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Arches are elegant and efficient structural forms that can be used in a wide variety of applications, from bridges to extraterrestrial shielding structures. Oftentimes their design hinges around the identification of the minimum-thickness required to ensure their stability when subjected to gravity and lateral (inertial) loading. This work presents a MATLAB-based code called OpenArch developed within a procedural programming framework for the preliminary design and assessment of optimal arch forms of minimum thickness when subjected to combined self-weight and seismically induced loads. The code, which is based on limit thrust-line analysis can handle any classical or non-classical no-tension arch form and the results compare excellently with the few available analytical solutions.

This article describes an honours-year class conducted in 2013 at the University of Otago in New Zealand. Students transcribed, annotated and wrote essays about a little-known New Zealand collection of unpublished letters written by leading British women writers of the Romantic era. Their research was then collected and published as a book entitled "In Her Hand: Letters of Romantic-Era British Women Writers in New Zealand Collections." The success of this course suggests the benefits of allowing students the opportunity to undertake original archival research and serves as a reminder that rich archival collections are found all over the world.

Autoantibodies targeting the central nervous system have been shown to induce psychiatric symptoms resembling schizophrenia. Concurrently, genetic studies have characterised a number of risk variants associated with schizophrenia although their functional implications are largely unknown. Any biological effects of functional variants on protein function may potentially be replicated by the presence of autoantibodies against such proteins. Recent research has demonstrated that the R1346H variant in the CACNA1I gene coding for the Cav 3.3 protein results in a synaptic reduction of Cav3.3 voltage gated calcium channels and, consequently, sleep spindles, which have been shown to correlate with several symptom domains in patients with schizophrenia. The present study measured plasma levels of IgG against two peptides derived from CACNA1I and CACNA1C, respectively, in patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls. The results demonstrated that increased anti-CACNA1I IgG levels were associated with schizophrenia but not associated with any symptom domain related to the reduction of sleep spindles. In contrast to previously published work indicating that inflammation may be a marker for a depressive phenotype, plasma levels of IgG against either CACNA1I or CACNA1C peptides were not associated with depressive symptoms, suggesting that anti-Cav3.3 autoantibodies may function independently of pro-inflammatory processes.