Francisco Javier González García

From Cultural Contact to Conquest: Rome and the Creation of a Tribal Zone in the North-Western Iberian Peninsula

In recent decades, archaeological and historical research on the Iron Age in the north-western Iberian Peninsula, as in many other areas and archaeological contexts, has developed a ‘pacifist’ interpretation. This is based, among other aspects, upon the rejection of the functional nature of the weapons documented in the archaeological record and on the development of a hypothesis on the non-defensive nature of walls, interpreting these structures as a symbol of the community or as an indication of the cohesion of the group living in the settlement. Such an interpretation can be integrated with the idea of a pre- and proto-historic ‘pacified past’ developed after the Second World War, which considered that ‘before civilization, war was rare, ritualised, abnormal and foreign to human psychology’ and with the belief that there has been a evolutionary progression from a primitive to a civilized way of war.

Nucleofection of whole murine retinas

The mouse retina constitutes an important research model for studies aiming to unravel the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying ocular diseases. The accessibility of this tissue and its feasibility to directly obtain neurons from it has increased the number of studies culturing mouse retina, mainly retinal cell suspensions. However, to address many questions concerning retinal diseases and protein function, the organotypic structure must be maintained, so it becomes important to devise methods to transfect and culture whole retinas without disturbing their cellular structure. Moreover, the postmitotic stage of retinal neurons makes them reluctant to commonly used transfection techniques. For this purpose some published methods employ in vivo virus-based transfection techniques or biolistics, methods that present some constraints. Here we report for the first time a method to transfect P15-P20 whole murine retinas via nucleofection, where nucleic acids are directly delivered to the cell nuclei, allowing in vitro transfection of postmitotic cells. A detailed protocol for successful retina extraction, organotypic culture, nucleofection, histological procedures and imaging is described. In our hands the A-33 nucleofector program shows the highest transfection efficiency. Whole flat-mount retinas and cryosections from transfected retinas were imaged by epifluorescence and confocal microscopy, showing that not only cells located in the outermost retinal layers, but also those in inner retinal layers are transfected. In conclusion, we present a novel method to successfully transfect postnatal whole murine retina via nucleofection, showing that retina can be successfully nucleofected after some optimization steps.

Neocon Greece: V. D. Hanson’s War on History

Given the fact that Victor Davis Hanson has a habit of making his views on almost everything public, it is not difficult to fit them into a neoconservative ideology. His remarks about ex-President Bush, the Iraq war or the threat of Mexican immigration to the identity of the United States leave no margin for doubt on this point. What we want to do in this article is to show how this ideology lays the foundations upon which he builds his proposals on the character of ancient Greek society, and especially on hoplite combat. Given these theoretical premises, it is easy to understand that the result is a complete distortion of the history of Greece, a distortion Hanson wants to expand to the entire history of the Western civilization.