smartPearls are a dermal delivery system for poorly soluble active agents, consisting of nanoporous silica particles loaded with a long-term stable, amorphous active agent in its mesopores (2–50 nm). The amorphous state of the active agent is known to increase dermal bioavailability. For use in marketed products, optimal silica types were identified from commercially available, regulatory accepted silica. In addition, a scalable production process was demonstrated. The loading of the particles was performed by applying the immersion–evaporation method. The antioxidant rutin was used as a model active agent and ethanol was applied as the solvent. Various silica particles (Syloid®, Davisil®) differing in particle size (7–50 µm), pore diameter (3–25 nm) and pore volume (0.4–1.75 mL/g) were investigated regarding their ease of processing. The evaporation from the silica–ethanol suspensions was performed in a rotary evaporator. The finest powders were obtained with larger-sized silica. The maximum loading staying amorphous was achieved between 10% and 25% (w/w), depending on the silica type. A loading mechanism was also proposed. The most suitable processing occurred with the large-sized Syloid® XDP 3050 silica with a 50 µm particle size and a pore diameter of 25 nm, resulting in 18% (w/w) maximum loading. Based on a 10% (w/w) loading and the amorphous solubility of the active agent, for a 100 kg dermal formulation, about 500 g of loaded particles were required. This corresponds to production of 5 kg of loaded smartPearls for a formulation batch size of a ton. The production of 5 kg (i.e., about 25 L of solvent removal) can be industrially realized in a commercial 50 L rotary evaporator.

This article advances our understanding of differences in hybrid stability by going beyond existing regime typologies that separate the study of political institutions from the study of economic institutions. It combines the work of Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast (NWW) on varieties of social orders with the literature on political and economic regime typologies and dynamics to understand hybrid regimes as Limited Access Orders (LAOs) that differ in the way dominant elites limit access to political and economic resources. Based on a measurement of political and economic access applied to seven post‐Soviet states, the article identifies four types of LAOs. Challenging NWW's claim, it shows that hybrid regimes can combine different degrees of political and economic access to sustain stability. Our typology allows to form theoretical expectations about the kinds of political and/or economic changes that will move different types of LAOs toward more openness or closure.

In Colombia, right-wing leadership returned to power after winning the presidential elections in 2018 in a campaign in which they opposed the previous government, primarily because of the negotiations and peacemaking with the FARC-EP (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia—Ejército del Pueblo ‘Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia—People’s Army’), Colombia’s largest guerrilla organization. Globally, there is a vibrant academic debate about how to characterize the current rise of right-wing populism or authoritarianism, but more profound insights from each country’s situation and its political economy implications are needed. The victory in Colombia was due to numerous factors, including the support from some rural elites who have historically obstructed the enforcement of redistributive land policies. However, the populist aspirations of the right-wing government have been persistently frustrated not only by social unrest and political mobilization but also because of the enforcement of institutions previously incorporated into the country’s political scenario. Specifically, in terms of agrarian political economy, two sets of human rights-oriented institutional changes are relevant regarding this matter: (a) the Land Restitution Law enacted in 2011 and (b) the Comprehensive Rural Reform contained in the Agrarian Chapter of the Peace Agreement between the national government and the FARC-EP in 2016. The purpose of this paper is to ground the ongoing theoretical and political debate about the rise of different forms of populism and right-wing authoritarianism in the current Colombian political context, and its implications on the countryside. The analytical contribution of this paper is twofold: On the one hand, I propose an alternative for explaining the nature of the current political regime in Colombia as right-wing authoritarianism; on the other hand, I analyze some features of such regimes in terms of its disputes with the enforcement of human rights-oriented institutions, that are in force as the result of political processes triggered by peasants’ mobilization.

Antimicrobial resistance is a major health problem, particularly in developing countries like Bangladesh, where there is a paucity of information on resistance patterns and prevalence of antimicrobial determinants. Therefore, the aims of this study were to investigate the prevalence of resistance, including multi-drug resistance (MDR), and the associated genetic determinants in Escherichia coli isolates from cloacal swabs of live broiler chickens in Bangladesh. Altogether, 400 cloacal swabs (200 from Rajshahi and 200 from Dhaka divisions) were randomly collected from individual chickens in 50 broiler farms. E. coli was isolated and identified using conventional bacteriological culture and biochemical methods. The isolates were further confirmed using genus-specific 16S rRNAtargeted polymerase chain reaction (PCR) primers. Antimicrobial susceptibilities and MDR of the isolates against nine different antimicrobial agents (ampicillin, erythromycin, tetracycline, gentamicin, ciprofloxacin, levofloxacin, trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole, colistin sulphate, and streptomycin) were determined using the Kirby-Bauer disc diffusion method. Resistance determinants of E. coli to ampicillin (blaTEM), streptomycin (aadA1), erythromycin [ere(A)], trimethoprim (dfrA1), and tetracycline [tet(A), tet(B)] were screened using PCR. Our results showed that all swab samples were positive for E. coli. The isolates were uniformly resistant to ampicillin, tetracycline, streptomycin, ciprofloxacin, erythromycin, and trimethoprim-sulphamethoxazole. The isolates exhibited highest susceptibility to colistin sulphate (73.5%), followed by gentamicin (49%), and levofloxacin (17%). All isolates were resistant to three classes of antibiotics, 204 isolates (51%) were resistant to four classes, and 56 isolates (14%) were resistant to five. The highest prevalence of antimicrobial resistance gene was recorded for tetracycline (tet(A):95.25%; tet(B):95.25%) followed by ampicillin (blaTEM:91.25%), streptomycin (aadA1:88.25%), erythromycin (ere(A):84.75%), and trimethoprim (dfrA1:65.5%). In conclusion, surveillance for MDR bacteria in poultry is a critical piece of knowledge, which would be useful for optimizing empiric antimicrobial treatments and exploring alternative antimicrobial agents.

Differences in gene regulation have been suggested to play essential roles in the evolution of phenotypic changes. Although DNA changes in cis-regulatory elements affect only the regulation of its corresponding gene, variations in gene regulatory factors (trans) can have a broader effect, because the expression of many target genes might be affected. Aiming to better understand how natural selection may have shaped the diversity of gene regulatory factors in human, we assembled a catalog of all proteins involved in controlling gene expression. We found that at least five DNA-binding transcription factor classes are enriched among genes located in candidate regions for selection, suggesting that they might be relevant for understanding regulatory mechanisms involved in human local adaptation. The class of KRAB-ZNFs, zinc-finger (ZNF) genes with a Krüppel-associated box, stands out by first, having the most genes located on candidate regions for positive selection. Second, displaying most nonsynonymous single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) with high genetic differentiation between populations within these regions. Third, having 27 KRAB-ZNF gene clusters with high extended haplotype homozygosity. Our further characterization of nonsynonymous SNPs in ZNF genes located within candidate regions for selection, suggests regulatory modifications that might influence the expression of target genes at population level. Our detailed investigation of three candidate regions revealed possible explanations for how SNPs may influence the prevalence of schizophrenia, eye development, and fertility in humans, among other phenotypes. The genetic variation we characterized here may be responsible for subtle to rough regulatory changes that could be important for understanding human adaptation.

As a part of a larger interdisciplinary project on Shakespeare sonnets’ reception (Jacobs et al., 2017; Xue et al., 2017), the present study analyzed the eye movement behavior of participants reading three of the 154 sonnets as a function of seven lexical features extracted via Quantitative Narrative Analysis (QNA). Using a machine learning- based predictive modeling approach five ‘surface’ features (word length, orthographic neighborhood density, word frequency, orthographic dissimilarity and sonority score) were detected as important predictors of total reading time and fixation probability in poetry reading. The fact that one phonological feature, i.e., sonority score, also played a role is in line with current theorizing on poetry reading. Our approach opens new ways for future eye movement research on reading poetic texts and other complex literary materials (cf. Jacobs, 2015c).

The presence of snow and ice at midlatitudes of Mars cannot be explained by current climatic conditions, as surface ice is unstable. However, a large variety of debris‐covered glaciers have been observed at both midlatitudes. Here, we report the presence of local, small‐scale, and debris‐covered stagnant ice deposits on the floor of a valley system in Terra Cimmeria. These deposits, termed valley fill deposits (VFD), have a distribution that is restricted to the host valley floor and to the extent of the ejecta blanket associated with Tarq impact crater. The VFD are characterized by convex‐upward morphology, various crevasses, sublimation pits, an average area of a few square kilometers, and occasional ejecta streaks on their surface. Our model age estimation points to two possible time frames for the Tarq impact event; thus, we suggest two formation scenarios for VFD: (I) distribution of ice due to impact into shallow ice during the Middle Amazonian and (II) post‐impact deposition of VFD due to precipitation. In both scenarios, ice preservation is most likely due to a lag of dust and debris deposited in the valley's topographic lows. Scenario I is more consistent with our geomorphological observation of the VFD being overlain by ejecta streaks. Our results highlight the importance of local geological events and conditions in the distribution and preservation of buried ice deposits on Mars and suggest that more small‐scale and debris‐covered ice deposits may exist in the midlatitudes than previously thought. These deposits are of high importance for future human exploration missions to Mars.

Analysis of 984 induced microearthquakes from The Geysers geothermal reservoir in California reveals that the retrieved moment tensors depend on the frequency band of the inverted waveforms. The observed dependence is more significant for the percentages of the double‐couple, compensated linear vector dipole, and isotropic (ISO) components than for the focal mechanisms. The average root‐mean‐square of the moment tensors obtained in different frequency bands is correlated with spectra of ambient noise. The percentages of double‐couple and ISO components tend to decrease and increase with the upper cutoff frequency (fu), respectively. This suggests that shear rupture radiates energy preferentially in a lower frequency band and tensile rupture in a higher frequency band. Events displaying a strong increase of the ISO with fu are confined within the same depth interval as the injection points. This might be related to the strong thermoelastic effects in the vicinity of injection points that promote opening of small cracks adjacent to the main fractures.

An efficient water oxidation system is a prerequisite for developing solar energy conversion devices. Using advanced time-resolved spectroscopy, we study the initial catalytic relevant electron transfer events in the light-driven water oxidation system utilizing [Ru(bpy)3]2+ (bpy = 2,2′-bipyridine) as a light harvester, persulfate as a sacrificial electron acceptor, and a high-valent iron clathrochelate complex as a catalyst. Upon irradiation by visible light, the excited state of the ruthenium dye is quenched by persulfate to afford a [Ru(bpy)3]3+/SO4˙− pair, showing a cage escape yield up to 75%. This is followed by the subsequent fast hole transfer from [Ru(bpy)3]3+ to the FeIV catalyst to give the long-lived FeV intermediate in aqueous solution. In the presence of excess photosensitizer, this process exhibits pseudo-first order kinetics with respect to the catalyst with a rate constant of 3.2(1) × 1010 s−1. Consequently, efficient hole scavenging activity of the high-valent iron complex is proposed to explain its high catalytic performance for water oxidation.

Two computational studies provide different sentiment analyses for text segments (e.g., “fearful” passages) and figures (e.g., “Voldemort”) from the Harry Potter books (Rowling, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2007) based on a novel simple tool called SentiArt. The tool uses vector space models together with theory-guided, empirically validated label lists to compute the valence of each word in a text by locating its position in a 2d emotion potential space spanned by the words of the vector space model. After testing the tool's accuracy with empirical data from a neurocognitive poetics study, it was applied to compute emotional figure and personality profiles (inspired by the so-called “big five” personality theory) for main characters from the book series. The results of comparative analyses using different machine-learning classifiers (e.g., AdaBoost, Neural Net) show that SentiArt performs very well in predicting the emotion potential of text passages. It also produces plausible predictions regarding the emotional and personality profile of fiction characters which are correctly identified on the basis of eight character features, and it achieves a good cross-validation accuracy in classifying 100 figures into “good” vs. “bad” ones. The results are discussed with regard to potential applications of SentiArt in digital literary, applied reading and neurocognitive poetics studies such as the quantification of the hybrid hero potential of figures.

This study presents a comprehensive analysis of processes determining heat waves across different climates in Europe for the period 1979–2016. Heat waves are defined using a percentile‐based index and the main processes quantified along trajectories are adiabatic compression by subsidence and local and remote diabatic processes in the upper and lower troposphere. This Lagrangian analysis is complemented by an Eulerian calculation of horizontal temperature advection. During typical summers in Europe, one or two heat waves occur, with an average duration of five days. Whereas high near‐surface temperatures over Scandinavia are accompanied by omega‐like blocking structures at 500 hPa, heat waves over the Mediterranean are connected to comparably flat ridges. Tracing air masses backwards from the heat waves, we identify three trajectory clusters with coherent thermodynamic characteristics, vertical motions, and geographic origins. In all regions, horizontal temperature advection is almost negligible. In two of the three clusters, subsidence in the free atmosphere is very important in establishing high temperatures near the surface, while the air masses in the third cluster are warmed primarily due to diabatic heating near the surface. Large interregional differences occur between the British Isles and western Russia. Over the latter region, near‐surface transport and diabatic heating appear to be very important in determining the intensity of the heat waves, whereas subsidence and adiabatic warming are of first‐order importance for the British Isles. Although the large‐scale pattern is quasistationary during heat wave days, new air masses are entrained steadily into the lower troposphere during the life cycle of a heat wave. Overall, the results of the present study provide a guideline as to which processes and diagnostics weather and climate studies should focus on to understand the severity of heat waves.

Large bioacoustic archives of wild animals are an important source to identify reappearing communication patterns, which can then be related to recurring behavioral patterns to advance the current understanding of intra-specific communication of non-human animals. A main challenge remains that most large-scale bioacoustic archives contain only a small percentage of animal vocalizations and a large amount of environmental noise, which makes it extremely difficult to manually retrieve sufficient vocalizations for further analysis – particularly important for species with advanced social systems and complex vocalizations. In this study deep neural networks were trained on 11,509 killer whale (Orcinus orca) signals and 34,848 noise segments. The resulting toolkit ORCA-SPOT was tested on a large-scale bioacoustic repository – the Orchive – comprising roughly 19,000 hours of killer whale underwater recordings. An automated segmentation of the entire Orchive recordings (about 2.2 years) took approximately 8 days. It achieved a time-based precision or positive-predictive-value (PPV) of 93.2% and an area-under-the-curve (AUC) of 0.9523. This approach enables an automated annotation procedure of large bioacoustics databases to extract killer whale sounds, which are essential for subsequent identification of significant communication patterns. The code will be publicly available in October 2019 to support the application of deep learning to bioaoucstic research. ORCA-SPOT can be adapted to other animal species.

A sustainable economy fulfills societal needs in a fundamentally different way to the current economic system. Improvements to the efficiency of existing technologies or practices appear insufficient for achieving sustainable development within the planetary boundaries. Disruptive, systemic and transformational changes appear necessary in order to replace existing technologies and practices to establish a sustainable economy. Such innovations often start out in niches; however, the scaling up and the ultimate replacement of current socio-technical systems requires governance to allow for the coordination of actors, the reorganization of socio-technical systems and the mobilization and allocation of resources. As governmental institutions are part of the current (non-sustainable) systems and thereby fail to provide coherent, integrated and transformative governance, we explore whether institutional innovation from non-state actors can step in to provide governance of transformation processes. Based on explorative qualitative case studies of networks in the food sector, city planning and reporting tools, we analyze the potential of bottom-up institutional innovations to coordinate actors in transformation processes.

Staphylococcus aureus is a major human pathogen and has to cope with reactive oxygen and chlorine species (ROS, RCS) during infections. The low molecular weight thiol bacillithiol (BSH) is an important defense mechanism of S. aureus for detoxification of ROS and HOCl stress to maintain the reduced state of the cytoplasm. Under HOCl stress, BSH forms mixed disulfides with proteins, termed as S-bacillithiolations, which are reduced by bacilliredoxins (BrxA and BrxB). The NADPH-dependent flavin disulfide reductase YpdA is phylogenetically associated with the BSH synthesis and BrxA/B enzymes and was recently suggested to function as BSSB reductase (Mikheyeva et al., 2019). Here, we investigated the role of the complete bacilliredoxin BrxAB/BSH/YpdA pathway in S. aureus COL under oxidative stress and macrophage infection conditions in vivo and in biochemical assays in vitro. Using HPLC thiol metabolomics, a strongly enhanced BSSB level and a decreased BSH/BSSB ratio were measured in the S. aureus COL ypdA deletion mutant under control and NaOCl stress. Monitoring the oxidation degree (OxD) of the Brx-roGFP2 biosensor revealed that YpdA is required for regeneration of the reduced BSH redox potential (EBSH) upon recovery from oxidative stress. In addition, the ypdA mutant was impaired in H2O2 detoxification as measured with the novel H2O2-specific Tpx-roGFP2 biosensor. Phenotype analyses further showed that BrxA and YpdA are required for survival under NaOCl and H2O2 stress in vitro and inside murine J-774A.1 macrophages in infection assays in vivo. Finally, NADPH-coupled electron transfer assays provide evidence for the function of YpdA in BSSB reduction, which depends on the conserved Cys14 residue. YpdA acts together with BrxA and BSH in de-bacillithiolation of S-bacillithiolated GapDH. In conclusion, our results point to a major role of the BrxA/BSH/YpdA pathway in BSH redox homeostasis in S. aureus during recovery from oxidative stress and under infections.

To get a job as a seafarer in the global maritime industry, thousands of male Filipino youths work for free as ‘utility men’ for manning agencies that supply seafarers to ship operators around the world. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and approached from a moral economy perspective, this article examines how manning agencies and utility men differentially rationalize this exploitative work (utility manning). Manning agencies use it as a technology of servitude that, through physical and verbal abuse and other techniques, enforces docility to prepare utility men for the harsher conditions on-board a ship. In contrast, utility men use it as a technology of imagination, gleaning from it a capacity to shape their future. Faced with few social possibilities in the Philippines, they deploy servitude as a strategy for attaining economic mobility and male adulthood.

Contaminated honey is a common cause of grayanotoxin intoxication in humans. Intoxication of animals, especially cattle, is usually due to ingestion of plants of the Ericaceae family, such as Rhododendron. Here, we report the ingestion of Pieris japonica as the cause of grayanotoxin I intoxication in 2 miniature pigs that were kept as pets. The pigs showed sudden onset of pale oral mucosa, tachycardia, tachypnea, hypersalivation, tremor, and ataxia that progressed to lateral recumbency. The pathological examination of one pig revealed no specific indications for intoxication except for the finding of plant material of Pieris japonica in the intestine. Grayanotoxin I was identified in the ingested plant, gastric content, blood, liver, bile, kidney, urine, lung, and skeletal muscle via HPLC-MS/MS. Grayanotoxin I should be considered as a differential etiological diagnosis in pigs with unspecific signs and discovery of ingested plant material as the only indication in the pathologic examination.

Ever since Evo Morales Ayma became Bolivia's first indigenous president in 2006 and the promulgation of a human-rights-enhancing Constitution (2009) thereafter, indigenous peoples’ rights were gradually recognised. Yet, with the increasing demand for natural resources, indigenous communities have been adversely affected by the state's neo-extractivist policies. While global indigenous rights norms protect their fundamental rights, legal-implementation processes in the country's lowlands reveal dilemmas in terms of the value of laws in practice as well as its reinterpretation on the ground. Namely, in the communities, different positions and camps have emerged in terms of the role and functions of participatory rights. Despite the potential of the latter in strengthening collective-rights regimes and self-determination, community leaders, advisers and other members report how such processes fracture and weaken decision-making mechanisms and human rights claims.

We study the ion density, shear viscosity and electroosmotic mobility of an aqueous monovalent electrolyte at a charged solid surface using molecular dynamics simulations. Upon increasing the surface charge density, ions are displaced first from the diffuse layer to the outer Helmholtz layer, increasing its viscosity, and subsequently to the hydrodynamically stagnant inner Helmholtz layer. The ion redistribution causes both charge inversion and reversal of the electroosmotic mobility. Because of the surface-charge dependent interfacial hydrodynamic properties, however, the charge density of mobility reversal differs from the charge density of charge inversion, depending on the salt concentration and the chemical details of the ions and the surface. Mobility reversal cannot be described by an effective slip boundary condition alone – the spatial dependence of the viscosity is essential.

Two computational studies provide different sentiment analyses for text segments (e.g., ‘fearful’ passages) and figures (e.g., ‘Voldemort’) from the Harry Potter books (Rowling, 1997 - 2007) based on a novel simple tool called SentiArt. The tool uses vector space models together with theory-guided, empirically validated label lists to compute the valence of each word in a text by locating its position in a 2d emotion potential space spanned by the > 2 million words of the vector space model. After testing the tool’s accuracy with empirical data from a neurocognitive study, it was applied to compute emotional figure profiles and personality figure profiles (inspired by the so-called ‚big five’ personality theory) for main characters from the book series. The results of comparative analyses using different machine-learning classifiers (e.g., AdaBoost, Neural Net) show that SentiArt performs very well in predicting the emotion potential of text passages. It also produces plausible predictions regarding the emotional and personality profile of fiction characters which are correctly identified on the basis of eight character features, and it achieves a good cross-validation accuracy in classifying 100 figures into ‘good’ vs. ‘bad’ ones. The results are discussed with regard to potential applications of SentiArt in digital literary, applied reading and neurocognitive poetics studies such as the quantification of the hybrid hero potential of figures.

We analyzed how often and in what ways the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is currently used in review, promotion, and tenure (RPT) documents of a representative sample of universities from the United States and Canada. 40% of research-intensive institutions and 18% of master’s institutions mentioned the JIF, or closely related terms. Of the institutions that mentioned the JIF, 87% supported its use in at least one of their RPT documents, 13% expressed caution about its use, and none heavily criticized it or prohibited its use. Furthermore, 63% of institutions that mentioned the JIF associated the metric with quality, 40% with impact, importance, or significance, and 20% with prestige, reputation, or status. We conclude that use of the JIF is encouraged in RPT evaluations, especially at research-intensive universities, and that there is work to be done to avoid the potential misuse of metrics like the JIF.