La peur du noir et la lumière défaillante du Nord dans les sagas et les contes islandais

La Saga de Grettir met en scène un personnage censé être l’homme le plus fort d’Islande à son époque. Ce héros a pourtant une grande faiblesse: la peur du noir. C’est la rencontre violente avec un revenant dans une ferme isolée à l’arrivée de l’hiver qui a déclenché chez Grettir cette frayeur épouvantable. Les revenants font partie des créatures imaginaires qui peuplent l’obscurité dans les contes islandais. Dans cet article, nous nous interrogerons sur le rôle de la lumière défaillante de la saison sombre dans les croyances folkloriques en Islande, notamment telles qu’elles apparaissent dans les contes populaires et les sagas

The Double Democratic Deficit in Climate Policy-making by the EU Commission

Abels und Mushaben (2012) argumentieren, dass in der Europäischen Union ein doppeltes Demokratiedefizit bezogen auf Geschlecht existiert: Frauen seien in den EU-Institutionen unterrepräsentiert und der EU-Politik fehle es insgesamt an einer Geschlechterperspektive. Dieser Beitrag trägt mit einem spezifischen Fokus auf Klimapolitik zu dieser Forschungsperspektive bei. Die EU ist eine wichtige Konstrukteurin des internationalen Klimaregimes und sie hat sich gleichzeitig verpflichtet, Gender Mainstreaming umzusetzen. Darüber hinaus sind in Europa geschlechtsspezifische Unterschiede bezogen auf das Verhalten zum und Ansichten über den Klimawandel dokumentiert. Dieser Artikel untersucht, wie relevant das doppelte Demokratiedefizit in der EU Klimapolitik ist. Wir stellen die Anteile der Expertinnen und Experten bei den zuständigen Referaten für Klimapolitik in der Europäischen Kommission dar und zeigen mit Dokumentenanalysen und Interviews mit politischen Entscheidungsträger*innen, dass geschlechtsspezifische Aspekte in den EU Klimadokumenten nicht enthalten sind. Mittels feministischem Institutionalismus kommen wir zu dem Ergebnis, dass die bestehenden geschlechtsspezifischen Machtverhältnisse innerhalb der Kommission die erforschten Klimaeinheiten beeinflussen und diese männlich konnotierte institutionelle Praktiken reproduzieren. (Autorenreferat)Abels and Mushaben (2012) argue that there is a double democratic deficit in the European Union regarding gender: women are underrepresented within the EU institutions and gender awareness is lacking in EU policymaking. This article contributes to this scholarship with a specific focus on the climate domain. The EU is an important constructor of the international climate regime and the Union is committed to gender mainstream all its policies and processes. Furthermore, there are documented gender differences in Europe regarding behaviour and views on climate change. This article investigates the relevance of the double democratic deficit for the EU´s climate policymaking. We map the representation of female and male experts at the European Commission´s climate units and search for gender recognition in the EU´s climate documents. There we discover silence regarding gender, confirmed through interviews with policy-makers. Using feminist institutionalism we conclude that existing gender power relations within the Commission affect the explored climate units, which reproduce masculine institutional practices. (author's abstract

Development and analysis of individual-based gut microbiome metabolic models

The human gut microbiota plays a large role in the metabolism of our diet. These microorganisms can break down indigestible materials such as polysaccharides and convert them into metabolites that the human body can take up and utilize (e.g., vitamins, essential amino acids, and short-chain fatty acids). Disbalances in the gut microbiome have been associated with several diseases, including diabetes and obesity. However, little is known about the detailed metabolic crosstalk that occurs between individual organisms within the microbiome and between the microbiome and the human intestinal cells. Because of the complexity of the intestinal ecosystem, these interactions are difficult to determine using existing experimental methods. Constraint-based reconstruction and analysis (COBRA) can help identify the possible metabolic mechanisms at play in the human gut. By combining mathematical, computational, and experimental methods, we can generate hypotheses and design targeted experiments to elucidate the metabolic mechanisms in the gut microbiome. In this thesis, I first applied comparative genomics to analyze the biosynthesis pathways of eight B-vitamins in hundreds of human gut microbial species. The results suggested that many gut microbes do not synthesize any B-vitamins, that is, they depend on the host’s diet and neighboring bacteria for these essential nutrients. Second, I developed a semi-automatic reconstruction refinement pipeline that quickly generates biologically relevant genome-scale metabolic reconstructions (GENREs) of human gut microbes based on automatically generated metabolic reconstructions, comparative genomics data, and data extracted from biochemical experiments on the relevant organisms. The pipeline generated metabolically diverse reconstructions that maintain high accuracy with known biochemical data. Finally, the refined GENREs were combined with metagenomic data from individual stool samples to build personalized human gut microbiome metabolic reconstructions. The resulting large-scale microbiome models were both taxonomically and functionally diverse. The work presented in this thesis has enabled the generation of biologically relevant human gut microbiome metabolic reconstructions. Metabolic models resulting from such reconstructions can be applied to study metabolism within the human gut microbiome and between the gut microbiome and the human host. Additionally, they can be used to study the effects of different dietary components on the metabolic exchanges in the gut microbiome and the metabolic differences between healthy and diseased microbiomes

Effective treatment of experimental acute otitis media by application of volatile fluids into the ear canal

To access publisher version of this article. Please click on the hyperlink in Additional Link fieldTo access full text version of this article. Please click on the hyperlink "View/Open" at the bottom of this pageEssential oils are volatile and can have good antimicrobial activity. We compared the effects of oil of basil (Ocimum basilicum) and essential oil components (thymol, carvacrol, and salicylaldehyde) to those of a placebo when placed in the ear canal of rats with experimental acute otitis media caused by pneumococci or Haemophilus influenzae. Progress was monitored by otomicroscopic examination and middle ear cultures. The treatment with oil of basil or essential oil components cured or healed 56%-81% of rats infected with H. influenzae and 6%-75% of rats infected with pneumococci, compared with 5.6%-6% of rats in the placebo group. Essential oils or their components placed in the ear canal can provide effective treatment of acute otitis media

Quatre sagas légendaires d'Islande

L'activité littéraire en Islande médiévale fut extraordinaire. En témoignent notamment les célèbres sagas des Islandais, mais aussi d'autres catégories de sagas moins connues à l'étranger comme par exemple les sagas de chevaliers, en partie traduites ou adaptées du français, et les sagas légendaires qui mettent en scène des héros du Nord dont les aventures se déroulent dans un passé lointain et un univers plus fictif que réel. Puisant dans les mythes et dans le folklore, les quatre textes ici présentés et traduits appartiennent à cette dernière catégorie : le Dit de Thorstein le Colosse-de-Ia Ferme, le Dit de Helgi Fils de Thorir, la Saga de Sturlaug l'Industrieux, et la Saga d'Egille Manchot et d'Asmund Tueur-de-Guerriers-Fauves. Rédigés à la fin du xiiie siècle et au xive siècle et destinés au divertissement, ces textes s'adressent aujourd'hui non seulement aux spécialistes mais aussi à tout amateur de merveilleux curieux de découvrir le monde imaginaire des Islandais de cette époque. L'ouvrage comporte une sélection bibliographique des sagas islandaises

Blimp-1 directly represses Il2 and the Il2 activator Fos, attenuating T cell proliferation and survival

Mice with a T cell–specific deletion of Prdm1, encoding Blimp-1, have aberrant T cell homeostasis and develop fatal colitis. In this study, we show that one critical activity of Blimp-1 in T cells is to repress IL-2, and that it does so by direct repression of Il2 transcription, and also by repression of Fos transcription. Using these mechanisms Blimp-1 participates in an autoregulatory loop by which IL-2 induces Prdm1 expression and thus represses its own expression after T cell activation, ensuring that the immune response is appropriately controlled. This activity of Blimp-1 is important for cytokine deprivation–induced T cell death and for attenuating T cell proliferation in antigen-specific responses both in vitro and in vivo