Gasdermins in Apoptosis: New players in an Old Game.

Apoptosis is a form of programmed cell death (PCD) that plays critical physiological roles in removing superfluous or dangerous cell populations that are unneeded or threatening to the health of the host organism. Although the molecular pathways leading to activation of the apoptotic program have been extensively studied and characterized starting in the 1970s, new evidence suggests that members of the gasdermin superfamily are novel pore-forming proteins that augment apoptosis by permeabilizing the mitochondria and participate in the final stages of the apoptotic program by inducing secondary necrosis/pyroptosis. These findings may explain outstanding questions in the field such as why certain gasdermin members sensitize cells to apoptosis, and why some apoptotic cells also show morphological features of necrosis. Furthermore, the interplay between the gasdermins and apoptosis may also explain why genetic and epigenetic alterations in these genes cause diseases and disorders like cancer and hearing loss. This review focuses on our current understanding of the function of several gasdermin superfamily members, their role in apoptosis, and how they may contribute to pathophysiological conditions

Hydrogeological and Thermal Sustainability of Geothermal Borehole Heat Exchangers

Assessment of the current approach taken by guidelines and design methods of vertical closed loop heat exchangers shows that often groundwater flow is either disregarded or is not methodically incorporated. The state of scientific research in this arena reveals that overlooking the groundwater flow in the design procedure may not always be a correct assumption. The significance of advective heat transport compared to conduction is defined by the groundwater flux or Darcy velocity which heavily depends on the hydraulic conductivity of the ground, followed by the hydraulic gradient which has a relatively limited range. A sensitivity analysis on ground and borehole properties ranks groundwater flux together with the thermal conductivity of the ground and the temperature gradient between the antifreeze and the ground (i.e. inlet and background temperatures) as the key factors defining the heat exchange efficiency. The study confirms that the effect of groundwater advection on an operational borehole heat exchanger (BHE) becomes notable at fluxes ≥10-7 m/s; fluxes ≥10-8 m/s accelerate the returning of ground temperatures to the initial background temperature (i.e. thermal recovery) when the BHE is not operational. Examining the groundwater flow impact on multiple BHEs shows that as increasing the number of boreholes causes larger temperature disturbances, the effect of advective transport becomes more substantial. The thermal interference between BHEs induced by groundwater flow in line arrays can be of higher relevance than square arrays, depending on the flow direction. Although the BHE spacing is a major design parameter, in the long-term groundwater flow may be more critical to improving the thermal performance of the system as it considerably shortens the time to reach steady state. The effect of hydrogeological inhomogeneities, i.e. fractures, depends on their dip angle. Modeling of vertical features up to 10 m away from a BHE with aperture ≥1 mm, which can be recognized through geological investigation techniques but not thermal response testing (TRT), shows long-term impacts. Depending on the openness and distance from the borehole, one major fracture has the most influence on the BHE. For horizontal features, fracture frequency is the key parameter to consider

Compact Dual-band Parallel Coupled T-shaped SIR Filter for WLAN Applications

In this article, a new compact dual-band bandpass filter was introduced. The filter utilized two operating bands centered at 2.45 GHz and 5 GHz widely used for wireless local area network applications. The filter consists of T-shaped sections of step impedance resonator. The structure is an even symmetrical around electrical or magnetic wall, so the operation mechanism of the filter can be analyzed by an even- and odd-mode transmission line theory. The resonator structure is parallel coupled to a pair of 50 Ω input/output ports. Proper feeding and coupling structures can realize at least two transmission zeros around each of the operating band. To enhance the spurs rejection in the out of the band response of the filter, additive transmission zero at 10 GHz was created by adding stub of quarter guided wavelength at a selected distant from the output port edge. The filter is designed and optimized using the full wave Electromagnetic simulator. The center frequency of the designed bands can be easily refined by the filter dimensions. The overall dimension of the filter is (where  is the guided wavelength at the frequency of 2.45 GHz) corresponding to 14.3 mm x 22 mm

Victimhood as a driving force in the intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: reflections on collective memory, conflict ethos, and collective emotional orientations.

In intractable conflicts the feelings and claims of victimhood are as mature and well-entrenched as the conflict itself. The longer a conflict is waged, the more the geopolitical reasons for victimisation shift to the psychological. This gradually blurs the difference between facts and perceptions, rendering the conflict harder to resolve (e.g. Coleman 2003; Bar-Tal 2013). The general assumption in this study is that due to unique historical and political circumstances, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict draws heavily — perhaps more than other conflicts — from past and present victimisations to rationalise, justify, and perpetuate the status quo. The study seeks to examine the extent to which the narratives of victimhood add to intractability and therefore hinder settlement. It mainly but not exclusively draws on Bar-Tal’s socio-psychological framework of collective memory, conflict ethos, and collective emotional orientations to guide the discussion. First, the study proposes that Israel’s victimhood draws much of its validity from the Jewish collective memory, especially the Shoah. That among other things gave rise to ethos that established the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as part of the Jewish continuum of suffering, and not entirely as a political struggle with defined geopolitical causes. It is also proposed that collective memory and the current conflict have established certain emotional responses ranging from soft emotions like guilt and shame, which have subtle but significant reverberations, to strong emotions like fear. Building on Bar-Tal’s claims (2001) that fear dominates Israel’s emotional sate, it is suggested that fear also represents a main force behind Israel’s 'hyper security,’ which is seen as the most destructive manifestation of Israel’s victimhood narratives. Second, it is argued that even though Palestinian and Israeli-Jewish victimhood narratives are socio-psychologically similar, there are factors mainly determined by the conflict power hierarchy which make certain aspects of Palestinian victimhood different and more salient. Whilst Israel’s collective memory is premised on the fear of annihilation, Palestinian memory is mainly centred on the fear of being forgotten. And, whilst Israel’s dominant emotion is fear, Palestinian emotional orientation is largely steered by a sense of collective humiliation. The conflict ethos, as a result, seems to excessively focus on muqawama (resistance) as a reformative measure against humiliation. Even though the societal beliefs about victimhood in Israel or Palestine are not completely homogenous, they are prominent enough to have a detrimental effect on conflict resolution

Cleavage of DFNA5 by caspase-3 during apoptosis mediates progression to secondary necrotic/pyroptotic cell death.

Apoptosis is a genetically regulated cell suicide programme mediated by activation of the effector caspases 3, 6 and 7. If apoptotic cells are not scavenged, they progress to a lytic and inflammatory phase called secondary necrosis. The mechanism by which this occurs is unknown. Here we show that caspase-3 cleaves the GSDMD-related protein DFNA5 after Asp270 to generate a necrotic DFNA5-N fragment that targets the plasma membrane to induce secondary necrosis/pyroptosis. Cells that express DFNA5 progress to secondary necrosis, when stimulated with apoptotic triggers such as etoposide or vesicular stomatitis virus infection, but disassemble into small apoptotic bodies when DFNA5 is deleted. Our findings identify DFNA5 as a central molecule that regulates apoptotic cell disassembly and progression to secondary necrosis, and provide a molecular mechanism for secondary necrosis. Because DFNA5-induced secondary necrosis and GSDMD-induced pyroptosis are dependent on caspase activation, we propose that they are forms of programmed necrosis

Research Practices in Cohesive Devices’ Studies: Benefiting from Chaos

This study has as its main goal exploring the possibility of benefiting from the chaotic status that permeates discourse analysis research done on cohesive devices since their inception by Halliday and Hasan (1976). These research studies have been categorised based on the foci of the research questions and the genres to which the analysed texts belong. The research practices of the reviewed papers have been analysed, compared and contrasted, and evaluated apropos the research design, methodology, literature review and findings. The analysis of the research practices found that the dominant feature of the reviewed studies is incompatibility. On a cautious note, while it is acknowledged that variance is imbued with research purposes, variance can be the product of certain flaws in the research design. This paper seeks to serve three purposes: 1) To critically survey the empirical studies conducted on cohesive devices, 2) to identify the problematic practices that led to the chaotic status, and 3) to propose a host of practices that can be followed in future research done on cohesive devices. Concomitant with this review a brief account of the cohesive devices model that was espoused by the majority of the studies addressed in this paper

From clothing to identity; manual and automatic soft biometrics

Soft biometrics have increasingly attracted research interest and are often considered as major cues for identity, especially in the absence of valid traditional biometrics, as in surveillance. In everyday life, several incidents and forensic scenarios highlight the usefulness and capability of identity information that can be deduced from clothing. Semantic clothing attributes have recently been introduced as a new form of soft biometrics. Although clothing traits can be naturally described and compared by humans for operable and successful use, it is desirable to exploit computer-vision to enrich clothing descriptions with more objective and discriminative information. This allows automatic extraction and semantic description and comparison of visually detectable clothing traits in a manner similar to recognition by eyewitness statements. This study proposes a novel set of soft clothing attributes, described using small groups of high-level semantic labels, and automatically extracted using computer-vision techniques. In this way we can explore the capability of human attributes vis-a-vis those which are inferred automatically by computer-vision. Categorical and comparative soft clothing traits are derived and used for identification/re identification either to supplement soft body traits or to be used alone. The automatically- and manually-derived soft clothing biometrics are employed in challenging invariant person retrieval. The experimental results highlight promising potential for use in various applications

Soft biometrics for subject identification using clothing attributes

Recently, soft biometrics has emerged as a novel attribute-based person description for identification. It is likely that soft biometrics can be deployed where other biometrics cannot, and have stronger invariance properties than vision-based biometrics, such as invariance to illumination and contrast. Previously, a variety of bodily soft biometrics has been used for identifying people. Describing a person by their clothing properties is a natural task performed by people. As yet, clothing descriptions have attracted little attention for identification purposes. There has been some usage of clothing attributes to augment biometric description, but a detailed description has yet to be used. We show here how clothing traits can be exploited for identification purposes. We explore the validity and usability of a set of proposed semantic attributes. Human identification is performed, evaluated and compared using different proposed forms of soft clothing traits in addition and in isolation