Exploring the socio-cultural contexts of fishers and fishing: Developing the concept of the ‘good fisher’

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the publisher via the DOI in this record.Recent calls have been made to pay greater attention to the social and cultural contexts of fisheries and their management. This paper explores how the recent Bourdieusian-inspired literature on the ‘good farmer’ might inform our discussion of fishers and their activities. Bourdieu’s ideas of habitus, field and capital(s), and how these interact in (re)shaping the positioning as a ‘good fisher’, allows us to move beyond the myopic, economic, framing of fishers seen in much previous literature and fishing policy. Through in-depth interviews and participant observations in a small-scale fishing community in North Wales (UK), the paper explores the particularity of the fishing field, and notes the multiple performances and demonstrations required in order for individuals to position as a ‘good fisher’. It goes on to highlight the importance of these performances in developing social capital and the associated access to networks of support and reciprocity at sea. Central to these interrelations, the paper observes, is adhering to and internalising various ‘rules of the game’ – which include managing territories, respecting fishing gear, maintaining safety at sea, and the importance of keeping secrets. The paper moves on to consider the implications of these observations for the current and future management of fishing in such areas – noting how pre-existing and context-specific relations between fishers offer boundaries to what change might be achieved by new policies – before examining future agendas for research in this field

Proton Lifetime and Baryon Number Violating Signatures at the LHC in Gauge Extended Models

There exist a number of models in the literature in which the weak interactions are derived from a chiral gauge theory based on a larger group than SU(2)_L x U(1)_Y. Such theories can be constructed so as to be anomaly-free and consistent with precision electroweak measurements, and may be interpreted as a deconstruction of an extra dimension. They also provide interesting insights into the issues of flavor and dynamical electroweak symmetry breaking, and can help to raise the mass of the Higgs boson in supersymmetric theories. In this work we show that these theories can also give rise to baryon and lepton number violating processes, such as nucleon decay and spectacular multijet events at colliders, via the instanton transitions associated with the extended gauge group. For a particular model based on SU(2)_1 x SU(2)_2, we find that the $B+L$ violating scattering cross sections are too small to be observed at the LHC, but that the lower limit on the lifetime of the proton implies an upper bound on the gauge couplings.Comment: 36 page

Platelet polyphosphate induces fibroblast chemotaxis and myofibroblast differentiation

BackgroundPlatelets secrete many pro‐wound healing molecules such as growth factors and cytokines. We found that releasates from activated human platelets induced the differentiation of cultured murine and human fibroblasts into a myofibroblast phenotype. Surprisingly, most of this differentiation‐inducing activity was heat‐stable, suggesting it was not due to the protein component of the releasates. Inorganic polyphosphate is a major constituent of platelet‐dense granules and promotes blood coagulation and inflammation.ObjectivesWe aim to investigate the contribution of polyphosphate on myofibroblast differentiating activity of platelet releasates.MethodsUsing NIH‐3T3 cells and primary human fibroblasts, we examined the effect of human platelet releasates and chemically synthesized polyphosphate on fibroblast differentiation and migration.ResultsWe found that the myofibroblast‐inducing activity of platelet releasates was severely attenuated after incubation with a polyphosphate‐degrading enzyme, and that fibroblasts responded to platelet‐sized polyphosphate by increased levels of α‐smooth muscle actin, stress fibers, and collagen. Furthermore, fibroblasts were chemotactic toward polyphosphate.ConclusionsThese findings indicate that platelet‐derived polyphosphate acts as a cell signaling molecule by inducing murine and human fibroblasts to differentiate into myofibroblasts, a cell type known to drive both wound healing and fibrosing diseases. Polyphosphate therefore not only promotes early wound responses through enhancing fibrin clot formation, but also may play roles in the later stages of wound healing, and, potentially, progression of fibrotic diseases, by recruiting fibroblasts and inducing their differentiation into myofibroblasts.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163376/2/jth15066_am.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163376/1/jth15066.pd

Evidence for a change in the nuclear mass surface with the discovery of the most neutron-rich nuclei with 17<Z <25

The results of measurements of the production of neutron-rich nuclei by the fragmentation of a 76-Ge beam are presented. The cross sections were measured for a large range of nuclei including fifteen new isotopes that are the most neutron-rich nuclides of the elements chlorine to manganese (50-Cl, 53-Ar, 55,56-K, 57,58-Ca, 59,60,61-Sc, 62,63-Ti, 65,66-V, 68-Cr, 70-Mn). The enhanced cross sections of several new nuclei relative to a simple thermal evaporation framework, previously shown to describe similar production cross sections, indicates that nuclei in the region around 62-Ti might be more stable than predicted by current mass models and could be an indication of a new island of inversion similar to that centered on 31-Na.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, to be published in Physical Review Letters, 200

GALEX FUV Observations of Comet C/2004 Q2 (Machholz): The Ionization Lifetime of Carbon

We present a measurement of the lifetime of ground state atomic carbon, C(^3P), against ionization processes in interplanetary space and compare it to the lifetime expected from the dominant physical processes likely to occur in this medium. Our measurement is based on analysis of a far ultraviolet (FUV) image of comet C/2004 Q2 (Machholz) recorded by the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) on 2005 March 1. The bright CI 1561 A and 1657 A multiplets dominate the GALEX FUV band. We used the image to create high S/N radial profiles that extended beyond one million km from the comet nucleus. Our measurements yielded a total carbon lifetime of 7.1 -- 9.6 x 10^5 s (scaled to 1 AU). Which compares favorably to calculations assuming solar photoionization, solar wind proton change exchange and solar wind electron impact ionization are the dominant processes occurring in this medium and that comet Machholz was embedded in the slow solar wind. The shape of the CI profiles inside 3x10^5 km suggests that either the CO lifetime is shorter than previously thought and/or a shorter-lived carbon-bearing parent molecule, such as CH_4 is providing the majority of the carbon in this region of the coma of comet Machholz.Comment: 26 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journa