Know now : achieving skills, preparing for life

Hoy presentamos Know Now. Achieving skills, preparing for life, una cartilla para que los estudiantes de educación media refuercen sus competencias lingüísticas en inglés y se preparen para una sociedad cada vez más globalizada. Los invito a utilizar esta pieza especial, pues complementa otras estrategias como la certificación continuada de docentes para la enseñanza del inglés y un modelo pedagógico

Chromogenic and fluorogenic reagents for chemical warfare nerve agents' detection

The ease of production, the extreme toxicity of organophosphorus-containing nerve agents, and their facile use in terrorism attacks underscores the need to develop accurate systems to detect these chemicals. Among different technologies we review here recent advances in the design of chromo-fluorogenic methods for the specific detection of nerve agents. Optical sensing (especially colorimetric detection) requires usually low-cost and widely used instrumentation and offers the possibility of so-called “naked eye detection”. Recent reported examples suggest that the application of chromo-fluorogenic supramolecular concepts for the chromogenic or fluorogenic sensing of nerve agents might be an area of increasing interest that would allow developing systems able to overcome some of the limitations shown by classical analytical methods.Costero Nieto, Ana Maria, [email protected] ; Parra Alvarez, Margarita, [email protected] ; Gil Grau, Salvador, [email protected]

The 10m AEI prototype facility A brief overview

The AEI 10 m prototype interferometer facility is currently being constructed at the Albert Einstein Institute in Hannover, Germany. It aims to perform experiments for future gravitational wave detectors using advanced techniques. Seismically isolated benches are planned to be interferometrically interconnected and stabilized, forming a low-noise testbed inside a 100 m^3 ultra-high vacuum system. A well-stabilized high power laser will perform differential position readout of 100 g test masses in a 10 m suspended arm-cavity enhanced Michelson interferometer at the crossover of measurement (shot) noise and backaction (quantum radiation pressure) noise, the so-called Standard Quantum Limit (SQL). Such a sensitivity enables experiments in the highly topical field of macroscopic quantum mechanics. In this article we introduce the experimental facility and describe the methods employed, technical details of subsystems will be covered in future papers

Adult-Onset Obesity Reveals Prenatal Programming of Glucose-Insulin Sensitivity in Male Sheep Nutrient Restricted during Late Gestation

BACKGROUND: Obesity invokes a range of metabolic disturbances, but the transition from a poor to excessive nutritional environment may exacerbate adult metabolic dysfunction. The current study investigated global maternal nutrient restriction during early or late gestation on glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity in the adult offspring when lean and obese. METHODS/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Pregnant sheep received adequate (1.0M; CE, n = 6) or energy restricted (0.7M) diet during early (1-65 days; LEE, n = 6) or late (65-128 days; LEL, n = 7) gestation (term approximately 147 days). Subsequent offspring remained on pasture until 1.5 years when all received glucose and insulin tolerance tests (GTT & ITT) and body composition determination by dual energy x-ray absorptiometry (DXA). All animals were then exposed to an obesogenic environment for 6-7 months and all protocols repeated. Prenatal dietary treatment had no effect on birth weight or on metabolic endpoints when animals were 'lean' (1.5 years). Obesity revealed generalised metabolic 'inflexibility' and insulin resistance; characterised by blunted excursions of plasma NEFA and increased insulin(AUC) (from 133 to 341 [s.e.d. 26] ng.ml(-1).120 mins) during a GTT, respectively. For LEL vs. CE, the peak in plasma insulin when obese was greater (7.8 vs. 4.7 [s.e.d. 1.1] ng.ml(-1)) and was exacerbated by offspring sex (i.e. 9.8 vs. 4.4 [s.e.d. 1.16] ng.ml(-1); LEL male vs. CE male, respectively). Acquisition of obesity also significantly influenced the plasma lipid and protein profile to suggest, overall, greater net lipogenesis and reduced protein metabolism. CONCLUSIONS: This study indicates generalised metabolic dysfunction with adult-onset obesity which also exacerbates and 'reveals' programming of glucose-insulin sensitivity in male offspring prenatally exposed to maternal undernutrition during late gestation. Taken together, the data suggest that metabolic function appears little compromised in young prenatally 'programmed' animals so long as weight is adequately controlled. Nutritional excess in adulthood exacerbates any programmed phenotype, indicating greater vigilance over weight control is required for those individuals exposed to nutritional thrift during gestation

(De)Touring Europe: The Balkan, The Postcolonial and Christos Tsiolkas’s Dead Europe

This article will interrogate the fictional mobilisation of ‘the Balkan’ as a trope in Christos Tsiolkas’s novel Dead Europe. Reversing the conventions of European travel writing, the novel stages a shambolic Grand Tour of vampiric contamination, which exposes the vacuity of Europe’s self-professed ideals of progress, rationality and liberalism. Whilst bearing the imprint of a recognisable Balkanist rhetoric which locates the origins of racial prejudice in a Second World War Greek village and the excesses of conspicuous consumption in a contemporary Athens, Dead Europe also presents ‘the Balkan’ as a disruptive medium which jostles the Australian protagonist out of his political complacency and awakens him to his own visceral, if spectral, relation to prejudice. ‘The Balkan’ in this set-up does not function as a mere backdrop to identify against; rather, it is a site of a radical interrogation of the coherence, boundedness and erasures of the (Australian and European) self – an interrogation that confronts without offering a solution or redemption