The New Deal, Race, and Home Ownership in the 1920s and 1930s

Many federal government housing policies began during the New Deal of the 1930s. Many claim that minorities benefited less from these policies than whites. We estimate the relationships between policies in the 1920s and 1930s and black and white home ownership in farm and nonfarm settings using a pseudo-panel of repeated cross-sections of households in 1920, 1930, and 1940 matched with policy measures in 460 state economic areas. The policies examined include FHA mortgage insurance, HOLC loan refinancing, state mortgage moratoria, farm loan programs, public housing, public works and relief, and payments to farmers to take land out of production.

Age-Related Gene Expression Differences in Monocytes from Human Neonates, Young Adults, and Older Adults.

A variety of age-related differences in the innate and adaptive immune systems have been proposed to contribute to the increased susceptibility to infection of human neonates and older adults. The emergence of RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) provides an opportunity to obtain an unbiased, comprehensive, and quantitative view of gene expression differences in defined cell types from different age groups. An examination of ex vivo human monocyte responses to lipopolysaccharide stimulation or Listeria monocytogenes infection by RNA-seq revealed extensive similarities between neonates, young adults, and older adults, with an unexpectedly small number of genes exhibiting statistically significant age-dependent differences. By examining the differentially induced genes in the context of transcription factor binding motifs and RNA-seq data sets from mutant mouse strains, a previously described deficiency in interferon response factor-3 activity could be implicated in most of the differences between newborns and young adults. Contrary to these observations, older adults exhibited elevated expression of inflammatory genes at baseline, yet the responses following stimulation correlated more closely with those observed in younger adults. Notably, major differences in the expression of constitutively expressed genes were not observed, suggesting that the age-related differences are driven by environmental influences rather than cell-autonomous differences in monocyte development

LCA of PHA Production – Identifying the Ecological Potential of Bio-plastic

A major reason for the call to increasingly switch towards polymers based on renewable resources is their presumed advantage regarding ecological performance compared to fossil competitors. Usually, this argument is based on the assumption that products based on renewable sources hold an inherent ecological advantage over products derived from other sources, in particular fossil sources. This claim however must be substantiated by looking into the ecological impacts accrued by the production of a material along the whole life cycle, from the raw material generation to the provision of the final product. Only thorough life cycle assessments (LCA) can provide solid, comprehensive and quantifiable information about the ecological performance of products, and thus answer the question of any superiority of bio-polymers regarding their environmental impacts. The paper will review the ongoing discourse about environmental performance of PHA in literature. It will also analyse the most important factors that decide about the ecological performance of PHA derived from different raw materials as well as the potential for improvement that is still available for PHA production

Flow cytometry data standards

Background: Flow cytometry is a widely used analytical technique for examining microscopic particles, such as cells. The Flow Cytometry Standard (FCS) was developed in 1984 for storing flow data and it is supported by all instrument and third party software vendors. However, FCS does not capture the full scope of flow cytometry (FCM)-related data and metadata, and data standards have recently been developed to address this shortcoming. Findings. The Data Standards Task Force (DSTF) of the International Society for the Advancement of Cytometry (ISAC) has developed several data standards to complement the raw data encoded in FCS files. Efforts started with the Minimum Information about a Flow Cytometry Experiment, a minimal data reporting standard of details necessary to include when publishing FCM experiments to facilitate third party understanding. MIFlowCyt is now being recommended to authors by publishers as part of manuscript submission, and manuscripts are being checked by reviewers and editors for compliance. Gating-ML was then introduced to capture gating descriptions - an essential part of FCM data analysis describing the selection of cell populations of interest. The Classification Results File Format was developed to accommodate results of the gating process, mostly within the context of automated clustering. Additionally, the Archival Cytometry Standard bundles data with all the other components describing experiments. Here, we introduce these recent standards and provide the very first example of how they can be used to report FCM data including analysis and results in a standardized, computationally exchangeable form. Conclusions: Reporting standards and open file formats are essential for scientific collaboration and independent validation. The recently developed FCM data standards are now being incorporated into third party software tools and data repositories, which will ultimately facilitate understanding and data reuse. © 2011 Brinkman et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd

Stable crystalline lattices in two-dimensional binary mixtures of dipolar particles

The phase diagram of binary mixtures of particles interacting via a pair potential of parallel dipoles is computed at zero temperature as a function of composition and the ratio of their magnetic susceptibilities. Using lattice sums, a rich variety of different stable crystalline structures is identified including $A_mB_n$ structures. [$A$ $(B)$ particles correspond to large (small) dipolar moments.] Their elementary cells consist of triangular, square, rectangular or rhombic lattices of the $A$ particles with a basis comprising various structures of $A$ and $B$ particles. For small (dipolar) asymmetry there are intermediate $AB_2$ and $A_2B$ crystals besides the pure $A$ and $B$ triangular crystals. These structures are detectable in experiments on granular and colloidal matter.Comment: 6 pages - 2 figs - phase diagram update

An Evolutionary Method for the Minimum Toll Booth Problem: the Methodology

This paper considers the minimum toll booth problem (MINTB) for determining a tolling strategy in a transportation network that requires the least number of toll locations, and simultaneously causes the most efficient use of the network. The paper develops a methodology for using the genetic algorithm to solve MINTB and presents the algorithm GAMINTB. The proposed method is tested and validated through a computational study with six example networks. Additional numerical test discovers some interesting properties for the proposed method, and provides guidelines for further application of the GAMINTB

Energy Demands of Early Life Drive a Disease Tolerant Phenotype and Dictate Outcome in Neonatal Bacterial Sepsis

Bacterial sepsis is one of the leading causes of death in newborns. In the face of growing antibiotic resistance, it is crucial to understand the pathology behind the disease in order to develop effective interventions. Neonatal susceptibility to sepsis can no longer be attributed to simple immune immaturity in the face of mounting evidence that the neonatal immune system is tightly regulated and well controlled. The neonatal immune response is consistent with a “disease tolerance” defense strategy (minimizing harm from immunopathology) whereas adults tend toward a “disease resistance” strategy (minimizing harm from pathogens). One major advantage of disease tolerance is that is less energetically demanding than disease resistance, consistent with the energetic limitations of early life. Immune effector cells enacting disease resistance responses switch to aerobic glycolysis upon TLR stimulation and require steady glycolytic flux to maintain the inflammatory phenotype. Rapid and intense upregulation of glucose uptake by immune cells necessitates an increased reliance on fatty acid metabolism to (a) fuel vital tissue function and (b) produce immunoregulatory intermediates which help control the magnitude of inflammation. Increasing disease resistance requires more energy: while adults have fat and protein stores to catabolize, neonates must reallocate resources away from critical growth and development. This understanding of sepsis pathology helps to explain many of the differences between neonatal and adult immune responses. Taking into account the central role of metabolism in the host response to infection and the severe metabolic demands of early life, it emerges that the striking clinical susceptibility to bacterial infection of the newborn is at its core a problem of metabolism. The evidence supporting this novel hypothesis, which has profound implications for interventions, is presented in this review