Der Einfluss von aktiven Altersbildern auf die freiwillige Sozialberatung älterer Menschen: Und wenn man nicht aktiv sein kann oder möchte?

Altersbilder verstehen sich als gesellschaftliche Vorstellungen eines guten und gelungenen Lebensabschnitts «Alter». Je nach Kultur und Zeitepoche können diese Vorstellungen variieren. In der Schweiz und weiteren Teilen Mitteleuropas lässt sich in den letzten Jahrzehnten eine Veränderung der Altersbilder feststellen. Während früher ein sozialer Rückzug im Alter als «Normalfall» angesehen wurde, tendieren die heutigen Altersbilder zu Aktivismus. Der vorliegenden Arbeit liegt deshalb die Frage zugrunde, welchen Einfluss diese neuen, aktiven Altersbilder auf ältere Menschen ausüben und wie die Sozialarbeit in der Beratung auf mögliche Problematiken reagieren kann. Der sogenannte Lebensabschnitt «Alter» ist keinesfalls eine einheitliche Lebensphase, sondern zeichnet sich durch seine Vielfalt aus. Es gibt ältere Menschen welche ihre Freiheiten in Form von Aktivitäten ausleben können. Viele ältere Menschen können jedoch aufgrund verschiedensten Faktoren, zum Beispiel Armut oder gesundheitlichen Einschränkungen, diesem aktiven Altersbild nicht entsprechen. Eine weitere Gruppe älterer Personen möchte sich bewusst nicht gemäss diesem Altersbild verhalten. Die Soziale Arbeit soll deshalb die neuen aktiven Altersbilder kritisch beäugen, die positiven Aspekte des Alters benennen, aber auch die Schattenseiten berücksichtigen. Eine Sowohl-als-auch-Sicht ist gefragt. Bezogen auf die freiwillige Sozialberatung der Pro Senectute macht eine Sensibilisierung der Sozialarbeitenden gegenüber aktuellen Altersbildern Sinn. So können in der Beratung von Klientinnen und Klienten mögliche Schwierigkeiten erkannt- und eine soziale Teilhabe unter Berücksichtigung ihrer Selbstbestimmung gefördert werden

Application of Mycorrhiza and Soil from a Permaculture System Improved Phosphorus Acquisition in Naranjilla

Naranjilla (Solanum quitoense) is a perennial shrub plant mainly cultivated in Ecuador, Colombia, and Central America where it represents an important cash crop. Current cultivation practices not only cause deforestation and large-scale soil degradation but also make plants highly susceptible to pests and diseases. The use of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) can offer a possibility to overcome these problems. AMF can act beneficially in various ways, for example by improving plant nutrition and growth, water relations, soil structure and stability and protection against biotic and abiotic stresses. In this study, the impact of AMF inoculation on growth and nutrition parameters of naranjilla has been assessed. For inoculation three European reference AMF strains (Rhizoglomus irregulare, Claroideoglomus claroideum, and Cetraspora helvetica) and soils originating from three differently managed naranjilla plantations in Ecuador (conventional, organic, and permaculture) have been used. This allowed for a comparison of the performance of exotic AMF strains (reference strains) versus native consortia contained in the three soils used as inocula. To study fungal communities present in the three soils, trap cultures have been established using naranjilla as host plant. The community structures of AMF and other fungi inhabiting the roots of trap cultured naranjilla were assessed using next generation sequencing (NGS) methods. The growth response experiment has shown that two of the three reference AMF strains, a mixture of the three and soil from a permaculture site led to significantly better acquisition of phosphorus (up to 104%) compared to uninoculated controls. These results suggest that the use of AMF strains and local soils as inoculants represent a valid approach to improve nutrient uptake efficiency of naranjilla and consequently to reduce inputs of mineral fertilizers in the cultivation process. Improved phosphorus acquisition after inoculation with permaculture soil might have been caused by a higher abundance of AMF and the presence of Piriformospora indica as revealed by NGS. A higher frequency of AMF and enhanced root colonization rates in the trap cultures supplemented with permaculture soil highlight the importance of diverse agricultural systems for soil quality and crop production

Processing of emotional words measured simultaneously with steady-state visually evoked potentials and near-infrared diffusing-wave spectroscopy

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Emotional stimuli are preferentially processed compared to neutral ones. Measuring the magnetic resonance blood-oxygen level dependent (BOLD) response or EEG event-related potentials, this has also been demonstrated for emotional versus neutral words. However, it is currently unclear whether emotion effects in word processing can also be detected with other measures such as EEG steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) or optical brain imaging techniques. In the present study, we simultaneously performed SSVEP measurements and near-infrared diffusing-wave spectroscopy (DWS), a new optical technique for the non-invasive measurement of brain function, to measure brain responses to neutral, pleasant, and unpleasant nouns flickering at a frequency of 7.5 Hz.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The power of the SSVEP signal was significantly modulated by the words' emotional content at occipital electrodes, showing reduced SSVEP power during stimulation with pleasant compared to neutral nouns. By contrast, the DWS signal measured over the visual cortex showed significant differences between stimulation with flickering words and baseline periods, but no modulation in response to the words' emotional significance.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>This study is the first investigation of brain responses to emotional words using simultaneous measurements of SSVEPs and DWS. Emotional modulation of word processing was detected with EEG SSVEPs, but not by DWS. SSVEP power for emotional, specifically pleasant, compared to neutral words was reduced, which contrasts with previous results obtained when presenting emotional pictures. This appears to reflect processing differences between symbolic and pictorial emotional stimuli. While pictures prompt sustained perceptual processing, decoding the significance of emotional words requires more internal associative processing. Reasons for an absence of emotion effects in the DWS signal are discussed.</p

The 1356 Basel earthquake: an interdisciplinary revision

Within historical times one of the most damaging events in intra-plate Europe was the 1356 Basel earthquake. Given its significance for assessing regional seismic hazard in central Europe, an interdisciplinary project was launched in 2005 to re-explore this event. Our effort aimed to incorporate techniques from history, seismology, archaeology, paleoseismology and engineering. New and reinterpreted historical data from Basel and its surroundings plus archaeological findings on buildings that survived the event and still exist enabled this macroseismic assessment. Palaeoseismological studies combined with historical evidence provided additional data. For the surrounding areas, archaeology offers sparse information on some castles and churches, sometimes supported by historical records. A contemporary source allows some reconstruction of the stronger fore- and aftershocks. This expanded information base improves our sense of the event's damage and consequences. For the city of Basel, the relatively abundant archaeological data allowed us to assess statistically the macroseismic intensity at IX, although the pattern of damage was scattered. Data points for the expected area of damage around Basel are not distributed regularly. The absence of historical and archaeological findings for southern Germany might be due to archival problems; future investigation may improve this situation. Our results confirm that the Basel earthquake was the most destructive known for central Europe. Intensities up to VIII are found within a radius of about 30 km. Analysing the macroseismic field confirms our former assessment of the event and shows an epicenter located about 10 km south of Basel. The most probable range for the moment magnitude Mw is between 6.7 and 7.

Brownian motion in a Maxwell fluid.

The equilibrium dynamics of a spherical particle immersed in a complex Maxwell fluid is analyzed in terms of velocity autocorrelation function (VACF), mean-square displacement (MSD), and power spectral density (PSD). We elucidate the role of hydrodynamic memory and its interplay with medium viscoelasticity for a free and a harmonically confined particle. The elastic response at high frequencies introduces oscillations in the VACF, which are found to be strongly damped by the coupling to the fluid. We show that in all Maxwell fluids hydrodynamic memory eventually leads to a power-law decay in the VACF as is already known for Newtonian fluids. The MSD displays asymptotically an intermediate plateau reflecting the elastic restoring forces of the medium. In the frequency domain, the PSD exhibits at high frequencies a step due to the trapping, whereas the low-frequency decay reflects the viscoelastic relaxation. Our results suggest that high-frequency microrheology is well-suited to infer the elastic modulus, which is sensitive over a wide range of Maxwell times

Intracellular microrheology of motile Amoeba proteus

The motility of motile Amoeba proteus was examined using the technique of passive particle tracking microrheology, with the aid of newly-developed particle tracking software, a fast digital camera and an optical microscope. We tracked large numbers of endogeneous particles in the amoebae, which displayed subdiffusive motion at short time scales, corresponding to thermal motion in a viscoelastic medium, and superdiffusive motion at long time scales due to the convection of the cytoplasm. Subdiffusive motion was characterised by a rheological scaling exponent of 3/4 in the cortex, indicative of the semiflexible dynamics of the actin fibres. We observed shear-thinning in the flowing endoplasm, where exponents increased with increasing flow rate; i.e. the endoplasm became more fluid-like. The rheology of the cortex is found to be isotropic, reflecting an isotropic actin gel. A clear difference was seen between cortical and endoplasmic layers in terms of both viscoelasticity and flow velocity, where the profile of the latter is close to a Poiseuille flow for a Newtonian fluid

Dissecting the Red Sequence. IV. The Role of Truncation in the Two-Dimensional Family of Early-Type Galaxy Star Formation Histories

In the three-dimensional parameter space defined by velocity dispersion, effective radius (R_e), and effective surface brightness (I_e), early-type galaxies are observed to populate a two-dimensional fundamental plane (FP) with finite thickness. In Paper III of this series, we showed that the thickness of the FP is predominantly due to variations in the stellar mass surface density (Sigma_*) inside the effective radius R_e. These variations represent differences in the dark matter fraction inside R_e (or possibly differences in the initial mass function) from galaxy to galaxy. This means that galaxies do not wind up below the FP at lower surface brightness due to the passive fading of their stellar populations; they are structurally different. Here, we show that these variations in Sigma_* at fixed dynamical mass (M_dyn) are linked to differences in the galaxy stellar populations, and therefore to differences in their star formation histories. We demonstrate that the ensemble of stellar population and Sigma_* variations through the FP thickness can be explained by a model in which early-type galaxies at fixed M_dyn have their star formation truncated at different times. The thickness of the FP can therefore be interpreted as a sequence of truncation times. Galaxies below the FP have earlier truncation times for a given M_dyn, resulting in lower Sigma_*, older ages, lower metallicities in both [Fe/H] and [Mg/H], and higher [Mg/Fe]. We show that this model is quantitatively consistent with simple expectations for chemical enrichment in galaxies. We also present fitting functions for luminosity-weighted age, [Fe/H], [Mg/H], and [Mg/Fe] as functions of the FP parameters velocity dispersion, R_e, and I_e. These provide a new tool for estimating the stellar population properties of quiescent early-type galaxies for which high-quality spectra are not available.Comment: 21 pages, 9 figures. Accepted to Ap

Membrane-Based Scanning Force Microscopy

We report the development of a scanning force microscope based on an ultrasensitive silicon nitride membrane optomechanical transducer. Our development is made possible by inverting the standard microscope geometry - in our instrument, the substrate is vibrating and the scanning tip is at rest. We present topography images of samples placed on the membrane surface. Our measurements demonstrate that the membrane retains an excellent force sensitivity when loaded with samples and in the presence of a scanning tip. We discuss the prospects and limitations of our instrument as a quantum-limited force sensor and imaging tool.</p