Dimethyl fumarate in patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19 (RECOVERY): a randomised, controlled, open-label, platform trial

Dimethyl fumarate (DMF) inhibits inflammasome-mediated inflammation and has been proposed as a treatment for patients hospitalised with COVID-19. This randomised, controlled, open-label platform trial (Randomised Evaluation of COVID-19 Therapy [RECOVERY]), is assessing multiple treatments in patients hospitalised for COVID-19 (NCT04381936, ISRCTN50189673). In this assessment of DMF performed at 27 UK hospitals, adults were randomly allocated (1:1) to either usual standard of care alone or usual standard of care plus DMF. The primary outcome was clinical status on day 5 measured on a seven-point ordinal scale. Secondary outcomes were time to sustained improvement in clinical status, time to discharge, day 5 peripheral blood oxygenation, day 5 C-reactive protein, and improvement in day 10 clinical status. Between 2 March 2021 and 18 November 2021, 713 patients were enroled in the DMF evaluation, of whom 356 were randomly allocated to receive usual care plus DMF, and 357 to usual care alone. 95% of patients received corticosteroids as part of routine care. There was no evidence of a beneficial effect of DMF on clinical status at day 5 (common odds ratio of unfavourable outcome 1.12; 95% CI 0.86-1.47; p = 0.40). There was no significant effect of DMF on any secondary outcome

35 kW peak power picosecond pulsed thulium-doped fibre amplifier system seeded by a gain-switched laser diode at 2 microns

High power fibre laser sources in the 2 µm wavelength region with picosecond-scale pulse durations have attractive applications such as materials processing, eye-safe radar and nonlinear frequency conversion to midinfrared wavelengths. Current implementations are typically based on the amplification of picosecond pulses obtained from a mode-locked oscillator, and pulse energies of several hundred nano-Joule and peak powers of the order of 10 kW have been achieved

High-energy diode-seeded nanosecond 2µm fiber MOPA systems incorporating active pulse shaping

We report on high-energy nanosecond-pulsed fiber master oscillator power amplifier (MOPA) systems seeded by semiconductor laser diodes at 2µm incorporating arbitrary pulse-shaping capabilities. Two MOPA systems, one based on direct diode modulation and the second using additional electro-optic modulator (EOM) based shaping, are investigated, with up to 0.5mJ (25kHz) and 1.0mJ (12.5kHz) pulse energies achieved, respectively, for 100ns pulses with user-defined pulse shapes. Our results indicate that further energy scaling with shaped output pulses is primarily limited by the maximum pulse peak power available from the seed laser diode and the dynamic range offered by the first generation of EOMs at 2µm

Loving to Straighten Out Development: Sexuality and ‘Ethnodevelopment’ in the World Bank’s Ecuadorian Lending

Gender staff in the World Bank -- the world's largest and most influential development institution -- have a policy problem. Having prioritised efforts to get women into paid employment as the "cure-all" for gender inequality they must deal with the work that women already do -- the unpaid labour of caring, socialisation, and human needs fulfilment. This article explores the most prominent policy solution enacted by the Bank to this tension between paid and unpaid work: the restructuring of normative heterosexuality to encourage a two-partner model of love and labour wherein women work more and men care better. Through a case study of Bank gender lending in Ecuador I argue that staff are trying to (re)forge normative arrangements of intimacy, a policy preference that remains invisible unless sexuality is taken seriously as a category of analysis in development studies. Specifically, I focus on four themes that emerge from the attempt to restructure heteronormativity in the loan: (1) the definition of good gender analysis as requiring complementary sharing and dichotomous sex; (2) the Bank's attempt to inculcate limited rationality in women such that they operate as better workers while retaining altruistic attachments to loved ones; (3) the Bank's attempt to inculcate better loving in men, such that they pick up the slack of caring labour when their (partially) rational wives move into productive work, and; (4) the invocation of a racialised hierarchy resting on the extent to which communities approximate ideals of sharing monogamous partnership. Aside from providing clear evidence that the world's largest development institution is involved in micro-processes of sexuality adjustment alongside macro-processes of economic restructuring, I also critique the Bank's sexualised policy interventions and suggest that they warrant contestation