Indian Forts of the Mid-17th Century in the Southern New England-New York Coastal Area

According to a recent hypothesis in connection with the emergence of the wampum trade, some 17th-century Indian forts in the southern New England-New York coastal area were built as trading stations rather than for defense or refuge. This proposition has not been fully explored. An examination of the data from the known Indian forts on Long Island and across the Long Island Sound in Connecticut and Rhode Island indicates that the proposition needs review. Only three out of nine forts discussed here appear to qualify as trading stations. These date comparatively later in the second half of the 17th century

The logic of public announcements, common knowledge, and private suspicions

This paper presents a logical system in which various group-level epistemic actions are incorporated into the object language. That is, we consider the standard modeling of knowledge among a set of agents by multi-modal Kripke structures. One might want to consider actions that take place, such as announcements to groups privately, announcements with suspicious outsiders, etc. In our system, such actions correspond to additional modalities in the object language. That is, we do not add machinery on top of models (as in Fagin et alia), but we reify aspects of the machinery in the logical language. Special cases of our logic have been considered in Plaza, Gerbrandy, and Gerbrandy and Groeneveld. The latter group of papers introduce a language in which one can faithfully represent all of the reasoning in examples such as the Muddy Children scenario. In that paper we find operators for updating worlds via announcements to groups of agents who are isolated from all others. We advance this by considering many more actions, and by using a more general semantics. Our logic contains the infinitary operators used in the standard modeling of common knowledge. We present a sound and complete logical system for the logic, and we study its expressive power

A proof of uniqueness of the Gurarii space

We present a short and elementary proof of isometric uniqueness of the Gurarii space.Comment: 6 pages, some improvements incorporate

Deliverable 9.1 - Report on mixtures and implementation strategy in Europe – Assessment of chemical mixtures under consideration of current and future regulatory requirements and scientific approaches

This report gives an overview on the regulatory processes and requirements for risk assessment of chemical mixtures, identifies gaps in the European legislation and summarises potential approaches for the health risk assessment of chemical mixtures

Myosin II Motors and F-Actin Dynamics Drive the Coordinated Movement of the Centrosome and Soma during CNS Glial-Guided Neuronal Migration

SummaryLamination of cortical regions of the vertebrate brain depends on glial-guided neuronal migration. The conserved polarity protein Par6α localizes to the centrosome and coordinates forward movement of the centrosome and soma in migrating neurons. The cytoskeletal components that produce this unique form of cell polarity and their relationship to polarity signaling cascades are unknown. We show that F-actin and Myosin II motors are enriched in the neuronal leading process and that Myosin II activity is necessary for leading process actin dynamics. Inhibition of Myosin II decreased the speed of centrosome and somal movement, whereas Myosin II activation increased coordinated movement. Ectopic expression or silencing of Par6α inhibited Myosin II motors by decreasing Myosin light-chain phosphorylation. These findings suggest leading-process Myosin II may function to “pull” the centrosome and soma forward during glial-guided migration by a mechanism involving the conserved polarity protein Par6α

Oxygen Tension and the VHL-Hif1α Pathway Determine Onset of Neuronal Polarization and Cerebellar Germinal Zone Exit.

Postnatal brain circuit assembly is driven by temporally regulated intrinsic and cell-extrinsic cues that organize neurogenesis, migration, and axo-dendritic specification in post-mitotic neurons. While cell polarity is an intrinsic organizer of morphogenic events, environmental cues in the germinal zone (GZ) instructing neuron polarization and their coupling during postnatal development are unclear. We report that oxygen tension, which rises at birth, and the von Hippel-Lindau (VHL)-hypoxia-inducible factor 1α (Hif1α) pathway regulate polarization and maturation of post-mitotic cerebellar granule neurons (CGNs). At early postnatal stages with low GZ vascularization, Hif1α restrains CGN-progenitor cell-cycle exit. Unexpectedly, cell-intrinsic VHL-Hif1α pathway activation also delays the timing of CGN differentiation, germinal zone exit, and migration initiation through transcriptional repression of the partitioning-defective (Pard) complex. As vascularization proceeds, these inhibitory mechanisms are downregulated, implicating increasing oxygen tension as a critical switch for neuronal polarization and cerebellar GZ exit

Développement d'outils microbiologiques et chimiques permettant d'identifier l'origine des pollutions fécales dans les eaux de baignades

La pollution organique issue des effluents d'élevage et des stations d'épuration urbaines conduit à un problème essentiel de santé publique lié à la contamination des eaux de surface où s'exercent des activités sensibles telles que la baignade. S'il est possible de déterminer les pollutions localisées liées à un dysfonctionnement des systèmes de traitement, il est beaucoup plus difficile d'identifier les pollutions organiques diffuses qui participent pourtant majoritairement à la dégradation de la qualité des eaux de surface. La problématique des pollutions diffuses est d'autant plus importante que la nouvelle réglementation européenne concernant les eaux de baignade (Directive 2006/7/CE) demande de constituer des profils de baignade qui nécessitent une identification et une hiérarchisation des sources de pollutions fécales. Le dénombrement de Escherichia coli et des entérocoques intestinaux stipulé par les textes réglementaires européens, représente actuellement le seul outil analytique permettant la mise en évidence d'une contamination fécale du milieu aquatique, sans toutefois différencier l'origine humaine ou animale de cette contamination. Il est donc nécessaire de développer de nouvelles méthodes de détection de la pollution fécale qui puissent non seulement mettre en évidence une contamination mais aussi en indiquer l'origine. C'est d'ailleurs dans cet objectif que s'est développé depuis quelques années, le concept de "Microbial Source Tracking" ("Traceurs de Sources Microbiennes") qui consiste à identifier à l'aide de marqueurs microbiologiques ou chimiques les sources de pollutions fécales. Dans ce contexte, six laboratoires de recherche se sont associés pour développer des techniques de traçage des contaminations fécales afin de proposer un outil opérationnel utilisable pour différencier les sources de pollution, de leur point d'émission jusqu'au milieu récepteur final que constituent les eaux de surface. Les marqueurs qui ont fait l'objet de cette étude sont des molécules chimiques naturelles (stéroïdes, caféine), des molécules de synthèse retrouvées dans les effluents de stations d'épuration ou des rapports de fluorescence de la matière organique ainsi que des micro-organismes (bactériophages, bactéries). A la suite des développements méthodologiques, plusieurs marqueurs ont été sélectionnés : - bactéries appartenant aux groupes bactériens dominants du tractus intestinal humain (Bifidobacterium adolescentis) et porcin (Lactobacillus amylovorus) ; - Bacteroidales spécifiques des humains, porcins et bovins (HF183, Pig-2-Bac, Rum-2-Bac); - génogroupes humains des bactériophages F ARN spécifiques; - rapports de stéroïdes : coprostanol/(24ethylcoprostanol+coprostanol) (R1) et sitostanol/coprostanol (R2); - caféine, benzophénone et tri(2-chloroethyl)phosphate (TCEP)