629 research outputs found

    Listening to youth? BBC youth broadcasts during the 1930s and the Second World War

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    This article explores the largely neglected history of BBC youth broadcasting in the 1930s and 1940s, particularly from the mid 1930s, when a broad youth movement drew together many voluntary youth organizations in humanitarian and political projects. A novel youth consciousness embraced a radical younger generation of middle-class literary intellectuals and artists who, disconcerted by the popular appeal of fascism in Europe, wanted to know more about the everyday lives and views of ‘ordinary’ working-class people. During the same period, the introduction of BBC audience research stimulated greater receptiveness to the idea of capturing ‘different’ voices, including those of youth and encouraged progressive programme producers to give young people a voice in the new public sphere of broadcasting, unusual in a period when children’s education and the workplace were dominated by adult-centred approaches and assumptions. These programmes, despite their limitations, recognized young people as protagonists with valid voices and stressed the importance of youth developing critical understanding in order to play an active and participatory role in society. Their emphases on audience participation and interactivity and their efforts to listen to young people and shape a public space in which they could express their own views and passions as critical and autonomous thinkers are part of the archaeology of youth programming. They also connect with our globalized world, in which the skills of critical thinking, debate and participation are so vital and where the importance of asking young people about what they think, what they feel, and actively listening to what they have to say is still so often ignored

    Hierarchical porosity design enables highly recyclable and efficient Au/TiO2 composite fibers for photodegradation of organic pollutants

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    Titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanomaterials are ideal for photocatalytic degradation of organic pollutants but remain infeasible for industrial and municipal wastewater treatment because they cannot simultaneously satisfy two essential criteria for practical application, i.e., high performance and good recyclability. Here, we design and create hierarchically porous TiO2 fibers by dual-polymer templating sol–gel electrospinning combined with precise control over crystallization. The produced fibers own unique interconnected macropores throughout the fiber body that enable significantly enhanced light absorption and unlimited mass transport, making them ideal hosts for anchoring plasmonic nanoparticles (NPs). The Au NP-coupled TiO2 fibers have photocatalytic efficiencies up to 6.6 times higher than plain TiO2 fibers, showing comparable ability as commercial P25 nanopowder in photodegrading methyl blue (MB) and achieving complete decomposition of methyl orange (MO) in 90 min while P25 degrades only 66% MO. Unlike P25 or anatase TiO2 nanopowders that non-reversibly disperse/aggregate in water, our composite fibers can be recollected through natural sedimentation, and their superior performance remains for at least six cycles. This work offers a practical and feasible design for high-performance recyclable photocatalysts for industrial-scale water treatment

    Severe combined hyperlipidaemia and retinal lipid infiltration in a patient with Type 2 diabetes mellitus

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    Severe combined hyperlipidaemia has occasionally been associated with infiltration of tissues in addition to arteries and the skin. We report a woman with Type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM) and severe combined hyperlipidaemia who developed retinal lipid infiltration, resulting in blindness. A 61-year-old woman with a 15-year history of Type 2 DM was admitted following a two-week history of progressive visual loss. Examination identified lipid infiltration into the retina. Phenotypically she had severe combined hyperlipidaemia with elevated IDL cholesterol and a broad beta band on lipoprotein electrophoresis, raising the possibility of familial dysbetalipoproteinaemia. However, gene sequencing analysis indicated that the patient was homozygous for the E3/E3 allele of the ApoE gene with no mutations detected in either the coding region or intron-exon boundaries. Her lipid profile improved following dietary therapy and gemfibrozil treatment, but this had little effect on either her fundal appearances or her visual acuity. Type 2 DM plays a vital role both in allowing expression of severe combined hyperlipoproteinaemia, in addition to serving as a risk factor for complications such as tissue infiltration

    White Blood Cell Differentials Enrich Whole Blood Expression Data in the Context of Acute Cardiac Allograft Rejection

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    Acute cardiac allograft rejection is a serious complication of heart transplantation. Investigating molecular processes in whole blood via microarrays is a promising avenue of research in transplantation, particularly due to the non-invasive nature of blood sampling. However, whole blood is a complex tissue and the consequent heterogeneity in composition amongst samples is ignored in traditional microarray analysis. This complicates the biological interpretation of microarray data. Here we have applied a statistical deconvolution approach, cell-specific significance analysis of microarrays (csSAM), to whole blood samples from subjects either undergoing acute heart allograft rejection (AR) or not (NR). We identified eight differentially expressed probe-sets significantly correlated to monocytes (mapping to 6 genes, all down-regulated in ARs versus NRs) at a false discovery rate (FDR) ≤ 15%. None of the genes identified are present in a biomarker panel of acute heart rejection previously published by our group and discovered in the same data***

    Absolute optical chirality of ammonium dihydrogen phosphate

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    Phagocytosis of Aspergillus fumigatus by Human Bronchial Epithelial Cells Is Mediated by the Arp2/3 Complex and WIPF2

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    Aspergillus fumigatus is an opportunistic fungal pathogen capable of causing severe infection in humans. One of the limitations in our understanding of how A. fumigatus causes infection concerns the initial stages of infection, notably the initial interaction between inhaled spores or conidia and the human airway. Using publicly-available datasets, we identified the Arp2/3 complex and the WAS-Interacting Protein Family Member 2 WIPF2 as being potentially responsible for internalization of conidia by airway epithelial cells. Using a cell culture model, we demonstrate that RNAi-mediated knockdown of WIPF2 significantly reduces internalization of conidia into airway epithelial cells. Furthermore, we demonstrate that inhibition of Arp2/3 by a small molecule inhibitor causes similar effects. Using super-resolution fluorescence microscopy, we demonstrate that WIPF2 is transiently localized to the site of bound conidia. Overall, we demonstrate the active role of the Arp2/3 complex and WIPF2 in mediating the internalization of A. fumigatus conidia into human airway epithelial cells
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