Modified Tapvei OÜ Stairs Induce an Anxiolytic Effect in Female C57BL/6 Mice in the Elevated Plus-Maze Test

We evaluated the effect of modified Tapvei OÜ stairs (stairs) on the behaviour of female C57BL/6 and BALB/c mice in the elevated plus-maze (EPM) test. The mice were kept under standard conditions for 4 weeks (control) or exposed to stairs for 3 or 4 weeks, and were assessed thereafter with the EPM. The C57BL/6 mice displayed less anxiety, when compared with the BALB/c mice. Exposure to stairs had an anxiolytic effect in C57BL/6 mice, but not in BALB/c. The strain-dependent effects of stairs should be considered in the design of housing refinements and behavioural experiments

Reworking research: interactions in academic articles and blogs

The blog is an increasingly familiar newcomer to the panoply of academic genres, offering researchers the opportunity to disseminate their work to new and wider audiences of experts and interested lay people. This digital medium, however, also brings challenges to writers in the form of a relatively unpredictable readership and the potential for immediate, public and potentially hostile criticism. To understand how academics in the social sciences respond to this novel rhetorical situation, we explore how they discoursally recontextualise in blogs the scientific information they have recently published in journal articles. Based on two corpora of 30 blog posts and 30 journal articles with the same authors and topics, we examine the ways researchers carefully reconstruct a different writer persona and relationship with their readers using stance and engagement (Hyland, 2005). In addition to supporting the view that the academic blog is a hybrid genre situated between academic and journalistic writing, we show how writers’ rhetorical choices help define different rhetorical contexts

Strategic use and perceptions of English as a Lingua Franca

English as a Lingua Franca is today a thriving and vibrant field of research which has sparkedconsiderable debate but also a wealth of studies in various directions. This paper builds on recentresearch in this field and focuses on two areas of investigation, namely pragmatic strategies andperceptions of ELF, while placing them within the larger theoretical framework of ELF studies

Cage material and food hopper as determinants in rat preference tests

Polycarbonate and stainless steel are commonly used cage materials for laboratory rodents. The aim of this study was to assess within-cage preference of rats for cage material, when the effect of illumination was eliminated. Altogether 64 male rats were used in two different facilities. The cages were made of either stainless steel with a polycarbonate false inner half with or without a false food hopper (Kuopio) or transparent or non-transparent polycarbonate with a steel false inner half (Oulu). A video camera with time lapse recording of one second per min was used and the positions of the rats were recorded. Once each week recording started at 16.00 and ended at 01.30, and each cage was recorded when the rats were aged four, five, six, seven and eight weeks. The results were processed separately for each facility and for day and night. Statistical analysis was carried out with repeated measures ANOVA. In cages with a stainless steel body and a polycarbonate false half, the rats chose always the cage half with the food hopper, irrespective of the cage material. Thus, the food hopper is more important to rats than the material of the cage; but when the rats were allowed to choose between those two materials, both with a hopper, they favoured steel. In cages with a polycarbonate body and a steel false inner half, the combination of food hopper with low illumination was favoured during light time. In conclusion, this study shows that rats, when given a choice, prefer low illumination and cage material may be of less importance

Academic discourse across disciplines.

This volume reflects the emerging interest in cross-disciplinary variation in both spoken and written academic English, exploring the conventions and modes of persuasion characteristic of different disciplines and which help define academic inquiry. This collection brings together chapter by applied linguists and EAP practitioners from seven different countries. The authors draw on various specialised spoken and written corpora to illustrate the notion of variation and to explore the concept of discipline and the different methodologies they use to investigate these corpora. The book also seeks to make explicit the valuable links that can be made between research into academic speech and writing as text, as process, and as social practice