Mining Life: An Exploration in Three Acts into the Potential of Socially Engaged Art Practices to Instigate Social Change investigates the intersection of art, activism, and social change through three major artistic research projects. Emerging from a critical shift in my own artistic practice, this thesis questions the role of socially engaged art within post-colonial structures, challenging the

Emmer (1993) claimed creativity to be a bridge between art and mathematics exemplified (www. olats.org/colloque/textes/texte7.shtml) in his traveling exhibition The Eye of Horus: Art and Mathematics (Emmer, 1990). A shared language is needed to make bridges between science, art and metaphysics (Thiessen, 1998). Scientific phenomena and concepts need to be possible to isolate for better understandi

Intra-islet crosstalk has become a focus area to fully understand the regulation of insulin secretion and impaired β-cell function in type 2 diabetes (T2D). Here, we put forward evidence for insulin-like growth factor binding protein 7 (IGFBP7) as a potential protein involved in autocrine and paracrine β-cell regulation. We showed presence of IGFBP7 in granules of both human α- and β-cells and mea

In 1934, Walter Benjamin published his major study Franz Kafka: Zur zehnten Wiederkehr seines Todestages. In the same year, Günther Anders, another German Jew in exile, gave a lecture on Kafka which later, in postwar years, developed into a small book titled Kafka, Pro und Contra. Bringing these two in dialogue—the much-celebrated essay by Benjamin and the generally overlooked book by Anders—the p

The aim of this research project was to create a bioinformatic image analysis pipeline for the investigation of lymphocytes in healthy human lungs. The lung is an important organ to study as it provides a fast way for pathogens to enter the body. Therefore, the pulmonary immune system must be further investigated in both healthy and diseased tissue. In order to do comparative studies, we need to c

With the increasing demands for higher data rates and long-range wireless power transfer, the development of new methods is a necessary step to meet the heightened requirements. One such method is improving the infrastructure for wireless transmission through the use of large intelligent surfaces (LIS). To be one step closer to enabling the construction of such infrastructure, this study examines

Metabolism plays a crucial role in an animal’s life as it determines the amount of energy that can be allocated to growth, reproduction, and survival. The strategies an individual adopts to manage its energy budget have direct consequences to its fitness. How an animal allocates its energy will determine whether it can ensure its own survival while having a high reproductive success or neglect one

Large carnivores are generally sensitive to ecosystem changes because their specialized diet and position at the top of the trophic pyramid is associated with small population sizes. Accordingly, low genetic diversity at the whole-genome level has been reported for all big cat species, including the widely distributed leopard. However, all previous whole-genome analyses of leopards are based on th

Temporal genomic data hold great potential for studying evolutionary processes such as speciation. However, sampling across speciation events would, in many cases, require genomic time series that stretch well back into the Early Pleistocene subepoch. Although theoretical models suggest that DNA should survive on this timescale1, the oldest genomic data recovered so far are from a horse specimen d

While present-day taxa are valuable proxies for understanding the biology of extinct species, it is also crucial to examine physical remains in order to obtain a more comprehensive view of their behavior, social structure, and life histories [1, 2]. For example, information on demographic parameters such as age distribution and sex ratios in fossil assemblages can be used to accurately infer socio

According to the nearly-neutral theory of evolution, the relative strengths of selection and drift shift in favour of drift at small population sizes. Numerous studies have analysed the effect of bottlenecks and small population sizes on genetic diversity in the MHC, which plays a central role in pathogen recognition and immune defense and is thus considered a model example for the study of adapti

Somatic copy number variations (CNVs), including abnormal chromosome numbers and structural changes leading to gain or loss of genetic material, play a crucial role in initiation and progression of cancer. CNVs are believed to cause gene dosage imbalances and modify cis-regulatory elements, leading to allelic expression imbalances in genes that influence cell division and thereby contribute to can