Interleukin-10 (IL-10) but not Lipopolysaccharide (LPS) produces increased motor activity and abnormal exploratory patterns while impairing spatial learning in Balb/c mice

Lipopolysaccharide (LPS) is a potent endotoxin, which produces âsickness behavioursâ including loss of weight, loss of interest in food and decreased exploration. LPS has also been shown in some studies to cause deficits in various learning and memory abilities, while in others these LPS-induced learning impairments have been attributed to performance-related deficits rather than learning deficits per se. Here, we use the novelty-preference paradigm, a task that minimises performance-related factors such as motivation, in an attempt to extract and examine the effects of LPS on spatial learning. In addition, some studies have indicated that the anti-inflammatory cytokine Interleukin-10 (IL-10) can alleviate some of the symptoms induced by LPS. Here, we also examine the effect of IL-10 on feeding, motor and learning behaviours. We demonstrate that a single injection of LPS does produce a lack of interest in food and weight loss; LPS, however, does not impair habituation in the noveltypreference paradigm. Furthermore, co-injection of IL-10 with LPS does not attenuate the LPS-induced effects of weight loss and lack of food intake. Interestingly, a single injection of IL-10 produces abnormal patterns of exploration, a general increase in activity and abnormal patterns of habituation

Effective headache management in the aneurysmal subarachnoid patient: a literature review

Subarachnoid haemorrhage (SAH) is described throughout the literature as a devastating neurological disorder associated with significant mortality and morbidity rates, arising not just from the haemorrhage itself, but also as a result of the catastrophic multisystem sequelae that can accompany the condition. Rupture of an intracranial aneurysm accounts for up to 85% of instances of SAH, occurring in approximately 6–7 per 100,000 in most populations and costing an estimated £510 million annually in the United Kingdom alone (Rivero-Arias et al, 2010). Treatment of Aneurysmal Subarachnoid Haemorrhage (aSAH) includes prevention of re-bleeding, evacuation of space occupying haematomas, management of hydrocephalus and prevention of secondary cerebral insult. Headache has been highlighted as the predominant, most characteristic and often the only symptom of aSAH, its severity having a variety of physiological and psychological effects on the patient. This paper summarises the findings of a literature review conducted as part of a research study to examine existing practices in the assessment and management of headache in patients with aSAH in an Irish Neurosciences Centre. The review demonstrates that despite a wealth of published literature on the diagnosis and management of aSAH, evaluation and management of its main symptom, headache, remains suboptimal and under-researched. The lack of available literature demonstrates that such enquiry is both timely and necessary

Snap denaturation reveals dimerization by AraC-like protein Rns

Here we show that the Rns regulator of Escherichia coli dimerises in vivo and in vitro. Furthermore, we demonstrate that Rns forms aggregates in vitro and describe a methodology to ameliorate aggregation thus permitting the analysis of Rns by cross-linking

Self-Assembled Supramolecular Hybrid Hydrogel Beads Loaded with Silver Nanoparticles for Antimicrobial Application

This paper reports the formation of silver (Ag) NPs within spatially-resolved two-component hydrogel beads that combine a low-molecular-weight gelator (LMWG) DBS-CONHNH2 and a polymer gelator (PG) calcium alginate. The AgNPs are formed via in situ reduction of Ag(I), with the resulting nanoparticle-loaded gels being characterised in detail. We tested the antibacterial activity of the nanocomposite gel beads against two drug-resistant bacterial strains, often associated with hospital-acquired infections: vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium (VRE) and Pseudomonas aeruginosa (PA14), and the AgNP-loaded gels showed good antimicrobial properties against both types of bacteria. We suggest that the gel bead format of these AgNP-loaded hybrid hydrogels makes them promising versatile materials for potential applications in orthopaedics or wound healing

Assessment of sleep in children with mucopolysaccharidosis Type III

Sleep disturbances are prevalent in mucopolysaccharidosis Type III (MPS III), yet there is a lack of objective, ecologically valid evidence detailing sleep quantity, quality or circadian system. Eight children with MPS III and eight age-matched typically developing children wore an actigraph for 7–10 days/nights. Saliva samples were collected at three time-points on two separate days, to permit analysis of endogenous melatonin levels. Parents completed a sleep questionnaire and a daily sleep diary. Actigraphic data revealed that children with MPS III had significantly longer sleep onset latencies and greater daytime sleep compared to controls, but night-time sleep duration did not differ between groups. In the MPS III group, sleep efficiency declined, and sleep onset latency increased, with age. Questionnaire responses showed that MPS III patients had significantly more sleep difficulties in all domains compared to controls. Melatonin concentrations showed an alteration in the circadian system in MPS III, which suggests that treatment for sleep problems should attempt to synchronise the sleep-wake cycle to a more regular pattern. Actigraphy was tolerated by children and this monitoring device can be recommended as a measure of treatment success in research and clinical practice

Influence of the 6^1S_0-6^3P_1 Resonance on Continuous Lyman-alpha Generation in Mercury

Continuous coherent radiation in the vacuum-ultraviolet at 122 nm (Lyman-alpha) can be generated using sum-frequency mixing of three fundamental laser beams in mercury vapour. One of the fundamental beams is at 254 nm wavelength, which is close to the 6^1S_0-6^3P_1 resonance in mercury. Experiments have been performed to investigate the effect of this one-photon resonance on phasematching, absorption and the nonlinear yield. The efficiency of continuous Lyman-alpha generation has been improved by a factor of 4.5.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure

Feeling our way: academia, emotions and a politics of care

This paper aims to better understand the role of emotions in academia, and their part in producing, and challenging, an increasingly normalized neoliberal academy. It unfolds from two narratives that foreground emotions in and across academic spaces and practices, to critically explore how knowledges and positions are constructed and circulated. It then moves to consider these issues through the lens of care as a political stance towards being and becoming academics in neoliberal times. Our aim is to contribute to the burgeoning literature on emotional geographies, explicitly bringing this work into conversation with resurgent debates surrounding an ethic of care, as part of a politic of critiquing individualism and managerialism in (and beyond) the academy. We consider the ways in which neoliberal university structures circulate particular affects, prompting emotions such as desire and anxiety, and the internalisation of competition and audit as embodied scholars. Our narratives exemplify how attendant emotions and affect can reverberate and be further reproduced through university cultures, and diffuse across personal and professional lives. We argue that emotions in academia matter, mutually co-producing everyday social relations and practices at and across all levels. We are interested in their political implications, and how neoliberal norms can be shifted through practices of caring-with

On staying grounded and avoiding Quixotic dead ends

The 15 articles in this special issue on The Representation of Concepts illustrate the rich variety of theoretical positions and supporting research that characterize the area. Although much agreement exists among contributors, much disagreement exists as well, especially about the roles of grounding and abstraction in conceptual processing. I first review theoretical approaches raised in these articles that I believe are Quixotic dead ends, namely, approaches that are principled and inspired but likely to fail. In the process, I review various theories of amodal symbols, their distortions of grounded theories, and fallacies in the evidence used to support them. Incorporating further contributions across articles, I then sketch a theoretical approach that I believe is likely to be successful, which includes grounding, abstraction, flexibility, explaining classic conceptual phenomena, and making contact with real-world situations. This account further proposes that (1) a key element of grounding is neural reuse, (2) abstraction takes the forms of multimodal compression, distilled abstraction, and distributed linguistic representation (but not amodal symbols), and (3) flexible context-dependent representations are a hallmark of conceptual processing

Picturing words? Sensorimotor cortex activation for printed words in child and adult readers

Learning to read involves associating abstract visual shapes with familiar meanings. Embodiment theories suggest that word meaning is at least partially represented in distributed sensorimotor networks in the brain (Barsalou, 2008; Pulvermueller, 2013). We explored how reading comprehension develops by tracking when and how printed words start activating these “semantic” sensorimotor representations as children learn to read. Adults and children aged 7–10 years showed clear category-specific cortical specialization for tool versus animal pictures during a one-back categorisation task. Thus, sensorimotor representations for these categories were in place at all ages. However, co-activation of these same brain regions by the visual objects’ written names was only present in adults, even though all children could read and comprehend all presented words, showed adult-like task performance, and older children were proficient readers. It thus takes years of training and expert reading skill before spontaneous processing of printed words’ sensorimotor meanings develops in childhood