Critiquing \u3cem\u3eMatter of A-B-\u3c/em\u3e: An Uncertain Future in Asylum Proceedings for Women Fleeing Intimate Partner Violence

The #MeToo movement has brought renewed attention to the impact of gender inequality on our society’s ability to provide protection to women from physical and sexual violence, including intimate partner violence. Despite advances in legal protections and increased resources to prevent, prosecute, and bring an end to intimate partner violence, in the absence of true efforts to combat gender inequality as a whole, intimate partner violence will continue to pervade our society. The discussion of gender inequality’s impact on the treatment of intimate partner violence must expand beyond the violence that occurs in the United States to gender inequality’s impact on the protection afforded to women who have suffered this violence in other countries and seek protection from the United States. This is because U.S. asylum law trails decades behind even our flawed federal and state protections for victims of intimate partner violence. The male-centric lens through which the refugee definition was drafted and is interpreted continues to inhibit any progress in recognizing women’s asylum claims involving intimate partner violence. This Article finds that Matter of A-B- returns to the perception that intimate partner violence is a personal matter outside the scope of asylum protections. The decision demonstrates continued ignorance regarding the underlying reasons for intimate partner violence against women—gender and subordination. The failure to recognize that intimate partner violence occurs because of a woman’s gender is one of the primary obstacles to improvements in the treatment of asylum claims involving intimate partner violence. This Article contrasts the lack of progress in U.S. asylum law to provide protection to women who suffer intimate partner violence outside the United States with the advancements made in federal and state efforts to combat intimate partner violence occurring inside the United States. As a remedy, this Article recommends new legislation and regulations recognizing and guiding adjudication of these asylum claims, combined with judicial training and the development of a tracking mechanism for determinations in these types of cases. The current commitment to eradicating gender inequality within the United States is the perfect moment for reforming how we treat gender inequality when it occurs outside the United States

Gender Harassment Persists in Medical Training

Medical students start their career with enthusiasm for a profession that emphasizes caring for others so as to promote health, treat injury, and prevent disease. The profession of medicine selects those who have demonstrated compassion, knowledge, and leadership. As students enter the profession, many possess a certain naiveté with the expectation for equity. After a few encounters of her own, one of our authors wondered whether the statistic that female medical students are ∼220% greater to experience harassment in medical education from faculty, staff, and patients was true and sought to determine whether her experience was unique. Unfortunately, with just a quick Instagram post, she received numerous messages from peers indicating that gender harassment is all too common

Mittelschicht zwischen Abstiegsängsten und hoher Belastung

Der Begriff 'Mittelschicht' ist nicht leicht zu definieren. Die entsprechenden Einkommensgrenzen werden von den untersuchenden Institutionen unterschiedlich gesetzt. Ob allerdings das Einkommen als charakteristisches Unterscheidungsmerkmal ausreicht, ist fraglich. Einigkeit besteht unter den Autoren, dass es der Mittelschicht, einmal abgesehen von deren steuerlicher Belastung, nicht so schlecht geht, wie häufig in der Öffentlichkeit angenommen wird

Disturbed Experience of Time in Depression - Evidence from Content Analysis

Disturbances in the experience of time have been a commonly reported feature of depressive disorders since the beginning of modern psychiatry and psychological research. However, qualitative research approaches to investigate the phenomenon are rarely used. We employed content analysis to investigate disturbances of time experience in Major Depressive Disorder. Our analysis from 25 participants showed that individuals with Major Depressive Disorder subjectively seem to have lost the ability to influence or change the present, resulting in an impersonal and blocked future. The present is rendered meaningless, the past unchangeably negative, and the passage of time turned into a dragging, inexorable, and viscous continuance. The overall,—possibly intersubjective—concept of time experience, remains largely intact, causing or adding to depressive mood and suffering. We elaborate on how these findings reflect previous theories on the experience of time in depression. This study might encourage future inquiries into both the phenomenal and neuroscientific foundation of time experience under psychopathological conditions

What is agentic about the Spatial Agency Bias? How pragmatic relevance contributes to the spatial representations of actions

The mental imagination of (social) actions has been shown to follow a left-to-right trajectory, with the thematic agent associated with the left position (Spatial Agency Bias, Suitner & Maass, 2016). For example, individuals asked to choose a picture that visualizes the sentence \u201cTom kicks George.\u201d tend to choose an image where the agent, Tom, is positioned on the left-hand side rather than on the righthand side. However, alternative to the thematic role of the agent, such findings may reflect a mental representation following pragmatic relevance. Specifically, a pragmatic perspective holds that word order and syntactic functions are strategic devices to communicate that the element is important for the sentence. Thus, positioning in the described picture-matching task may actually reflect the agent\u2019s pragmatic relevance instead of agency per se. For a test, we vary whether sentences are written in active versus passive voice. Results from five studies indicate that passive voice results in the tendency to place the agent on the right-hand side rather than on the left-hand side of a picture. Instead, the acted-upon person is positioned on the left-hand side of a picture. A sixth experiment reveals that for passive voice, the agent is still seen as more agentic than the receiver, but is considered less relevant. The findings are congruent with the proposed pragmatic relevance account. Implications for the Spatial Agency Bias as well as for building mental representations in general are discussed

Polyoxazoline-Based Nanovaccine Synergizes with Tumor-Associated Macrophage Targeting and Anti-PD-1 Immunotherapy against Solid Tumors

Nanovaccines; Tumor immune microenvironment; Tumor-associated macrophagesNanovacunes; Microambient immune tumoral; Macròfags associats al tumorNanovacunas; Microambiente inmune tumoral; Macrófagos asociados al tumorImmune checkpoint blockade reaches remarkable clinical responses. However, even in the most favorable cases, half of these patients do not benefit from these therapies in the long term. It is hypothesized that the activation of host immunity by co-delivering peptide antigens, adjuvants, and regulators of the transforming growth factor (TGF)-β expression using a polyoxazoline (POx)-poly(lactic-co-glycolic) acid (PLGA) nanovaccine, while modulating the tumor-associated macrophages (TAM) function within the tumor microenvironment (TME) and blocking the anti-programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) can constitute an alternative approach for cancer immunotherapy. POx-Mannose (Man) nanovaccines generate antigen-specific T-cell responses that control tumor growth to a higher extent than poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG)-Man nanovaccines. This anti-tumor effect induced by the POx-Man nanovaccines is mediated by a CD8+-T cell-dependent mechanism, in contrast to the PEG-Man nanovaccines. POx-Man nanovaccine combines with pexidartinib, a modulator of the TAM function, restricts the MC38 tumor growth, and synergizes with PD-1 blockade, controlling MC38 and CT26 tumor growth and survival. This data is further validated in the highly aggressive and poorly immunogenic B16F10 melanoma mouse model. Therefore, the synergistic anti-tumor effect induced by the combination of nanovaccines with the inhibition of both TAM- and PD-1-inducing immunosuppression, holds great potential for improving immunotherapy outcomes in solid cancer patients.Funding: R.S.-F. and H.F.F. thank the following funding agencies for their generous support: The project that gave rise to these results has received funding from the “la Caixa” Foundation under the grant agreements LCF/PR/HR22/52420016, LCF/PR/HR19/52160021, and LCF/TR/CD20/52700005 (R.S.-F. and H.F.F). H.F.F thanks the generous financial support from The Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia-Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Ensino Superior (FCT-MCTES) (EXPL/MED-QUI/1316/2021, PTDC/BTM-SAL/4350/2021, UTAP-EXPL/NPN/0041/2021, UIDB/04138/2020, UIDP/04138/2020). R.S.-F. thanks to the European Research Council (ERC) PoC Grant Agreement no. 101113390 and ERC Advanced Grant Agreement no. 835227, the Israel Science Foundation (1969/18), the Melanoma Research Alliance (Established Investigator Award no. 615808 to R.S.-F.), the Israel Cancer Research Fund (ICRF) Professorship award (no. PROF-18-682), the Morris Kahn Foundation. B.C. is supported by the FCT-MCTES (Ph.D. Fellowship SFRH/BD/131969/2017). The authors also acknowledge the NIH Tetramer Core Facility for the provision of Adpgk tetramers, in addition to the Comparative Pathology Unit of IMM and the Histopathology Facility of IGC for supporting the histopathological study

Regulation of transcription factor activity by interconnected, post-translational modifications

Transcription factors comprise just over 7% of the human proteome and serve as gatekeepers of cellular function, integrating external signal information into gene expression programs that reconfigure cellular physiology at the most basic levels. Surface-initiated cell signaling pathways converge on transcription factors, decorating these proteins with an array of post-translational modifications (PTMs) that are often interdependent, being linked in time, space, and combinatorial function. These PTMs orchestrate every activity of a transcription factor over its entire lifespan—from subcellular localization to protein–protein interactions, sequence-specific DNA binding, transcriptional regulatory activity, and protein stability—and play key roles in the epigenetic regulation of gene expression. The multitude of PTMs of transcription factors also offers numerous potential points of intervention for development of therapeutic agents to treat a wide spectrum of diseases. We review PTMs most commonly targeting transcription factors, focusing on recent reports of sequential and linked PTMs of individual factors