Central Banking, Climate Change and Green Finance

Responsibility for financial and macroeconomic stability implicitly or explicitly lies with the central bank, which therefore ought to address climate-related and other environmental risks on a systemic level. Furthermore, central banks, through their regulatory oversight over money, credit, and the financial system, are in a powerful position to support the development of green finance models and enforce an adequate pricing of environmental and carbon risk by financial institutions. The central topic of this paperare the public financial governance policies through which central banks, as well as other relevant financial regulatory agencies, can address environmental risk and promote sustainable finance. The paperfirst discusses the reasons why central banks should be concerned with aligning finance with sustainable development. Second, the paperreviews the tools and instruments that can be utilized by central banks and financial regulatory agencies to address environmental risk and promote green finance and sustainable development. Third, the paperprovides a brief review of green public financial governance initiatives

Mean-field models for non-Markovian epidemics on networks

This paper introduces a novel extension of the edge-based compartmental model to epidemics where the transmission and recovery processes are driven by general independent probability distributions. Edge-based compartmental modelling is just one of many different approaches used to model the spread of an infectious disease on a network; the major result of this paper is the rigorous proof that the edge-based compartmental model and the message passing models are equivalent for general independent transmission and recovery processes. This implies that the new model is exact on the ensemble of configuration model networks of infinite size. For the case of Markovian transmission themessage passing model is re-parametrised into a pairwise-like model which is then used to derive many well-known pairwise models for regular networks, or when the infectious period is exponentially distributed or is of a fixed length

Prevalence and psychopathological characteristics of depression in consecutive otorhinolaryngologic inpatients

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>High prevalence of depression has been reported in otorhinolaryngologic patients (ORL). However, studies using a semi-structured interview to determine the prevalence of depression in ORL are lacking. Therefore the present study sought to determine the depression prevalence in ORL applying a semi-structured diagnostic interview and to further characterize the pathopsychological and demographic characteristics of depression in these patients.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>One-hundred inpatients of the otorhinolaryngologic department of a German university hospital participated voluntarily (age M = 38.8 years, SD = 13.9; 38.0% female). Depression was assessed using a clinical interview in which the International Diagnostic Checklist for depression (IDCL) was applied. Patients completed the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI) which constitutes three composite scores and nine symptom scales and the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). Multivariate analyses of variance, correlations and effect sizes were conducted.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A prevalence of depression of 21.0% was determined, 38.0% of the depressed patients were female. Depressed patients showed higher scores on the BSI-scales "interpersonal sensitivity", "depression", "anxiety", "phobic anxiety" and "psychoticism" with medium effect sizes.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>High prevalence of depression was found which is in accordance with results of prior studies. Depressed patients showed higher psychological distress as compared to non-depressed patients. The results call for carrying on in engaging in depression research and routine depression screening in ORL.</p

A Cysteine Protease Is Critical for Babesia spp. Transmission in Haemaphysalis Ticks

Vector ticks possess a unique system that enables them to digest large amounts of host blood and to transmit various animal and human pathogens, suggesting the existence of evolutionally acquired proteolytic mechanisms. We report here the molecular and reverse genetic characterization of a multifunctional cysteine protease, longipain, from the babesial parasite vector tick Haemaphysalis longicornis. Longipain shares structural similarity with papain-family cysteine proteases obtained from invertebrates and vertebrates. Endogenous longipain was mainly expressed in the midgut epithelium and was specifically localized at lysosomal vacuoles and possibly released into the lumen. Its expression was up-regulated by host blood feeding. Enzymatic functional assays using in vitro and in vivo substrates revealed that longipain hydrolysis occurs over a broad range of pH and temperature. Haemoparasiticidal assays showed that longipain dose-dependently killed tick-borne Babesia parasites, and its babesiacidal effect occurred via specific adherence to the parasite membranes. Disruption of endogenous longipain by RNA interference revealed that longipain is involved in the digestion of the host blood meal. In addition, the knockdown ticks contained an increased number of parasites, suggesting that longipain exerts a killing effect against the midgut-stage Babesia parasites in ticks. Our results suggest that longipain is essential for tick survival, and may have a role in controlling the transmission of tick-transmittable Babesia parasites

Conscious perception of errors and its relation to the anterior insula

To detect erroneous action outcomes is necessary for flexible adjustments and therefore a prerequisite of adaptive, goal-directed behavior. While performance monitoring has been studied intensively over two decades and a vast amount of knowledge on its functional neuroanatomy has been gathered, much less is known about conscious error perception, often referred to as error awareness. Here, we review and discuss the conditions under which error awareness occurs, its neural correlates and underlying functional neuroanatomy. We focus specifically on the anterior insula, which has been shown to be (a) reliably activated during performance monitoring and (b) modulated by error awareness. Anterior insular activity appears to be closely related to autonomic responses associated with consciously perceived errors, although the causality and directions of these relationships still needs to be unraveled. We discuss the role of the anterior insula in generating versus perceiving autonomic responses and as a key player in balancing effortful task-related and resting-state activity. We suggest that errors elicit reactions highly reminiscent of an orienting response and may thus induce the autonomic arousal needed to recruit the required mental and physical resources. We discuss the role of norepinephrine activity in eliciting sufficiently strong central and autonomic nervous responses enabling the necessary adaptation as well as conscious error perception

Fundamental differences in patterns of retinal ageing between primates and mice

Photoreceptors have high metabolic demands and age rapidly, undermining visual function. We base our understanding mainly on ageing mice where elevated inflammation, extracellular deposition, including that of amyloid beta, and rod and cone photoreceptor loss occur, but cones are not lost in ageing primate although their function declines, revealing that primate and mouse age differently. We examine ageing primate retinae and show elevated stress but low inflammation. However, aged primates have a >70% reduction in adenosine triphosphate (ATP) and a decrease in cytochrome c oxidase. There is a shift in cone mitochondrial positioning and glycolytic activity increases. Bruch’s membrane thickens but unlike in mice, amyloid beta is absent. Hence, reduced ATP may explain cone functional decline in ageing but their retained presence offers the possibility of functional restoration if they can be fuelled appropriately to restore cellular function. This is important because as humans we largely depend on cone function to see and are rarely fully dark adapted. Presence of limited aged inflammation and amyloid beta deposition question some of the therapeutic approaches taken to resolve problems of retinal ageing in humans and the possible lack of success in clinical trials in macular degeneration that have targeted inflammatory agents

The opposing transcriptional functions of Sin3a and c-Myc are required to maintain tissue homeostasis.

How the proto-oncogene c-Myc balances the processes of stem-cell self-renewal, proliferation and differentiation in adult tissues is largely unknown. We explored c-Myc's transcriptional roles at the epidermal differentiation complex, a locus essential for skin maturation. Binding of c-Myc can simultaneously recruit (Klf4, Ovol-1) and displace (Cebpa, Mxi1 and Sin3a) specific sets of differentiation-specific transcriptional regulators to epidermal differentiation complex genes. We found that Sin3a causes deacetylation of c-Myc protein to directly repress c-Myc activity. In the absence of Sin3a, genomic recruitment of c-Myc to the epidermal differentiation complex is enhanced, and re-activation of c-Myc-target genes drives aberrant epidermal proliferation and differentiation. Simultaneous deletion of c-Myc and Sin3a reverts the skin phenotype to normal. Our results identify how the balance of two transcriptional key regulators can maintain tissue homeostasis through a negative feedback loop