Upper femoral osteotomy in the treatment of paralytic subluxation of the hip due to poliomyelitis

No Abstrac

Mind the gap:the use of research in protected area management in Madagascar

It is increasingly well recognised that a lot of conservation-related research is not being used to improve conservation practice. However, much of the research in this area has been conducted with conservation managers in high income countries, where the barriers to accessing and using research may be different. We conducted questionnaires (n=85) and face to face interviews (n=54) with managers of protected areas in Madagascar to explore their use of research results. Despite considering research results—including peer reviewed articles, theses, in-house research and research by other organisations—a very useful information source, many managers do not use research results regularly to inform their on-the-ground actions. Instead they tend to rely on experience, or advice from others. The reasons for the low use of research results are many and varied but include barriers to accessing research, especially peer-reviewed publications and reports published by other organisations. Managers also raised concern about the practical relevance of some of the research being conducted in their protected areas. We identify a series of resources which can be useful to managers to improve the access they have to research results and highlight a series of steps which researchers can follow to increase the likelihood of their research being used. We also suggest there is a role for the Malagasy authorities in improving the ways in which research reports— received as part of the conditions of research permits— are shared and archived. Researchers are increasingly aware of the moral imperative that research conducted should be available to inform practice, and protected area managers want access to the best possible information to inform their decisions. With such good intentions, overcoming the gap between research and practice should not be difficult with good communication and essential to improving conservation management in Madagascar

Wound healing and hyper-hydration - a counter intuitive model

Winters seminal work in the 1960s relating to providing an optimal level of moisture to aid wound healing (granulation and re-epithelialisation) has been the single most effective advance in wound care over many decades. As such the development of advanced wound dressings that manage the fluidic wound environment have provided significant benefits in terms of healing to both patient and clinician. Although moist wound healing provides the guiding management principle confusion may arise between what is deemed to be an adequate level of tissue hydration and the risk of developing maceration. In addition, the counter-intuitive model ‘hyper-hydration’ of tissue appears to frustrate the moist wound healing approach and advocate a course of intervention whereby tissue is hydrated beyond what is a normally acceptable therapeutic level. This paper discusses tissue hydration, the cause and effect of maceration and distinguishes these from hyper-hydration of tissue. The rationale is to provide the clinician with a knowledge base that allows optimisation of treatment and outcomes and explains the reasoning behind wound healing using hyper-hydration

Anomaly Mediation, Fayet-Iliopoulos D-terms and the Renormalisation Group

We address renormalisation group evolution issues that arise in the Anomaly Mediated Supersymmetry Breaking scenario when the tachyonic slepton problem is resolved by Fayet-Iliopoulos term contributions. We present typical sparticle spectra both for the original formulation of this idea and an alternative using Fayet-Iliopoulos terms for a U(1) compatible with a straightforward GUT embedding.Comment: 20 pages, 2 figure

A class of elementary particle models without any adjustable real parameters

Conventional particle theories such as the Standard Model have a number of freely adjustable coupling constants and mass parameters, depending on the symmetry algebra of the local gauge group and the representations chosen for the spinor and scalar fields. There seems to be no physical principle to determine these parameters as long as they stay within certain domains dictated by the renormalization group. Here however, reasons are given to demand that, when gravity is coupled to the system, local conformal invariance should be a spontaneously broken exact symmetry. The argument has to do with the requirement that black holes obey a complementarity principle relating ingoing observers to outside observers, or equivalently, initial states to final states. This condition fixes all parameters, including masses and the cosmological constant. We suspect that only examples can be found where these are all of order one in Planck units, but the values depend on the algebra chosen. This paper combines findings reported in two previous preprints, and puts these in a clearer perspective by shifting the emphasis towards the implications for particle models.Comment: 28 pages (incl. title page), no figure

Genetic partitioning of interleukin-6 signalling in mice dissociates Stat3 from Smad3-mediated lung fibrosis

Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is a fatal disease that is unresponsive to current therapies and characterized by excessive collagen deposition and subsequent fibrosis. While inflammatory cytokines, including interleukin (IL)-6, are elevated in IPF, the molecular mechanisms that underlie this disease are incompletely understood, although the development of fibrosis is believed to depend on canonical transforming growth factor (TGF)-β signalling. We examined bleomycin-induced inflammation and fibrosis in mice carrying a mutation in the shared IL-6 family receptor gp130. Using genetic complementation, we directly correlate the extent of IL-6-mediated, excessive Stat3 activity with inflammatory infiltrates in the lung and the severity of fibrosis in corresponding gp130757F mice. The extent of fibrosis was attenuated in B lymphocyte-deficient gp130757F;µMT−/− compound mutant mice, but fibrosis still occurred in their Smad3−/− counterparts consistent with the capacity of excessive Stat3 activity to induce collagen 1α1 gene transcription independently of canonical TGF-β/Smad3 signalling. These findings are of therapeutic relevance, since we confirmed abundant STAT3 activation in fibrotic lungs from IPF patients and showed that genetic reduction of Stat3 protected mice from bleomycin-induced lung fibrosis

Life at the extreme:Plant-driven hotspots of soil nutrient cycling in the hyper-arid core of the Atacama Desert

The hyperarid core of the Atacama Desert represents one of the most intense environments on Earth, often being used as an analog for Mars regolith. The area is characterized by extremes in climate (e.g., temperature, humidity, UV irradiation) and edaphic factors (e.g., hyper-salinity, high pH, compaction, high perchlorates, and low moisture, phosphorus and organic matter). However, the halophytic C4 plant Distichlis spicata appears to be one of the few species on the planet that can thrive in this environment. Within this habitat it captures windblown sand leading to the formation of unique structures and the generation of above-ground phyllosphere soil. Using a combination of approaches (e.g., X-ray Computed Tomography, TXRF, δ13C/δ15N isotope profiling, microbial PLFAs, 14C turnover, phosphate sorption isotherms) we examined the factors regulating the biogeochemical cycling of nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) and carbon (C) in both vegetated and unvegetated areas. Our results showed that D. spicata rhizomes with large aerenchyma were able to break through the highly cemented topsoil layer leading to root proliferation in the underlying soil. The presence of roots increased soil water content, P availability and induced a change in microbial community structure and promoted microbial growth and activity. In contrast, soil in the phyllosphere exhibited almost no biological activity. Organic C stocks and recent C4 plant derived input increased as follows: phyllosphere (1941 g C m−2; 85% recent) &gt; soils under plants (575–748 g C m−2; 55–60%) &gt; bare soils (491–642 g C m−2; 9–17%). Due to the high levels of nitrate in soil (&gt;2 t ha−1) and high rates of P sorption/precipitation, our data suggest that the microbial activity is both C and P, but not N limited. Root-mediated salt uptake combined with foliar excretion and dispersal of NaCl into the surrounding area indicated that D. spicata was responsible for actively removing ca. 55% of the salt from the rhizosphere. We also demonstrate that NH3 emissions may represent a major N loss pathway from these soil ecosystems during the processing of organic N. We attribute this to NH3 volatilization to the high pH of the soil and slow rates of nitrification. In conclusion, we demonstrate that the extremophile D. spicata physically, chemically and biologically reengineers the soil to create a highly bioactive hotspot within the climate-extreme of the Atacama Desert.</p

Formation of Small-Scale Condensations in the Molecular Clouds via Thermal Instability

A systematic study of the linear thermal instability of a self-gravitating magnetic molecular cloud is carried out for the case when the unperturbed background is subject to local expansion or contraction. We consider the ambipolar diffusion, or ion-neutral friction on the perturbed states. In this way, we obtain a non-dimensional characteristic equation that reduces to the prior characteristic equation in the non-gravitating stationary background. By parametric manipulation of this characteristic equation, we conclude that there are, not only oblate condensation forming solutions, but also prolate solutions according to local expansion or contraction of the background. We obtain the conditions for existence of the Field lengths that thermal instability in the molecular clouds can occur. If these conditions establish, small-scale condensations in the form of spherical, oblate, or prolate may be produced via thermal instability.Comment: 16 page, accepted by Ap&S

D-branes on AdS flux compactifications

We study D-branes in N=1 flux compactifications to AdS_4. We derive their supersymmetry conditions and express them in terms of background generalized calibrations. Basically because AdS has a boundary, the analysis of stability is more subtle and qualitatively different from the usual case of Minkowski compactifications. For instance, stable D-branes filling AdS_4 may wrap trivial internal cycles. Our analysis gives a geometric realization of the four-dimensional field theory approach of Freedman and collaborators. Furthermore, the one-to-one correspondence between the supersymmetry conditions of the background and the existence of generalized calibrations for D-branes is clarified and extended to any supersymmetric flux background that admits a time-like Killing vector and for which all fields are time-independent with respect to the associated time. As explicit examples, we discuss supersymmetric D-branes on IIA nearly Kaehler AdS_4 flux compactifications.Comment: 43 pages, 2 pictures, 1 table; v2: added references, color to figure and corrected typo in (6.21b