Grateful recounting: do differences in participants\u27 writing impact well-being?

Studies have shown gratitude treatments to successfully enhance well-being in participants. Of these treatments, the ones most frequently used are what Watkins (2014) referred to as grateful recounting tasks. These tasks generally involve participants writing down things in their life that they are grateful for. While some studies have found this task to be effective at enhancing well-being, others have had mixed results. A possible avenue for helping to understand these inconsistencies is that participants likely differ in how they write in these tasks. Using a grateful recounting treatment completed in a previous study (Watkins, Uhder, & Pichinevskiy, 2015), participants\u27 grateful listings were measured along six writing dimensions: human benefactors, interpersonal benefits, benefactor span, gratitude expression, specificity, and surprise. Watkins et al. (2015) found this task, compared to a placebo and pride condition, to significantly enhance well-being in participants at three post treatment assessments (immediately post treatment, one week post treatment, and five weeks post treatment). It was predicted that scores on each of the six dimensions would be positively associated with the increases in participants\u27 well-being found in Watkins et al. (2015). Results indicated that gratitude expression, specificity, and surprise scores were positively correlated with increases in well-being immediately post treatment. These findings provide partial support that differences on these dimensions may moderate the effectiveness of grateful recounting tasks --Leaf iv

Some aspects of leucocyte metabolism: "in vitro" effects of drugs inducing agranulocytosis on separated human lymphocytes and polymorphonuclear leucocytes

This work was carried out in order to investigate the actions of drugs known to induce agranulocytosis on certain metabolic reactions of human leucocytes. Lymphocytes and polymorphonuclear leucocytes (PMN) were separated "in vitro" from samples of normal human blood, utilising the property of PMN whereby they will adhere to siliconed glass surfaces while lymphocytes do not adhere. The respiration and lactic acid production of the separated leucocytes was measured using manometric and enzymic methods respectively. It was found that drugs inducing predominately agranulocytosis - chlorpromazine, amidopyrine, and thiouracil - inhibited PMN respiration by 20% at concentrations which occur "in vivo" under normal therapeutic conditions. Drugs inducing both agranulocytosis and aplastic anaemia - phenylbutazone and chloramphenicol - showed little inhibitory activity on PMN respiration. No drugs exerted any apparent effect on lymphocyte respiration and on PMN lactic acid production. The significance of these results was discussed

A Study of Hadronic Final States in e+e- Annihilation at 44 GeV

The analysis of multihadronic events resulting from the interaction of an electron and a positron has been carried out using the data obtained with the CELLO detector situated at the PETRA e+e- storage ring. There are 5605 events in the data sample which were acquired at an average beam energy of 22 GeV. These events were used to ascertain whether the hadronic data could be described by a candidate theory of the strong interaction; namely quantum chromodynamics. It is shown that quantum chromodynamics describes the main features of the data. The theoretical properties of the transition from quark and gluons to hadrons is discussed, and in particular, three models of fragmentation are discussed. The relative merits of the string model, the independent jet model and the cluster model were evaluated from an experimental viewpoint and on a theoretical basis. The string model of fragmentation was found to give the best agreement with the published experimental data. Using the string model of fragmentation, a value of aS, the strong interaction coupling constant, was obtained. This was done by statistically fitting the experimental corrected data to the theoretical quantum chromodynamic prediction. Various distributions were employed to determine as and their relative merits assessed. It was found that the energy energy correlation asymmetry provided the most accurate measure of the strong coupling constant, namely, aS(Q2 = 1936GeV2) = 0.152+/-0 .010(systematic) +/-0.01(statistical)

Combatting the spread of rabies from the air with the help of the Bateleurs

In South Africa the World Heritage Site of the Cradle of Humankind in Gauteng Province, is a wild area of some 175 km and whilst not a game reserve as such, it is a wilderness area and home to numerous wild animals. Among the inhabitants are black backed jackals and honey badgers, where a rabies outbreak is determined to have occurred. Prof Katja Koeppel, veterinary wildlife specialist and Professor of Wildlife Health in the University of Pretoria’s Faculty of Veterinary Science have a plan of bait dropping. Quite simply a bait with a base ingredient of fishmeal is laced with rabies vaccine and then air dropped in the region. This bait provides inoculation for up to a year and if there were any animals (and there certainly are) currently infected with rabies, then those will perish within this year of coverage and with the surviving remainder being inoculated, the problem is hopefully solvedNews article with colour photos about what's happening at the Faculty of Veterinary Science, University of Pretoria.Originally published on the University of Pretoria's websiteab202

Foci of trinucleotide repeat transcripts in nuclei of myotonic dystrophy cells and tissues

We have analyzed the intracellular localization of transcripts from the myotonin protein kinase (Mt-PK) gene in fibroblasts and muscle biopsies from myotonic dystrophy patients and normal controls. In affected individuals, a trinucleotide expansion in the gene results in the phenotype, the severity of which is proportional to the repeat length. A fluorochrome-conjugated probe (10 repeats of CAG) hybridized specifically to this expanded repeat. Mt-PK transcripts containing CTG repeat expansions were detected in the nucleus as bright foci in DM patient fibroblasts and muscle biopsies, but not from normal individuals. These foci represented transcripts from the Mt-PK gene since they simultaneously hybridized to fluorochrome-conjugated probes to the 5\u27-end of the Mt-PK mRNA. A single oligonucleotide probe to the repeat and the sense strand each conjugated to different fluorochromes revealed the gene and the transcripts simultaneously, and indicated that these focal concentrations (up to 13 per nucleus) represented predominately posttranscriptional RNA since only a single focus contained both the DNA and the RNA. This concentration of nuclear transcripts was diagnostic of the affected state, and may represent aberrant processing of the RNA