Globalization and Equestrian Cultures: The case of Equitation in the French Tradition

In 2011, Equitation in the French Tradition was included on the UNESCO list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. This listing brings not only notions of heritage and culture, but also the complex balance between global and local scales to the forefront. France, like many other countries, has an age-old equestrian culture which is still alive and well, nourished by various international and local influences and sometimes by conflicting ideas.   In second half of the 20th century, both the nation and its equestrian culture were brought within the sphere of Western societies of leisure and consumption under the hegemony of the American model, upsetting the ancestral utilitarian functions of horses and riding and urging their redefinition within the prism of pleasure-oriented, sporting and emotional relationships. This in turn raised issues about what constitutes the French equestrian culture which is protected today, within the more general landscape of globalization. This chapter examines its construction and definition within a progressive society, combining both resistance to and assimilation of new national and international trends. The methodology employed conjoins diachronic and synchronic approaches, associating quantitative and qualitative data in a study based on historical bibliography, current French Equestrian Federation and the French Institute for Horse and Horse Riding (IFCE) statistics, in-depth interviews with key actors of French equestrian and cultural institutions and observations and interviews undertaken during introductory ‘baucheriste’ horse-riding training

Hypopituitarism and brain injury: recent advances in screening and management

This review gives an overview of the research on hypothalamopituitary dysfunction as a potential consequence of traumatic brain injury, including the natural history of this complication and its clinical and public health implications

Southern Massive Stars at High Angular Resolution: Observational Campaign and Companion Detection

Multiplicity is one of the most fundamental observable properties of massive O-type stars and offers a promising way to discriminate between massive star formation theories. Nevertheless, companions at separations between 1 and 100 mas remain mostly unknown due to intrinsic observational limitations. [...] The Southern MAssive Stars at High angular resolution survey (SMASH+) was designed to fill this gap by providing the first systematic interferometric survey of Galactic massive stars. We observed 117 O-type stars with VLTI/PIONIER and 162 O-type stars with NACO/SAM, respectively probing the separation ranges 1-45 and 30-250mas and brightness contrasts of Delta H < 4 and Delta H < 5. Taking advantage of NACO's field-of-view, we further uniformly searched for visual companions in an 8''-radius down to Delta H = 8. This paper describes the observations and data analysis, reports the discovery of almost 200 new companions in the separation range from 1mas to 8'' and presents the catalog of detections, including the first resolved measurements of over a dozen known long-period spectroscopic binaries. Excluding known runaway stars for which no companions are detected, 96 objects in our main sample (DEC < 0 deg; H<7.5) were observed both with PIONIER and NACO/SAM. The fraction of these stars with at least one resolved companion within 200mas is 0.53. Accounting for known but unresolved spectroscopic or eclipsing companions, the multiplicity fraction at separation < 8'' increases to f_m = 0.91 +/- 0.03. The fraction of luminosity class V stars that have a bound companion reaches 100% at 30mas while their average number of physically connected companions within 8'' is f_c = 2.2 +/- 0.3. This demonstrates that massive stars form nearly exclusively in multiple systems. Additionally, the nine non-thermal (NT) radio emitters observed by SMASH+ are all resolved [...]Comment: 57 pages, 20 figures, 7 tables; accepted for publication in ApJ

Global Health Needs Modernized Containment Strategies to Prepare for the Next Pandemic

COVID-19 continues to be a public health crisis, while severely impacting global financial markets causing significant economic and social hardship. As with any emerging disease, pharmaceutical interventions required time, emphasizing the initial and continuing need for non-pharmaceutical interventions. We highlight the role of anthropological and historical perspectives to inform approaches to non-pharmaceutical interventions for future preparedness. The National Academy of Medicine, a not-for-profit, non-governmental US-based medical watchdog organization, published a key document early in the COVID-19 pandemic which points to inadequate quarantine and containment infrastructure as a significant obstacle to an effective pandemic response. In considering how to implement effective quarantine policies and infrastructure, we argue that it is essential to take a longitudinal approach to assess interventions that have been effective in past pandemics while simultaneously addressing and eliminating the negative socio-historical legacies of ineffective quarantine practices. Our overview reinforces the need for social equity and compassion when implementing containment

Tryptophan metabolism and bacterial commensals prevent fungal dysbiosis in Arabidopsis roots

In nature, roots of healthy plants are colonized by multikingdom microbial communities that include bacteria, fungi, and oomycetes. A key question is how plants control the assembly of these diverse microbes in roots to maintain host–microbe homeostasis and health. Using microbiota reconstitution experiments with a set of immunocompromised Arabidopsis thaliana mutants and a multikingdom synthetic microbial community (SynCom) representative of the natural A. thaliana root microbiota, we observed that microbiota-mediated plant growth promotion was abolished in most of the tested immunocompromised mutants. Notably, more than 40% of between-genotype variation in these microbiota-induced growth differences was explained by fungal but not bacterial or oomycete load in roots. Extensive fungal overgrowth in roots and altered plant growth was evident at both vegetative and reproductive stages for a mutant impaired in the production of tryptophan-derived, specialized metabolites (cyp79b2/b3). Microbiota manipulation experiments with single- and multikingdom microbial SynComs further demonstrated that 1) the presence of fungi in the multikingdom SynCom was the direct cause of the dysbiotic phenotype in the cyp79b2/b3 mutant and 2) bacterial commensals and host tryptophan metabolism are both necessary to control fungal load, thereby promoting A. thaliana growth and survival. Our results indicate that protective activities of bacterial root commensals are as critical as the host tryptophan metabolic pathway in preventing fungal dysbiosis in the A. thaliana root endosphere

Automorphism groups of polycyclic-by-finite groups and arithmetic groups

We show that the outer automorphism group of a polycyclic-by-finite group is an arithmetic group. This result follows from a detailed structural analysis of the automorphism groups of such groups. We use an extended version of the theory of the algebraic hull functor initiated by Mostow. We thus make applicable refined methods from the theory of algebraic and arithmetic groups. We also construct examples of polycyclic-by-finite groups which have an automorphism group which does not contain an arithmetic group of finite index. Finally we discuss applications of our results to the groups of homotopy self-equivalences of K(\Gamma, 1)-spaces and obtain an extension of arithmeticity results of Sullivan in rational homotopy theory

Electronic sculpting of ligand-GPCR subtype selectivity:the case of angiotensin II

GPCR subtypes possess distinct functional and pharmacological profiles, and thus development of subtype-selective ligands has immense therapeutic potential. This is especially the case for the angiotensin receptor subtypes AT1R and AT2R, where a functional negative control has been described and AT2R activation highlighted as an important cancer drug target. We describe a strategy to fine-tune ligand selectivity for the AT2R/AT1R subtypes through electronic control of ligand aromatic-prolyl interactions. Through this strategy an AT2R high affinity (<i>K</i>_i = 3 nM) agonist analogue that exerted 18,000-fold higher selectivity for AT2R versus AT1R was obtained. We show that this compound is a negative regulator of AT1R signaling since it is able to inhibit MCF-7 breast carcinoma cellular proliferation in the low nanomolar range