A Consciousness of Streets: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Partition

This largely speculative review historicises the current era of ‘Springs’ through the lens of partition. I offer a critique of political modernity and the modern nation-state through analysis of the turn to border politics in colonial conquests, decolonisation efforts, Cold War politics and other instances of international relations across the long twentieth century. The pervasiveness of such plans across late modernity marks the beginning of the end of the nation as a single, reifiable, imaginable structure. With Ireland as exemplar, I posit national dividedness —a generally underestimated paradigm shaping our time— as spurring a decline in state authority and a new, radical “consciousness of streets.” Together with other defining political structures, it participates in transforming the postmodern map of nation into a conflicted network, an imagined community as metropolitan circuit. I take recourse to theories of partition and nation and work by geographers, historians and postcolonial theorists including Joseph Cleary, Benedict Anderson, Monica Duffy Toft, Étienne Balibar and Michel Foucault

Abandonment of crop lands leads to different recovery patterns for ant and plant communities in Eastern Europe

Significant proportion of crop lands have been abandoned as management strategies have changed in Central and Eastern Europe in the past decades. The study of insect versus plant communities in such areas could help us understand how these processes take place, and whether these communities return to a semi-natural state maintained by human activities. Amongst insects ants, as ecosystem engineers, are a perfect target group in this respect. We studied epigaeic ant and plant communities of abandoned old-fields in Romania. Contrary to our expectations, the total number of ant species did not increase with time during succession on old-fields contrary to plants, where an increase was registered in the total number. Disturbancetolerant ant species dominated the ant communities throughout the successional gradient, while in the case of plants a transition was found from weed-dominated to semi-natural communities. The diversity of both ant and plant communities increased after the 1-year stage, but the patterns were different. While a return to semi-natural state could be observed in plants during old-field succession, such a definite change did not occur in ants. This might be caused by the landscape context: the lack of connectivity of old-fields to larger natural areas. While plant propagules of semi-natural and natural habitat species can still successfully colonize the old fields even under such conditions, ant colonizers are mainly disturbance-tolerant species typical for agricultural areas, which can be hardly replaced by typical grassland species. Our findings underline the existence of important discrepancies between plant and ant community succession, mostly treated as paralleling each other. This is the first study to handle the effect of abandonment on ant and plant communities simultaneously in Eastern Europe

Enhancement of the Deuteron-Fusion Reactions in Metals and its Experimental Implications

Recent measurements of the reaction d(d,p)t in metallic environments at very low energies performed by different experimental groups point to an enhanced electron screening effect. However, the resulting screening energies differ strongly for divers host metals and different experiments. Here, we present new experimental results and investigations of interfering processes in the irradiated targets. These measurements inside metals set special challenges and pitfalls which make them and the data analysis particularly error-prone. There are multi-parameter collateral effects which are crucial for the correct interpretation of the observed experimental yields. They mainly originate from target surface contaminations due to residual gases in the vacuum as well as from inhomogeneities and instabilities in the deuteron density distribution in the targets. In order to address these problems an improved differential analysis method beyond the standard procedures has been implemented. Profound scrutiny of the other experiments demonstrates that the observed unusual changes in the reaction yields are mainly due to deuteron density dynamics simulating the alleged screening energy values. The experimental results are compared with different theoretical models of the electron screening in metals. The Debye-H\"{u}ckel model that has been previously proposed to explain the influence of the electron screening on both nuclear reactions and radioactive decays could be clearly excluded.Comment: 22 pages, 12 figures, REVTeX4, 2-column format. Submitted to Phys. Rev. C; accepte

Biodiversity-rich European grasslands : ancient, forgotten ecosystems

Worldwide reforestation has been recommended as a landscape restoration strategy to mitigate climate change in areas where the climate can sustain forest. This approach may threaten grassland ecosystems of unique biodiversity as such policies are based on the false assumption that most grasslands are man-made. Here, we use multiple lines of evidence (palaeoecological, pedological, phylogenetic, palaeontological) from Central Eastern Europe and show that various types of grasslands have persisted in this area throughout the postglacial i.e., the past 11,700 years. A warm and dry climate, frequent fires, herbivore pressure and early Neolithic settlements kept forests open until widespread forest clearance beginning 4000 to 3000 years ago. Closed forest cover has been the exception for the last two million years. This long-term persistence has likely contributed to the high biodiversity of these grasslands. Consequently, we call for a more cautious prioritisation of the protection of what may be erroneously considered natural, i.e. forests, by many environmental specialists and managers. Instead we provide a new framework for a better understanding of the evolution and persistence of different grassland types and their biodiversity, so that grasslands can be better understood, valued and conserved

Probing dipolar effects with condensate shape oscillation

We discuss the low energy shape oscillations of a magnetic trapped atomic condensate including the spin dipole interaction. When the nominal isotropic s-wave interaction strength becomes tunable through a Feshbach resonance (e.g. as for $^{85}$Rb atoms), anisotropic dipolar effects are shown to be detectable under current experimental conditions [E. A. Donley {\it et al.}, Nature {\bf 412}, 295 (2001)].Comment: revised version, submitte

Low-Density Granulocytes Are a Novel Immunopathological Feature in Both Multiple Sclerosis and Neuromyelitis Optica Spectrum Disorder

Objective: To investigate whether low-density granulocytes (LDGs) are an immunophenotypic feature of patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) or neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder (NMOSD). Methods: Blood samples were collected from 20 patients with NMOSD and 17 patients with MS, as well as from 15 patients with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE) and 23 Healthy Donors (HD). We isolated peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) with density gradient separation and stained the cells with antibodies against CD14, CD15, CD16, and CD45, and analyzed the cells by flow cytometry or imaging flow cytometry. We defined LDGs as CD14-CD15(high) and calculated their share in total PBMC leukocytes (CD45+) as well as the share of CD16(hi) LDGs. Clinical data on disease course, medication, and antibody status were obtained. Results: LDGs were significantly more common in MS and NMOSD than in HDs, comparable to SLE samples (median values HD 0.2%, MS 0.9%, NMOSD 2.1%, SLE 4.3%). 0/23 of the HDs, but 17/20 NMOSD and 11/17 MS samples as well as 13/15 SLE samples had at least 0.7 % LDGs. NMOSD patients without continuous immunosuppressive treatment had significantly more LDGs compared to their treated counterparts. LDG nuclear morphology ranged from segmented to rounded, suggesting a heterogeneity within the group. Conclusion: LDGs are a feature of the immunophenotype in some patients with MS and NMOSD