTAC-mediated attenuation of viruses may be broadly applicable for generating live attenuated vaccines. Influenza virus is attenuated for vaccine production using PROTAC degradation technology.

We use tsunami records from five early Pacific tide gauges in the United States and Australia to estimate the size of the 1868 and 1877 Chile‐Peru earthquakes—two of the largest documented in South America since colonial times. To interpret these records, we derive empirical relationships between moment magnitude (Mw) and maximum tsunami amplitude (MTA) for the five remote tide gauge locations using synthetic Mw 8–9 Chile‐Peru earthquakes and validate them with recent events. We infer Mw 8.8–9.1 for the 1868 earthquake and Mw 8.8–8.9 for the 1877 earthquake, clarifying a long‐standing debate and providing key insights for hazard models for this region. Our results confirm that MTA is predominantly controlled by Mw, but is also influenced by rupture strike, rupture length, and slip size; given Mw, greater slip over a shorter rupture increases MTA. These findings offer globally relevant insights into how source parameters influence far‐field tsunami amplitudes.

Key Points Carbohydrate structures decorate the surface of pathogens and malignant cells and could be exploited as potential targets for vaccine design. Indeed, most vaccines against bacterial infections are carbohydrate vaccines. The steady increase in drug resistance has catalysed a renewed interest in carbohydrate vaccine development against a wide range of pathogens (that is, bacteria, fungi, protozoa, helminths and viruses) as well as cancer. Recent advances in glycomics, particularly carbohydrate synthesis, protein conjugation methods, analysis, structural determination and array fabrication, are accelerating progress in the carbohydrate vaccine field. For example, improvements in synthetic methods facilitate the identification and evaluation of potential glycan antigens by providing usable amounts of pure material. A number of challenges are associated with targeting glycan structures in a vaccine context. Generally speaking, the main challenges include the poor immunogenicity of carbohydrates, low affinity of protein–carbohydrate interactions, structural diversity of glycans between species and/or strains and microheterogeneity. A major breakthrough in improving immunogenicity came with the discovery that chemical conjugation of glycans to a suitable protein scaffold can convert carbohydrates from T-cell-independent antigens to T-cell-dependent antigens. Co-administration of adjuvants has also been shown to improve the strength of the immune response against carbohydrate immunogens. Certain pathogen-associated carbohydrate antigens as well as tumour-associated carbohydrate antigens may be poorly immunogenic owing to the expression of similar or identical structures in humans, albeit at a lower density or during early developmental stages. To address this issue, strategies are being developed to better mimic the presentation (for example, clustering) of glycans on target cells or organisms and to introduce conservative chemical modifications to the target antigens to render them more immunogenic. The ability to elicit specific, potent and long-lasting anti-carbohydrate antibody responses that are therapeutic and/or protect against diseases caused by pathogens or tumours is a complex goal dependent on the antigen(s) and the disease. In many cases, the mechanisms of disease and potential of antibody-mediated protection need further clarification to facilitate the development of more effective vaccines or passive immunization approaches. Antibiotic drug resistance has increased interest in developing vaccines against carbohydrate structures on the surface of bacterial pathogens. Astronomo and Burton examine recent progress in the identification, synthesis and evaluation of glycan epitopes found not only on bacteria, but also on protozoa, helminths, viruses, fungi and cancer cells for vaccine design. Recent technological advances in glycobiology and glycochemistry are paving the way for a new era in carbohydrate vaccine design. This is enabling greater efficiency in the identification, synthesis and evaluation of unique glycan epitopes found on a plethora of pathogens and malignant cells. Here, we review the progress being made in addressing challenges posed by targeting the surface carbohydrates of bacteria, protozoa, helminths, viruses, fungi and cancer cells for vaccine purposes.

Karl Friday, an internationally recognised authority on Japanese warriors, provides the first comprehensive study of the topic to be published in English. This work incorporates nearly twenty years of on-going research and draws on both new readings of primary sources and the most recent secondary scholarship. It overturns many of the stereotypes that have dominated views of the period. Friday analyzes Heian -, Kamakura- and Nambokucho-period warfare from five thematic angles. He examines the principles that justified armed conflict, the mechanisms used to raise and deploy armed forces, the weapons available to early medieval warriors, the means by which they obtained them, and the techniques and customs of battle.A thorough, accessible and informative review, this study highlights the complex casual relationships among the structures and sources of early medieval political power, technology, and the conduct of war.