Pedagogy of hate

Written as an extended review of Peter McLaren’s 'Pedagogy of Insurrection: from Resurrection to Revolution’ published in 2015, this paper contradicts McLaren’s affirmation of political religion and the version of critical pedagogy on which it is based, claiming hate rather than Christian love as a core concept of Critical Theory. Not a personal, psychological or pathological hate, but a radical hate for what the world has become, or absolute negativity. Hate must be invoked as love-hate for the magic of dialectics to work against the holy love of McLaren’s Christian socialism. Radical hate reveals the main transcendental tenets of capitalist civilisation: God and Money, as impersonal forms of social domination that must be brought down to earth so real existence can learn, learn, learn itself. That is the educative power of the Pedagogy of Hate. Now and forever

A perspective on the measurement of time in plant disease epidemiology

The growth and development of plant pathogens and their hosts generally respond strongly to the temperature of their environment. However, most studies of plant pathology record pathogen/host measurements against physical time (e.g. hours or days) rather than thermal time (e.g. degree-days or degree-hours). This confounds the comparison of epidemiological measurements across experiments and limits the value of the scientific literature

The search for transient astrophysical neutrino emission with IceCube-DeepCore

We present the results of a search for astrophysical sources of brief transient neutrino emission using IceCube and DeepCore data acquired between 2012 May 15 and 2013 April 30. While the search methods employed in this analysis are similar to those used in previous IceCube point source searches, the data set being examined consists of a sample of predominantly sub-TeV muon-neutrinos from the Northern Sky (-5 degrees < delta < 90 degrees) obtained through a novel event selection method. This search represents a first attempt by IceCube to identify astrophysical neutrino sources in this relatively unexplored energy range. The reconstructed direction and time of arrival of neutrino events are used to search for any significant self-correlation in the data set. The data revealed no significant source of transient neutrino emission. This result has been used to construct limits at timescales ranging from roughly 1 s to 10 days for generic soft-spectra transients. We also present limits on a specific model of neutrino emission from soft jets in core-collapse supernovae

Effective Rheology of Bubbles Moving in a Capillary Tube

We calculate the average volumetric flux versus pressure drop of bubbles moving in a single capillary tube with varying diameter, finding a square-root relation from mapping the flow equations onto that of a driven overdamped pendulum. The calculation is based on a derivation of the equation of motion of a bubble train from considering the capillary forces and the entropy production associated with the viscous flow. We also calculate the configurational probability of the positions of the bubbles.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figur

Gene Therapy Corrects Mitochondrial Dysfunction in Hematopoietic Progenitor Cells and Fibroblasts from Coq9R239X Mice

This study has been submitted to the patent's offices at the "University of Granada" and "Fundación Progreso y Salud". Please note that the results of this manuscript have been submitted to patent protection (application number P201630630; title: “Uses of Coenzyme Q biosynthetic proteins”; date:05/16/2016).Recent clinical trials have shown that in vivo and ex vivo gene therapy strategies can be an option for the treatment of several neurological disorders. Both strategies require efficient and safe vectors to 1) deliver the therapeutic gene directly into the CNS or 2) to genetically modify stem cells that will be used as Trojan horses for the systemic delivery of the therapeutic protein. A group of target diseases for these therapeutic strategies are mitochondrial encephalopathies due to mutations in nuclear DNA genes. In this study, we have developed a lentiviral vector (CCoq9WP) able to overexpress Coq9 mRNA and COQ9 protein in mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs) and hematopoietic progenitor cells (HPCs) from Coq9R239X mice, an animal model of mitochondrial encephalopathy due to primary Coenzyme Q (CoQ) deficiency. Ectopic over-expression of Coq9 in both cell types restored the CoQ biosynthetic pathway and mitochondrial function, improving the fitness of the transduced cells. These results show the potential of the CCoq9WP lentiviral vector as a tool for gene therapy to treat mitochondrial encephalopathies.This work was supported by grants from Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Spain) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) from the European Union, to LCL through the research grants SAF2013-47761-R and SAF2015-65786-R; by Fondo de Investigaciones Sanitarias ISCIII (Spain) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) from the European Union through the research grants PI12/01097 and ISCIII Red de Terapia Celular TerCel RD12/0019/0006 to FM; by the Consejería de Economía, Innovación, Ciencia y Empleo, Junta de Andalucía-FEDER/Fondo de Cohesion Europeo (FSE) de Andalucía through the research grants P10-CTS-6133 to LCL; P09-CTS-04532, PI-57069, PI-0001/2009 and PAIDI-Bio-326 to F.M.; PI-0160/2012 to KB and PI-0407/2012 to MC; by the NIH through the research P01HD080642 to LCL and by the foundation “todos somos raros, todos somos únicos” to LCL. LCL is supported by the ‘Ramón y Cajal’ National Programme, Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Spain (RYC-2011-07643)

An overview of using small punch testing for mechanical characterization of MCrAlY bond coats

Considerable work has been carried out on overlay bond coats in the past several decades because of its excellent oxidation resistance and good adhesion between the top coat and superalloy substrate in the thermal barrier coating systems. Previous studies mainly focus on oxidation and diffusion behavior of these coatings. However, the mechanical behavior and the dominant fracture and deformation mechanisms of the overlay bond coats at different temperatures are still under investigation. Direct comparison between individual studies has not yet been achieved due to the fragmentary data on deposition processes, microstructure and, more apparently, the difficulty in accurately measuring the mechanical properties of thin coatings. One of the miniaturized specimen testing methods, small punch testing, appears to have the potential to provide such mechanical property measurements for thin coatings. The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of using small punch testing to evaluate material properties and to summarize the available mechanical properties that include the ductile-to-brittle transition and creep of MCrAlY bond coat alloys, in an attempt to understand the mechanical behavior of MCrAlY coatings over a broad temperature range

Geomorphic and stratigraphic evidence for an unusual tsunami or storm a few centuries ago at Anegada, British Virgin Islands

© The Author(s), 2010. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Natural Hazards 63 (2012): 51-84, doi:10.1007/s11069-010-9622-6.Waters from the Atlantic Ocean washed southward across parts of Anegada, east-northeast of Puerto Rico, during a singular event a few centuries ago. The overwash, after crossing a fringing coral reef and 1.5 km of shallow subtidal flats, cut dozens of breaches through sandy beach ridges, deposited a sheet of sand and shell capped with lime mud, and created inland fields of cobbles and boulders. Most of the breaches extend tens to hundreds of meters perpendicular to a 2-km stretch of Anegada’s windward shore. Remnants of the breached ridges stand 3 m above modern sea level, and ridges seaward of the breaches rise 2.2–3.0 m high. The overwash probably exceeded those heights when cutting the breaches by overtopping and incision of the beach ridges. Much of the sand-and-shell sheet contains pink bioclastic sand that resembles, in grain size and composition, the sand of the breached ridges. This sand extends as much as 1.5 km to the south of the breached ridges. It tapers southward from a maximum thickness of 40 cm, decreases in estimated mean grain size from medium sand to very fine sand, and contains mud laminae in the south. The sand-and-shell sheet also contains mollusks—cerithid gastropods and the bivalve Anomalocardia—and angular limestone granules and pebbles. The mollusk shells and the lime-mud cap were probably derived from a marine pond that occupied much of Anegada’s interior at the time of overwash. The boulders and cobbles, nearly all composed of limestone, form fields that extend many tens of meters generally southward from limestone outcrops as much as 0.8 km from the nearest shore. Soon after the inferred overwash, the marine pond was replaced by hypersaline ponds that produce microbial mats and evaporite crusts. This environmental change, which has yet to be reversed, required restriction of a former inlet or inlets, the location of which was probably on the island’s south (lee) side. The inferred overwash may have caused restriction directly by washing sand into former inlets, or indirectly by reducing the tidal prism or supplying sand to post-overwash currents and waves. The overwash happened after A.D. 1650 if coeval with radiocarbon-dated leaves in the mud cap, and it probably happened before human settlement in the last decades of the 1700s. A prior overwash event is implied by an inland set of breaches. Hypothetically, the overwash in 1650–1800 resulted from the Antilles tsunami of 1690, the transatlantic Lisbon tsunami of 1755, a local tsunami not previously documented, or a storm whose effects exceeded those of Hurricane Donna, which was probably at category 3 as its eye passed 15 km to Anegada’s south in 1960.The work was supported in part by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission under its project N6480, a tsunami-hazard assessment for the eastern United States

Cigarette Smoke Affects Keratinocytes SRB1 Expression and Localization via H2O2 Production and HNE Protein Adducts Formation

Scavenger Receptor B1 (SR-B1), also known as HDL receptor, is involved in cellular cholesterol uptake. Stratum corneum (SC), the outermost layer of the skin, is composed of more than 25% cholesterol. Several reports support the view that alteration of SC lipid composition may be the cause of impaired barrier function which gives rise to several skin diseases. For this reason the regulation of the genes involved in cholesterol uptake is of extreme significance for skin health. Being the first shield against external insults, the skin is exposed to several noxious substances and among these is cigarette smoke (CS), which has been recently associated with various skin pathologies. In this study we first have shown the presence of SR-B1 in murine and human skin tissue and then by using immunoblotting, immunoprecipitation, RT-PCR, and confocal microscopy we have demonstrated the translocation and the subsequent lost of SR-B1 in human keratinocytes (cell culture model) after CS exposure is driven by hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) that derives not only from the CS gas phase but mainly from the activation of cellular NADPH oxidase (NOX). This effect was reversed when the cells were pretreated with NOX inhibitors or catalase. Furthermore, CS caused the formation of SR-B1-aldheydes adducts (acrolein and 4-hydroxy-2-nonenal) and the increase of its ubiquitination, which could be one of the causes of SR-B1 loss. In conclusion, exposure to CS, through the production of H2O2, induced post-translational modifications of SR-B1 with the consequence lost of the receptor and this may contribute to the skin physiology alteration as a consequence of the variation of cholesterol uptake