Chemokine (C-C Motif) Ligand 2 (CCL2) in Sera of Patients with Type 1 Diabetes and Diabetic Complications

Chemokine (C-C motif) ligand 2 (CCL2), commonly known as monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1), has been implicated in the pathogenesis of many diseases characterized by monocytic infiltration. However, limited data have been reported on MCP-1 in type 1 diabetes (T1D) and the findings are inconclusive and inconsistent.In this study, MCP-1 was measured in the sera from 2,472 T1D patients and 2,654 healthy controls using a Luminex assay. The rs1024611 SNP in the promoter region of MCP-1 was genotyped for a subset of subjects (1764 T1D patients and 1323 controls) using the TaqMan-assay.Subject age, sex or genotypes of MCP-1 rs1024611SNP did not have a major impact on serum MCP-1 levels in either healthy controls or patients. While hemoglobin A1c levels did not have a major influence on serum MCP-1 levels, the mean serum MCP-1 levels are significantly higher in patients with multiple complications (mean = 242 ng/ml) compared to patients without any complications (mean = 201 ng/ml) (p = 3.5×10(-6)). Furthermore, mean serum MCP-1 is higher in controls (mean = 261 ng/ml) than T1D patients (mean = 208 ng/ml) (p<10(-23)). More importantly, the frequency of subjects with extremely high levels (>99(th) percentile of patients or 955 ng/ml) of serum MCP-1 is significantly lower in the T1D group compared to the control group (odds ratio = 0.11, p<10(-33)).MCP-1 may have a dual role in T1D and its complications. While very high levels of serum MCP-1 may be protective against the development of T1D, complications are associated with higher serum MCP-1 levels within the T1D group

Conflict transformation and history teaching: social psychological theory and its contributions

The aim of this introductory chapter is to render intelligible how history teaching can be enriched with knowledge of social psychological theories that deal with the issue of conflict transformation and partcularly the notions of prejudice reduction and reconciliation. A major aim of history teaching is to engage students with historical texts, establish historical significance, identify continuity and change, analyse cause and consequence, take historical perspectives and understand the ethical dimensions of historical interpretations. Such teaching, enriched with social psychological theory, will enlarge the notion of historical literacy into a study of historical culture and historical consciousness in the classroom so that students become reflective of the role of collective memory and history teaching in processes of conflict transformation and understand the ways in which various forms of historical consciousness relate the past, present and future. This is what the editors of this volume call an interdisciplinary paradigm of transformative history teachin

Towards a plurilingual habitus: engendering interlinguality in urban spaces

This article focuses on the potential of the multilingual city to create spaces in which monolingual hegemonies may be challenged, inclusive, intercultural values may be nurtured, and plurilingualism may be valorised. Following a contextualisation of linguistic diversity in theories of globalisation and superdiversity, discourses of deficit and power are addressed, arguing that the problematisation of multilingualism and pathologisation of plurilingualism reflect a monolingual habitus. Bringing about a shift towards a plurilingual habitus requires a Deep Approach, as it involves a critical revaluing of deep-seated dispositions. It suggests that the city offers spaces, which can engender interlinguality, a construct that includes interculturality, criticality and a commitment to creative and flexible use of other languages in shared, pluralistic spaces. It then proposes critical, participatory and ethnographic research in three multidimensional spaces: the urban school and a potential interlingual curriculum; networks, lobbying for inclusive policy and organising celebratory events in public spaces; and grass roots-level local spaces, some created by linguistic communities to exercise agency and maintain their languages and cultures, and some emerging as linguistically hybrid spaces for convivial encounter

Renal malformations associated with mutations of developmental genes: messages from the clinic

Renal tract malformations (RTMs) account for about 40% of children with end-stage renal failure. RTMs can be caused by mutations of genes normally active in the developing kidney and lower renal tract. Moreover, some RTMs occur in the context of multi-organ malformation syndromes. For these reasons, and because genetic testing is becoming more widely available, pediatric nephrologists should work closely with clinical geneticists to make genetic diagnoses in children with RTMs, followed by appropriate family counseling. Here we highlight families with renal cysts and diabetes, renal coloboma and Fraser syndromes, and a child with microdeletion of chromosome 19q who had a rare combination of malformations. Such diagnoses provide families with often long-sought answers to the question “why was our child born with kidney disease”. Precise genetic diagnoses will also help to define cohorts of children with RTMs for long-term clinical outcome studies

Diving below the spin-down limit:constraints on gravitational waves from the energetic young pulsar PSR J0537-6910

We present a search for continuous gravitational-wave signals from the young, energetic X-ray pulsar PSR J0537-6910 using data from the second and third observing runs of LIGO and Virgo. The search is enabled by a contemporaneous timing ephemeris obtained using NICER data. The NICER ephemeris has also been extended through 2020 October and includes three new glitches. PSR J0537-6910 has the largest spin-down luminosity of any pulsar and is highly active with regards to glitches. Analyses of its long-term and inter-glitch braking indices provided intriguing evidence that its spin-down energy budget may include gravitational-wave emission from a time-varying mass quadrupole moment. Its 62 Hz rotation frequency also puts its possible gravitational-wave emission in the most sensitive band of LIGO/Virgo detectors. Motivated by these considerations, we search for gravitational-wave emission at both once and twice the rotation frequency. We find no signal, however, and report our upper limits. Assuming a rigidly rotating triaxial star, our constraints reach below the gravitational-wave spin-down limit for this star for the first time by more than a factor of two and limit gravitational waves from the l = m = 2 mode to account for less than 14% of the spin-down energy budget. The fiducial equatorial ellipticity is limited to less than about 3 x 10⁻⁵, which is the third best constraint for any young pulsar

Search for anisotropic gravitational-wave backgrounds using data from Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo's first three observing runs

We report results from searches for anisotropic stochastic gravitational-wave backgrounds using data from the first three observing runs of the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors. For the first time, we include Virgo data in our analysis and run our search with a new efficient pipeline called {\tt PyStoch} on data folded over one sidereal day. We use gravitational-wave radiometry (broadband and narrow band) to produce sky maps of stochastic gravitational-wave backgrounds and to search for gravitational waves from point sources. A spherical harmonic decomposition method is employed to look for gravitational-wave emission from spatially-extended sources. Neither technique found evidence of gravitational-wave signals. Hence we derive 95\% confidence-level upper limit sky maps on the gravitational-wave energy flux from broadband point sources, ranging from $F_{\alpha, \Theta} < {\rm (0.013 - 7.6)} \times 10^{-8} {\rm erg \, cm^{-2} \, s^{-1} \, Hz^{-1}},$ and on the (normalized) gravitational-wave energy density spectrum from extended sources, ranging from $\Omega_{\alpha, \Theta} < {\rm (0.57 - 9.3)} \times 10^{-9} \, {\rm sr^{-1}}$, depending on direction ($\Theta$) and spectral index ($\alpha$). These limits improve upon previous limits by factors of $2.9 - 3.5$. We also set 95\% confidence level upper limits on the frequency-dependent strain amplitudes of quasimonochromatic gravitational waves coming from three interesting targets, Scorpius X-1, SN 1987A and the Galactic Center, with best upper limits range from $h_0 < {\rm (1.7-2.1)} \times 10^{-25},$ a factor of $\geq 2.0$ improvement compared to previous stochastic radiometer searches.Comment: 23 Pages, 9 Figure

The population of merging compact binaries inferred using gravitational waves through GWTC-3

We report on the population properties of 76 compact binary mergers detected with gravitational waves below a false alarm rate of 1 per year through GWTC-3. The catalog contains three classes of binary mergers: BBH, BNS, and NSBH mergers. We infer the BNS merger rate to be between 10 $\rm{Gpc^{-3} yr^{-1}}$ and 1700 $\rm{Gpc^{-3} yr^{-1}}$ and the NSBH merger rate to be between 7.8 $\rm{Gpc^{-3}\, yr^{-1}}$ and 140 $\rm{Gpc^{-3} yr^{-1}}$ , assuming a constant rate density versus comoving volume and taking the union of 90% credible intervals for methods used in this work. Accounting for the BBH merger rate to evolve with redshift, we find the BBH merger rate to be between 17.9 $\rm{Gpc^{-3}\, yr^{-1}}$ and 44 $\rm{Gpc^{-3}\, yr^{-1}}$ at a fiducial redshift (z=0.2). We obtain a broad neutron star mass distribution extending from $1.2^{+0.1}_{-0.2} M_\odot$ to $2.0^{+0.3}_{-0.3} M_\odot$. We can confidently identify a rapid decrease in merger rate versus component mass between neutron star-like masses and black-hole-like masses, but there is no evidence that the merger rate increases again before 10 $M_\odot$. We also find the BBH mass distribution has localized over- and under-densities relative to a power law distribution. While we continue to find the mass distribution of a binary's more massive component strongly decreases as a function of primary mass, we observe no evidence of a strongly suppressed merger rate above $\sim 60 M_\odot$. The rate of BBH mergers is observed to increase with redshift at a rate proportional to $(1+z)^{\kappa}$ with $\kappa = 2.9^{+1.7}_{-1.8}$ for $z\lesssim 1$. Observed black hole spins are small, with half of spin magnitudes below $\chi_i \simeq 0.25$. We observe evidence of negative aligned spins in the population, and an increase in spin magnitude for systems with more unequal mass ratio