This investigation was planned to observe if the leukemic thymic tissue in vitro would inactivate TSH and to study the effect that TSH would have on the leukemogenic properties of these cells when transplanted into a high-leukemia strain of mice.

The purpose of this study was to investigate womens experience of yoga. The study applied a qualitative approach with thematical analysis. Six women in varying ages was interviewed and during the beginning of this study they participated in a yoga course. The analysis led to four themes: A different view of life, Demands and increased self-esteem, Body and emotion and Resistance and demands. The results showed that the women experience several positive effects of yoga like increased strength, calm, harmony and increased self-esteem. They also experience transpersonal experiences and altered states of consciousness to some degree. The results also show that the women feel some kind of resistance to yoga but this resistance overcomes because of motivational factors. The conlcusions are that the participants experiences agrees with previous research but other factors may affect the the experiences that are stated. More research in how altered states of conssciousness can affect self-esteem is proposed and also research in what motivates people to do yoga.

Bakgrund: Mellan 20000 och 25000 personer beräknas leva med stomi i Sverige. Dessa patienter har olika bakgrundsproblematik där tarm-och urinblåsecancer samt inflammatoriska tarm-sjukdomar är vanligast förekommande. En stomi leder till förlorad kontroll över eliminationen, förändrad kroppsuppfattning och generellt även till fysisk sexuell dysfunktion. Sexualitet är en central del i människans liv och människan har behov av att uttrycka sig sexuellt genom hela livet oberoende av sjukdom. Dock har det visat sig att sjuksköterskan pratar om sexualitet i allt för liten utsträckning. Syfte: Syftet var att beskriva stomipatienters upplevelse av sin sexualitet i relation till en förändrad kropp. Metod: En integrativ litteraturstudie genomfördes på tio artiklar med kvalitativ ansats. Resultat: Ur de studerade artiklarna framkom fyra övergripande kategorier kring patienternas upplevelse av sin sexualitet i relation till den förändrade kroppen: (1) förändrad identitet, (2) rädsla och oro, (3) att känna sig begränsad samt (4) försoning. Slutsats: Denna studie visar att de förändringar som en stomi innebär generellt påverkar sexualiteten negativt hos patientgruppen. Klinisk betydelse: Sjuksköterskan bör ge stöd, information och tillsammans med patienten och eventuell partner utveckla strategier att hantera de problem som individen upplever. / Background: An estimated number of 20,000 to 25,000 persons in Sweden live with a stoma. These patients have different medical histories that lead to the stoma, where intestinal and urinary bladder cancers together with inflammatory bowel diseases are the most common. A stoma leads to the loss of control over the elimination, an altered body image, and generally physical sexual dysfunctions. Sexuality is a central part of human life and people have a need to express their sexuality throughout their lives, regardless of diseases. However, studies have found that nurses talk too little about sexuality. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to describe stoma patients’ experiences of their sexuality in relation to an altered body. Method: An integrative review methodology was conducted on ten papers. Findings: Four broad categories emerged from the data: (1) altered identity, (2) fear and anxiety, (3) sense of limitation, and (4) reconciliation. Conclusion: This study shows that a stoma generally influences the sexuality negatively in the patient group. Clinical implications: The nurse should be supportive, give information, and together with the patient and, if present, his or her partner develop strategies to deal with the problems that the individual experience.

Large, exotic (those whose headwaters are in distant places) rivers are some of the most unique and diverse ecosystems on earth. Because they often flow through a multitude of biomes and climates, their waters are a vital resource not only for the organisms that inhabit these rivers, but for human societies as well. Thus, large rivers, like the Rio Grande, that flow through arid and agricultural regions are highly regulated and diverted. Regulation and dewatering upset a river’s natural flow regime (e.g., magnitude, duration, timing of large flood events), subsequently impacting the river’s ability to transport its sediment supply, and eventually perturbing a river into either sediment surplus or deficit. The combination of altered flow and sediment regimes influence the availability of habitat essential for the survival and viability of aquatic organisms, such as fish and invertebrates. In addition, increased deposition of sediment creates areas suitable for invasive riparian vegetation to establish, likely affecting habitat complexity and increasing the abundance of leaf litter deposited into the river. The altered flow and sediment regimes, in combination with invasive riparian vegetation, culminate and eventually affect the food resources and aquatic communities present in a river ecosystem. Most often, the links between the physical perturbations to a system with the biological factors are poorly understood. In this study, we use distinct segments of the Rio Grande along the US-Mexico border to compare areas with greater and lower habitat heterogeneity, water quality, and invasive riparian species abundance to better understand what physical factors can influence aquatic species such as fish and invertebrate communities. We identify critical limiting factors for the native fish community present, and link the altered flow and sediment regimes with the aquatic ecological template of the Rio Grande.

Dark Retreat - to spend days in total darkness. A qualitative content analysis of people's experiences of dark retreats and the potential health benefits of such a retreat. This essay will examine spiritual and personal development YouTube channels where the content is about what it is like to do a dark retreat. The questions of the study is if they talk about that there are any health and physical benefits in doing a dark retreat and how their experience can be explained. This is linked to one of the key messages in the study which is to point to the altered state of consciousness and what life-changing transformation and positive change that can bring for the person who have experienced a transcendent and mystic state of consciousness. A dark retreat is one practice used in the tantric Tibetan Buddhist movement "the Great Perfection" Dzogchen where a person is for a long time in total darkness to gain knowledge of the emptiness of everything. The dark retreat tradition that is the focus of this study are linked to the new age movement that differs from the Dzogchen tradition regarding dark retreat in that there are no masters or rules that the person doing their dark retreat must follow. There is also an underlying commercial agenda for why people share their experiences of what it is like to do a dark retreat and upload their videos on YouTube. The pattern that became clear with the collection of the material was that those who are doing a dark retreat are working with some form of spiritual and personal development and it is these services that they want to sell by creating an interest by sharing their dark retreat experiences. This is something that is addressed and discussed in the study. The methods are conversation analysis to determine how genuine people are when they talk about their experiences in the dark. Content analysis is used to be able to find themes in the material for how the people experience their dark retreat stay, the focus on themes, phrases and words is linked to health or life-changing transformation. The findings from the content analysis are that people talk about surrender/acceptance when the situation became intense in the dark, that they met themselves/gained new insights, got a glimpse of relationships that have not been good and where there are things to work with and that there were a lot who were positive about their dark retreat stay.

The term "memory-craft" refers to arts and crafts media where personal memorabilia and journaling are combined and assembled into book form. Examples of memory-crafts include scrapbooks, art journals, and altered books. Traditionally, women have been the primary assemblers of memory-crafts, using this form as a method of autobiography and genealogical archiving. Memory-crafting is often associated with the amateur home-crafter, and while historians have long understood its cultural significance, academia has not properly considered memory-craft as a type of alternative discourse. The purpose of this study is to examine the use of memory-crafting as a non-traditional method of writing, especially among women who use it to record personal and familial narratives. Just as women are usually the primary care-takers of the family, through memory-craft they also become responsible for collecting and preserving memories, which would otherwise become lost. These memories of the everyday--birthday parties, family vacations, and wedding anniversaries--grow to be culturally significant over time. Through the use of domestic technology, which today includes both paper scraps and home computer systems, memory-crafts assist in the interpretation of the present and provide insight into the past. To help explore the connection between domestic technology and memory-crafts, I have organized this study into four themes: history and memory-craft; women and domestic technology; feminist literary autobiography and memoir; and feminism and hypermedia. My approach is a mixture of fictionalized personal narrative and analysis loosely modeled after Writing Machines by N. Katherine Halyes and Alias Olympia by Eunice Lipton. Just as I discuss experimental methods of writing in the form of memory-crafting, I also use an experimental writing technique which gathers from personal memories in the form of a persona named Tess and from the life of my Great Aunt Mamie Veach Dudley. Mamie's journals and letter to her sister document the memories of the Dudleys including a tragic double suicide, which still haunts the Dudleys almost 100 years later. As narrator and storyteller, my stories connect to those documented by Mamie and link the past to the present. Along with Mamie's family records, I consider other memory-related works by women during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries including Jane Austen, Anne Bronte, and Emily Dickinson, and I also examine contemporary memory-crafters such as those constructed by altered book artists Tom Phillips and Judith Margolis. Digital memory-craft is another source of support for my argument, and I look at web groups and bloggers. For example, I discuss the Wish Jar Journal, a weblog written by illustrator Keri Smith, where she journals her life and creative process and often mixes textual and visual elements in her blog posts. Writer and blogger Heather Armstrong from Dooce.com is another case study included in this project as her blog is an example of documenting familial events and memoir. Because of their fragmented formats and narrative elements, hardcopy and digitally-based memory-crafts become artifacts which combine text and visual elements to tell a story and pass on knowledge of the everyday through the mixture of text and domestic technology. Memory-craft construction does not follow conventional writing models. Therefore, this provides opportunity for experimentation by those writers who have traditionally been removed from established rhetorical writing methods.

This thesis investigates the acute phenomenology of altered states of consciousness induced through psychedelics and various Zen practices through the lens of comparative mysticism. Through inductive reasoning, tentative conclusions are drawn regarding how the acute phenomenological qualities of these states compare to one another. This topic had not been meaningfully studied, so the data from which these conclusions were drawn is limited. Though these findings are tentative, they have important implications for the study of comparative mysticism involving psychedelics, and for policy decisions regarding the credentialing of newly trained psychedelic therapists. Further research is required to draw more definitive conclusions on whether psychedelics users and Zen practitioners are having the same sorts of experiences, and this thesis identifies some of the theoretical challenges that can be expected with such research, particularly with regards to the reliability of qualitative data collection methods. To address these challenges, a novel theoretical approach to the study of comparative mysticism involving psychedelic and non-psychedelic altered states of consciousness has been developed.

Climate and agricultural practice interact to influence both crop production and soil microbes in agroecosystems. Here, we carried out a unique experiment in Central Germany to simultaneously investigate the effects of climates (ambient climate vs. future climate expected in 50–70 years), agricultural practices (conventional vs. organic farming), and their interaction on arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) inside wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) roots. AMF communities were characterized using Illumina sequencing of 18S rRNA gene amplicons. We showed that climatic conditions and agricultural practices significantly altered total AMF community composition. Conventional farming significantly affected the AMF community and caused a decline in AMF richness. Factors shaping AMF community composition and richness at family level differed greatly among Glomeraceae, Gigasporaceae and Diversisporaceae. An interactive impact of climate and agricultural practices was detected in the community composition of Diversisporaceae. Organic farming mitigated the negative effect of future climate and promoted total AMF and Gigasporaceae richness. AMF richness was significantly linked with nutrient content of wheat grains under both agricultural practices.

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