CAN WE COMPARE THE BEHAVIOUR OF THE ZAZOUS IN THE 1940s AND ADOLESCENTS DURING THE COVID-19 CRISIS?

Background: This article provides an insight into the behaviour of adolescents during the COVID-19 crisis through a comparison with the life of young people living in France under German occupation during the Second World War. Method: We conducted a literature review of articles in the CAIRN, SCOPUS and PsycINFO databases using the keywords zazou, adolescent and COVID-19. Results: The zazou movement was a manifestation of young people\u27s denial of the war through derision. Initially discredited, it was subsequently violently repressed by collaborationists and supporters of Marshal Pétain, as it was interpreted as an enemy of politics. In particular, it ran contrary to the Vichy regime\u27s desire that young French men should spearhead the national revolution. The reaction among young people was to feel that they were being used by ageing politicians, who they considered were out of touch with reality. With respect to adolescents during the COVID-19 crisis, our review found that the French government has pressurised them to make sacrifices for the rest of the population, and has ignored their greater need for social links with peers. Many adolescents feel that they have been forgotten, in the midst of measures that have been imposed upon them with no explanation. This may have led, as in the 1940s, to a feeling of being instrumentalised and demonised by politicians. Conclusion: We argue that, in both cases, the dominant oppressive atmosphere has fostered similar behaviours and mental mechanisms. We therefore recommend that, rather than demonising young people, efforts should be made to include them in decision-making processes, in order to improve their understanding of the situation and encourage them to feel included

CAN WE COMPARE THE BEHAVIOUR OF THE ZAZOUS IN THE 1940s AND ADOLESCENTS DURING THE COVID-19 CRISIS?

Background: This article provides an insight into the behaviour of adolescents during the COVID-19 crisis through a comparison with the life of young people living in France under German occupation during the Second World War. Method: We conducted a literature review of articles in the CAIRN, SCOPUS and PsycINFO databases using the keywords zazou, adolescent and COVID-19. Results: The zazou movement was a manifestation of young people\u27s denial of the war through derision. Initially discredited, it was subsequently violently repressed by collaborationists and supporters of Marshal Pétain, as it was interpreted as an enemy of politics. In particular, it ran contrary to the Vichy regime\u27s desire that young French men should spearhead the national revolution. The reaction among young people was to feel that they were being used by ageing politicians, who they considered were out of touch with reality. With respect to adolescents during the COVID-19 crisis, our review found that the French government has pressurised them to make sacrifices for the rest of the population, and has ignored their greater need for social links with peers. Many adolescents feel that they have been forgotten, in the midst of measures that have been imposed upon them with no explanation. This may have led, as in the 1940s, to a feeling of being instrumentalised and demonised by politicians. Conclusion: We argue that, in both cases, the dominant oppressive atmosphere has fostered similar behaviours and mental mechanisms. We therefore recommend that, rather than demonising young people, efforts should be made to include them in decision-making processes, in order to improve their understanding of the situation and encourage them to feel included

A novel and universal method for microRNA RT-qPCR data normalization

Gene expression analysis of microRNA molecules is becoming increasingly important. In this study we assess the use of the mean expression value of all expressed microRNAs in a given sample as a normalization factor for microRNA real-time quantitative PCR data and compare its performance to the currently adopted approach. We demonstrate that the mean expression value outperforms the current normalization strategy in terms of better reduction of technical variation and more accurate appreciation of biological changes

Sodium flux ratio in Na/K pump-channels opened by palytoxin

© 2007 Rakowski et al. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. The definitive version was published in Journal of General Physiology 130 (2007): 41-54, doi:10.1085/jgp.200709770.Palytoxin binds to Na+/K+ pumps in the plasma membrane of animal cells and opens an electrodiffusive cation pathway through the pumps. We investigated properties of the palytoxin-opened channels by recording macroscopic and microscopic currents in cell bodies of neurons from the giant fiber lobe, and by simultaneously measuring net current and 22Na+ efflux in voltage-clamped, internally dialyzed giant axons of the squid Loligo pealei. The conductance of single palytoxin-bound "pump-channels" in outside-out patches was ~7 pS in symmetrical 500 mM [Na+], comparable to findings in other cells. In these high-[Na+], K+-free solutions, with 5 mM cytoplasmic [ATP], the K0.5 for palytoxin action was ~70 pM. The pump-channels were ~40–50 times less permeable to N-methyl-D-glucamine (NMG+) than to Na+. The reversal potential of palytoxin-elicited current under biionic conditions, with the same concentration of a different permeant cation on each side of the membrane, was independent of the concentration of those ions over the range 55–550 mM. In giant axons, the Ussing flux ratio exponent (n') for Na+ movements through palytoxin-bound pump-channels, over a 100–400 mM range of external [Na+] and 0 to –40 mV range of membrane potentials, averaged 1.05 ± 0.02 (n = 28). These findings are consistent with occupancy of palytoxin-bound Na+/K+ pump-channels either by a single Na+ ion or by two Na+ ions as might be anticipated from other work; idiosyncratic constraints are needed if the two Na+ ions occupy a single-file pore, but not if they occupy side-by-side binding sites, as observed in related structures, and if only one of the sites is readily accessible from both sides of the membrane.This work was supported by NIH grants NS22979, NS11223, and HL36783, and National Science Foundation grant CCF- 0622158. This research was also partially funded by the Intra mural Research Program of the NIH, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke