The criminal association of Leishmania parasites and viruses.

In nature, humans infected with protozoan parasites can encounter viruses, which could alter their host immune response. The impact of viruses on human parasitic diseases remains largely unexplored due to the highly sterilized environment in experimental studies and the difficulty to draw a correlation between co-infection and pathology. Recent studies show that viral infections exacerbate pathology and promote dissemination of some Leishmania infections, based on a hyper-inflammatory reaction driven by type I interferons. Thus, not only the infecting parasite species, but also bystander viral infections could be a major determinant of the outcome of Leishmania infection. In this review, we focus on the contribution of viral co-infection to the exacerbation of leishmaniasis's pathology and its possible impact on treatment and vaccination strategies

The path to fusion power†

The promise, status and challenges of developing fusion power are outlined. The key physics and engineering principles are described and recent progress quantified. As the successful demonstration of 16 MW of fusion in 1997 in the Joint European Torus showed, fusion works. The central issue is therefore to make it work reliably and economically on the scale of a power station. We argue that to meet this challenge in 30 years we must follow the aggressive programme known as the ‘Fast Track to Fusion’. This programme is described in some detail

A simple approach for describing metal-supported cyclohexaphenylene dehydrogenation: Hybrid classical/DFT metadynamics simulations

The mechanisms for the dehydrogenation reaction of cyclohexaphenylene at a copper surface are investigated with the help of density functional theory and metadynamics. Our results represent a showcase for an approach that describes the surface using many-body classical potentials and molecule-surface interactions with a van der Waals model. Starting from the experimental observation that dispersion-assisted mechanisms are at least as important as catalytic processes for the description of the reaction, we fully describe the former, we identify intermediate states and estimate the free energy barriers that characterize the reactio