This chapter considers the coordination of the actions of bionanomachines, such as cluster formation. This task is important to applications such as drug delivery at tumour sites. Mathematical models of cluster formation and system designs are presented, along with computer simulation results demonstrating that bionanomachines can move collectively and form clusters.

Chapter 1 explores medical and wider cultural responses to the arrival of the stethoscope in British medical practice. Although they provided new medical insights into the workings of the human body and its pathologies, new technologies like the stethoscope were a source of not only practical, social, and professional challenges but also deep confusion, mistrust, and corporeal anxiety. Music, language, and literature, I argue, all played an active role by providing conceptual frameworks for the scientific exploration and interpretation of a new auditory realm, while proffering imaginative explorations of its potential physical and, at times, metaphysical significance. I consider the stethoscope as the subject not only of ongoing scientific debate and experimentation but also of poetry and fiction, as tales of its use and abuse, as well as its supposed powers, spread from among those who first encountered it.

French Muslim leaders regularly engage in praxis of self-restraint, politeness, and social upliftment in the context of strong assimilationist pressures. Their everyday acts of piety indicate the crafting of a discreet Islam, geared toward appeasing tensions around Muslim presence in France and encouraging justice and respect for minority citizens. These self-limiting forms of political claims – which have gone hitherto unexplored – should be understood as their politics of respectability. This concept, borrowed from Black studies in the US, is used to shed light on the multifaceted dimensions of discreet Islam, whether its incorporation through morals and manners, its grounding in middle-class attributes, or its political ambivalence, resulting in both conservative and emancipatory outcomes for minority citizens. Moreover, studying the respectability politics of French Muslim leaders allows for important epistemological acts, such as moving beyond the images of in-your-face Muslim politics that saturate public discussions, taking the religious commitment of minority citizens seriously, and opening a transatlantic conversation on class and morals in minority politics. To do so, the book builds on an ethnographic inquiry with one of France’s most influential Muslim organizations, the Union des organisations islamiques de France (UOIF, the Union of Islamic Organizations of France), in the context of a tense France following the 2015 terror attacks.

This chapter uses the Strategic Displacement in Civil Conflict dataset to conduct a cross-national analysis of displacement by state actors, who it finds are the predominant perpetrators. The statistical tests provide an indirect test of the arguments by revealing where strategic displacement in general, and forced relocation in particular, tends to occur, and by identifying the factors associated with the use of these strategies across conflicts. It also evaluates the observable implications of several alternative explanations for state-induced displacement, including ethnic nationalism, rebel threat/desperation, and collective punishment. The results show that, consistent with the theory, different displacement strategies occur in different contexts and seem to follow different logics. Cleansing is more likely in conventional civil wars, where territorial conquest takes primacy, while forced relocation is more likely in irregular wars, where information and identification problems are most acute. The evidence indicates that cleansing follows a logic of punishment. The results for relocation, however, are consistent with the implications of the assortative theory: It is more likely to be employed by resource-constrained incumbents fighting insurgencies in “illegible” areas – rural, peripheral territories – and when incumbents lack group-level information about wartime loyalties.

Considers diffusion and statistical models for bacterial motility from the perspective of anomalous transport.

This chapter tests the book’s arguments in a case study from Uganda. The Ugandan government faced a series of armed rebellions throughout the country from 1986 to 2006, and it forcibly relocated civilians while fighting some rebel groups but not others. This chapter draws on a wealth of information collected during six months of fieldwork in 2016 and 2017 on how, when, where, and why authorities employed displacement. By exploiting within-case variation in the location and timing of relocation by the same government, the chapter conducts a structured, controlled comparative analysis. Drawing on original data – including archival materials, subnational violence and displacement data, and hundreds of interviews and surveys with political officials, military officers, rank-and-file soldiers, civil society groups, journalists, community leaders, and civilians – it traces the decision by Ugandan counterinsurgents to employ forced relocation, examine the observable implications of the theory, and demonstrate the assortative logic of displacement. It also shows that alternative logics are insufficient to explain variation in this case.

A 33-year-old man was referred because of winging of the right scapula. History taking disclosed that seven months prior to referral he had experienced excruciating pain in the neck, irradiating to the right arm and thumb. The pain, which was particularly severe in the right scapular region, kept him initially awake and lasted for approximately six weeks. A week after the pain had started, he noticed having difficulty raising his right arm and hand. The latter is no longer present but at referral he still had a right-sided winged scapula and sensory disturbances of the radial part of the right medial forearm and of part of his thumb. Family history was negative for neuromuscular diseases.

A 38-year-old woman was referred to a dermatologist because of a rash in the face. She had been feeling low in energy for several months and in the past two months her arms and legs felt weak accompanied by myalgia. The rash had expanded to the extensor surfaces of hands and knees, upper chest, and neck. Serum CK was 4313 U/L (20 × ULN), and she was referred to the outpatient department for neuromuscular disorders with a presumed diagnosis of dermatomyositis.

A 64-year-old man suffered from progressive swallowing difficulty, in particular of solid food. There was a feeling of food getting stuck. He needed to take small bites and coughed while he was eating. Choking occurred frequently, and sometimes food came out his nose. He lost 7 kg over the past year. Gradually, drinking also became difficult. His GP first referred him to an ENT specialist and subsequently to a gastroenterologist who referred him to a neuromuscular centre. He was treated with Botox injections in the cricopharyngeal muscle, and this ameliorated his swallowing problems for about a year. He did not complain about limb weakness, diplopia, drooping eyelids, slurring of speech, shortness of breath, or muscle twitching. Family history was unremarkable.

The subject of Chapter 2 is the tradition of the apotheosis in Mesoamerica, principally Central Mexico. The chapter opens with the context of indigenous political and social organization, and a summary of Spanish penetration of Mexico from 1519. There follows a fictive reconstruction of dialogue between the Aztec ruler Moctezuma and his counsellors in order to offer one plausible, source-based scenario for how the ruling elite might have interpreted the advent of the Spaniards on the basis of rational, pragmatic considerations. The chapter then analyzes the response of Moctezuma and the Mexica, outlines the lack of evidence for an apotheosis in the Spanish and native chroniclers, and examines the significance of Nahuatl terminology, in particular the concept of teotl, which was the word often translated as “god.” The Quetzalcoatl myth (the notion of the identification of Cortés with the god Quetzalcoatl) is presented as a post-conquest construct, devised retrospectively to make sense of the momentous events. The tradition of pre-conquest omens is discussed. No evidence is found that the emperor Moctezuma treated Cortés as a god at their meetings.