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One of the most common swimming strategies employed by microorganisms is based on the use of rotating helical filaments, called flagella, that are powered by molecular motors. Determining the physical properties of this propulsive system is crucial to understanding the behavior of these organisms. Furthermore, the ability to dynamically monitor the activity of the flagellar motor is a valuable indicator of the overall energetics of the cell. In this work, inherently magnetic bacteria confined in micromagnetic CoFe traps are used to directly and noninvasively determine the flagellar thrust force and swimming speed of motile cells. The technique permits determination of the ratio of propulsive force/swimming speed (the hydrodynamic resistance) and the power output of the flagellar motor for individual cells over extended time periods. Cells subjected to ultraviolet radiation are observed to experience exponential decays in power output as a function of exposure time. By noninvasively measuring thrust, velocity, and power output over time at a single-cell level, this technique can serve as the foundation for fundamental studies of bacterial hydrodynamics and also provides a novel, to our knowledge, tether-free probe of single-cell energetics over time.

This research explores commonly overlooked intersections of disability and HIV/AIDS, theorizing that institutional desexualization of disabled students in educational settings is correlated with higher rates of HIV transmission later in life. Working primarily within the fields of disability studies, HIV/AIDS studies, and gender studies, this project targets the gap in research on disability and HIV/AIDS, understanding disabled individuals as being at a heightened risk for HIV transmission yet simultaneously being less likely to receive sexual health education than non-disabled peers, as seen in emerging research by Nora Grace (2003; 2004). This research theorizes a relationship between institutional desexualization and HIV transmission later in life. Specifically, this relationship may exist in the following pattern, beginning with early and continued desexualization of disabled individuals leading to social assumptions of universal asexuality, thus potentially causing a lack of sexual health resources and education due to this assumed sexual inactivity. A lack of sexual health resources may influence higher rates of engagement in high-risk sexual activity due to this lack of sexual health knowledge among disabled individuals, which could thus account for higher rates of HIV transmission within disabled populations. In establishing disabled individuals as at heightened risk for HIV and disrupting the desexualization of disability, I provide recommendations for future research and policy pathways in the aim of further exploring the intersections of HIV/AIDS and disability in order to reduce the rates of HIV transmission within disabled population.

Skaldic diction has long been noted for the many analogies it creates between the human body and the natural environment. One manifestation of this interchange occurs where women are referenced by kennings with base words denoting “land” or “earth,” as in the kenning grund gulls [ground of gold]. The idiosyncrasies of this type of woman-kenning have not before been studied, although a related metaphorical construction in which land is likened to a woman has been discussed. This article examines the linguistic taxonomies, metaphorical correlatives, and creative adaptations of this kenning-type “woman-as-land” within skaldic verse of the tenth to fourteenth centuries. The article also looks beyond kennings as lexical units, considering how imagery of women as “land” occurs in various forms of wordplay in skaldic verse and how these images are subsequently incorporated into the prosimetrical contexts of sagas.