“A wind of change” in recreational fisheries? Recreational fishermen and wind farms: current use and perception

Offshore wind farms create opportunities for recreational fishermen in Belgium, since the presence of hard substrates and the closure for trawling create a favorable habitat for fish. After the construction in 2008, a concentration of anglers was observed in the vicinity of the first wind farm during monitoring. In the following years, however, the interest of anglers for the wind farms seemed to disappear. To elucidate the evolution in the relation between recreational angling intensity and wind farms, this study aimed to assess how Belgian recreational fishermen perceive wind farms, how often they visit them and why, and which fish species they (expect to) catch. Data were derived from the annual DCF survey for recreational fishermen. Less than 2% of the sea anglers reported to go fishing in the larger wind farm area, even when 30 to 40 percent of the respondents either expected more fish, bigger fish or other fish species. The main reasons to stay away from wind farms is because entering the wind farms themselves is not allowed, because the distance to the wind farms is relatively large, because charter vessels do not offer fish trips to wind farms, and because wind farms are protection zones and nursery areas for fish. 40% of the respondents would consider fishing inside wind farms if it were allowed, mainly because they expect more or other fish. This is a clear indication that the enforcement of wind farm closure for fisheries and shipping is vital when aiming at the creation and/or restoration of nursing grounds in the area. However, the large distance to the wind farms will probably continue to limit fishing pressure, even if wind farms would (partly) be opened for recreational fisheries

Scientific Expertise in Child Protection Policies and Juvenile Justice Practices in Twentieth-Century Belgium

Modern society cannot function without experts and yet we increasingly question the authority of those who advise us. The essays in this collection explore our reliance on experts within a historical context and across a wide range of fields, including agriculture, engineering, health sciences and labour management. Contributors argue that experts were highly aware of their audiences and used performance to gain both scientific and popular support

Comprehensive transcriptome-wide analysis of spliceopathy correction of myotonic dystrophy using CRISPR-Cas9 in iPSCs-derived cardiomyocytes

CTG repeat expansion (CTGexp) is associated with aberrant alternate splicing that contributes to cardiac dysfunction in myotonic dystrophy type 1 (DM1). Excision of this CTGexp repeat using CRISPR-Cas resulted in the disappearance of punctate ribonuclear foci in cardiomyocyte-like cells derived from DM1-induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). This was associated with correction of the underlying spliceopathy as determined by RNA sequencing and alternate splicing analysis. Certain genes were of particular interest due to their role in cardiac development, maturation, and function (TPM4, CYP2J2, DMD, MBNL3, CACNA1H, ROCK2, ACTB) or their association with splicing (SMN2, GCFC2, MBNL3). Moreover, while comparing isogenic CRISPR-Cas9-corrected versus non-corrected DM1 cardiomyocytes, a prominent difference in the splicing pattern for a number of candidate genes was apparent pertaining to genes that are associated with cardiac function (TNNT, TNNT2, TTN, TPM1, SYNE1, CACNA1A, MTMR1, NEBL, TPM1), cellular signaling (NCOR2, CLIP1, LRRFIP2, CLASP1, CAMK2G), and other DM1-related genes (i.e., NUMA1, MBNL2, LDB3) in addition to the disease-causing DMPK gene itself. Subsequent validation using a selected gene subset, including MBNL1, MBNL2, INSR, ADD3, and CRTC2, further confirmed correction of the spliceopathy following CTGexp repeat excision. To our knowledge, the present study provides the first comprehensive unbiased transcriptome- wide analysis of the differential splicing landscape in DM1 patient-derived cardiac cells after excision of the CTGexp repeat using CRISPR-Cas9, showing reversal of the abnormal cardiac spliceopathy in DM1

Entanglement-assisted quantum low-density parity-check codes

This paper develops a general method for constructing entanglement-assisted quantum low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, which is based on combinatorial design theory. Explicit constructions are given for entanglement-assisted quantum error-correcting codes (EAQECCs) with many desirable properties. These properties include the requirement of only one initial entanglement bit, high error correction performance, high rates, and low decoding complexity. The proposed method produces infinitely many new codes with a wide variety of parameters and entanglement requirements. Our framework encompasses various codes including the previously known entanglement-assisted quantum LDPC codes having the best error correction performance and many new codes with better block error rates in simulations over the depolarizing channel. We also determine important parameters of several well-known classes of quantum and classical LDPC codes for previously unsettled cases.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figures. Final version appearing in Physical Review