Social Citizenship and Social Rights in an Age of Extremes: T. H. Marshall’s Social Philosophy in the longue durée

This article demonstrates how T. H. Marshall’s conceptualisation of sociology – its subject, key questions, and methodology – was embedded within broader moments in twentieth-century political history, including two world wars, the economic crisis of the interwar era, the onset of the Cold War and the rise of decolonization. In doing so, it brings intellectual history and the history of academic disciplines (particularly sociology) together with more recent trends in the historiography of twentieth-century Europe, including research on post-war democratization, reconstruction and the global spread of human rights discourses. Marshall was a sociological thinker in what Eric Hobsbawm has called the “age of extremes”, whose understanding of social citizenship not only played a role in theorizing the welfare state in post-war Britain, but also helped shape reconstruction within Europe and international development efforts following decolonization. In this respect, Marshall was part of a transnational and global movement to recast key concepts such as democracy, human rights and citizenship after the Second World War. This broader perspective illuminates how his work straddles traditions of pluralism and idealism, liberalism and social democracy, rather than being simply representative of any one of these schools of thought

Effect of thermal and physicochemical treatment on abattoir waste water – A case study of Ikpoba-hill abattoir

Evacuation of abattoir waste waters into water bodies results in excessive proliferation of decomposers, thus causing oxygen depletion and eutrophication. This study is designed to find means of effectively treating the abattoir waste water before they are reused or discharged into water bodies. The waste water was taken from open drainage before it discharges into Ikpoba river water body and subjected to physicochemical and thermal treatment prior to adsorption by granulated activated charcoal (GAC). The waste water and treated water were analysed for chemical oxygen demand (COD), biochemical oxygen demand (BOD5), total nitrogen (TN), ammonium nitrogen, total phosphate (TP), total solid content (TSC), dissolved solid content (DSC), suspended solid and pH to ascertain the removal efficiency of the treatment procedure. The study revealed that the removal efficiency using a combination of adsorption, physicochemical and thermal treatment in treating waste water from an abattoir was most efficient for total phosphate (95.78%) and least efficient for dissolved solid content (64.80%).Keywords: Heat, Coagulant, Adsorption, Treatment, Abattoir, Wastewater

A translational synthetic biology platform for rapid access to gram-scale quantities of novel drug-like molecules

Plants are an excellent source of drug leads. However availability is limited by access to source species, low abundance and recalcitrance to chemical synthesis. Although plant genomics is yielding a wealth of genes for natural product biosynthesis, the translation of this genetic information into small molecules for evaluation as drug leads represents a major bottleneck. For example, the yeast platform for artemisinic acid production is estimated to have taken >150 person years to develop. Here we demonstrate the power of plant transient transfection technology for rapid, scalable biosynthesis and isolation of triterpenes, one of the largest and most structurally diverse families of plant natural products. Using pathway engineering and improved agro-infiltration methodology we are able to generate gram-scale quantities of purified triterpene in just a few weeks. In contrast to heterologous expression in microbes, this system does not depend on re-engineering of the host. We next exploit agro-infection for quick and easy combinatorial biosynthesis without the need for generation of multi-gene constructs, so affording an easy entrée to suites of molecules, some new-to-nature, that are recalcitrant to chemical synthesis. We use this platform to purify a suite of bespoke triterpene analogs and demonstrate differences in anti-proliferative and anti-inflammatory activity in bioassays, providing proof of concept of this system for accessing and evaluating medicinally important bioactives. Together with new genome mining algorithms for plant pathway discovery and advances in plant synthetic biology, this advance provides new routes to synthesize and access previously inaccessible natural products and analogs and has the potential to reinvigorate drug discovery pipelines

Identification of differentially methylated CpG Sites in fibroblasts from Keloid Scars

As a part of an abnormal healing process of dermal injuries and irritation, keloid scars arise on the skin as benign fibroproliferative tumors. Although the etiology of keloid scarring remains unsettled, considerable recent evidence suggested that keloidogenesis may be driven by epigenetic changes, particularly, DNA methylation. Therefore, genome-wide scanning of methylated cytosine-phosphoguanine (CpG) sites in extracted DNA from 12 keloid scar fibroblasts (KF) and 12 control skin fibroblasts (CF) (six normal skin fibroblasts and six normotrophic fibroblasts) was conducted using the Illumina Human Methylation 450K BeadChip in two replicates for each sample. Comparing KF and CF used a Linear Models for Microarray Data (Limma) model revealed 100,000 differentially methylated (DM) CpG sites, 20,695 of which were found to be hypomethylated and 79,305 were hypermethylated. The top DM CpG sites were associated with TNKS2, FAM45B, LOC723972, GAS7, RHBDD2 and CAMKK1. Subsequently, the most functionally enriched genes with the top 100 DM CpG sites were significantly (p ≤ 0.05) associated with SH2 domain binding, regulation of transcription, DNA-templated, nucleus, positive regulation of protein targeting to mitochondrion, nucleoplasm, Swr1 complex, histone exchange, and cellular response to organic substance. In addition, NLK, CAMKK1, LPAR2, CASP1, and NHS showed to be the most common regulators in the signaling network analysis. Taken together, these findings shed light on the methylation status of keloids that could be implicated in the underlying mechanism of keloid scars formation and remission

Cyclotron effective masses in layered metals

Many layered metals such as quasi-two-dimensional organic molecular crystals show properties consistent with a Fermi liquid description at low temperatures. The effective masses extracted from the temperature dependence of the magnetic oscillations observed in these materials are in the range, m^*_c/m_e \sim 1-7, suggesting that these systems are strongly correlated. However, the ratio m^*_c/m_e contains both the renormalization due to the electron-electron interaction and the periodic potential of the lattice. We show that for any quasi-two-dimensional band structure, the cyclotron mass is proportional to the density of states at the Fermi energy. Due to Luttinger's theorem, this result is also valid in the presence of interactions. We then evaluate m_c for several model band structures for the \beta, \kappa, and \theta families of (BEDT-TTF)_2X, where BEDT-TTF is bis-(ethylenedithia-tetrathiafulvalene) and X is an anion. We find that for \kappa-(BEDT-TTF)_2X, the cyclotron mass of the \beta-orbit, m^{*\beta}_c, is close to 2 m^{*\alpha}_c, where m^{*\alpha}_c is the effective mass of the \alpha- orbit. This result is fairly insensitive to the band structure details. For a wide range of materials we compare values of the cyclotron mass deduced from band structure calculations to values deduced from measurements of magnetic oscillations and the specific heat coefficient.Comment: 12 pages, 3 eps figure

Large scale numerical investigation of excited states in poly(phenylene)

A density matrix renormalisation group scheme is developed, allowing for the first time essentially exact numerical solutions for the important excited states of a realistic semi-empirical model for oligo-phenylenes. By monitoring the evolution of the energies with chain length and comparing them to the experimental absorption peaks of oligomers and thin films, we assign the four characteristic absorption peaks of phenyl-based polymers. We also determine the position and nature of the nonlinear optical states in this model.Comment: RevTeX, 10 pages, 4 eps figures included using eps

Superconducting fluctuation corrections to ultrasound attenuation in layered superconductors

We consider the temperature dependence of the sound attenuation and sound velocity in layered impure metals due to superconducting fluctuations of the order parameter above the critical temperature. We obtain the dependence on material properties of these fluctuation corrections in the hydrodynamic limit, where the electron mean free path is much smaller than the wavelength of sound and where the electron collision rate is much larger than the sound frequency. For longitudinal sound propagating perpendicular to the layers, the open Fermi surface condition leads to a suppression of the divergent contributions to leading order, in contrast with the case of paraconductivity. The leading temperature dependent corrections, given by the Aslamazov-Larkin, Maki-Thompson and density of states terms, remain finite as T->Tc. Nevertheless, the sensitivity of new ultrasonic experiments on layered organic conductors should make these fluctuations effects measurable.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures. Accepted for PRB. Added discussion on incoherent interlayer tunneling and other small modifications suggested by referee

The low-lying excitations of polydiacetylene

The Pariser-Parr-Pople Hamiltonian is used to calculate and identify the nature of the low-lying vertical transition energies of polydiacetylene. The model is solved using the density matrix renormalisation group method for a fixed acetylenic geometry for chains of up to 102 atoms. The non-linear optical properties of polydiacetylene are considered, which are determined by the third-order susceptibility. The experimental 1Bu data of Giesa and Schultz are used as the geometric model for the calculation. For short chains, the calculated E(1Bu) agrees with the experimental value, within solvation effects (ca. 0.3 eV). The charge gap is used to characterise bound and unbound states. The nBu is above the charge gap and hence a continuum state; the 1Bu, 2Ag and mAg are not and hence are bound excitons. For large chain lengths, the nBu tends towards the charge gap as expected, strongly suggesting that the nBu is the conduction band edge. The conduction band edge for PDA is agreed in the literature to be ca. 3.0 eV. Accounting for the strong polarisation effects of the medium and polaron formation gives our calculated E(nBu) ca. 3.6 eV, with an exciton binding energy of ca. 1.0 eV. The 2Ag state is found to be above the 1Bu, which does not agree with relaxed transition experimental data. However, this could be resolved by including explicit lattice relaxation in the Pariser- Parr-Pople-Peierls model. Particle-hole separation data further suggest that the 1Bu, 2Ag and mAg are bound excitons, and that the nBu is an unbound exciton.Comment: LaTeX, 23 pages, 4 postscript tables and 8 postscript figure

Nonadiabatic approach to dimerization gap and optical absorption coefficient of the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model

An analytical nonadiabatic approach has been developed to study the dimerization gap and the optical absorption coefficient of the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model where the electrons interact with dispersive quantum phonons. By investigating quantitatively the effects of quantum phonon fluctuations on the gap order and the optical responses in this system, we show that the dimerization gap is much more reduced by the quantum lattice fluctuations than the optical absorption coefficient is. The calculated optical absorption coefficient and the density of states do not have the inverse-square-root singularity, but have a peak above the gap edge and there exist a significant tail below the peak. The peak of optical absorption spectrum is not directly corresponding to the dimerized gap. Our results of the optical absorption coefficient agree well with those of the experiments in both the shape and the peak position of the optical absorption spectrum.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures. to be published in PR

Detection of underground structures and tunnels

This is the final report of a one year, Laboratory Directed Research and Development project at Los Alamos National Laboratory. There is a continuing need in the United States defense and drug interdiction for effective over, convert, and standoff means of detecting underground tunnels, structures, and objects. This project sought to begin an assessment of electromagnetic and gravitational gradient detection approaches to the detection of underground structures and tunnels