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Common names allow species diversity to be acknowledged by experts and non-specialists alike; they are descriptors with both scientific and cultural implications. However, a lack of clarity when using a common name could risk altering perceptions of threatened species. This is the case for the Critically Endangered wild camel Camelus ferus, which, despite extensive evidence of its species status, is frequently referred to in English as wild Bactrian camel. However, the wild camel (Mongolian: хавтгай, khavtgai; Chinese: 野骆驼, ye luo tuo) is not a wild version of the domestic Bactrian camel Camelus bactrianus but a separate species near extinction, with an estimated population of c. 950. Failure to clearly separate Bactrian and wild camels in name risks masking the plight of the few remaining wild camels with the visible abundance of the domesticated species. Here we advocate the use of the accurate English common name wild camel for C. ferus ideally alongside its Indigenous names to correctly represent its cultural and conservation importance.
This invited response commentary engages with Benoit Mayer's case comment, published in this issue of Transnational Environmental Law, on the recent landmark decision by the District Court of The Hague (The Netherlands) of May 2021 in Milieudefensie v. Royal Dutch Shell. The Court ordered the oil giant Royal Dutch Shell to reduce at least 45% of its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 compared with 2019 levels. In this response commentary I build on and contrast Mayer's examination of how the Court arrived at this target. In doing so, I discuss the normativity of tort law compared with international law against the background of the ideas of Martti Koskenniemi. I conclude that the District Court legitimately qualified Shell's business plans as tortious. The specific reduction target is the result of civil procedural rules on evidence and the debate between the parties. In the light of this analysis, I respectfully reject Benoit Mayer's suggestion that sectoral practices should play a more significant role in determining corporate climate mitigation obligations. In my view, such an approach would be dangerously apologetic and lead to dystopian outcomes.
This paper gathers interim results of a study on the accessibility of artistic research. Since no corresponding subject portal could be found, a specific data collection was started. Due to the study's background in Switzerland, the resulting DataBase for Applied, Fine and Performing Arts (AFPA-DB) focusses mostly on the German-speaking and European countries, while aiming to be expanded in the future. After summarizing the formal findings of the study, the authors explore the challenges that occurred during the research process. Their struggle in finding and/or accessing artistic research seems to be characteristic of the field and is therefore likely to affect similar projects in other academic art libraries.
OBJECTIVES/GOALS: The goal of this project was to conduct a preliminary assessment of in vivo feasibility early on in the drug-discovery process in an effort to expedite the translation of novel drug scaffolds to potential clinical candidates. The data gathered in this study will be used to direct analog synthesis of our current lead compounds through rational drug design. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: Based on virtual and physical high-throughput screening efforts and subsequent similarity searching, we identified a set of potent and selective spermine oxidase (SMOX) inhibitors adhering to a common structural scaffold. In order to address potential barriers to in vivo use, we then conducted a robust optimization analysis in an effort to identify analogs with improved drug-like characteristics. Docking simulations to predict binding were performed and visualized using molecular modeling software (MOE and PyMol). ADMET properties were calculated using a variety of software resources including SwissADME and CDD Vault. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: Through these optimization efforts, we were able to successfully identify analogs with improved drug-like characteristics, including increases in predicted CNS penetration, isosteric replacement of metabolically labile functional groups, increased lipophilicity, and elimination of structural attributes suggestive of off-target activity. Analogs were ranked according to predicted binding and properties of in vivo feasibility. Compounds achieving the highest scores were then selected as scaffolds to guide analog synthesis. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE: Despite evidence implicating induction of SMOX as a mechanism contributing to neuronal pathology, the lack of potent and selective inhibitors with profiles conducive for in vivo use has significantly impeded clinical investigation of this target. In this presentation, rational drug design focusing on translational optimization will be discussed.
Machu Picchu, in Cuzco, is one of the most famous archaeological sites in South America. The precise dating of the monumental complex, however, relies largely on documentary sources. Samples of bone and teeth from individuals buried in caves at four cemeteries around Machu Picchu form the basis for a new programme of AMS radiocarbon-dating. The results show that the site was occupied from c. AD 1420–1532, with activity beginning two decades earlier than suggested by the textual sources that associate the site with Emperor Pachacuti's rise to power in AD 1438. The new AMS dates—the first large set published for Machu Picchu—therefore have implications for the wider understanding of Inca chronology.
VARIATIONS OF THE word pite appear in the General Prologue and fifteen of the Canterbury Tales. But they cluster meaningfully in just seven, each associated with poetic high style and/or high social estate: the Knight's (14 times), Man of Law's (10), Clerk's (8), Merchant's (3), Squire's (4), and Franklin's (6) Tales, and the Tale of Melibee (5). In contrast, references to pite are strikingly absent from the fabliau or estate satire tales—the Miller’s, Reeve’s, Cook’s, Friar’s, Summoner’s, and Shipman's Tales—and from the two tales associated with embodied, oral female wisdom—the Wife of Bath's and Manciple’s. We might expect, based on the centrality of ennobling love as a crucial question in so much of Chaucer's earlier poetry, that when pite clusters in the Tales it would be in the context of fin’amor service—where the pitous situation of the courtly lover crucially elicits (or not) a corresponding pite on the part of his lady. But the fin’amor contexts for pity in the Tales, more often than not, distort typical modes of signification and undercut any ennobling function it might have. Nor do the Canterbury Tales echo the widespread use of empathetic pity in late medieval affective devotion, where devotees are incited to identify in embodied compassionate terms with events in Christ's life and thereby connect directly with the godhead through Christ's humanity and sacrifice. Such affective devotion is largely absent from “straight” religious tales such as the Second Nun's and Parson’s. And as we will see, when such structures of feeling are evoked in a quasi-saint's legend such as the Man of Law's Tale, pite emerges as a much more hybrid form of feeling, as much secular as religious.
Instead, Chaucer associates pite in the Canterbury Tales both with specifically gentil or ennobling modes of feeling and with how a particular kind of womanly attunement to empathy can profoundly affect masculine self-rule. As a case study for considering Chaucer's analysis of such exchanges of feeling, I will focus on those tales—Knight’s, Man of Law’s, Merchant’s, and Squire’s— where the refrain “pitee runneth soone in gentil herte” appears.
Preliminary evidence suggests beneficial effects of cognitive remediation in depression. An update of the current evidence is needed. The aim was to systematically assess the effectiveness of cognitive remediation in depression on three outcomes.
Methods
The meta-analysis was pre-registered on PROSPERO (CRD42019124316). PubMed, PsycINFO, Embase and Cochrane Library were searched on 2 February 2019 and 8 November 2020 for peer-reviewed published articles. We included randomized and non-randomized clinical trials comparing cognitive remediation to control conditions in adults with primary depression. Random-effects models were used to calculate Hedges' g, and moderators were assessed using mixed-effects subgroup analyses and meta-regression. Main outcome categories were post-treatment depressive symptomatology (DS), cognitive functioning (CF) and daily functioning (DF).
Results
We identified 5221 records and included 21 studies reporting on 24 comparisons, with 438 depressed patients receiving cognitive remediation and 540 patients in a control condition. We found a small effect on DS (g = 0.28, 95% CI 0.09–0.46, I2 40%), a medium effect on CF (g = 0.60, 95% CI 0.37–0.83, I2 44%) and a small effect on DF (g = 0.22, 95% CI 0.06–0.39, I2 3%). There were no significant effects at follow-up. Confounding bias analyses indicated possible overestimation of the DS and DF effects in the original studies.
Conclusions
Cognitive remediation in depression improves CF in the short term. The effects on DS and DF may have been overestimated. Baseline depressive symptom severity should be considered when administering cognitive remediation.
This article presents a novel smart sensor garment with integrated miniaturized inertial measurements units (IMUs) that can be used to monitor lower body kinematics during daily training activities, without the need of extensive technical assistance throughout the measurements. The smart sensor tights enclose five ultra-light sensor modules that measure linear accelerations, angular velocities, and the earth magnetic field in three directions. The modules are located at the pelvis, thighs, and shanks. The garment enables continuous measurement in the field at high sample rates (250 Hz) and the sensors have a large measurement range (32 g, 4,000°/s). They are read out by a central processing unit through an SPI bus, and connected to a centralized battery in the waistband. A fully functioning prototype was built to perform validation studies in a lab setting and in a field setting. In the lab validation study, the IMU data (converted to limb orientation data) were compared with the kinematic data of an optoelectronic measurement system and good validity (CMCs >0.8) was shown. In the field tests, participants experienced the tights as comfortable to wear and they did not feel restricted in their movements. These results show the potential of using the smart sensor tights on a regular base to derive lower limb kinematics in the field.
In this paper, we derive and analyse mean-field models for the dynamics of groups of individuals undergoing a random walk. The random motion of individuals is only influenced by the perceived densities of the different groups present as well as the available space. All individuals have the tendency to stay within their own group and avoid the others. These interactions lead to the formation of aggregates in case of a single species and to segregation in the case of multiple species. We derive two different mean-field models, which are based on these interactions and weigh local and non-local effects differently. We discuss existence and stability properties of solutions for both models and illustrate the rich dynamics with numerical simulations.
To explore the impact of COVID-19 public health restrictions on the lives of older adults living in Uganda.
Design:
Qualitative semi-structured interview study.
Setting:
Participants’ homes.
Participants:
Older adults living in Uganda (aged 60+).
Measurements:
Older adults in Uganda were interviewed over the phone and asked about their lives before and since COVID-19, and how public health restrictions have affected their lives. Semi-structured interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed and translated into English. Transcripts were thematically analyzed and themes generated in discussion.
Results:
In total, 30 older adults participated in the study. Five themes were identified: (1) economic impacts; (2) lack of access to basic necessities; (3) impact on healthcare utilization; (4) social impacts and (5) violent reinforcement of public health restrictions. COVID-19 public health restrictions had severe impacts on their lives, with many people having not enough food to eat due to lack of income, and being unable to pay their grandchildren’s school fees. Steep rises in public transport fares and an overall avoidance of transport also resulted in a lack of access to healthcare services and difficulty in getting food. Restrictions were violently reinforced by security guards.
Conclusions:
Public health restrictions have a severe impact not only on older adults but also on the whole family in Uganda. Governmental strategies to contain the virus need to provide more support to enable people to get basic necessities and live as normal a life as possible.
The propagation of gradient flow structures from microscopic to macroscopic models is a topic of high current interest. In this paper, we discuss this propagation in a model for the diffusion of particles interacting via hard-core exclusion or short-range repulsive potentials. We formulate the microscopic model as a high-dimensional gradient flow in the Wasserstein metric for an appropriate free-energy functional. Then we use the JKO approach to identify the asymptotics of the metric and the free-energy functional beyond the lowest order for single particle densities in the limit of small particle volumes by matched asymptotic expansions. While we use a propagation of chaos assumption at far distances, we consider correlations at small distance in the expansion. In this way, we obtain a clear picture of the emergence of a macroscopic gradient structure incorporating corrections in the free-energy functional due to the volume exclusion.
On December 20, 2019, the Supreme Court of the Netherlands published its judgment in The State of the Netherlands v. Urgenda. The judgment is largely a discussion of questions of Dutch law, but contains several conclusions that are relevant from an international law perspective. In particular, the Court held that on the basis of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the Netherlands has a positive obligation to take measures for the prevention of climate change and that it was required to reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by at least 25 percent by the end of 2020, compared with 1990 levels.
Neuroimaging techniques have rapidly expanded our understanding of how the brain responds to addiction in humans. This chapter will discuss methods used to assess brain response, how the data is analyzed, and how it can be used to better understand addiction. Foundational to inferences drawn from these methods is study design. Common designs employed in human neuroimaging research are discussed, including cross-sectional designs, longitudinal/cohort designs, and experimental designs. A description of various neuroimaging methods and their strengths and weaknesses is included: functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), positron-emission tomography, electroencephalogram, magnetoencephalography, structural MRI, and resting state fMRI. Given its popularity in research, discussion of MRI includes details on paradigm design and data analysis of functional and structural MRI, as well as some common oversights in data processing and interpretation of results.
We describe system verification tests and early science results from the pulsar processor (PTUSE) developed for the newly commissioned 64-dish SARAO MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa. MeerKAT is a high-gain (
${\sim}2.8\,\mbox{K Jy}^{-1}$
) low-system temperature (
${\sim}18\,\mbox{K at }20\,\mbox{cm}$
) radio array that currently operates at 580–1 670 MHz and can produce tied-array beams suitable for pulsar observations. This paper presents results from the MeerTime Large Survey Project and commissioning tests with PTUSE. Highlights include observations of the double pulsar
$\mbox{J}0737{-}3039\mbox{A}$
, pulse profiles from 34 millisecond pulsars (MSPs) from a single 2.5-h observation of the Globular cluster Terzan 5, the rotation measure of Ter5O, a 420-sigma giant pulse from the Large Magellanic Cloud pulsar PSR
$\mbox{J}0540{-}6919$
, and nulling identified in the slow pulsar PSR J0633–2015. One of the key design specifications for MeerKAT was absolute timing errors of less than 5 ns using their novel precise time system. Our timing of two bright MSPs confirm that MeerKAT delivers exceptional timing. PSR
$\mbox{J}2241{-}5236$
exhibits a jitter limit of
$<4\,\mbox{ns h}^{-1}$
whilst timing of PSR
$\mbox{J}1909{-}3744$
over almost 11 months yields an rms residual of 66 ns with only 4 min integrations. Our results confirm that the MeerKAT is an exceptional pulsar telescope. The array can be split into four separate sub-arrays to time over 1 000 pulsars per day and the future deployment of S-band (1 750–3 500 MHz) receivers will further enhance its capabilities.
Study of risk factors of diabetes mellitus from the general population in a schizophrenic population.
Method:
Measurement of glucose and insuline levels, fasting and 120’ after oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT) and calculating of HOMA-IR and HOMA-B.
Results:
We studied 167 outpatients, mean age 40.2 years, 90.9% Caucasian, suffering from schizophrenia (83%) or schizoaffective disorder (17%).
Age could not be confirmed as a risk factor on any of the glucose or insuline measurements or HOMA in patients with typical or atypical antipsychotics.
With bodyweight, patients with typical differed from those with atypical antipsychotics. Weight was not a risk factor on any measurement or model in with typical antipsychotics. In patients with atypical, a significant correlation with levels of plasma glucose (p=0.017), insuline (p= 0.003 resp. p= 0.010) or glucose homeostasis models (p= 0.004 resp. p= 0.016). Fasting plasma glucose (FPG) was the notable exception (p=0.987).
Conclusion:
Diabetes risk factors age and weight behave differently in schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder.
The finding that age was not a risk factor, suggests that age is not a suitable criterion for the decision of glucose screening in this population.
The different effect of weight (a risk factor only in patients treated with atypical, but not with typical antipsychotics) suggests in different pathophysiological pathway.
As FPG was the only measurement with no correlation with either risk factors, this suggests that FPG is insufficiently sensitive for detection of disturbed glucosemetabolism in schizophrenia. Additional measurements (fasting insuline, HOMA-IR, HOMA-B, OGTT) seem to be necessary.
During this presentation, the first pharmacogenetic study on response to methylphenidate (MPH) in adults with ADHD will be reported.
Methods
We performed a stratified analysis of the association between response to MPH, assessed under double-blind conditions, in 42 adults with ADHD, and polymorphisms in the genes encoding the dopamine transporter, SLC6A3 (DAT1), the norepinephrine transporter, SLC6A2 (NET), and the dopamine receptor D4, DRD4.
Results
Polymorphisms in the DRD4 and the SLC6A2 (NET) genes were not significantly associated with the response to MPH treatment; however, the VNTR polymorphism in the 3'untranslated region of SLC6A3 (DAT1) was significantly associated with an increased likelihood of a response to MPH treatment (odds ratio 5.4; 95% CI 1.4-21.9) in heterozygous 10-repeat allele carriers in comparison with the 10/10 homozygotes: 52.2% of the participants heterozygous for the 10-repeat allele improved significantly on MPH treatment whereas only 22.2% of the 10/10 homozygous individuals did.
Conclusions
This study confirms that the SLC6A3 (DAT1) genotype may have an influential role in determining the response to MPH in the treatment of ADHD. The SLC6A3 (DAT1) gene might be a factor worth evaluating further in the future regarding choice of treatment and possibly dose adjustment.