Masks For Sports: Development project of protective respiratory masks for ice hockey teams during the COVID-19 pandemic

COVID-19 caused pressure and the uncertainty by the immediate lock-down in sports, this “HelpfulETH” initiative project pursued a fast-track development of a protective respiratory mask tailored to ice hockey. The project defined the requirements of protective gear gathering the information from athletes but also experts in the sport, in medicine and in virology. As project results, commercially available respiratory masks were not found suitable for sports, hindering the breathability and performance of the athletes. In search of a solution to meet the complex and very exigent needs, an anesthetic mask combining existent components such as a viral filter showed better suitability. Testing a realized prototype, further research and design needs were identified to allow respiration in this professional and demanding sport

From Negative to Positive Integration. European State Aid Control through Soft and Hard Law

European state aid control, a part of competition policy, typically follows the logic of negative integration. It constrains the potential for Member States to distort competition by reducing their ability to subsidize industry. In addition, this paper argues, ambiguous Treaty rules and heterogeneous Member States' preferences have enabled the European Commission to act as a supranational entrepreneur, not only enforcing the prohibition of distortive state aid, but also developing its own vision of “good” state aid policy. In order to prevent or to settle political conflict about individual decisions, the Commission has sought to establish more general criteria for the state aid which it still deems admissible. These criteria have been codified into a complex system of soft law and, more recently, hard state aid law. The Commission has thus created positive integration “from above” and increasingly influences the objectives of national state aid policies

Enhancer hijacking at the ARHGAP36 locus is associated with connective tissue to bone transformation

: Heterotopic ossification is a disorder caused by abnormal mineralization of soft tissues in which signaling pathways such as BMP, TGFβ and WNT are known key players in driving ectopic bone formation. Identifying novel genes and pathways related to the mineralization process are important steps for future gene therapy in bone disorders. In this study, we detect an inter-chromosomal insertional duplication in a female proband disrupting a topologically associating domain and causing an ultra-rare progressive form of heterotopic ossification. This structural variant lead to enhancer hijacking and misexpression of ARHGAP36 in fibroblasts, validated here by orthogonal in vitro studies. In addition, ARHGAP36 overexpression inhibits TGFβ, and activates hedgehog signaling and genes/proteins related to extracellular matrix production. Our work on the genetic cause of this heterotopic ossification case has revealed that ARHGAP36 plays a role in bone formation and metabolism, outlining first details of this gene contributing to bone-formation and -disease