Extra-Thymic Physiological T Lineage Progenitor Activity Is Exclusively Confined to Cells Expressing either CD127, CD90, or High Levels of CD117

T cell development depends on continuous recruitment of progenitors from bone marrow (BM) to the thymus via peripheral blood. However, both phenotype and functional characteristics of physiological T cell precursors remain ill-defined. Here, we characterized a putative CD135+CD27+ T cell progenitor population, which lacked expression of CD127, CD90, and high levels of CD117 and was therefore termed triple negative precursor (TNP). TNPs were present in both BM and blood and displayed robust T lineage potential, but virtually no myeloid or B lineage potential, in vitro. However, TNPs did not efficiently generate T lineage progeny after intravenous or intrathymic transfer, suggesting that a physiological thymic microenvironment does not optimally support T cell differentiation from TNPs. Thus, we propose that physiological T cell precursors are confined to populations expressing either CD127, CD90, or high levels of CD117 in addition to CD135 and CD27 and that TNPs may have other physiological functions

The Transformative Power of Voice in George Bernard Shaw\u27s Pygmalion

George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion is first and foremost a play about voice, particularly about the voice of flower-girl-tumed-lady Liza Doolittle. Though the voice is not Liza’s true self, it is the way the Liza’s identity can be expressed, and thus an important marker of identity transformations in the play. This work explores three different ways in which Shaw discusses voice in the play: as singing instruction, scientific methods for recording voice, and vocalizing automata and dolls. First, the play is deeply influenced by Shaw’s background in singing instruction from his childhood. Shaw learned voice study from his mother’s beau, a singing teacher named Vandeleur Lee, whose treatise on voice informed Shaw’s Irish nationalist sensibilities, his own writer’s voice, and most importantly, his ideas about how voice could be systematically transformed. Like music, science provides ways to understand and discuss voice; through engineering feats such as phonograph recordings and laryngoscope inspections, scientists could analyze and observe the voice. Pygmalion\u27s male lead Higgins embraces and even idolizes such scientific devices, which allow him at once to transform and control his subject. Furthermore, the use of this science in Edison’s invention of the talking doll is a clear source for Pygmalion, in which the language of automata is specifically used. Shaw understood voice in terms of its applications in singing instruction, engineering, and robotics, and presented each of these concepts in his play. The transformations in Pygmalion are accomplished primarily through the science of voice study. Shaw knew how singing and voice training transformed his own family in its social connections and structure, and he metaphorically explores this in Liza’s transformation from flower girl to lady. Voice had the ability not only to transform, but also to animate. As such, voice manipulation, through training and recording, was considered powerful in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly to Shaw, who dealt intimately with science as his hobby and music as his family’s occupation. Voice meant identity, and voice analysis meant an ability to control and change the voice—an ability which Liza actively practices. Shaw’s portrayal of Liza as a “talking doll,” is herein placed in its 1912 context by examining European and American interest in vocalizing dolls and automata. Shaw was knowledgeable about talking dolls and actively shaped Pygmalion as a narrative about automata. This kind of scholarship provides new opportunities for reading Pygmalion. Combining literary and historical approaches and exploring topics in the histories of both music and science, this work gives voice to some previously underdeveloped topics in Shavian studies

Comparison of ordinations of some apennine forest communities based on different characters and methods

In the course of numerical ordinations of Apennines woodlands, the problem arose of different performance of ordination methods, using different character sets and methods. To reveal underlying trends and relationships, 47 ordinations are jointly examinated, corresponding to combinations of 6 methods and 8 character types. The Spearman formula has been used to measure the similarity between different ordinations. The ordinations based on families are, on the average, the most similar to the other ones irrespective to the method used. The ordination based on detailed life forms (growth forms) are the least similar to the other ordinations. Ordinations based on the same character set and different methods could be different as well as ordinations based on different character sets and the same method. The suggested procedure can be the basis to select among different ordinations those explaining complementary informations

Open banking: la direttiva c’è i consumatori forse sì

I servizi di open banking abilitati dalla direttiva PSD2 (ovvero la Direttiva dei sistemi di pagamento EU 2015/2366) rappresentano un autentico cambio di paradigma per il mondo bancario tradizionale, tanto nella prospettiva delle banche quanto in quella dei clienti. Lo studio quantitativo condotto da SDA Bocconi su oltre 1200 clienti bancari italiani ha rivelato la presenza di tre categorie principali di clientela (i fedeli, gli aspiranti fedifraghi, i delusi), corrispondenti ad altrettanti gradi di propensione alla condivisione di informazioni finanziarie, presupposto fondamentale per rendere l’open banking realtà