Academic mobility, transnational identity capital, and stratification under conditions of academic capitalism

Academic mobility has existed since ancient times. Recently, however, academic mobility—the crossing of international borders by academics who then work ‘overseas’—has increased. Academics and the careers of academics have been affected by governments and institutions that have an interest in coordinating and accelerating knowledge production. This article reflects on the relations between academic mobility and knowledge and identity capital and their mutual entanglement as academics move, internationally. It argues that the contemporary movement of academics takes place within old hierarchies among nation states, but such old hierarchies intersect with new academic stratifications which will be described and analysed. These analytical themes in the article are supplemented by excerpts from interviews of mobile academics in the UK, USA, New Zealand, Korea and Hong Kong as selected examples of different locales of academic capitalism

New genetic loci link adipose and insulin biology to body fat distribution.

Body fat distribution is a heritable trait and a well-established predictor of adverse metabolic outcomes, independent of overall adiposity. To increase our understanding of the genetic basis of body fat distribution and its molecular links to cardiometabolic traits, here we conduct genome-wide association meta-analyses of traits related to waist and hip circumferences in up to 224,459 individuals. We identify 49 loci (33 new) associated with waist-to-hip ratio adjusted for body mass index (BMI), and an additional 19 loci newly associated with related waist and hip circumference measures (P < 5 × 10(-8)). In total, 20 of the 49 waist-to-hip ratio adjusted for BMI loci show significant sexual dimorphism, 19 of which display a stronger effect in women. The identified loci were enriched for genes expressed in adipose tissue and for putative regulatory elements in adipocytes. Pathway analyses implicated adipogenesis, angiogenesis, transcriptional regulation and insulin resistance as processes affecting fat distribution, providing insight into potential pathophysiological mechanisms

Helium Droplets Doped with Sulfur and C 60

[Image: see text] Clusters of sulfur are grown by passing superfluid helium nanodroplets through a pickup cell filled with sulfur vapor. In some experiments the droplets are codoped with C(60). The doped droplets are collided with energetic electrons and the abundance distributions of positively and negatively charged cluster ions are recorded. We report, specifically, distributions of S(m)(+), S(m)(–), and C(60)S(m)(–) containing up to 41 sulfur atoms. We also observe complexes of sulfur cluster anions with helium; distributions are presented for He(n)S(m)(–) with n ≤ 31 and m ≤ 3. The similarity between anionic and cationic C(60)S(m)(±) spectra is in striking contrast to the large differences between spectra of S(m)(+) and S(m)(–)