Der Affekt des vermeintlichen Siegers: Zu Hauke Brunkhorsts Auseinandersetzung mit Antiintellektualismus und Konservatismus

Die Tagesordnung der politischen Diskussion wird seit geraumer Zeit nicht mehr von der kritischen Intelligenz festgelegt. Die »Themenführerschaft« wurde an die Neokonservativen abgegeben. Ist dies bloß das (letzte) Aufbäumen der »deutschen Manadarine« gegen die im Zuge der Demokratisierung erfolgte gesellschaftliche Institutionalisierung der Rolle kritischer Intellektueller, die ihren entscheidenden Schub in den sechziger Jahren erhielt - wie dies Hauke Brunkhorst behauptet- oder spiegelt sich darin vielmehr eine Krise des Projekts der Modeme wider, die auch Position und Funktion der kritischen Intellektuellen umfaßt? Der Neokonservatismus kann auf tiefgreifende gesellschaftliche Enwicklungen bauen. Insbesondere die Gruppe der »Modernitätstraditionalisten« hat ein analytisches Instrumentarium entwickelt, mit dem sie die Ambivalenz der kulturellen Prozesse der achtziger Jahre erfassen und auf die sie ideologisch-politisch einwirken kann. Eine Geringschätzung des westdeutschen Neokonservatismus durch kritische Intellektuelle ist irreführend

Electrical microcurrent to prevent conditioning film and bacterial adhesion to urological stents

Long-term catheters remain a significant clinical problem in urology due to the high rate of bacterial colonization, infection, and encrustation. Minutes after insertion of a catheter, depositions of host urinary components onto the catheter surface form a conditioning film actively supporting the bacterial adhesion process. We investigated the possibility of reducing or avoiding the buildup of these naturally forming conditioning films and of preventing bacterial adhesion by applying different current densities to platinum electrodes as a possible catheter coating material. In this model we employed a defined environment using artificial urine and Proteus mirabilis. The film formation and desorption was analyzed by highly mass sensitive quartz crystal microbalance and surface sensitive atomic force microscopy. Further, we performed bacterial staining to assess adherence, growth, and survival on the electrodes with different current densities. By applying alternating microcurrent densities on platinum electrodes, we could produce a self regenerative surface which actively removed the conditioning film and significantly reduced bacterial adherence, growth, and survival. The results of this study could easily be adapted to a catheter design for clinical us

Massive star evolution: from the early to the present day Universe

Mass loss and axial rotation are playing key roles in shaping the evolution of massive stars. They affect the tracks in the HR diagram, the lifetimes, the surface abundances, the hardness of the radiation field, the chemical yields, the presupernova status, the nature of the remnant, the mechanical energy released in the interstellar medium, etc... In this paper, after recalling a few characteristics of mass loss and rotation, we review the effects of these two processes at different metallicities. Rotation probably has its most important effects at low metallicities, while mass loss and rotation deeply affect the evolution of massive stars at solar and higher than solar metallicities.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, IAU Symp. 252, L. CUP, Deng, K.L. Chan, C. Chiosi, ed

S-process production in rotating massive stars at solar and low metallicities

This article has been accepted for publication by Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. © The Authors. Published by the Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society.Rotation was shown to have a strong impact on the structure and light element nucleosynthesis in massive stars. In particular, models including rotation can reproduce the primary nitrogen observed in halo extremely metal poor (EMP) stars. Additional exploratory models showed that rotation may enhance s-process production at low metallicity. Here we present a large grid of massive star models including rotation and a full s-process network to study the impact of rotation on the weak s-process.We explore the possibility of producing significant amounts of elements beyond the strontium peak, which is where the weak s-process usually stops.We used the Geneva stellar evolution code coupled to an enlarged reaction network with 737 nuclear species up to bismuth to calculate 15-40M⊙ models at four metallicities (Z = 0.014, 10-3, 10-5 and 10-7) from the main sequence up to the end of oxygen burning. We confirm that rotation-induced mixing between the convective H-shell and He-core enables an important production of primary 14N and 22Ne and s-process at low metallicity. At low metallicity, even though the production is still limited by the initial number of iron seeds, rotation enhances the s-process production, even for isotopes heavier than strontium, by increasing the neutronto- seed ratio. The increase in this ratio is a direct consequence of the primary production of 22Ne. Despite nuclear uncertainties affecting the s-process production and stellar uncertainties affecting the rotation-induced mixing, our results show a robust production of s-process at low metallicity when rotation is taken into account. Considering models with a distribution of initial rotation rates enables us to reproduce the observed large range of the [Sr/Ba] ratios in (carbon-enhanced and normal) EMP stars.Peer reviewe

Numerical simulation of the impact of COVID-19 lockdown on tropospheric composition and aerosol radiative forcing in Europe

Aerosols influence the Earth\u27s energy balance directly by modifying the radiation transfer and indirectly by altering the cloud microphysics. Anthropogenic aerosol emissions dropped considerably when the global COVID-19 pandemic resulted in severe restraints on mobility, production, and public life in spring 2020. We assess the effects of these reduced emissions on direct and indirect aerosol radiative forcing over Europe, excluding contributions from contrails. We simulate the atmospheric composition with the ECHAM5/MESSy Atmospheric Chemistry (EMAC) model in a baseline (business-as-usual) and a reduced emission scenario. The model results are compared to aircraft observations from the BLUESKY aircraft campaign performed in May–June 2020 over Europe. The model agrees well with most of the observations, except for sulfur dioxide, particulate sulfate, and nitrate in the upper troposphere, likely due to a biased representation of stratospheric aerosol chemistry and missing information about volcanic eruptions. The comparison with a baseline scenario shows that the largest relative differences for tracers and aerosols are found in the upper troposphere, around the aircraft cruise altitude, due to the reduced aircraft emissions, while the largest absolute changes are present at the surface. We also find an increase in all-sky shortwave radiation of 0.21 ± 0.05 W m⁻² at the surface in Europe for May 2020, solely attributable to the direct aerosol effect, which is dominated by decreased aerosol scattering of sunlight, followed by reduced aerosol absorption caused by lower concentrations of inorganic and black carbon aerosols in the troposphere. A further increase in shortwave radiation from aerosol indirect effects was found to be much smaller than its variability. Impacts on ice crystal concentrations, cloud droplet number concentrations, and effective crystal radii are found to be negligible

Improving the reach of vaccines to low-resource regions, with a needle-free vaccine delivery device and long-term thermostabilization

Dry-coated microprojections can deliver vaccine to abundant antigen-presenting cells in the skin and induce efficient immune responses and the dry-coated vaccines are expected to be thermostable at elevated temperatures. In this paper, we show that we have dramatically improved our previously reported gas-jet drying coating method and greatly increased the delivery efficiency of coating from patch to skin to from 6.5% to 32.5%, by both varying the coating parameters and removing the patch edge. Combined with our previous dose sparing report of influenza vaccine delivery in a mouse model, the results show that we now achieve equivalent protective immune responses as intramuscular injection (with the needle and syringe), but with only 1/30th of the actual dose. We also show that influenza vaccine coated microprojection patches are stable for at least 6 months at 23 degrees C. inducing comparable immunogenicity with freshly coated patches. The dry-coated microprojection patches thus have key and unique attributes in ultimately meeting the medical need in certain low-resource regions with low vaccine affordability and difficulty in maintaining "cold-chain" for vaccine storage and transport. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Impact of reduced emissions on direct and indirect aerosol radiative forcing during COVID-19 lockdown in Europe

Aerosols influence the Earth’s energy balance through direct radiative effects and indirectly by altering the cloud microphysics. Anthropogenic aerosol emissions dropped considerably when the global COVID–19 pandemic resulted in severe restraints on mobility, production, and public life in spring 2020. Here we assess the effects of these reduced emissions on direct and indirect aerosol radiative forcing over Europe, excluding contributions from contrails. We simulate the atmospheric composition with the ECHAM5/MESSy Atmospheric Chemistry (EMAC) model in a baseline (business as usual) and a reduced emission scenario. The model results are compared to aircraft observations from the BLUESKY aircraft campaign performed in May June 2020 over Europe

Tuning the electrochemical swelling of polyelectrolyte multilayers toward nanoactuation

We discuss physicochemical determinants of electrochemical polyelectrolyte multilayer swelling that are relevant to actuator usage. We used electrochemical quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation monitoring (EC-QCM-D) and cyclic voltammetry to compare the electrochemical swelling of two types of ferrocyanide-containing polyelectrolyte multilayers, poly(l-glutamic acid)/poly(allylamine hydrochloride) (PGA/PAH), and carboxymethyl cellulose/poly(diallyldimethylammonium chloride) (CMC/PDDA). We showed that ferrocyanide oxidation causes the swelling of PGA/PAH multilayers whereas it results in the contraction of CMC/PDDA multilayers. This behavior can be attributed to the presence of a positive and a negative Donnan potential in the case of PGA/PAH and CMC/PDDA multilayers, respectively. Using multilayers consisting of PGA and poly(allylamine) ferrocene (PGA/PAH-FC), we applied EC-QCM-D and demonstrated potentiostatic thickness control with nanometer precision and showed that the multilayer’s thickness depends linearly on the applied potential within a certain potential range