Trump, climate change and white US Evangelicalism

President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord last week was made possible by the rise of a climate-denying faction within white US Evangelicalism. Over the past decade this growing faction has come to regard the very idea of climate change as a threat to their identity, presenting climate discourse as a cultural attack on the embattled Christian identity. Willis Jenkins argues that we should view this climate denial not as the result of a religious narrative, but as a way of avoiding accountability for polluting the atmosphere

Ecological Management, Cultural Reform, and Religious Creativity

Complex environmental problems frustrate practical reasoning and scientific research, and thereby challenge relations between ethics and ecology. Sustainability crises, in which human powers affect ecological systems in ways that jeopardize basic social values, become practical problems only as cultures create capacities to take responsibility for them. They become real problems, that is, only as cultural reform processes generate ways to confront and learn from social crises. Issues such as climate change therefore require professionals who can make challenges to environmental science and moral culture into sites for adaptive learning and social change, thereby making inchoate threats into intelligible civic problems. How to make crises into problems shapes an ongoing debate over competing strategies of practical reason. Should ethics critique the cultural worldviews and metaphysical assumptions at root of environmental crises, or should it develop practical responses to specific problems from broadly available cultural values? The question seems to force a dilemma: choosing the cosmological route lets one critique the depth of problems, but at the cost of distance from the moral imagination and political values of most citizens, while choosing the pragmatic route lets one deploy cultural values to support specific policy solutions, but at the cost of being constrained by the modest reforms those values permit

The role of perivascular adipose tissue and infiltrating macrophages in vascular dysfunction with inflammatory bowel disease

Historically, adipose tissue (AT) throughout the body has been categorized as either brown adipose tissue (BAT) or white adipose tissue (WAT). These categories are determined by color, physical characteristics, and physiological functions of the adipocytes of the tissue. WAT is the predominant subtype found in humans with two major depot types: subcutaneous WAT under the skin and visceral WAT, which surrounds the internal organs (Richard et al., 2000). Subcutaneous WAT is located under the skin and acts as a protective barrier against infections, an insulator of body heat and protection against external mechanical stress. The adipocytes in WAT are generally a sphere-shaped cell (Richard et al., 2000; Trayhurn & Beattie, 2001). Because of the single large lipid droplet within the cell, the normal cell organelles are pushed to the cell's periphery. White adipose tissue has a large capacity for lipid storage, thus contributing to its dysfunctional involvement in obesity and dyslipidemia. Further, its structural plasticity allows rapid changes in adipocyte size and/or number (i.e., hypertrophy vs hyperplasia) based on global and local metabolic conditions (Sakers et al., 2022). Regardless of location, WAT was originally thought to function only in energy homeostasis, by taking up excess lipids and store them as triglycerides or breaking them down and releasing the lipids as fatty acids via de novo lipogenesis (Richard et al., 2000; Trayhurn & Beattie, 2001). However, the discovery of leptin in 1990 quickly changed this limited thinking (Zhang et al., 1994). Continued discovery of even more adipose-derived factors, or adipokines, highlighted WAT as a dynamic endocrine tissue that plays an active role in both health and disease. Adipokines include hormones, pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokines, and other proteins with a ride range of global and tissue-specific effects. Overall, adipose research now shows that WAT is involved in inflammation, metabolism and endocrine/paracrine signaling. Brown adipose tissue (BAT) functions as a thermal regulator via non-shivering thermogenesis (Cannon & Nedergaard, 2004). As a specialized AT, BAT represents a relatively small proportion of total adipose and functions as a thermal regulator via nonshivering thermogenesis. There are six anatomic regions that are considered activated BAT depots --cervical, supraclavicular, axillary, mediastinal, paraspinal, and abdominal-- with a majority of all activated BAT concentrated in a continuous layer within the upper torso (Leitner et al., 2017). A specialized, BAT-specific protein called uncoupling protein 1 (UCP1) mediates the uncoupling of mitochondrial respiration necessary for this thermogenesis (Richard et al., 2000). This allows for heat generated by the BAT to dissipate. Brown adipose also contains lipid droplets, but they are smaller than those in WAT and dispersed throughout the cell along with an increased number of iron-containing mitochondria in comparison to white adipose, which gives the tissue its brownish hue (Cannon & Nedergaard, 2004). BAT is found in large quantities in mammals postnatally and during hibernation. In humans, it was initially thought that brown adipose was only present in infants, however it has been found that adult humans have BAT depots with changes to BAT activity occurring during times of external environmental change (Richard et al., 2000). Recently, another phenotype of adipose has been described. Beige adipose tissue shares similar characteristics and function to both brown and white adipocytes. They are thought to develop from a subpopulation of preadipocytes or from the "browning" of WAT into a "browner" phenotype, caused by the high iron-containing mitochondria. The result is an adipocyte with large lipid droplets, increased mitochondria, and protection against metabolic dysfunction in comparison to WAT adipocytes (Cannon & Nedergaard, 2004). The beige phenotype is relatively unstable, and beige adipocytes often re-whiten, becoming indistinguishable from WAT that never underwent the browning process (Mulya & Kirwan, 2016).Includes bibliographical references

Twas a Thursday in Class…

The purpose of this article is to describe a service-learning partnership between a human sexuality class and a community agency that assists those affected by intimate partner violence and sexual assault, and the benefits of the service-learning experience from the viewpoints of two of the students

On principles and standards in ecological restoration

The Society for Ecological Restoration (SER) has long debated how to define best practices. We argue that a principles-first approach offers more flexibility for restoration practitioners than a standards-based approach, is consistent with the developmental stage of restoration, and functions more effectively at a global level. However, the solution is not as simple as arguing that one approach to professional practice is sufficient. Principles and standards can and do operate effectively together, but only if they are coordinated in a transparent and systematic way. Effective professional guidance results when standards anchored by principles function in a way that is contextual and evolving. Without that clear relation to principles, the tendency to promote performance standards may lead to a narrowing of restoration practice and reduction in the potential to resolve very difficult and diverse ecological and environmental challenges. We offer recommendations on how the evolving project of restoration policy by SER and other agencies and organizations can remain open and flexible

In-Home Medication Reviews: A Novel Approach to Improving Patient Care Through Coordination of Care

Abstract The use of multiple medications, in persons 65 years and older, has been linked to increased risk for cognitive impairment, falls, hip fractures, hospitalizations, adverse drug reactions, and mortality. The purpose of this study was to determine if trained undergraduate students, in conjunction with pharmacists, could provide in-home medication reviews and demonstrate benefit to the health and welfare of a senior population affiliated with a primary care facility. Students received training in the completion of an in-home medication inventory, assessing a home for fall risk, and performing blood pressures. Once trained and proven proficient students performed the assessments in homes of Decatur Family Medicine Residency patients 65 years and older. Collected medication inventories were reviewed by a hospital pharmacist for fall risk medications, major drug interactions, or duplicate therapy. Changes to patient management were made by the primary care provider as needed. In all, 75 students visited 118 patients in Fall 2010. Findings from the medication review include: 102 (86%) patients were prescribed at least one fall risk medication; 43% were prescribed 3 or more; 14% had the potential for a major drug interaction; and 7% were prescribed duplicate therapies. Fifty-seven patients had a subsequent change made to their clinical medication list. The results demonstrate that an in-home outreach can be successfully performed by student volunteers and provide data of high clinical relevance and use. This application of the patient-centered medical home can readily and directly improve patient safety

Seeing the smart city on Twitter: Colour and the affective territories of becoming smart

This paper pays attention to the immense and febrile field of digital image files which picture the smart city as they circulate on the social media platform Twitter. The paper considers tweeted images as an affective field in which flow and colour are especially generative. This luminescent field is territorialised into different, emergent forms of becoming ‘smart’. The paper identifies these territorialisations in two ways: firstly, by using the data visualisation software ImagePlot to create a visualisation of 9030 tweeted images related to smart cities; and secondly, by responding to the affective pushes of the image files thus visualised. It identifies two colours and three ways of affectively becoming smart: participating in smart, learning about smart, and anticipating smart, which are enacted with different distributions of mostly orange and blue images. The paper thus argues that debates about the power relations embedded in the smart city should consider the particular affective enactment of being smart that happens via social media. More generally, the paper concludes that geographers must pay more attention to the diverse and productive vitalities of social media platforms in urban life and that this will require experiment with methods that are responsive to specific digital qualities

The XMM-LSS survey: the Class 1 cluster sample over the initial 5 square degrees and its cosmological modelling

We present a sample of 29 galaxy clusters from the XMM-LSS survey over an area of some 5deg2 out to a redshift of z=1.05. The sample clusters, which represent about half of the X-ray clusters identified in the region, follow well defined X-ray selection criteria and are all spectroscopically confirmed. For all clusters, we provide X-ray luminosities and temperatures as well as masses. The cluster distribution peaks around z=0.3 and T =1.5 keV, half of the objects being groups with a temperature below 2 keV. Our L-T(z) relation points toward self-similar evolution, but does not exclude other physically plausible models. Assuming that cluster scaling laws follow self-similar evolution, our number density estimates up to z=1 are compatible with the predictions of the concordance cosmology and with the findings of previous ROSAT surveys. Our well monitored selection function allowed us to demonstrate that the inclusion of selection effects is essential for the correct determination of the evolution of the L-T relation, which may explain the contradictory results from previous studies. Extensive simulations show that extending the survey area to 10deg2 has the potential to exclude the non-evolution hypothesis, but that constraints on more refined ICM models will probably be limited by the large intrinsic dispersion of the L-T relation. We further demonstrate that increasing the dispersion in the scaling laws increases the number of detectable clusters, hence generating further degeneracy [in addition to sigma8, Omega_m, L(M,z) and T(M,z)] in the cosmological interpretation of the cluster number counts. We provide useful empirical formulae for the cluster mass-flux and mass-count-rate relations as well as a comparison between the XMM-LSS mass sensitivity and that of forthcoming SZ surveys.Comment: Accepted for publication by MNRAS. Full resolution images as well as additional cluster data are available through a dedicated database at http://l3sdb.in2p3.fr:8080/l3sdb

The cosmological analysis of X-ray cluster surveys: I- A new method for interpreting number counts

We present a new method aiming to simplify the cosmological analysis of X-ray cluster surveys. It is based on purely instrumental observable quantities, considered in a two-dimensional X-ray colour-magnitude diagram (hardness ratio versus count-rate). The basic principle is that, even in rather shallow surveys, substantial information on cluster redshift and temperature is present in the raw X-ray data and can be statistically extracted; in parallel, such diagrams can be readily predicted from an ab initio cosmological modeling. We illustrate the methodology for the case of a 100 deg2 XMM survey having a sensitivity of ~10^{-14} ergs/s/cm^2 and fit at the same time, the survey selection function, the cluster evolutionary scaling-relations and the cosmology; our sole assumption -- driven by the limited size of the sample considered in the case-study -- is that the local cluster scaling relations are known. We devote special care to the realistic modeling of the count-rate measurement uncertainties and evaluate the potential of the method via a Fisher analysis. In the absence of individual cluster redshifts, the CR-HR method appears to be much more efficient than the traditional approach based on cluster counts (i.e. dn/dz, requiring redshifts). In the case where redshifts are available, our method performs similarly as the traditional mass function (dn/dM/dz) for the purely cosmological parameters, but better constrains parameters defining the cluster scaling relations and their evolution. A further practical advantage of the CR-HR method is its simplicity : this fully top-down approach totally bypasses the tedious steps consisting in deriving cluster masses from X-ray temperature measurements.Comment: 18 pages, 15 figures, 3 tables. Accepted for publication in MNRAS (minor changes with respect to previous version