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Curcumin Mitigates Fumonisin B1-Induced Ovarian Toxicity in Peak-Laying Ducks via Hormone Metabolic Protection and Enhanced Reproductive Resilience.
Get PDFThe objective of this study was to evaluate the protective effect of curcumin (Cur) on reproductive toxicity induced by fumonisin B1 (FB1) in laying ducks during the peak egg-laying period. A total of seventy-two 50-week-old Cherry Valley ducks were randomly assigned to four groups: control, FB1 (30 mg/kg), Cur (200 mg/kg), and Cur + FB1 (200 mg/kg + 30 mg/kg). The experiment lasted for 35 days. Our results showed that cur supplementation effectively restored the reductions in final body weight (p = 0.005) and oviduct length (p = 0.020) induced by FB1 exposure. Residual FB1 concentrations in serum, liver, and ovaries were markedly increased in the FB1-treated group, while Cur significantly decreased the FB1 residual in duck liver (p < 0.05). Meanwhile, Cur supplementation markedly counteracted the FB1-induced reductions in serum total protein, albumin, triglycerides, and high-density lipoprotein induced by FB1 exposure. Cur supplementation effectively regulated FB1-induced oxidative stress, inflammation, and endocrine disruption. Specifically, Cur lowered FB1-induced malondialdehyde levels (p < 0.010), attenuated interleukin-1β increase (p = 0.083), and reversed the reduction in immunoglobulin G levels. FB increased the levels of hormones associated with duck reproduction, including estradiol, follicle-stimulating hormone, and luteinizing hormone; in contrast, curcumin supplementation decreased the levels of these hormones (p < 0.010). Histopathological analysis revealed that Cur significantly alleviated the inflammation and necrosis in the liver, kidneys, ovaries, and oviducts induced by FB1. In conclusion, dietary Cur supplementation effectively alleviated FB1-induced reproductive toxicity in laying ducks by enhancing antioxidant capacity, improving lipid metabolism, and restoring hormonal homeostasis
Physical and mental health professionals perspectives of providing mental health care for young people: A qualitative interview study.
Get PDFRates of poor mental health among children and young people are rising globally, with physical health professionals increasingly expected to respond to psychiatric needs. Despite this shift, limited research has explored how these professionals experience and manage mental health presentations, particularly in paediatric settings. This study examines the challenges and opportunities faced by staff supporting young people with mental health needs on paediatric hospital wards, within a system that often treats physical and mental health separately. We conducted a secondary analysis of 31 one-off semi-structured interviews, conducted with 16 mental health and 15 physical health professionals. Using reflexive thematic analysis, themes were iteratively refined in dialogue with NHS collaborators, a senior qualitative researcher, and interview participants to ensure analytic rigour and relevance. Professionals reported a widening gap between the complexity of young patients' mental health needs and the limited expertise available on physical health wards. Three themes emerged: (1) "We all feel out of our depth," reflecting feelings of being underprepared and overwhelmed; (2) "A mental health waiting room," highlighting wards being used as temporary spaces while patients await psychological care; and (3) "We're the place to keep them safe," revealing a primary focus on immediate risk management. Physical health professionals reported feeling unprepared to support young patients with mental health needs, often managing self-harm, suicidality, and eating disorders without specialist training. Both physical and mental health professionals emphasized a need for trauma-informed, non-stigmatizing communication and emotional support for staff. Barriers to integrated care within these two trusts included digital system incompatibility, understaffing, and limited psychiatric liaison. Findings highlight the urgency of cross-disciplinary training, supervision, and structural investment to support compassionate, coordinated care for young people with complex mental and physical health needs
Cooperative human signals to honeyguides form local dialects
Get PDFAbstract Human language enables the exchange of complex information and precise instructions for collaborative planning and action. It rapidly evolves through social learning, generating diverse cultural communication signals used not only with other humans, but also with domesticated animals bred or trained to respond. More rarely, humans communicate with untrained, wild animals to coordinate joint actions, yet little is known about how or why these human‐to‐wildlife signals diversify. Human‐wildlife cooperation allows us to investigate whether human signals directed at untrained, wild animals exhibit regional variation, akin to dialects in human language. We investigated regional variation in human signals used to cooperate with greater honeyguides ( Indicator indicator ): wild birds that guide people to bees' nests in exchange for access to beeswax. Across 13 villages in northern Mozambique, we tested whether human honey‐hunting calls varied with spatial distance, as expected if regional dialects had emerged, or with measures of the physical environment affecting sound propagation, as expected if calls were shaped by habitat acoustics. Our analyses showed that trills, grunts, whoops, and whistles used while cooperating with honeyguides (i) consistently varied with spatial distance between villages, (ii) varied irrespective of the local habitat, and (iii) appeared to be adopted by immigrant honey‐hunters to match local calls. These findings suggest that regional variation in human‐to‐wildlife signals is shaped primarily by human social factors, forming a landscape of interspecific signal diversity similar to human language dialects. Honeyguides cooperate effectively with honey‐hunters throughout this landscape, suggesting that they accommodate (and likely reinforce) cultural differences by learning the local interspecies dialect. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.
Resumo A linguagem humana permite a trocade informações complexas e instruções precisas para o planeamento e a ação colaborativa. Esta evolui rapidamente através da aprendizagem social, gerando diversos sinais de comunicação cultural usados não apenas com outros humanos, mas também por animais domesticados, criados ou treinados para responder. Mais raramente, humanos comunicam com animais selvagens não treinados para coordenar ações conjuntas; ainda pouco se sabe sobre como ou por que estes sinais entre humanos e animais selvagens se diversificam. A cooperação entre humanos e animais selvagens nos permite investigar se os sinais humanos direcionados a animais selvagens não treinados apresentam variações regionais, semelhantes aos dialectos da língua humana. Investigamos a variação regional nos sinais humanos, usados para cooperar com o indicador de mel maior ( Indicator indicator ): pássaros selvagens que guiam as pessoas até ninhos de abelhas, em troca com acesso à cera de abelha. Em 13 aldeias no norte de Moçambique, testamos se os chamamentos humanos na caça ao mel variavam com a distância espacial como seria de esperar se tivessem surgido dialectos regionais; ou com medições do ambiente físico que afetam a propagação do som, como seria de esperar se os chamamentos fossem moldados pela acústica do habitat. As nossas análises mostraram que os trilos, grunhidos, guinchos e assobios utilizados durante a cooperação com indicadores de mel (i) variaram consistentemente com a distância espacial entre as aldeias, (ii) variaram independentemente do habitat local, e (iii) foram adotados por caçadores de mel imigrantes para corresponder aos chamamentos locais. Estes resultados sugerem que a variação regional nos sinais entre humanos e animais selvagens é moldada principalmente por fatores sociais humanos, formando uma paisagem de diversidade de sinais interespecífica semelhantes aos dialetos da língua humana. Os indicadores de mel cooperam eficazmente com os caçadores de mel em toda esta paisagem, indicando que estas se adaptam (e provavelmente reforçam) às diferenças culturais ao aprender o dialeto interspecífico local.
Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog
Converging to Mediocrity: Trends in Firm-Level Markups in the United Kingdom 2008-2019
Get PDFUK manufacturing productivity has declined sharply since 2008, yet little is known about the role of trends in firm-level markups in this context. We estimate firm-level markups using a structural demand approach with revenue shares and industry elasticities, which is complemented by a primal method. Findings indicate a decline in aggregate markups of two to five per cent from 2008 to 2019, driven mainly by within-firm declines. These results suggest that the UK’s productivity slowdown reflects structural deterioration within manufacturing firms rather than reallocation effects
Brain-resident regulatory T cells and their role in health and disease.
Get PDFRegulatory T cells (Tregs) control inflammation and maintain immune homeostasis. The well-characterised circulatory population of CD4+Foxp3+ Tregs is effective at preventing autoimmunity and constraining the immune response, through direct and indirect restraint of conventional T cell activation. Recent advances in Treg cell biology have identified tissue-resident Tregs, with tissue-specific functions that contribute to the maintenance of tissue homeostasis and repair. A population of brain-resident Tregs, characterised as CD69+, has recently been identified in the healthy brain of mice and humans, with rapid population expansion observed under a number of neuroinflammatory conditions. During neuroinflammation, brain-resident Tregs have been proposed to control astrogliosis through the production of amphiregulin, polarize microglia into neuroprotective states, and restrain inflammatory responses by releasing IL-10. While protective effects for Tregs have been demonstrated in a number of neuroinflammatory pathologies, a clear demarcation between the role of circulatory and brain-resident Tregs has been difficult to achieve. Here we review the state-of-the-art for brain-resident Treg population, and describe their potential utilization as a therapeutic target across different neuroinflammatory conditions
Living the clash within: secular/conservative divide of immigrant Turkish parents on the identity formations of British Turks
Get PDFThis article addresses the identity constructions of British Turks in the context of the inherent fragmentation of Turkish immigrant parents situated within the historically complex secular or conservative divisions of Turkish politics. British Turks raised in the UK maintain identities defined within the parameters of the either/or epistemology forced by their Turkish immigrant parents, who are either in harmony with Turkish moral values and Islamic lifestyles or adopting a modern secular approach to life embedded in secular principles of Kemalism. Accordingly, we see the manifestations of polarity between religious/conservative versus secular principles of Turkish immigrant parents who, in a strictly practical sense, interfere in British Turks’ identity constructions. Illustrated through the empirical findings, a fault line appears in the impact of conservative/secular ideologies of Turkish immigrant parents on their British-born children due to the latter’s encounter with versions of Britishness and British ways of life. On both fronts, we see that British Turks understand the limits of the certainty of parental ideologies and values and therefore embrace more fragmented and pluralized selves as if the former were the necessary source of the latter
From Colonial Subjecthood to Shared Humanity: Social Work and the Politics of “Doing” in Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay's International Thought
Get PDFAbstract This article tracks a paradox in elite, Third-World thinkers’ nation-building and postcolonial world-making in the early to mid-twentieth century. The tension lay in highly universalized notions of equality in imagined postcolonial worlds and the hierarchized social organizing tactics required to bring these worlds to life. The paper examines Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay—a prominent Indian social activist—and her international thought as she encountered this paradox in her social work praxis. I assess Kamaladevi's social work politics in the 1920s and 1930s at the Congress Seva Dal (a mass-based voluntary organization) as an imperial site where her universalized ideas about subjecthood clashed with practical disciplinary and hierarchical modes of political engagement. Then, I explore Kamaladevi's alienation from party politics in a newly independent India in the 1940s, which offered her an alternative pathway to leverage her social work as she built anticolonial solidarities at the substate level. Reading new archival material from Kamaladevi's travels in West Asia and parts of Africa in the 1950s–1960s, I suggest that her anti-imperial and race-conscious international thought in the “postimperial” world is a continuation rather than a breakaway from the earlier tensions of her normative and hierarchical civil–society activism. Kamaladevi's specific political trajectory that cuts across the Indian independence divide in 1947 is interesting in two ways. First, it problematizes hierarchies in historical elite Indian women's anticolonial and civil–society activism. Second, examining her social work allows for a disruptive reading of taken-for-granted binaries of the colonial/postcolonial, local/international, and social/political in historical international thought
Light‐Driven Competitive Selection in a Protein‐Catalyzed Dissipative Peptide Replication
Get PDFABSTRACT Theoretical models of prebiotic evolution propose that catalytic modulation can influence autocatalytic replication cycles. We hypothesized that a protein catalyst could create a favorable environment for proximity‐controlled, dissipative replication of primitive peptides. This setup, in principle, allows competitive selection by making the catalyst a limited resource. Here, we show that a structurally flexible and promiscuous protein, calmodulin, catalyzes UVA light‐driven replication in a helical foldamer‐based replicator system. The protein accelerates both non‐autocatalytic synthesis and autocatalytic replication, with autocatalysis being the dominant pathway. The system demonstrates light‐intensity‐dependent competitive selection, where replicators compete for scarce binding sites on the catalyst. This mechanism enables efficient selection even within a large replicator pool. Our results provide evidence that the specific catalyst–replicator interactions envisioned in Eigen's hypercycle model can be approximated under dissipative conditions in catalyzed primitive replicator systems
Pre/post-asymmetries in Dutch verbalizers
Get PDFAbstract In this paper we provide a Nanosyntactic account of two verbalizing affixes in Dutch: the prefix ver - and the suffix - el . We show that they behave differently in their interaction with past tense and in their effect on argument structure. We derive these differences by assigning the two affixes a different lexical representation – a so-called L-tree – which in turn means that they are inserted into the syntactic derivation in very different ways. The analysis intends to be a first step towards a more general formalization of the systematic asymmetries between pre- and post-elements
Redefining Egyptian “pastes”: material characterisation and technological developments in Third Intermediate Period coffin sets from Thebes
No full textAncient Egyptian coffins have been the subject of numerous scientific studies, primarily focusing on wood analysis and the polychrome decoration of their surfaces. However, the construction materials of coffins, often collectively referred to as “pastes,” have received relatively little scholarly attention. These materials may encompass plasters but also gypsum or crushed limestone bound with organic media, sometimes incorporating clay minerals and plant fibers. Pastes served multiple functions, including the creation of complete objects, gap-filling, acting as a substrate for decoration, and forming a crucial component of cartonnage—a free-standing composite material made from layers of linen, glue, and paste. Their microstructure and composition provide valuable insights into manufacturing techniques, raw material procurement, and broader technological traditions and craft organization. However, researchers face significant challenges in studying these materials due to the need for minimally invasive sampling and the complexity of their organic and inorganic mixtures.
Building on the pioneering research conducted by the Fitzwilliam Museum team, this thesis aimed to develop a standardised analytical protocol to harness the full informative potential of pastes, and to begin to demonstrate this through case studies. The focus is placed on wooden coffin sets from the Third Intermediate Period, with special attention to the ‘yellow coffin’ set of Nespawershefyt (E.1.1822), dated to approximately 1070–1000 BCE, and the inner and intermediate coffins of Pakepu (E.2.1869), dated to approximately 680–664 BCE – in addition to samples of others used for comparative purposes. Each coffin exhibits distinct construction methods, incorporating different types of pastes (mud, pink, and white), each mixed with varying organic binders. Of particular interest is the inner coffin of Pakepu, which features a complex layering structure resembling cartonnage over a thick coating of ‘fibrous glue’ applied to the wood surface.
This investigation employs a combination of optical microscopy, SEM-EDS, FTIR, and palaeoproteomic techniques. These methods provide new insights into both the inorganic and organic components of the pastes, highlighting the significant potential of this research approach in furthering the understanding of ancient Egyptian coffin production and technological traditions