Macrophages directly contribute collagen to scar formation during zebrafish heart regeneration and mouse heart repair

Canonical roles for macrophages in mediating the fibrotic response after a heart attack include extracellular matrix turnover and activation of cardiac fibroblasts to initiate collagen deposition. Here we reveal that macrophages directly contribute collagen to the forming post-injury scar. Unbiased transcriptomics shows an upregulation of collagens in both zebrafish and mouse macrophages following heart injury. Adoptive transfer of macrophages, from either collagen-tagged zebrafish or adult mouse GFPtpz-collagen donors, enhances scar formation via cell autonomous production of collagen. In zebrafish, the majority of tagged collagen localises proximal to the injury, within the overlying epicardial region, suggesting a possible distinction between macrophage-deposited collagen and that predominantly laid-down by myofibroblasts. Macrophage-specific targeting of col4a3bpa and cognate col4a1 in zebrafish significantly reduces scarring in cryoinjured hosts. Our findings contrast with the current model of scarring, whereby collagen deposition is exclusively attributed to myofibroblasts, and implicate macrophages as direct contributors to fibrosis during heart repair

Altimetry for the future: Building on 25 years of progress

In 2018 we celebrated 25 years of development of radar altimetry, and the progress achieved by this methodology in the fields of global and coastal oceanography, hydrology, geodesy and cryospheric sciences. Many symbolic major events have celebrated these developments, e.g., in Venice, Italy, the 15th (2006) and 20th (2012) years of progress and more recently, in 2018, in Ponta Delgada, Portugal, 25 Years of Progress in Radar Altimetry. On this latter occasion it was decided to collect contributions of scientists, engineers and managers involved in the worldwide altimetry community to depict the state of altimetry and propose recommendations for the altimetry of the future. This paper summarizes contributions and recommendations that were collected and provides guidance for future mission design, research activities, and sustainable operational radar altimetry data exploitation. Recommendations provided are fundamental for optimizing further scientific and operational advances of oceanographic observations by altimetry, including requirements for spatial and temporal resolution of altimetric measurements, their accuracy and continuity. There are also new challenges and new openings mentioned in the paper that are particularly crucial for observations at higher latitudes, for coastal oceanography, for cryospheric studies and for hydrology. The paper starts with a general introduction followed by a section on Earth System Science including Ocean Dynamics, Sea Level, the Coastal Ocean, Hydrology, the Cryosphere and Polar Oceans and the ‘‘Green” Ocean, extending the frontier from biogeochemistry to marine ecology. Applications are described in a subsequent section, which covers Operational Oceanography, Weather, Hurricane Wave and Wind Forecasting, Climate projection. Instruments’ development and satellite missions’ evolutions are described in a fourth section. A fifth section covers the key observations that altimeters provide and their potential complements, from other Earth observation measurements to in situ data. Section 6 identifies the data and methods and provides some accuracy and resolution requirements for the wet tropospheric correction, the orbit and other geodetic requirements, the Mean Sea Surface, Geoid and Mean Dynamic Topography, Calibration and Validation, data accuracy, data access and handling (including the DUACS system). Section 7 brings a transversal view on scales, integration, artificial intelligence, and capacity building (education and training). Section 8 reviews the programmatic issues followed by a conclusion

Altimetry for the future: building on 25 years of progress

In 2018 we celebrated 25 years of development of radar altimetry, and the progress achieved by this methodology in the fields of global and coastal oceanography, hydrology, geodesy and cryospheric sciences. Many symbolic major events have celebrated these developments, e.g., in Venice, Italy, the 15th (2006) and 20th (2012) years of progress and more recently, in 2018, in Ponta Delgada, Portugal, 25 Years of Progress in Radar Altimetry. On this latter occasion it was decided to collect contributions of scientists, engineers and managers involved in the worldwide altimetry community to depict the state of altimetry and propose recommendations for the altimetry of the future. This paper summarizes contributions and recommendations that were collected and provides guidance for future mission design, research activities, and sustainable operational radar altimetry data exploitation. Recommendations provided are fundamental for optimizing further scientific and operational advances of oceanographic observations by altimetry, including requirements for spatial and temporal resolution of altimetric measurements, their accuracy and continuity. There are also new challenges and new openings mentioned in the paper that are particularly crucial for observations at higher latitudes, for coastal oceanography, for cryospheric studies and for hydrology. The paper starts with a general introduction followed by a section on Earth System Science including Ocean Dynamics, Sea Level, the Coastal Ocean, Hydrology, the Cryosphere and Polar Oceans and the “Green” Ocean, extending the frontier from biogeochemistry to marine ecology. Applications are described in a subsequent section, which covers Operational Oceanography, Weather, Hurricane Wave and Wind Forecasting, Climate projection. Instruments’ development and satellite missions’ evolutions are described in a fourth section. A fifth section covers the key observations that altimeters provide and their potential complements, from other Earth observation measurements to in situ data. Section 6 identifies the data and methods and provides some accuracy and resolution requirements for the wet tropospheric correction, the orbit and other geodetic requirements, the Mean Sea Surface, Geoid and Mean Dynamic Topography, Calibration and Validation, data accuracy, data access and handling (including the DUACS system). Section 7 brings a transversal view on scales, integration, artificial intelligence, and capacity building (education and training). Section 8 reviews the programmatic issues followed by a conclusion

A bad time of it in this world : The construction of the unattractive woman in American film of the 1940s

In a culture that has traditionally valued women\u27s looks above all else they offer, ugliness has been a site where powerful forms of oppression--sexism, racism classism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia--intersect. Just as physical determinants of unattractiveness have fluctuated along with changing cultural ideals, film\u27s construction and treatment of the unattractive woman have varied throughout the hundred years of film history, forming a site upon which one may explore the shifting socio-cultural imperatives presented to U.S. women in the 20th century. Using socio-historic and feminist methods, I argue that film constructs ugliness as carefully as it does beauty, and that, as cinematic signifiers of ugliness are fluid, the look of the camera is the most reliable indicator of ugliness and spectator (non-)identification. Cinematic representations of ugly women may be broken down into two broad categories whose dimensions--barely evident during the silent film era--became fixed during the classical era of Hollywood cinema. I refer to these depictions as the ugly duckling and the truly ugly woman. The ugly duckling is a sympathetic character, transformed--usually at the hands/eyes/scalpel of a man--from ugly to beautiful, while the truly ugly woman, never transformed, demonstrates that it is she herself, not only her appearance, that is ugly. This dissertation focuses primarily on the cinematic construction of the ugly woman during the 1940\u27s--an age generally regarded by film historians as Hollywood\u27s Golden Era ; a decade of intense military, economic, and social upheavals reflected in the gender messages presented on the silver screen; and a period when the ugly duckling was more prevalent than at any other time in film history. Though the ugly duckling plot was compromised often by patronizing treatment of the material, and always by the utilization of a glamorous star appearing in homely drag (rather than the employment of an average-looking actress), it nevertheless merits serious and extended analysis because of its potential to present powerfully liberatory images of women on the screen

Edge Waves on the Sydney Coast

Pressure and current oscillations at periods of 40 s to 17 min observed during storm conditions at two locations separated by 560 m in the alongshore direction in the coastal ocean near Sydney, Australia, indicate the existence of infragravity waves having amplitudes of ∼20 cm and velocities of ∼10 cm s−1. The observed infragravity waves appear to be locally forced by the wind wave envelope through radiation stress, yet the observed alongshore phase differences of the infragravity waves are consistent with those predicted from free edge wave theory for low-mode edge waves travelling northward and the relationship of pressure to velocity at each location is also consistent with free edge wave theory. As a function of time, the infragravity wave spectral energy grows and decays in step with the longer-period wind waves, suggesting a continuous transfer of energy. The infragravity waves appear to contain energy in both directly forced and freely propagating (edge wave) oscillations. The edge waves may be generated either by radiation stress as outlined above, by a resonant triad mechanism, or by a combination of the two. An edited version of this paper was published by AGU. Copyright 1987 American Geophysical Union.Science, Faculty ofEarth and Ocean Sciences, Department ofReviewedFacult

Evaluation of GlobCurrent surface ocean current products: A case study in Australia

Australia's marginal seas include a wide range of ocean current regimes ranging from tide-dominated in the North-West where the continental shelf is wide, to boundary current- and eddy-dominated in the South-East, where the shelf is narrow. Here, we take the opportunity to test the GlobCurrent surface ocean current products against in-situ observations in these two contrasting regimes. Observations by Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP) instruments of Australia's Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS) and drifting buoys of the Global Drifting Programme (GDP) are used. The monthly-timescale variability of the GlobCurrent alongshore current component is in moderately good agreement with the observations on the continental shelf in the South-East but neither the shorter period variability nor the long-term mean are representative of the ADCP observations. While the observed tidal currents are negligibly small, the wind-driven signals are not. But these are evidently too transient to be adequately sampled by altimetry. The inclusion of an Ekman component does not represent these signals because the interaction of the Ekman transport with the coastal boundary condition is not included. Similarly, the error of the time-mean velocity, which is the dominant error, is because that product is not designed to represent the highly anisotropic nature of the sea level gradients over the continental shelf nor the constraints on the flow field that are imposed by the topography. We thus conclude that the GlobCurrent product needs improvements before it can be described as very suitable for applications on this, and probably other, narrow continental shelf. Off the continental shelf, in contrast, the GlobCurrent products compare quite well with the trajectories of drifting buoys, confirming that the products are quite suitable for blue-water applications. In contrast to the South-East, the tides are very strong in the North-West region of Australia. The sub-tidal variability is weak, in both relative and absolute senses. Consequently, the removal of the tidal signal from the sea level observations needs to be very complete for the residual error to be smaller than the true sub-tidal signal. Transient wind forced signals are also occasionally large so this step of the de-aliasing also needs to be very accurate. Unfortunately, it appears that more work is required before accurate estimates of sub-tidal variability are available from GlobCurrent: the magnitude of the GlobCurrent estimates of sub-tidal current variability far exceed the magnitude of, and are uncorrelated with, the detided ADCP data

Development and Evaluation of 3D-Printed Dry Microneedle Electrodes for Surface Electromyography

Surface electromyography (sEMG) allows for direct measurement of electrical muscle activity with use in fundamental research and many applications in health and sport. However, conventional surface electrode technology can suffer from poor signal quality, requires careful skin preparation, and is commonly not suited for long-term recording. These drawbacks have challenged translation of sEMG to clinical applications. In this paper, dry 3D-printed microneedle electrodes (MNEs) are proposed to overcome some of the limitations of conventional electrodes. Employing a direct-metal-laser-sintering (DMLS) 3D printing process, a two-step fabrication method is developed to produce sharp medical-grade stainless steel MNEs. The developed MNEs are compared to needle-free versions and to standard wet Ag/AgCl electrodes. Functional testing is conducted to analyze the electrode–skin impedance in healthy human volunteers and sEMG data are recorded from the biceps brachii muscle. Results show that microneedle electrodes display a greatly reduced (≈63%) electrode–skin contact impedance with respect to needle-free electrodes and record sEMG at a signal-to-noise ratio comparable to clinical-grade wet Ag/AgCl electrodes over a period of up to 6 h. Overall, a fabrication method and electrode type are presented which yield high-quality sEMG signals when evaluated in humans, highlighting the potential of MNEs as a platform for biosignal recording.European Commission Horizon 2020Irish Research CouncilNational University of Ireland Travel Studentshi

Desiccation as a mitigation tool to manage biofouling risks: trials on temperate taxa to elucidate factors influencing mortality rates

<p>The desiccation tolerance of biofouling taxa (adults and early life-stages) was determined under both controlled and ‘realistic’ field conditions. Adults of the ascidian <i>Ciona</i> spp. died within 24 h. Mortality in the adult blue mussel <i>Mytilus galloprovincialis</i> occurred within 11 d under controlled conditions, compared with 7 d when held outside. The Pacific oyster <i>Crassostrea gigas</i> was the most desiccation-tolerant taxon tested (up to 34 d under controlled conditions). Biofouling orientated to direct sunlight showed faster mortality rates for all the taxa tested. Mortality in <i>Mytilus</i> juveniles took up to 24 h, compared with 8 h for <i>Ciona</i>, with greater survival at the higher temperature (18.5°C) and humidity (~95% RH) treatment combination. This study demonstrated that desiccation can be an effective mitigation method for a broad range of fouling taxa, especially their early life-stages. Further work is necessary to assess risks from other high-risk species such as algae and cyst forming species.</p