EXPeditions - The living library of knowlegde

How does DNA topology affect living cells? - Davide Michieletto

DNA topology, more specifically, is the study of the topological properties of DNA. And it's really fascinating.
About Davide Michieletto "I am a Professor of Biomaterials at the University of Edinburgh working on Topological Problems in Soft Matter and Biology. I am a 2024 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner.I am the group leader of the Topological Active Polymers Lab. We aim to discover new DNA-based topological soft materials and complex fluids that can change properties in time. The group's expertise is rooted in polymer and statistical physics and employs both simulations and experiments to answer our questions. We believe boundaries between disciplines were made to be broken, and we do our best to shatter them every day."
Key Points• DNA topology refers to the structural features of DNA – supercoiling, knotting, and linking – that affect its function and are preserved under continuous deformation.• Topoisomerases are essential enzymes that cut, rearrange and reseal DNA strands to manage topological problems, making them critical for processes like gene expression and cell division.• Drugs that target DNA topology, such as antibiotics and cancer therapies, work by inhibiting topoisomerases, but they often affect both healthy and diseased cells.• DNA topology is not inherently harmful; complex structures like knots and links may offer evolutionary or functional advantages in packaging or preserving genetic material.

The living book of DNA - Davide Michieletto

DNA is the blueprint of life. It contains all the genetic information required for complex organisms to be alive and to sustain life.
About Davide Michieletto "I am a Professor of Biomaterials at the University of Edinburgh working on Topological Problems in Soft Matter and Biology. I am a 2024 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner.I am the group leader of the Topological Active Polymers Lab. We aim to discover new DNA-based topological soft materials and complex fluids that can change properties in time. The group's expertise is rooted in polymer and statistical physics and employs both simulations and experiments to answer our questions. We believe boundaries between disciplines were made to be broken, and we do our best to shatter them every day."
Key Points• DNA is not only the blueprint of life, but from a physical perspective it is a long string that needs to be packaged in the cell. The way DNA is packaged and folded influences how genes are expressed.• The shape and folding of chromatin in the cell nucleus play a crucial role in determining which genes are active, impacting cell function and identity.• Genome organization is dynamic and responds to environmental cues, such as pathogens, allowing cells to adapt by altering gene expression.• The discovery of DNA’s structure was a competitive and interdisciplinary effort, highlighting both the collaborative and ego-driven sides of scientific research.

The emotional side of trust - Tiffany Watt Smith

Trust is absolutely essential for our ability to cooperate with other people, to get anything done, to move around in the world at all.
About Tiffany Watt SmithI am an author and historian of emotions. I write about the cultural and historical forces that shape our most intimate worlds. I have won multiple awards for my research and writing, including grants from Wellcome Trust, the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I am the 2018 Philip Leverhulme Prize winner.I am Reader (emerita) at the School of Arts, Queen Mary University of London, where I taught for fifteen years and directed its Centre for the History of Emotions. In 2024, I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Key Points•Trust is often misunderstood as a purely rational process, but it is fundamentally emotional, involving vulnerability and uncertainty.• Its meaning has evolved historically – from religious faith to interpersonal reliance – especially with the rise of modern urban life and complex societies.• Cultural and gender norms shape how trust is built and expressed, with contrasting expectations for men and women and across different societies.• In some cultures, like Korea, trust is cultivated not through evidence but through ongoing acts of care and mutual attentiveness.

A history of female friendship - Tiffany Watt Smith

Female friendship is a powerful, evolving force that has long been overlooked, yet reveals deep emotional, cultural, and social significance across history
About Tiffany Watt SmithI am an author and historian of emotions. I write about the cultural and historical forces that shape our most intimate worlds. I have won multiple awards for my research and writing, including grants from Wellcome Trust, the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I am the 2018 Philip Leverhulme Prize winner.I am Reader (emerita) at the School of Arts, Queen Mary University of London, where I taught for fifteen years and directed its Centre for the History of Emotions. In 2024, I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Key Points• Female friendships have historically been overlooked but were deeply supportive and practical, often forming vital networks among unmarried or working women.• In the 19th century, female friendship became idealized as morally and emotionally superior, especially within the expectations of Victorian womanhood.• The 20th century saw increasing scrutiny of close female bonds, with fears around lesbianism and social nonconformity influencing how friendships were policed and expressed.• Modern ideas like the “toxic friend” reflect cultural shifts toward individualism, often placing unrealistic expectations on friendships.

A brief history of emotions - Tiffany Watt Smith

It's sometimes counterintuitive to think that emotions might have a history, because surely everyone across the world and everyone across time has always felt fear and anger and sorrow and joy in the same kind of way.
About Tiffany Watt SmithI am an author and historian of emotions. I write about the cultural and historical forces that shape our most intimate worlds. I have won multiple awards for my research and writing, including grants from Wellcome Trust, the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I am the 2018 Philip Leverhulme Prize winner.I am Reader (emerita) at the School of Arts, Queen Mary University of London, where I taught for fifteen years and directed its Centre for the History of Emotions. In 2024, I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Key Points• Emotions aren't fixed; how we express and understand them changes across time and cultures.• Some emotions, like boredom or nostalgia, were named and defined in specific historical moments.• Societies have unspoken rules about which emotions are acceptable and when.• Some of the emotions that are going to become more spoken about are emotions to do with our response to the climate crisis.

Stuart Elden - Foucault, Shakespeare and the question of territory

Foucault thinks that territory was much more of a focus of politics in the medieval period, but this has been supplanted by this interest of government over population in a more modern period. Shakespeare also offers a lot of material that can help us to think about those kinds of questions.
About Stuart Elden"I’m a Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick. My research is at the intersection of politics, philosophy and geography. I undertake my work predominantly through approaches from the history of ideas.
My work over the past decade or so has been in two main areas - the history, concept and practice of territory; and the history of twentieth-century French thought. I've been writing a multivolume intellectual history of the entire career of Michel Foucault. I’m the author of books on Henri Lefebvre, Martin Heidegger and the question of territory."
Key Points
• Foucault makes the claim that in the 17th century there is a shift from the object of government being over territory to government becoming the population.• What I suggest, however, is that the modern notion of territory is produced around the same time as the modern notion of population.• Shakespeare offers a lot of material that can help us to think about questions regarding economic, political and legal aspects of territory. “Historically misleading”When I was doing my work on the history of the concept and practice of territory, I was very influenced by the way that Foucault had done some of his historical work. I was interested in exploring the relation between a word, a concept and a practice of territory. Foucault, along with some other thinkers, was really powerful for me in terms of how we might do a history of a concept through these different times, these different places.
I could never have written The Birth of Territory without having done the work on Foucault and being inspired by the approach that he suggests. And yet, in that book, I suggest that almost everything that Foucault says about the question of territory is, at best, historically misleading.
Foucault: territory and populationFoucault makes the claim, in some of his lecture courses, that what we’ve seen around the 17th century is a shift from a concentration of the object of government being over territory to the object of government becoming the population. Foucault suggests that you can see this in a whole range of ways in which the population becomes the object, the thing to which governmental practices are directed.
Foucault claims you can see that in the development of statistics. You can see it in things like birth and death rates, the health of the population, crop yields – these kinds of questions. He thinks that population then becomes the focus of politics. Foucault thinks that territory was much more of a focus of politics in the medieval period, but this has been supplanted by this interest of government over population in a more modern period.

David Hillman - Greetings, partings and the magic of Shakespeare

Greetings and partings are mini rituals that frame every encounter and condense emotional intensity into gestures and words.
About David Hillman"I lecture on Shakespeare and Renaissance culture at the University of Cambridge and direct studies at King’s College in Cambridge.
I'm the author of Shakespeare's Entrails, which is my first monograph. I've also written about Shakespeare and Freud; the history of the body in relation to Shakespeare in particular; Shakespeare and philosophy and epistemological issues around Shakespeare. I am currently completing a monograph, Greetings and Partings in Shakespeare and early modern England, which addresses the rich topic of salutary acts in Shakespeare and early modernity."
Key Points
• Greetings and partings are mini rituals that frame every encounter and condense emotional intensity into gestures and words.• The ways in which Shakespeare’s characters greet and part from one another are sometimes peculiarly resonant.• Moments of parting are when one is most aware of the potential for solitude, and therefore when one longs for connection. Hellos and goodbyes are my current topic of main research, and it turns out that this is a remarkably apt topic for our times. We’re all changing the way we greet and part from each other; we are all dying to hug each other but aware that a hug can lead to our dying.
We’re at a very interesting moment in relation to greetings and partings. This is a topic that people have not written much about. There’s a certain amount of writing in psychoanalytic literature about partings, especially about endings. Anthropologists are more interested in greetings, gestures and rituals of encounter; however, almost nobody has written about both of them together.
Mini rituals that frame encountersThe way we greet and the way we part are essentially the same. We shake hands, we kiss, we hug, we wave. At least we used to do these things; we have elbow bumps now. But the same gestures and, often, the same words – “ciao”, “shalom” – are used at greeting and at parting. Even “adieu” is used as a greeting in France. So there must be an inherent relationship between the things that we are dealing with when greeting and when parting.
These are mini rituals that frame an encounter. It is all too easy to move beyond them, to start thinking about the meat of the encounter, and to forget that this has been framed by a greeting and by a parting. A lot goes on at these moments. They condense a huge amount into tiny gestures and the choice of words that are used.
Shakespeare knew this. His art involved constantly having people encounter one another – beginning scenes, ending scenes, sometimes entering scenes in medias res – but all the time, actors have to come into and move out of relation to each other. What a director does with those moments is quite important to a production.
When we greet or part from the other, when we encounter the other, the first decision takes place in almost no time at all. We have to decide: friend or foe? There’s a spectrum. Do we want to embrace the other, or do we want to kill the other? At the extreme ends, there’s a sex or death choice at that moment. We’re not aware of this most of the time; these moments are precisely designed as rituals to keep at bay the enormous emotional intensity of meeting another human being.

David Hillman - Listening to Shakespeare: dreams and reality

My life in relation to Shakespeare has always been torn between the stage and the page, thinking about Shakespeare as a literary text that one can pore over.
About David Hillman"I lecture on Shakespeare and Renaissance culture at the University of Cambridge and direct studies at King’s College in Cambridge.
I'm the author of Shakespeare's Entrails, which is my first monograph. I've also written about Shakespeare and Freud; the history of the body in relation to Shakespeare in particular; Shakespeare and philosophy and epistemological issues around Shakespeare. I am currently completing a monograph, Greetings and Partings in Shakespeare and early modern England, which addresses the rich topic of salutary acts in Shakespeare and early modernity."
Key Points
• Shakespeare’s rich, metaphorical language can make his plays difficult to understand at first.• By approaching Shakespeare’s plays with what psychoanalysts call a “third ear”, one can discover patterns and access deeper layers of meaning.• Shakespeare’s plays address the relationship between dreams and reality in a way that speaks to a Freudian understanding of the psyche. The Plays of William Shakespeare, circa 1849 by John Gilbert. wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
My interest in Shakespeare started when I was a teenager, and it was always a perplexed interest in Shakespeare. I immediately fell in love with his plays when I first read them, and my first encounter with Shakespeare was reading, but I felt like I really didn’t understand them. I didn’t understand the language; I didn’t understand the subterranean text; I didn’t know what I was loving. Then I saw some Shakespeare on stage. Othello was the first play I saw, and it moved me to tears. I didn’t understand that, either.
My life in relation to Shakespeare has always been torn between the stage and the page, thinking about Shakespeare as a literary text that one can pore over. Many of the plays I’ve now read 40 times or more. Each time I find more layers, more hidden marvels that are simply astonishing. The Shakespearean text is so rich and full of interconnections between different parts of the text, and different texts.

Islam Issa - Shakespeare in popular "world" culture

Islam Issa, Professor of Literature and History at Birmingham City University, looks at the influence of Shakespeare in popular culture.
About Islam Issa"I am a professor of Literature and History at Birmingham City University.
I’m most interested in cultural history and literary criticism, but particularly reception studies: how and why we read literature, and why that matters."
Key Points
• Education systems and cultural hierarchy are factors that have contributed to Shakespeare’s status as a global phenomenon.• Shakespeare’s plays have a certain simplicity in structure and language, which also facilitates their translation.• Representations of the Other reveal perceptions of the so-called Other during Shakespeare’s time, while offering an opportunity to understand the reactions of different communities today to those texts.A global phenomenon
There are many ways to approach Shakespeare’s presence. We can start by saying that Shakespeare’s a phenomenon. We don’t quite know why. For decades, many of us have been trying to understand: why Shakespeare? Certain things come to mind. The education system, one could say, imposes Shakespeare. Cultural hierarchy, in some ways, imposes Shakespeare.
For example, think of Romeo and Juliet. Many people have called Layla and Majnun, which is a similar story, the Romeo and Juliet of the East. Yet this story was written hundreds of years before Romeo and Juliet. So there’s no doubt that a cultural hierarchy exists. Shakespeare has a special status. Shakespeare is one of the most popular and respected writers around the world.

Ricardo Soares de Oliveira - The impact of the extractive industries in Africa

Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, Professor of International Politics of Africa at the University of Oxford, examines the extractive industries in Africa.
About Ricardo Soares de Oliveira"I’m a Professor of International Politics of Africa at the University of Oxford, and co-editor of the journal African Affairs.
My research interests include the workings of the extractive industries (oil, gas and mining) in sub-Saharan Africa; the relationships that African states have established with Asian countries, especially in the last two decades; and, more recently, the politics of global finance and its impact on Africa."
Key Points
• One impact of prioritising the extractive industries is under-development in other areas of the economy.• While Africa only has around 12% of the world’s oil, its welcoming of foreign companies makes it central to the global corporate oil economy.• Building a sustainable future involves not just moving beyond extraction in the long term but also managing dependence in the short term.
Extractive industries and African governments
The extractive industries – oil, gas and mining – are absolutely crucial for Africa. In fact, they are the biggest source of exports from Africa into the world economy. For all but a handful of States, the revenues of African governments tend to come from these sectors. This impacts on everything from how these governments deal with the outside world to the way they deal with their own populations.
In terms of international relations, governments that possess oil and natural resources tend to be more empowered in their relations with other States as well as oil and mining companies. Internally, this also makes a difference. African governments with revenues from the extractive industries face less pressure to tax their own populations. They have their own alternative sources of revenue. Because they have this ready source of revenue, they have been less concerned with the development of other sectors. There’s very little incentive for them to develop industrial sectors or agricultural sectors, which in the long term further consolidates their dependence on oil, gas and mining.