Republicans hold office as Probate Judge, Sheriff, Property Tax Commissioner, Superintendent of Education, and Coroner. All 9 seats on the Shelby County Commission, all 5 seats on the Shelby County Board of Education, all Circuit and District Judges, as well as the District Attorney and Circuit Clerk are held by Republicans.
In Shelby County, Republicans hold office in all 11 legislative seats in the Alabama Legislature with jurisdiction within the county, including 4 Alabama Senate seats and 7 seats in the Alabama House of Representatives. Shelby County Republicans serving in statewide office include a Judge on the Alabama Court of Civil Appeals and members of the Alabama State Board of Education District 3 and District 6.
Cell division, or the process of how daughter cells emerge from a mother cell, is fundamental to biology. Every cell inherits the same protein and DNA building blocks that make up the cell it originally came from. Yet exactly how these molecular building blocks arrange themselves into new cells has remained a mystery.
Studying cell division requires simultaneously viewing nanometer-scale macromolecules like proteins and DNA all the way up to millimeter-scale populations of cells, and over a time frame that ranges from seconds to weeks. Previous microscopes have been able to capture tiny objects only in short time frames, typically just tens of seconds. There hasn’t been a method that can examine a wide range of size and time scales all at once.
This hourglass depicts the process of superresolution over time, where the bottom shows a protein and the top a dividing cell going from unresolved, at left, to resolved, at right.Somin Lee, CC BY-ND
Advancing superresolution imaging
It wasn’t possible to view cells at the molecular level until recently with the 2014 Nobel Prize-winning development of superresolution.
Traditional light microscopes blur very small objects that are close together in a sample, because light spreads out as it moves through space. With superresolution, fluorescent probes attached to the sample could be switched on and off like twinkling stars on a clear night. By collecting and combining many images of these probes, a superresolution image can bring very small objects into view. Superresolution opened a whole new world in biology, revealing structures as small as 10 nanometers, which is about the size of a protein molecule.
However, the fluorescent probes that this technique relies on can quickly wear out. This limits its use in studying processes that take place over extended periods, such as cell division.
My research team and I have a developed a solution we call PINE nanoscopy. Instead of absorbing light as traditional fluorescent probes do, the probes we use scatter the light so they do not break down with repeated light exposure.
To resolve very small objects that are close together, we built filters made of thin layers of polymers and liquid crystals that allow for detection of scattered light, which triggers the probes to switch on and off. This allowed us to see nanometer-scale details of cells that would otherwise be blurred by traditional microscopes.
Remarkably, we found that these nanometer-scale details could be viewed for very long periods – over 250 hours. These details would typically be lost over time with traditional superresolution methods.
Shedding new light on cell division
We then applied our method to study how molecular building blocks organize in cell division.
We focused on a protein called actin that helps maintain cell structure, among many other functions. Actin is shaped like branching filaments, each about 7 nanometers (millionths of a millimeter) in diameter, that link together to span thousands of nanometers. Using PINE nanoscopy, we attached scattering probes to actin to visually follow human cells as they divided.
We made three observations on how actin building blocks organize during cell division. First, these molecular building blocks expand to increase their connections to their neighbors. Second, they also draw closer to their neighbors to increase their points of contact. And third, the resulting networks tend to contract when the actin molecules are more connected to one another and expand when they are less connected to one another.
Based on these findings, we were able to discover new information about the process of cell division. We found that interactions between actin building blocks sync up with the contraction and expansion of the whole cell during division. In other words, the behavior of the actin molecules is connected to the behavior of the cell: The cell contracts when the actin expands, and it expands when the actin contracts.
Superresolution microscopy won the 2014 Nobel Prize in chemistry.
Uncovering disease with superresolution
We plan to use our method to study how other molecular building blocks organize into tissues and organs. Like cells, tissues and organs are organized in a hierarchy that can be examined from a scale of small to large. Examining the dynamic and complex process of how protein building blocks interact with one another to form larger structures could advance the future creation of new replacement tissues and organs, such as skin grafts.
We also plan to use our imaging technique to study how protein building blocks become disorganized in disease. Proteins organize into cells, cells organize into tissues and tissues organize into organs. A very small change in building blocks can disturb this organization, with effects that can lead to diseases like cancer. Our technique could potentially help researchers visualize and, in turn, better understand how molecular defects in tissues and organs may develop into disease.
Everywhere you look, you can see moments of kindness. From a friend sending a thoughtful text message to a stranger holding the bus for someone running late or a person paying for someone else’s coffee, acts of kindness happen every day. While these moments can have a monumental impact on the person on the receiving end, they often go unrecognized.
In fact, a study published in the “Journal of Experimental Psychology” found that performing acts of kindness improves individual well-being and leads to more positive moods. At the same time, many people underestimate the impact their kindness may have on themselves and others.
To help foster positive connection among friends, family and communities, which the U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory revealed can help reduce the risk of serious health conditions, people should consider ways to weave moments of kindness into their daily lives.
Here are a few simple ways to show kindness:
Hold the Door for Strangers
It may seem small, but holding the door for someone who is entering or exiting a building after you is a brief way to offer a helping hand and set off a contagious string of goodwill.
Send a Thoughtful Surprise
Sending someone a favorite treat, book or even a photo memory can provide a positive boost to not only the recipient but the sender as well. To take this gesture one step further, have a gift delivered to a person you don’t know but may be in need of a thoughtful gesture – such as a basket to a soldier overseas or senior citizens in local nursing homes or assisted living facilities.
Celebrate and Share Kindness Online
So much of the world is connected via social media. To build positive connections online, seek out digital spaces or services that emphasize and inspire kindness, such as the Starbucks Kindness Mobile AR experience. By combining the real world with augmented reality, the experience invites people to explore and share acts of kindness through notes inspired by real stories of kindness, photos, videos and Kindness Cards that can be shared on social media or by text message.
Look for Volunteer Opportunities
Volunteering time to local organizations, such as nursing homes, homeless shelters or food pantries, is an engaging and personal way to help those in your community.
Be Kind to Your Mind
By practicing gratitude, compassion and kindness toward yourself, you can spark moments of kindness that are more genuine and intentional with others. Meditation practice, such as the free, guided collection from Starbucks and Headspace, invites calm and kindness, opening the door to cultivate a more considerate relationship with mind, body and world.
“Experiencing kindness in the world begins with cultivating kindness toward ourselves,” said Dora Kamau, mindfulness and meditation teacher at Headspace. “This week, try being kind to your mind and notice how this has a ripple effect on others and the world around you.”
Offer Words of Encouragement and Gratitude
Whether it be via a text, note or conversation in-person, words are a direct way to show kindness and help individuals feel seen, appreciated and respected. Depending on what the situation requires, providing a compliment or saying, “thank you,” can make a significant impact on someone’s day.
Back-to-school season brings change to routines and often makes each day slightly more hectic, especially for families with little ones. This year, despite the hustle and bustle, you can make quick and easy lunches for your kids (and yourself) that are both simple and better for you. These sandwich suggestions can brighten busy school days with a taste of home.
Brighten your children’s day with a fun, colorful Caterpillar Sandwich inspired by the experts at Nature’s Own. This tasty snack calls for ham, lettuce, cheese, tomato, cucumber and fresh, soft, fluffy bread before using a cookie cutter to cut out sandwich rounds and shape them into a creepy-crawly (yet delicious) “caterpillar.”
For an even simpler lunch you can enjoy at home, grab to go or send off with your little one to savor in the cafeteria, this Fluffernutter Sandwich calls for just three simple ingredients. Spread peanut butter and marshmallow fluff on two slices of bread then enjoy for a flavorful break from the office or classroom.
Both lunchtime favorites are made using Nature’s Own Butterbread, baked with a simple buttery flavor to take sandwiches to new heights. Plus, it’s made with no artificial preservatives, colors or flavors; no high fructose corn syrup; and 0 grams of trans fat.
Janet Echelman says she never set out to be a sculptor of wind. But if you have ever explored Porto, Portugal, walked the streets of Gwanggyo, South Korea, or passed through West Hollywood, you might have seen her massive iridescent sculptures of fiber floating above cities and the millions of people in them. Working closely with engineers, Echelman has spent the past 26 years of her career producing sculptures that rival the size of skyscrapers.
In March, Echelman spoke at the 2023 Imagine Solutions Conference in Naples, Florida, about her journey to becoming a sculptor, her creative process and how her sculptures have forever changed the landscapes of the cities where they ripple, dance and billow in the wind.
Janet Echelman speaks at the 2023 Imagine Solutions Conference.
What inspired you to create this type of art?
I began my career as a painter. In 1997, I traveled to India as a Fulbright scholar and planned to give exhibitions around the country. I had my paints and brushes shipped to India from the U.S., but they never arrived. As the deadline for the show loomed, I had to come up with something fast. In Mahabalipuram, the Indian fishing village where I was staying, I would watch the fishermen work and reel in their mounds of netting on the beach at the end of each day. One day, it occurred to me that those nets would make excellent material for sculptures. By the end of my Fulbright year, I had created an entire series of these netted sculptures with the fishermen, called the Bellbottom Series, named after the popular bell-bottom pants.
I’ve been working to develop and refine this visual language ever since. It’s an ever-evolving challenge to go from making handmade nets on the beach with fishermen in India to creating works the scale of one or two city blocks attached to skyscrapers.
How do you approach the engineering side of your art? How are these pieces constructed, especially given their large scale?
Every piece is planned out digitally first. The first sketches are very simple – it’s just me with a pencil.
But the final design in our studio is a complete digital color 3D model. We can see how the sculpture sits in space and how it attaches to everything around it. We’re able to move around the three-dimensional site to see the work from all sides.
My team and I have engaged in a decade of development of original computer software to do soft-body modeling of our sculptures, which allows us to design our 3D netted forms while understanding the constraints of our craft, showing response to the forces of gravity and wind.
Every element – every line of twine, and every knot – is modeled in terms of its thickness, stiffness, weight and density. So it’s actually quite an endeavor to analyze such unusual structures that are both porous and fluidly moving. This is not the standard – building departments typically analyze solid buildings made of things they know, like steel and concrete – so this is really pushing everyone to work in new ways.
In terms of the physical construction, my sculptures appear delicate yet are incredibly strong. They have to be able to withstand winds of a Category 5 hurricane. We achieve that by using highly engineered materials, including a fiber that NASA used for the Mars Rover called ultrahigh-molecular-weight polyethylene, which is custom-braided into structural ropes. We use a variety of other fibers to create the braided twine for the soft layers of each sculpture.
The ropes are then all hand-spliced together with methods that have been used for hundreds of years to construct boats in the maritime industry. These are old human technologies passed down from generation to generation.
Once we have these knotted net panels, we incorporate different colors to create patterns within the work. These panels are then attached to rope structures and usually lifted into space using cranes. My team pulls them into tension so that they can withstand immense forces of nature.
What was the hardest sculpture to create from a technical standpoint, and why?
My commission for the St. Petersburg pier in Florida titled “Bending Arc” was challenging, because it needed to withstand a Category 5 hurricane – and yet we did it. There’s footage of it during Hurricane Ian, and it was just dancing beautifully.
Hurricane testing starts in the design stages. Our detailed digital models are tested and analyzed for their capacity to withstand certain forces of wind, which, for public safety reasons, is required in order to obtain a building permit. My sculptures have to satisfy the same requirements as a skyscraper, and they can withstand the same forces as any major building.
What are you currently working on that you’re excited about?
I am excited to continue to explore the relationship between dance and art. In 2014, I collaborated with the Stuttgart Ballet in Germany to create sculptures that dancers could interact with in their performances.
Since then I have worked with a choreographer and engineer at Princeton University to create a sculpture that the dancers actually enter into and interact with. Their movements cause the sculpture to move and appear as if it were a dancer itself at a larger scale. I see it as an exploration of our planet and its climate. It illustrates how the Earth and human beings are always mutually influencing one another – and yet we are not equals.
What do you hope your art evokes in people?
It’s important to me that each person can create their own meaning from art. They are the expert in their own experience.
If my work offers a moment of contemplation and allows you to feel a sense of calm and your own interconnection with the wind, sun, people and city, then that’s all I could hope for. I like how complete strangers often start talking to each other underneath the sculptures. Our cities are made up of straight lines and hard edges and my sculptures offer something completely different – they are soft and adaptable, yet they’re the same scale as skyscrapers.
If my art prompts people to contemplate that the world can be built in a completely different way than it always has been, if it opens up questions, then that is the most an artist could ever hope to do.
Many of these artists, activists and entrepreneurs have contributed to an ever-growing hip-hop scene within the Deaf community, which includes a subgenre of rap known as dip hop.
Dip hop is one of many styles of rap that have developed over the years. But it stands apart from other subgenres of hip-hop because rappers lay down rhymes in sign languages and craft music informed by their cultural experiences within the Deaf community.
The birth of a musical movement
As an ethnomusicologist, I’ve followed the development of dip hop since 2011, documenting how rappers have pioneered this art form while introducing outsiders, like myself, to Deaf culture.
In 2005, the rapper Warren “Wawa” Snipe came up with the term “DIP HOP” in ASL and English to classify a developing style of rap music within the Deaf community.
While artists of this style identify their music in different ways – some use labels like “deaf rap,” “deaf hip-hop” and “sign rap” – the designation “dip hop” goes beyond adding a qualifier to the broader musical genre of rap. Instead, it signals an independent style grounded in both hip-hop and Deaf culture. Like bounce, trap and drill, the label “dip hop” makes a greater distinction from being a variation of rap to a style that is heavily situated within Deaf culture and determined by Deaf aesthetics.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Deaf DJs and entertainment entrepreneurs organized DIY parties, nightlife events and social gatherings. These venues provided opportunities for rappers, DJs, dancers and other artists to begin to develop and explore their own style of hip-hop and connect with other rappers and DJs.
Cities with Deaf schools served as cultural hubs for musical networking. Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. and the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in Rochester, New York, have acted as significant sites of production within the U.S. by connecting deaf and hard of hearing students from all over the world.
Additionally, greater access to recording technology, video streaming sites and social media have given Deaf artists tools to create music and connect with other artists and fans.
The many forms of dip hop
While the incorporation of sign language is a fundamental element of dip hop – and remains at the forefront of defining this style – dip hop extends far beyond crafting original rap songs in sign language.
It involves musical expression that’s shaped through a Deaf cultural lens – songs that reorient mainstream notions of what can be considered music. At the same time, every artist has their own rapping style, with dip hop performances taking on a range of different forms and structures.
For example, some dip hop artists work with both oral and manual languages to make their music accessible to hearing people. There are those who perform in both languages simultaneously, and others who prerecord their vocal track, which plays in the background as they rap in sign language.
Some artists collaborate with interpreters. In “Vergiss mich nicht,” artist Deaf Kat Night raps in German sign language, while the lyrics are interpreted orally in German.
Then there are those who collaborate with hearing or deaf DJs. “Breaking Barrels,” featuring DefStar, is just one of the many collaborations between Wawa and DJ Nicar.
Performances can also involve musical instruments. Sean Forbes, for example, performs with a live band while also rapping in ASL and English, an approach seen in his music video “Calm Like a Bomb.”
Alternatively, there are rappers who create music for Deaf audiences and solely rap in sign languages. These songs, however, may still have auditory components, which often consist of artists composing their own beats or raising the volume of previously recorded songs to rap over.
Dip hop, like many styles of music, comes to life through live performance. Artists move across the stage with their hands flying through the air as audiences pulse to the rhythm of the blasting bass beat.
A performance by dip hop artists Wawa and Polar Bear at Gallaudet University’s 2015 DSP Bash.
Some artists further immerse their audiences in the musical experience by using specialized instruments and equipment such as subwoofers, objects that can conduct vibrations like balloons, or new forms of haptic technology, which refers to wearables, such as vests, that channel sound vibrations.
Some artists also incorporate visuals into their performances through the use of video screens and sound-activated lights.
Breaking into the mainstream
Dip hop artists have struggled to be acknowledged as musicians in their own right – to have their artistry be the focus of attention, rather than the fact that they’re deaf or hard of hearing.
That’s starting to change.
In 2009, Finnish rapper Marko “Signmark” Vuoriheimo signed a record deal with Warner Music Finland and released “Smells Like Victory” and “Speakerbox” that same year.
This marked the first time in history a Deaf artist was signed to a major record label. The following year, Detroit-based rapper and National Technical Institute for the Deaf alumnus Sean Forbes signed a contract with WEB Entertainment and released the single “I’m Deaf,” attracting mainstream attention to this style of rap.
Sean Forbes poses during the 2014 National Association for the Deaf Breakthrough Awards Gala.Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
And through the support of the Deaf community, hearing allies and fans, Forbes’ EP “Little Victories” reached No. 1 in the hip-hop category on iTunes and made it to the top 200 Billboard chart in 2020.
Sup beautiful people
I’m the Godpop of dip hop
Deaf eyes through hip hop
With signs for your eyes
Blow your mind and it won’t stop.
As dip hop evolves, it continues to push the boundaries of convention. In the spirit of hip-hop, dip hop rebels both musically and socially against cultural norms, breaking the mold and expanding possibilities for musical artistry.
Through their performances, dip hop artists not only subvert preconceived notions of music but also of Deaf culture and deafness, changing what it means for music to be heard.
