2,539 research outputs found
"Some of us need to be taken care of": young adults' perspectives on support and help in drug reducing interventions in coercive contexts in Denmark and the UK
This paper provides an account of young peopleās experiences of and perspectives on help and support in drug reducing interventions. It is based on interviews with young people age 14ā25 who were in contact with the Criminal Justice System (CJS) and, at the same time, participated in a drug reducing intervention. The interview data forms part of the EU funded EPPIC project. Two main themes emerged from the young peoplesā accounts that cut across different types of interventions and social systems in both countries. The first revolves around the āsystemā of welfare, criminal justice, health and educational services and the barriers young people encountered in navigating the system to find help. The second revolves around the young peopleās experiences with professionals, including what they appreciated and what they found problematic in professionalsā approach to them. Basing our analysis on data from two different countries, we are able to emphasize similarities in the young peoplesā perspectives, despite being enrolled in different drug reducing and CJS interventions. The insights gained indicate a need for systems and service changes that can facilitate a better balance between building individual resilience and providing appropriate, timely and adequate support within a āresilience-building environmen
Scanning Tunneling Spectroscopy on the novel superconductor CaC6
We present scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy of the newly
discovered superconductor CaC. The tunneling conductance spectra, measured
between 3 K and 15 K, show a clear superconducting gap in the quasiparticle
density of states. The gap function extracted from the spectra is in good
agreement with the conventional BCS theory with = 1.6 0.2
meV. The possibility of gap anisotropy and two-gap superconductivity is also
discussed. In a magnetic field, direct imaging of the vortices allows to deduce
a coherence length in the ab plane 33 nm
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Temperature and precipitation extremes in century-long gridded observations, reanalyses, and atmospheric model simulations
Knowledge about long-term changes in climate extremes is vital to better understand multidecadal climate variability and long-term changes and to place todayās extreme events in a historical context. While global changes in temperature and precipitation extremes since the midtwentieth century are well studied, knowledge about century-scale changes is limited. This paper analyses a range of largely independent observations-based data sets covering 1901ā2010 for long-term changes and interannual variability in daily scale temperature and precipitation extremes. We compare across data sets for consistency to ascertain our confidence in century-scale changes in extremes. We find consistent warming trends in temperature extremes globally and in most land areas over the past century. For precipitation extremes we find global tendencies toward more intense rainfall throughout much of the twentieth century; however, local changes are spatially more variable. While global time series of the different data sets agree well after about 1950, they often show different changes during the first half of the twentieth century. In regions with good observational coverage, gridded observations and reanalyses agree well throughout the entire past century. Simulations with an atmospheric model suggest that ocean temperatures and sea ice may explain up to about 50% of interannual variability in the global average of temperature extremes, and about 15% in the global average of moderate precipitation extremes, but local correlations are mostly significant only in low latitudes
Editorial DEPP: drug experienced young people in contact with the criminal justice system. Understanding the challenges and working towards solutions
The focus of this collection of papers is on young people (age 14ā25) who are drug experienced and are in contact with the Criminal Justice System (CJS). In general, research tends to focus on either young peopleās drug use or offending; equally, we see a tendency within policy and service responses to focus on interventions aimed either at drug use or at offending but rarely addressing complex problems that may include drug use and offending (Herold et al., 2019). By drawing on young peoplesā own perspectives and experiences and focusing on multiple problem areas at the same time, this collection presents findings that complement and augment the existing literature, and are highly relevant to policy development and service provision by: providing an account of young peopleās own perspectives and experiences of their drug use and offending trajectories and the experienced relationship between these trajectories; describing young peopleās own perspectives and experiences of different kinds of drug and/or offending reducing initiatives they have participated in and what they appreciate and/or find difficult in these institutional arrangements; showing how professionals engage with this group of young people, and how young people themselves consider engagement in services offered to them; and finally, highlighting the unintended consequences for and experienced by young people of the application of prohibitive drug policies and of involvement in the criminal justice system
Analysis of Visible/SWIR surface reflectance ratios for aerosol retrievals from satellite in Mexico City urban area
International audienceThe surface reflectance ratio between the visible (VIS) and shortwave infrared (SWIR) radiation is an important quantity for the retrieval of the aerosol optical depth (?a) from the MODIS sensor data. Based on empirically determined VIS/SWIR ratios, MODIS ?a retrieval uses the surface reflectance in the SWIR band (2.1 Āµm), where the interaction between solar radiation and the aerosol layer is small, to predict the visible reflectances in the blue (0.47 Āµm) and red (0.66 Āµm) bands. Therefore, accurate knowledge of the VIS/SWIR ratio is essential for achieving accurate retrieval of aerosol optical depth from MODIS. We analyzed the surface reflectance over some distinct surface covers in and around the Mexico City metropolitan area (MCMA) using MODIS radiances at 0.66 Āµm and 2.1 Āµm. The analysis was performed at 1.5 kmĆ1.5 km spatial resolution. Also, ground-based AERONET sun-photometer data acquired in Mexico City from 2002 to 2005 were analyzed for aerosol depth and other aerosol optical properties. In addition, a network of hand-held sun-photometers deployed in Mexico City, as part of the MCMA-2006 Study during the MILAGRO Campaign, provided an unprecedented measurement of ?a in 5 different sites well distributed in the city. We found that the average RED/SWIR ratio representative of the urbanized sites analyzed is 0.73Ā±0.06 for scattering angles a averaged from sun-photometer measurements. The use of the new RED/SWIR ratio of 0.73 in the MODIS retrieval over Mexico City led to a significant improvement in the agreement between the MODIS and sun-photometer AOD results; with the slope, offset, and the correlation coefficient of the linear regression changing from (?aMODIS=0.91?a sun-photometer+0.33, R2=0.66) to (?aMODIS=0.96 ?a sun-photometer?0.006, R2=0.87). Indeed, an underestimation of this ratio in urban areas lead to a significant overestimation of the AOD retrieved from satellite. Therefore, we strongly encourage similar analyses in other urban areas to enhance the development of a parameterization of the surface ratios accounting for urban heterogeneities
Targeting atypical protein kinase C iota reduces viability in glioblastoma stem-like cells via a notch signaling mechanism
In a previous study, Protein Kinase C iota (PRKCI) emerged as an important candidate gene for glioblastoma (GBM) stem-like cell (GSC) survival. Here, we show that PKCĪ¹ is overexpressed and activated in patient derived GSCs compared with normal neural stem cells and normal brain lysate, and that silencing of PRKCI in GSCs causes apoptosis, along with loss of clonogenicity and reduced proliferation. Notably, PRKCI silencing reduces tumor growth in vivo in a xenograft mouse model. PKCĪ¹ has been intensively studied as a therapeutic target in non-small cell lung cancer, resulting in the identification of an inhibitor, aurothiomalate (ATM), which disrupts the PKCĪ¹/ERK signaling axis. However, we show that, although sensitive to pharmacological inhibition via a pseudosubstrate peptide inhibitor, GSCs are much less sensitive to ATM, suggesting that PKCĪ¹ acts along a different signaling axis in GSCs. Gene expression profiling of PRKCI-silenced GSCs revealed a novel role of the Notch signaling pathway in PKCĪ¹ mediated GSC survival. A proximity ligation assay showed that Notch1 and PKCĪ¹ are in close proximity in GSCs. Targeting PKCĪ¹ in the context of Notch signaling could be an effective way of attacking the GSC population in GBM
Compton Scattering in Ultra-Strong Magnetic Fields: Numerical and Analytical Behavior in the Relativistic Regime
This paper explores the effects of strong magnetic fields on the Compton
scattering of relativistic electrons. Recent studies of upscattering and energy
loss by relativistic electrons that have used the non-relativistic, magnetic
Thomson cross section for resonant scattering or the Klein-Nishina cross
section for non-resonant scattering do not account for the relativistic quantum
effects of strong fields ( G). We have derived a
simplified expression for the exact QED scattering cross section for the
broadly-applicable case where relativistic electrons move along the magnetic
field. To facilitate applications to astrophysical models, we have also
developed compact approximate expressions for both the differential and total
polarization-dependent cross sections, with the latter representing well the
exact total QED cross section even at the high fields believed to be present in
environments near the stellar surfaces of Soft Gamma-Ray Repeaters and
Anomalous X-Ray Pulsars. We find that strong magnetic fields significantly
lower the Compton scattering cross section below and at the resonance, when the
incident photon energy exceeds in the electron rest frame. The cross
section is strongly dependent on the polarization of the final scattered
photon. Below the cyclotron fundamental, mostly photons of perpendicular
polarization are produced in scatterings, a situation that also arises above
this resonance for sub-critical fields. However, an interesting discovery is
that for super-critical fields, a preponderance of photons of parallel
polarization results from scatterings above the cyclotron fundamental. This
characteristic is both a relativistic and magnetic effect not present in the
Thomson or Klein-Nishina limits.Comment: AASTeX format, 31 pages included 7 embedded figures, accepted for
publication in The Astrophysical Journa
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