Clint Jones, Apocalyptic Ecology in the Graphic Novel: Life and the Environment after Societal Collapse

This could be a depressing reading because of its topic and the conclusions it reaches, but it is also a well-written, enlightening and useful book about the popular representations of apocalyptic ecology in some graphic novels and more generally, in popular culture. The study focuses more on the content than on the specificity of the “comics.” For comics aca-fans, this perspective could disappoint, but it is nonetheless necessary in order to understand that comics in themselves are not the g..

Lund, Martin. Re-Constructing the Man of Steel, Superman 1938–1941, Jewish American History, and the Invention of the Jewish–Comics Connection

The basic purpose of this book is to de-construct the connection between Jewishness and comics. Since the late 1990s, many academic and newspaper articles, academic books, and even novels, have argued that Jewish culture had an essential and strong influence in the business and art of comics from the 1930s onward. Martin Lund, a postdoctoral student at Linnaeus University (Sweden), does not deny that there is a connection but also questions past evidence that has been too often circumstantial..

Programmed cell death 1 inhibits inflammatory helper T-cell development through controlling the innate immune response

免疫のブレーキPD-1が、自然免疫反応の調節によって免疫難病の発症を抑制することを解明. 京都大学プレスリリース. 2013-09-17.Programmed cell death 1 (PD-1) is an inhibitory coreceptor on immune cells and is essential for self-tolerance because mice genetically lacking PD-1 (PD-1(-/-)) develop spontaneous autoimmune diseases. PD-1(-/-) mice are also susceptible to severe experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE), characterized by a massive production of effector/memory T cells against myelin autoantigen, the mechanism of which is not fully understood. We found that an increased primary response of PD-1(-/-) mice to heat-killed mycobacteria (HKMTB), an adjuvant for EAE, contributed to the enhanced production of T-helper 17 (Th17) cells. Splenocytes from HKMTB-immunized, lymphocyte-deficient PD-1(-/-) recombination activating gene (RAG)2(-/-) mice were found to drive antigen-specific Th17 cell differentiation more efficiently than splenocytes from HKMTB-immunized PD-1(+/+) RAG2(-/-) mice. This result suggested PD-1's involvement in the regulation of innate immune responses. Mice reconstituted with PD-1(-/-) RAG2(-/-) bone marrow and PD-1(+/+) CD4(+) T cells developed more severe EAE compared with the ones reconstituted with PD-1(+/+) RAG2(-/-) bone marrow and PD-1(+/+) CD4(+) T cells. We found that upon recognition of HKMTB, CD11b(+) macrophages from PD-1(-/-) mice produced very high levels of IL-6, which helped promote naive CD4(+) T-cell differentiation into IL-17-producing cells. We propose a model in which PD-1 negatively regulates antimycobacterial responses by suppressing innate immune cells, which in turn prevents autoreactive T-cell priming and differentiation to inflammatory effector T cells

Gene Selection using a High-Dimensional Regression Model with Microarrays in Cancer Prognostic Studies

Mining of gene expression data to identify genes associated with patient survival is an ongoing problem in cancer prognostic studies using microarrays in order to use such genes to achieve more accurate prognoses. The least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (lasso) is often used for gene selection and parameter estimation in high-dimensional microarray data. The lasso shrinks some of the coefficients to zero, and the amount of shrinkage is determined by the tuning parameter, often determined by cross validation. The model determined by this cross validation contains many false positives whose coefficients are actually zero. We propose a method for estimating the false positive rate (FPR) for lasso estimates in a high-dimensional Cox model. We performed a simulation study to examine the precision of the FPR estimate by the proposed method. We applied the proposed method to real data and illustrated the identification of false positive genes

Negative Regulation of T Cell Receptor–Lipid Raft Interaction by Cytotoxic T Lymphocyte–associated Antigen 4

Cytotoxic T lymphocyte–associated antigen 4 (CTLA-4) is an essential negative regulator of T cell activation. Recent evidence suggests that CTLA-4 association with the immunological synapse during contact with antigen-presenting cells is important for its inhibitory function. In the present study, we observed a direct interaction of CTLA-4 with the phosphorylated form of T cell receptor (TCR)ζ within the glycolipid-enriched microdomains associated with the T cell signaling complex. In this setting, CTLA-4 regulated the accumulation/retention of TCRζ in the signaling complex, as the lipid raft fractions from CTLA-4KO T cells contained significantly higher amounts of the TCR components when compared with wild-type littermates. In contrast, coligation of CTLA-4 with the TCR during T cell activation selectively decreased the amount of TCRζ that accumulated in the rafts. These results suggest that CTLA-4 functions to regulate T cell signaling by controlling TCR accumulation and/or retention within this a critical component of the immunological synapse

A New Test Statistic Based on Shrunken Sample Variance for Identifying Differentially Expressed Genes in Small Microarray Experiments

Choosing an appropriate statistic and precisely evaluating the false discovery rate (FDR) are both essential for devising an effective method for identifying differentially expressed genes in microarray data. The t-type score proposed by Pan et al. (2003) succeeded in suppressing false positives by controlling the underestimation of variance but left the overestimation uncontrolled. For controlling the overestimation, we devised a new test statistic (variance stabilized t-type score) by placing shrunken sample variances of the James-Stein type in the denominator of the t-type score. Since the relative superiority of the mean and median FDRs was unclear in the widely adopted Significance Analysis of Microarrays (SAM), we conducted simulation studies to examine the performance of the variance stabilized t-type score and the characteristics of the two FDRs. The variance stabilized t-type score was generally better than or at least as good as the t-type score, irrespective of the sample size and proportion of differentially expressed genes. In terms of accuracy, the median FDR was superior to the mean FDR when the proportion of differentially expressed genes was large. The variance stabilized t-type score with the median FDR was applied to actual colorectal cancer data and yielded a reasonable result

Xavier Fournier, Super-héros: une histoire française

Ceci pourrait être un « livre de table à café » [coffee table book]; et il l’est un peu par ses qualités matérielles, son grand format, sa typographie claire, la qualité de ses nombreuses images, en noir et blanc et en couleurs, petites et grandes (pleine page) ; mais il est aussi beaucoup plus. Accompagné d’un texte bien écrit et très instructif, tout fan, amateur ou spécialiste, en tirera beaucoup d’informations et de plaisir. De par son titre, juxtaposant le super-héros, « nécessairement »..