138 research outputs found

    Capturing protest in urban environments:The ‘police kettle’ as a territorial strategy

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    ‘Kettling’ has emerged in recent decades as an established, if controversial, tactic of public order policing. Departing from a historical emphasis on dispersal, kettling instead acts to contain protesters within a police cordon for sustained periods of time. This article elaborates upon the spatial and temporal logics of kettling by investigating the conditions of is historical emergence. We argue that kettling should be understood as a territorial strategy that co-evolved in relation to forms of disruptive protest. Whereas techniques of crowd dispersal serve to diffuse a unified collective, ‘kettling’ aims to capture the volatile intensities of public dissent and exhaust its political energies. Drawing on police manuals, media coverage, accounts from activists and expert interviews, we show how the ‘kettle’ re-territorializes protest by acting on its spatio-temporal and affective constitution. By fabricating an inner outside of the urban milieu, freezing the time of collective mobilization and inducing debilitating affects such as fear and boredom, kettling intervenes into the scene of political subjectification that each congregation of protesting bodies seeks to fashion

    From basic mechanisms to clinical applications in heart protection, new players in cardiovascular diseases and cardiac theranostics: meeting report from the third international symposium on "New frontiers in cardiovascular research"

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    In this meeting report, particularly addressing the topic of protection of the cardiovascular system from ischemia/reperfusion injury, highlights are presented that relate to conditioning strategies of the heart with respect to molecular mechanisms and outcome in patients' cohorts, the influence of co-morbidities and medications, as well as the contribution of innate immune reactions in cardioprotection. Moreover, developmental or systems biology approaches bear great potential in systematically uncovering unexpected components involved in ischemia-reperfusion injury or heart regeneration. Based on the characterization of particular platelet integrins, mitochondrial redox-linked proteins, or lipid-diol compounds in cardiovascular diseases, their targeting by newly developed theranostics and technologies opens new avenues for diagnosis and therapy of myocardial infarction to improve the patients' outcome

    The Einstein Toolkit: A Community Computational Infrastructure for Relativistic Astrophysics

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    We describe the Einstein Toolkit, a community-driven, freely accessible computational infrastructure intended for use in numerical relativity, relativistic astrophysics, and other applications. The Toolkit, developed by a collaboration involving researchers from multiple institutions around the world, combines a core set of components needed to simulate astrophysical objects such as black holes, compact objects, and collapsing stars, as well as a full suite of analysis tools. The Einstein Toolkit is currently based on the Cactus Framework for high-performance computing and the Carpet adaptive mesh refinement driver. It implements spacetime evolution via the BSSN evolution system and general-relativistic hydrodynamics in a finite-volume discretization. The toolkit is under continuous development and contains many new code components that have been publicly released for the first time and are described in this article. We discuss the motivation behind the release of the toolkit, the philosophy underlying its development, and the goals of the project. A summary of the implemented numerical techniques is included, as are results of numerical test covering a variety of sample astrophysical problems.Comment: 62 pages, 20 figure

    A Measurement of Gravitational Lensing of the Cosmic Microwave Background Using SPT-3G 2018 Data

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    We present a measurement of gravitational lensing over 1500 deg2^2 of the Southern sky using SPT-3G temperature data at 95 and 150 GHz taken in 2018. The lensing amplitude relative to a fiducial Planck 2018 Λ\LambdaCDM cosmology is found to be 1.020±0.0601.020\pm0.060, excluding instrumental and astrophysical systematic uncertainties. We conduct extensive systematic and null tests to check the robustness of the lensing measurements, and report a minimum-variance combined lensing power spectrum over angular multipoles of 50<L<200050<L<2000, which we use to constrain cosmological models. When analyzed alone and jointly with primary cosmic microwave background (CMB) spectra within the Λ\LambdaCDM model, our lensing amplitude measurements are consistent with measurements from SPT-SZ, SPTpol, ACT, and Planck. Incorporating loose priors on the baryon density and other parameters including uncertainties on a foreground bias template, we obtain a 1σ1\sigma constraint on σ8Ωm0.25=0.595±0.026\sigma_8 \Omega_{\rm m}^{0.25}=0.595 \pm 0.026 using the SPT-3G 2018 lensing data alone, where σ8\sigma_8 is a common measure of the amplitude of structure today and Ωm\Omega_{\rm m} is the matter density parameter. Combining SPT-3G 2018 lensing measurements with baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) data, we derive parameter constraints of σ8=0.810±0.033\sigma_8 = 0.810 \pm 0.033, S8σ8(Ωm/0.3)0.5=0.836±0.039S_8 \equiv \sigma_8(\Omega_{\rm m}/0.3)^{0.5}= 0.836 \pm 0.039, and Hubble constant H0=68.81.6+1.3H_0 =68.8^{+1.3}_{-1.6} km s1^{-1} Mpc1^{-1}. Using CMB anisotropy and lensing measurements from SPT-3G only, we provide independent constraints on the spatial curvature of ΩK=0.0140.026+0.023\Omega_{K} = 0.014^{+0.023}_{-0.026} (95% C.L.) and the dark energy density of ΩΛ=0.7220.026+0.031\Omega_\Lambda = 0.722^{+0.031}_{-0.026} (68% C.L.). When combining SPT-3G lensing data with SPT-3G CMB anisotropy and BAO data, we find an upper limit on the sum of the neutrino masses of mν<0.30\sum m_{\nu}< 0.30 eV (95% C.L.)

    A Measurement of the CMB Temperature Power Spectrum and Constraints on Cosmology from the SPT-3G 2018 TT/TE/EE Data Set

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    We present a sample-variance-limited measurement of the temperature power spectrum (TTTT) of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) using observations of a  ⁣1500deg2\sim\! 1500 \,\mathrm{deg}^2 field made by SPT-3G in 2018. We report multifrequency power spectrum measurements at 95, 150, and 220GHz covering the angular multipole range 750<3000750 \leq \ell < 3000. We combine this TTTT measurement with the published polarization power spectrum measurements from the 2018 observing season and update their associated covariance matrix to complete the SPT-3G 2018 TT/TE/EETT/TE/EE data set. This is the first analysis to present cosmological constraints from SPT TTTT, TETE, and EEEE power spectrum measurements jointly. We blind the cosmological results and subject the data set to a series of consistency tests at the power spectrum and parameter level. We find excellent agreement between frequencies and spectrum types and our results are robust to the modeling of astrophysical foregrounds. We report results for Λ\LambdaCDM and a series of extensions, drawing on the following parameters: the amplitude of the gravitational lensing effect on primary power spectra ALA_\mathrm{L}, the effective number of neutrino species NeffN_{\mathrm{eff}}, the primordial helium abundance YPY_{\mathrm{P}}, and the baryon clumping factor due to primordial magnetic fields bb. We find that the SPT-3G 2018 T/TE/EET/TE/EE data are well fit by Λ\LambdaCDM with a probability-to-exceed of 15%15\%. For Λ\LambdaCDM, we constrain the expansion rate today to H0=68.3±1.5kms1Mpc1H_0 = 68.3 \pm 1.5\,\mathrm{km\,s^{-1}\,Mpc^{-1}} and the combined structure growth parameter to S8=0.797±0.042S_8 = 0.797 \pm 0.042. The SPT-based results are effectively independent of Planck, and the cosmological parameter constraints from either data set are within <1σ<1\,\sigma of each other. (abridged)Comment: 35 Pages, 17 Figures, 11 Table

    VEGF Promotes Malaria-Associated Acute Lung Injury in Mice

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    The spectrum of the clinical presentation and severity of malaria infections is broad, ranging from uncomplicated febrile illness to severe forms of disease such as cerebral malaria (CM), acute lung injury (ALI), acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), pregnancy-associated malaria (PAM) or severe anemia (SA). Rodent models that mimic human CM, PAM and SA syndromes have been established. Here, we show that DBA/2 mice infected with P. berghei ANKA constitute a new model for malaria-associated ALI. Up to 60% of the mice showed dyspnea, airway obstruction and hypoxemia and died between days 7 and 12 post-infection. The most common pathological findings were pleural effusion, pulmonary hemorrhage and edema, consistent with increased lung vessel permeability, while the blood-brain barrier was intact. Malaria-associated ALI correlated with high levels of circulating VEGF, produced de novo in the spleen, and its blockage led to protection of mice from this syndrome. In addition, either splenectomization or administration of the anti-inflammatory molecule carbon monoxide led to a significant reduction in the levels of sera VEGF and to protection from ALI. The similarities between the physiopathological lesions described here and the ones occurring in humans, as well as the demonstration that VEGF is a critical host factor in the onset of malaria-associated ALI in mice, not only offers important mechanistic insights into the processes underlying the pathology related with malaria but may also pave the way for interventional studies

    Overview of the TCV tokamak experimental programme

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    The tokamak a configuration variable (TCV) continues to leverage its unique shaping capabilities, flexible heating systems and modern control system to address critical issues in preparation for ITER and a fusion power plant. For the 2019-20 campaign its configurational flexibility has been enhanced with the installation of removable divertor gas baffles, its diagnostic capabilities with an extensive set of upgrades and its heating systems with new dual frequency gyrotrons. The gas baffles reduce coupling between the divertor and the main chamber and allow for detailed investigations on the role of fuelling in general and, together with upgraded boundary diagnostics, test divertor and edge models in particular. The increased heating capabilities broaden the operational regime to include T (e)/T (i) similar to 1 and have stimulated refocussing studies from L-mode to H-mode across a range of research topics. ITER baseline parameters were reached in type-I ELMy H-modes and alternative regimes with \u27small\u27 (or no) ELMs explored. Most prominently, negative triangularity was investigated in detail and confirmed as an attractive scenario with H-mode level core confinement but an L-mode edge. Emphasis was also placed on control, where an increased number of observers, actuators and control solutions became available and are now integrated into a generic control framework as will be needed in future devices. The quantity and quality of results of the 2019-20 TCV campaign are a testament to its successful integration within the European research effort alongside a vibrant domestic programme and international collaborations
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