The ethics of psychopharmacological research in legal minors

Research in psychopharmacology for children and adolescents is fraught with ethical problems and tensions. This has practical consequences as it leads to a paucity of the research that is essential to support the treatment of this vulnerable group. In this article, we will discuss some of the ethical issues which are relevant to such research, and explore their implications for both research and standard care. We suggest that finding a way forward requires a willingness to acknowledge and discuss the inherent conflicts between the ethical principles involved. Furthermore, in order to facilitate more, ethically sound psychopharmacology research in children and adolescents, we suggest more ethical analysis, empirical ethics research and ethics input built into psychopharmacological research design

Mass loss from hot massive stars

Mass loss is a key process in the evolution of massive stars, and must be understood quantitatively to be successfully included in broader astrophysical applications. In this review, we discuss various aspects of radiation driven mass loss, both from the theoretical and the observational side. We focus on winds from OB-stars, with some excursions to the Luminous Blue Variables, Wolf- Rayet stars, A-supergiants and Central Stars of Planetary Nebulae. After reca- pitulating the 1-D, stationary standard model of line-driven wind, extensions accounting for rotation and magnetic fields are discussed. The relevance of the so-called bi-stability jump is outlined. We summarize diagnostical methods to infer wind properties from observations, and compare the results with theore- tical predictions, featuring the massloss-metallicity dependence. Subsequently, we concentrate on two urgent problems which challenge our present understanding of radiation driven winds: weak winds and wind- clumping. We discuss problems of measuring mass-loss rates from weak winds and the potential of NIR- spectroscopy. Wind-clumping has severe implications for the interpretation of observational diagnostics, as derived mass-loss rates can be overestimated by factors of 2 to 10 if clumping is ignored, and we describe ongoing attempts to allow for more uniform results. We point out that independent arguments from stellar evolution favor a moderate reduction of present- day mass-loss rates. We also consider larger scale wind structure, interpreted in terms of co-rotating interacting regions, and complete this review with a discussion of recent progress on the X-ray line emission from massive stars, highlighting as to how far the analysis of such X-ray line emission can give further clues regarding an adequate description of wind clumping. (Abridged abstract)Comment: Astronomy and Astrophysics Review (accepted