The swinging cities of the eternal present

Abstract How many furnitures, or houses, or urban districts, that where designed and made in the 80s are still relevant today? What clothes or shoes that period can be worn without appearing old or out of time? Everybody can say almost all. In forty years the living spaces have not changed that much. Even less their projects have been modified. The way in which they are conceived and designed is almost the same. Fashion, architecture, and cities are the sensitive forms that better represent the people that generated them. They express lifestyle, a status and, in some way aspirations and expectations for the future. Is it possible that they remained so indifferent to the changes of the last decades? A few times the distance between gestalt and zeitgeist was so dramatic. The paradigm that binds the aesthetics to the projection of time blowed up. The overcoming of modernity lies especially in this. We live like an eternal present. Where the sensitive forms and their representations in solid space no longer carry an idea of the future. They always seem to be more or less the same, immutable and increasingly deprived of sense in the rush of the sharing information technologies revolution that is distorting the system of social relations and the way in which things and places are related each other. Even today everything changes and so much faster than before. Innovation is conducted in the intangible areas of the net rather than in the material spaces. We live with our head in the Cloud . Objects are intended to produce informations that are monitored and transmitted in real time. Everything is accessible and traceable. The control is based on knowledge. In the era of the Internet of Everything, everything is destined to become another (as Marco Valsecchi wrote in February 2016 in the Sole 24 Ore Dossier on Technological Innovation). How the forms of living are changing, or will change? The architecture of the eternal present, paraphrasing Giedion (The Eternal Present, the beginnings of architecture. Pantheon Books, New York, 1964 ), is still able to propose innovation trough projects? The simultaneous action of three key factors: the economic crisis, the environmental one and the sharing information technologies revolution is so deeply changing our lifestyles and the way we imagine and we want the solid forms of our future that all our design knowledge suddenly seems inadequate both as an interpretative tool of the current condition and as a device capable of generating new environmental, social, economic performances and new beauty. Nothing surprising. In the history of architecture and the city the great technological changes have produced major changes in the lifestyles, in the forms of living and consequently in the way in which we design them. If the major paradigm of modernity was about the best possible spatial synthesis between function and architecture. Today, with the information technologies revolution, we have the opposite problem. To give meaning, narrative and uses-even temporary uses- to spaces that have already given forms and turn ..

On the antifragility of cities and of their buildings

Abstract We discuss the relevance of the concept of antifragility, introduced by Nassim Taleb, to the theory and practice of urban planning and design. We further contrast the antifragility of cities with that of their \u201csmartness\u201d, suggesting that the former deserves a greater focus in the planning practice. Finally, we explore the potential antifragility of buildings, arguing it to be an important factor of the antifragility of cities in general

Changes of membrane fatty acids and proteins of Shewanella putrefaciens treated with cinnamon oil and gamma irradiation

Abstract Background In order to detect the antimicrobial mechanism of combined treatment of cinnamon oil and gamma irradiation (GI), the membrane fatty acids and proteins characteristics of Shewanella putrefaciens ( S. putrefaciens ) treated with cinnamon oil and GI, and the distribution of cinnamon oil in S. putrefaciens were observed in this study. Results The membrane lipid profile of S. putrefaciens was notably damaged by treatments of cinnamon oil and the combination of cinnamon oil and GI, with significantly fatty acids decrease in C14:0, C16:0, C16:1, C17:1, C18:1 ( p \ua0<\ua00.05). The SDS-PAGE result showed that GI did not have obvious effect on membrane proteins (MP), but GI combined with cinnamon oil changed the MP subunits. Cinnamaldehyde, the main component of cinnamon oil, can not transport into S. putrefaciens obviously. It was transformed into cinnamyl alcohol in the nutrient broth with the action of S. putrefaciens . This indicated that the antimicrobial action of cinnamon oil mainly happened on the membrane of S. putrefaciens. Conclusion Cinnamon oil could act on the membrane of S. putrefaciens with the damage of fatty acids and proteins, and GI would increase the destructive capability of cinnamon oil on the membrane fatty acids and proteins of S. putrefaciens

Taking social media to a university classroom: teaching and learning using Twitter and blogs

Abstract Social media has taken many sectors including the higher education by storm. However, with wide spread fears that social media may be a distractor to pedagogy, this paper investigated how social media facilitates teaching and learning. Unlike most prior studies which relied much on soliciting mere views from students and lecturers about their intentions to use or not to use social media, this study incorporated Twitter and blogs into two undergraduate courses offered in the Department of Library and Information Science at Mzuzu University which is a public university in Malawi. Data were collected in two ways: first, analysis of blog and Twitter posts by students and second, a questionnaire was sent to 64 students to find out their perception towards the use of blogs and Twitter in a classroom environment. Results suggest that if appropriately deployed, Twitter and blogs are catalysts for the much hyped learner-centred approach to teaching because using these technologies, it emerged that students shared and discussed course materials, posted their course reflections and interacted amongst themselves and with their lecturer 24/7. Challenges faced include cost of internet data bundles, inaccessible Wi-Fi, poor bandwidths and insufficient computers

Headache and anxiety/mood disorders: are we trapped in a cul-de-sac?

No abstract available

Depression of home cage wheel running: a reliable and clinically relevant method to assess migraine pain in rats

Abstract Background The development of new anti-migraine treatments is limited by the difficulty inassessing migraine pain in laboratory animals. Depression of activity is one of the few diagnostic criteria formigraine that can be mimicked in rats. The goal of the present study was to test the hypothesis thatdepression of home cage wheel running is a reliable and clinically relevant method to assess migraine painin rats. Methods Adult female rats were implanted with a cannula to inject allyl isothiocyanate (AITC) onto the dura to induce migraine pain, as has been shown before. Rats recovered from implantation surgery for 8 days in cages containing a running wheel. Home cage wheel running was recorded 23 h a day. AITC and the migraine medication sumatriptan were administered in the hour prior to onset of the dark phase. Results Administration of AITC caused a concentration-dependent decrease in wheel running that lasted 3 h. The duration and magnitude of AITC-induced depression of wheel running was consistent following three repeated injections spaced 48 h apart. Administration of sumatriptan attenuated AITC-induced depressionof wheel running when a large dose (1 mg/kg) was administered immediately following AITC administration. Wheel running patterns did not change when sumatriptan was given to na\uefve rats. Conclusions These data indicate that home cage wheel running is a sensitive, reliable, and clinically relevant method to assess migraine pain in the rat

Comparison of alternative approaches to single-trait genomic prediction using genotyped and non-genotyped Hanwoo beef cattle

Abstract Background Genomic predictions from BayesA and BayesB use training data that include animals with both phenotypes and genotypes. Single-step methodologies allow additional information from non-genotyped relatives to be included in the analysis. The single-step genomic best linear unbiased prediction (SSGBLUP) method uses a relationship matrix computed from marker and pedigree information, in which missing genotypes are imputed implicitly. Single-step Bayesian regression (SSBR) extends SSGBLUP to BayesB-like models using explicitly imputed genotypes for non-genotyped individuals. Methods Carcass records included 988 genotyped Hanwoo steers with 35,882 SNPs and 1438 non-genotyped steers that were measured for back-fat thickness (BFT), carcass weight (CWT), eye-muscle area, and marbling score (MAR). Single-trait pedigree-based BLUP, Bayesian methods using only genotyped individuals, SSGBLUP and SSBR methods were compared using cross-validation. Results Methods using genomic information always outperformed pedigree-based BLUP when the same phenotypic data were modeled from either genotyped individuals only or both genotyped and non-genotyped individuals. For BFT and MAR, accuracies were higher with single-step methods than with BayesB, BayesC and BayesC \u3c0 . Gains in accuracy with the single-step methods ranged from +0.06 to +0.09 for BFT and from +0.05 to +0.07 for MAR. For CWT, SSBR always outperformed the corresponding Bayesian methods that used only genotyped individuals. However, although SSGBLUP incorporated information from non-genotyped individuals, prediction accuracies were lower with SSGBLUP than with BayesC ( \u3c0 \ua0=\ua00.9999) and BayesB ( \u3c0 \ua0=\ua00.98) for CWT because, for this particular trait, there was a benefit from the mixture priors of the effects of the single nucleotide polymorphisms. Conclusions Single-step methods are the preferred approaches for prediction combining genotyped and non-genotyped animals. Alternative priors allow SSBR to outperform SSGBLUP in some cases

ARA-PEPs: a repository of putative sORF-encoded peptides in Arabidopsis thaliana

Abstract Background Many eukaryotic RNAs have been considered non-coding as they only contain short open reading frames (sORFs). However, there is increasing evidence for the translation of these sORFs into bioactive peptides with potent signaling, antimicrobial, developmental, antioxidant roles etc. Yet only a few peptides encoded by sORFs are annotated in the model organism Arabidopsis thaliana . Results To aid the functional annotation of these peptides, we have developed ARA-PEPs (available at http://www.biw.kuleuven.be/CSB/ARA-PEPs ), a repository of putative peptides encoded by sORFs in the A. thaliana genome starting from in-house Tiling arrays, RNA-seq data and other publicly available datasets. ARA-PEPs currently lists 13,748 sORF-encoded peptides with transcriptional evidence. In addition to existing data, we have identified 100 novel transcriptionally active regions (TARs) that might encode 341 novel stress-induced peptides (SIPs). To aid in identification of bioactivity, we add functional annotation and sequence conservation to predicted peptides. Conclusion To our knowledge, this is the largest repository of plant peptides encoded by sORFs with transcript evidence, publicly available and this resource will help scientists to effortlessly navigate the list of experimentally studied peptides, the experimental and computational evidence supporting the activity of these peptides and gain new perspectives for peptide discovery

Link prediction in drug-target interactions network using similarity indices

Abstract Background In silico drug-target interaction (DTI) prediction plays an integral role in drug repositioning: the discovery of new uses for existing drugs. One popular method of drug repositioning is network-based DTI prediction, which uses complex network theory to predict DTIs from a drug-target network. Currently, most network-based DTI prediction is based on machine learning \u2013 methods such as Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM) or Support Vector Machines (SVM). These methods require additional information about the characteristics of drugs, targets and DTIs, such as chemical structure, genome sequence, binding types, causes of interactions, etc., and do not perform satisfactorily when such information is unavailable. We propose a new, alternative method for DTI prediction that makes use of only network topology information attempting to solve this problem. Results We compare our method for DTI prediction against the well-known RBM approach. We show that when applied to the MATADOR database, our approach based on node neighborhoods yield higher precision for high-ranking predictions than RBM when no information regarding DTI types is available. Conclusion This demonstrates that approaches purely based on network topology provide a more suitable approach to DTI prediction in the many real-life situations where little or no prior knowledge is available about the characteristics of drugs, targets, or their interactions

Diagnosis implications of the whole genome sequencing in a large Lebanese family with hyaline fibromatosis syndrome

Abstract Background Hyaline fibromatosis syndrome (HFS) is a recently introduced alternative term for two disorders that were previously known as juvenile hyaline fibromatosis (JHF) and infantile systemic hyalinosis (ISH). These two variants are secondary to mutations in the anthrax toxin receptor 2 gene ( ANTXR2) located on chromosome 4q21. The main clinical features of both entities include papular and/or nodular skin lesions, gingival hyperplasia, joint contractures and osteolytic bone lesions that appear in the first few years of life, and the syndrome typically progresses with the appearance of new lesions. Methods We describe five Lebanese patients from one family, aged between 28 and 58\ua0years, and presenting with nodular and papular skin lesions, gingival hyperplasia, joint contractures and bone lesions. Because of the particular clinical features and the absence of a clinical diagnosis, Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) was carried out on DNA samples from the proband and his parents. Results A mutation in ANTXR2 (p. Gly116Val) that yielded a diagnosis of HFS was noted. Conclusions The main goal of this paper is to add to the knowledge related to the clinical and radiographic aspects of HFS in adulthood and to show the importance of Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) techniques in resolving such puzzling cases