Practical tools for a pluralistic approach: knowledge of and attitudes towards multilingualism in the classroom

This contribution focuses on didactic resources developed with the aim to provide appropriate tools for dealing with the ‘new multilingualism’ in the schools of South Tyrol. These tools consist of a travelling exhibition and eight workshops developed and created within the project One School, Many Languages (SMS). Each workshop includes a number of activities and brings into focus a specific aspect of multilingualism (etymology, intercomprehension, etc.). This paper presents the perspective of students aged 11 to 14 (middle school) on the activities, thus offering an alternative insight into the implementation and practice of plurilingualism and intercultural awareness in education.Dieser Beitrag konzentriert sich auf die didaktischen Ressourcen, die mit dem Ziel entwickelt wurden, geeignete Instrumente für den Umgang mit der ‚neuen Mehrsprachigkeit‘ in den Südtiroler Schulen bereitzustellen. Diese Tools bestehen aus einer Wanderausstellung und acht Workshops, die im Rahmen des Projekts One School, Many Languages (SMS) entwickelt und erstellt wurden. Jeder Workshop umfasst eine Reihe von Aktivitäten und fokussiert einen spezifischen Aspekt der Mehrsprachigkeit (Etymologie, Interkomprehension, etc.). Dieser Beitrag stellt die Perspektive der 11- bis 14-Jährigen (Mittelschule) auf die Aktivitäten dar und bietet so einen alternativen Einblick in die Umsetzung und Praxis der Mehrsprachigkeit und des interkulturellen Bewusstseins in der Bildung

Practical tools for a pluralistic approach: knowledge of and attitudes towards multilingualism in the classroom

This contribution focuses on didactic resources developed with the aim to provide appropriate tools for dealing with the ‘new multilingualism’ in the schools of South Tyrol. These tools consist of a travelling exhibition and eight workshops developed and created within the project One School, Many Languages (SMS). Each workshop includes a number of activities and brings into focus a specific aspect of multilingualism (etymology, intercomprehension, etc.). This paper presents the perspective of students aged 11 to 14 (middle school) on the activities, thus offering an alternative insight into the implementation and practice of plurilingualism and intercultural awareness in education

Ecosystem Health Education: Teaching Leadership Through Team-Based Assignments

The health and sustainability of humans, animals, and environments are interdependent. The relationship between climate change, disease emergence, and food security on sustainability of ecosystem services is embodied in the sustainable development goals (SDGs). A diverse workforce needs to be equipped with leadership skills to function in a transdisciplinary, team-based environment. Ecosystem health (ESH) provides a critical and innovative approach to solving these complex challenges and offers a toolbox to actualize SDGs. This article outlines the development of a course detailing the process of framing a new academic approach in ESH as a training pathway for undergraduate and graduate students

Recombinations to the Rydberg States of Hydrogen and Their Effect During the Cosmological Recombination Epoch

In this paper we discuss the effect of recombinations to highly excited states (n > 100) in hydrogen during the cosmological recombination epoch. For this purpose, we developed a new ODE solver for the recombination problem, based on an implicit Gear's method. This solver allows us to include up to 350 l-resolved shells or ~61 000 separate levels in the hydrogen model and to solve the recombination problem for one cosmology in ~27 hours. This is a huge improvement in performance over our previous recombination code, for which a 100-shell computation (5050 separate states) already required ~150 hours on a single processor. We show that for 350 shells down to redshift z ~200 the results for the free electron fraction have practically converged. The final modification in the free electron fraction at z ~200 decreases from about \DeltaNe/Ne ~2.8% for 100 shells to \DeltaNe/Ne ~1.6% for 350 shells. However, the associated changes in the CMB power spectra at large multipoles l are rather small, so that for accurate computations in connection with the analysis of Planck data already ~100 shells are expected to be sufficient. Nevertheless, the total value of \tau could still be affected at a significant level. We also briefly investigate the effect of collisions on the recombination dynamics. With our current estimates for the collisional rates we find a correction of \DeltaNe/Ne ~ -0.088% at z ~ 700, which is mainly caused by l-changing collisions with protons. Furthermore, we present results on the cosmological recombination spectrum, showing that at low frequencies collisional processes are important. However, the current accuracy of collisional rates is insufficient for precise computations of templates for the recombination spectrum at \nu<~1 GHz, and also the effect of collisions on the recombination dynamics suffers from the uncertainty in these rates.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figures, 1 table; Sect. 4.1.2 added; accepted versio

Susceptibility to hormone-mediated cancer is reflected by different tick rates of the epithelial and general epigenetic clock

Background A variety of epigenetic clocks utilizing DNA methylation changes have been developed; these clocks are either tissue-independent or designed to predict chronological age based on blood or saliva samples. Whether discordant tick rates between tissue-specific and general epigenetic clocks play a role in health and disease has not yet been explored. Results Here we analyze 1941 cervical cytology samples, which contain a mixture of hormone-sensitive cervical epithelial cells and immune cells, and develop the WID general clock (Women’s IDentification of risk), an epigenetic clock that is shared by epithelial and immune cells and optimized for cervical samples. We then develop the WID epithelial clock and WID immune clock, which define epithelial- and immune-specific clocks, respectively. We find that the WID-relative-epithelial-age (WID-REA), defined as the difference between the epithelial and general clocks, is significantly reduced in cervical samples from pre-menopausal women with breast cancer (OR 2.7, 95% CI 1.28-5.72). We find the same effect in normal breast tissue samples from pre-menopausal women at high risk of breast cancer and show that potential risk reducing anti-progesterone drugs can reverse this. In post-menopausal women, this directionality is reversed. Hormone replacement therapy consistently leads to a significantly lower WID-REA in cancer-free women, but not in post-menopausal women with breast or ovarian cancer. Conclusions Our findings imply that there are multiple epigenetic clocks, many of which are tissue-specific, and that the differential tick rate between these clocks may be an informative surrogate measure of disease risk.publishedVersio

Evolutionary Ecological Genomics

The recognition that evolution can happen on ecological timescales (Hairston et al. 2005; Pelletier et al. 2009; Ellner et al. 2011; Becks et al. 2012) has prompted the integration of ecology and evolution, while easier access to high-throughput sequencing technologies has increased the number of genetic nonmodel species entering the ‘omics’ era (e.g. Turner et al. 2010; Colbourne et al. 2011; Jones et al. 2012). We are now in a position to identify the genetic basis of adaptation and the mechanisms of adaptive responses in the wild. It nonetheless remains a challenge to go beyond descriptive measures of patterns of genetic variation and to identify the evolutionary processes driving species adaptation and evolution. This special issue represents a broad cross-section of research into evolutionary adaptation at the genetic level. The approaches used vary from classic QTL studies to RAD sequencing and RNAseq. Given the rapid advance of sequencing technology, we fully expect that ‘genomic’ as defined here will be merely ‘genetic’ in a few years, but we nonetheless hope that the results and methods described in this special issue will serve as a blueprint for future work in this field

Thermally controlled growth of carbon onions within porous graphitic carbon-detonation nanodiamond monolithic composites

Unique porous carbon monoliths containing thermally annealed carbon onions, were prepared from a resorcinol formaldehyde precursor rod, containing silica gel acting as a hard template, detonation nanodiamond, and Fe3+ as a graphitisation catalyst. Detonation nanodiamond was converted to carbon onions during controlled pyrolysis under N2, where the temperature cycle reached a maximum of 1250 °C. Thermal characterisation and high resolution electron microscopy have confirmed the graphitisation of nanodiamond, and revealed the resulting quasi-spherical carbon onions with an average particle size of 5.24 nm. The bimodal porous composite contains both macropores (5 μm) and mesopores (10 nm), with a BET surface area of 214 m2 g-1 for a nanodiamond prepared monolith (0.012 wt% nanodiamond in the precursor mixture), approximately twice that of blank monoliths, formed without the addition of nanodiamond, thus providing a new approach to increase surface area of such porous carbon rods. Raman spectroscopy and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy also confirmed an enhanced graphitisation of the monolithic carbon skeleton resulting from the elevated thermal conductivity of the added nanodiamond. TEM imaging has confirmed the nanodiamond remains intact following pyrolysis at temperatures up to 900 °C

The WID-EC test for the detection and risk prediction of endometrial cancer

The incidence of endometrial cancer is rising. Measures to identify women at risk and to detect endometrial cancer earlier are required to reduce the morbidity triggered by the aggressive treatment required for advanced endometrial cancer. We developed the WID-EC (Women's cancer risk IDentification-Endometrial Cancer) test, which is based on DNA methylation at 500 CpG sites, in a discovery set of cervical liquid-based cytology samples from 1,086 women with and without an endometrial cancer (217 cancer cases and 869 healthy controls) with a worse prognosis (grade 3 or ≥stage IB). We validated the WID-EC test in an independent external validation set of 64 endometrial cancer cases and 225 controls. We further validated the test in 150 healthy women (prospective set) who provided a cervical sample as part of the routine Swedish cervical screening programme, 54 of whom developed endometrial cancer within three years of sample collection. The WID-EC test identified women with endometrial cancer with a receiver operator characteristic area under the curve (AUC) of 0.92 (95% CI: 0.88-0.97) in the external set and of 0.82 (95% CI: 0.74-0.89) in the prospective validation set. Using an optimal cutoff, cancer cases were detected with a sensitivity of 86% and a specificity of 90% in the external validation set, and a sensitivity and specificity of 52% and 98% respectively in the prospective validation set. The WID-EC test can identify women with or at risk of endometrial cancer

The WID-BC-index identifies women with primary poor prognostic breast cancer based on DNA methylation in cervical samples

Genetic and non-genetic factors contribute to breast cancer development. An epigenome-based signature capturing these components in easily accessible samples could identify women at risk. Here, we analyse the DNA methylome in 2,818 cervical, 357 and 227 matched buccal and blood samples respectively, and 42 breast tissue samples from women with and without breast cancer. Utilising cervical liquid-based cytology samples, we develop the DNA methylation-based Women’s risk IDentification for Breast Cancer index (WID-BC-index) that identifies women with breast cancer with an AUROC (Area Under the Receiver Operator Characteristic) of 0.84 (95% CI: 0.80–0.88) and 0.81 (95% CI: 0.76–0.86) in internal and external validation sets, respectively. CpGs at progesterone receptor binding sites hypomethylated in normal breast tissue of women with breast cancer or in BRCA mutation carriers are also hypomethylated in cervical samples of women with poor prognostic breast cancer. Our data indicate that a systemic epigenetic programming defect is highly prevalent in women who develop breast cancer. Further studies validating the WID-BC-index may enable clinical implementation for monitoring breast cancer risk.publishedVersio