A global marine sedimentary response to the end-Permian mass extinction: Examples from southern Turkey and the western United States

The end-Permian mass extinction greatly diminished marine diversity and brought about a whole-scale restructuring of marine ecosystems; these ecosystem changes also profoundly affected the sedimentary record. Data presented here, attained through facies analyses of strata deposited during the immediate aftermath of the end-Permian mass extinction (southern Turkey) and at the close of the Early Triassic (southwestern United States), in combination with a literature review, show that sedimentary systems were profoundly affected by: (1) a reduction in biotic diversity and abundance and (2) long-term environmental fluctuations that resulted from the end-Permian crisis. Lower Triassic strata display widespread microbialite and carbonate seafloor fan development and contain indicators of suppressed infaunal bioturbation such as flat-pebble conglomerates and wrinkle structures (facies considered unusual in post-Cambrian subtidal deposits). Our observations suggest that depositional systems, too, respond to biotic crises, and that certain facies may act as barometers of ecologic and environmental change independent of fossil assemblage analyses. Close investigation of facies changes during other critical times in Earth history may serve as an important tool in interpreting the ecology of metazoans and their environment.

Une européanisation des politiques de conciliation de la vie familiale et professionnelle? : les cas de l'Italie et de la France

Les différents pays membres de l'UE connaissent des politiques dites de « conciliation de la vie professionnelle et familiale » qui correspondent à un ensemble de dispositifs hétéroclites, plus ou moins complexes, mais rarement cohérents. Alliant des objectifs tels que la hausse de la natalité, la protection des mères et des enfants, l'égalité entre femmes et hommes, la lutte contre la pauvreté des enfants et des familles monoparentales et l'activation des femmes, ces politiques sont fortement ancrées dans des traditions nationales de politiques familiales, d'emploi et fiscales. Ces politiques portent en elles l'héritage et les tensions de l'histoire d'un pays. Au moment où un nouvel acteur international, l'Union européenne, intervient de manière de plus en plus explicite dans le débat et dans la définition de ces politiques, la présente étude tend à analyser l'influence exercées par les référentiels européens en matière de politiques de conciliation sur les discours et politiques nationales de l'Italie et de la France. A partir d'une analyse cognitive du processus d'européanisation, nous montrons que les référentiels développés au sein de l'UE, par leur caractère abstrait et flou, n'ont eu jusqu'ici qu'une faible influence sur les discours et politiques en Italie et en France. Croisant une perspective néo-institutionnaliste historique et discursive, notre recherche a été construite autour de deux axes de réflexion. Premièrement, il a été question d'analyser, d'une part, l'évolution du discours tenu par les différentes instances européennes (notamment de la Commission européenne, le Conseil européen et le Fonds Social européen) et, d'autre part, questionner comment un consensus a pu émerger entre des pays et des acteurs qui ont des traditions extrêmement différentes en matière de politique sociale, de politique familiale et de convention de genre. Deuxièmement, il a été question d'analyser si et comment un cadre de référence conçu au niveau communautaire a pu influencer les discours et politiques au niveau national. - The reconciliation of work and family life policies forms, in the EU's member States, a plurality of politics, more or less complex, but rarely coherent. Combining different objectives such as fertility increase, mothers and children protection, equality between men and women, fight against children and lone-parent families poverty and women activation, these policies are part of the national traditions of family, employment and tax policy and bear the heritage and the tensions of the country history. At a moment when a new global player, the European Union, interferes increasingly explicitly in the debate and the definition of reconciling work and family life policies, the question at the heart of this thesis was to define what kind of influence the référentiels of European discourses have on reconciliation policies since the late 1990s, in the Italian and French discourses and policies. Starting from a cognitive analysis of the Europeanization process, we show that the référentiels developed within the EU, by their abstract and vague nature, have had little influence in Italy and France. Crossing an historical and a discursive neo-institutionalist perspective, our research was based on two axes of reasoning. First, we have analysed, on the one hand, the evolution of various European institutions' discoursed (including the European Commission, the European Council and the European Social Fund) and, on the other hand, we have questioned how a consensus has emerged between countries and actors who have very different traditions in social policy, family policy and gender conventions. Secondly, we have observed if and how a framework developed at Community level, as a kind of ideal to strive for, has influenced discourses and policies at the national level.

Catechol-binding serines of beta(2)-adrenergic receptors control the equilibrium between active and inactive receptor states.

The binding free energy for the interaction between serines 204 and 207 of the fifth transmembrane helix of the beta(2)-adrenergic receptor (beta(2)-AR) and catecholic hydroxyl (OH) groups of adrenergic agonists was analyzed using double mutant cycles. Binding affinities for catecholic and noncatecholic agonists were measured in wild-type and mutant receptors, carrying alanine replacement of the two serines (S204A, S207A beta(2)-AR), a constitutive activating mutation, or both. The free energy coupling between the losses of binding energy attributable to OH deletion from the ligand and from the receptor indicates a strong interaction (nonadditivity) as expected for a direct binding between the two sets of groups. However, we also measured a significant interaction between the deletion of OH groups from the receptor and the constitutive activating mutation. This suggests that a fraction of the decrease in agonist affinity caused by serine mutagenesis may involve a shift in the conformational equilibrium of the receptor toward the inactive state. Direct measurements using a transient transfection assay confirm this prediction. The constitutive activity of the (S204A, S207A) beta(2)-AR mutant is 50 to 60% lower than that of the wild-type beta(2)-AR. We conclude that S204 and S207 do not only provide a docking site for the agonist, but also control the equilibrium of the receptor between active (R*) and inactive (R) forms.

Un "régime méditerranéen" bon à penser : la lisibilité sociale et médicale des pratiques alimentaires des migrants italiens aux Etats-Unis et en Suisse (20e siècle) = The good "Mediterranean diet" : medical and social readability of food practices among Italian migrants in the United-States and Switzerland (20th century)

[Ressource électronique] : open access journal

Developing psychosis and its risk States through the lens of schizotypy.

Starting from the early descriptions of Kraepelin and Bleuler, the construct of schizotypy was developed from observations of aberrations in nonpsychotic family members of schizophrenia patients. In contemporary diagnostic manuals, the positive symptoms of schizotypal personality disorder were included in the ultra high-risk (UHR) criteria 20 years ago, and nowadays are broadly employed in clinical early detection of psychosis. The schizotypy construct, now dissociated from strict familial risk, also informed research on the liability to develop any psychotic disorder, and in particular schizophrenia-spectrum disorders, even outside clinical settings. Against the historical background of schizotypy it is surprising that evidence from longitudinal studies linking schizotypy, UHR, and conversion to psychosis has only recently emerged; and it still remains unclear how schizotypy may be positioned in high-risk research. Following a comprehensive literature search, we review 18 prospective studies on 15 samples examining the evidence for a link between trait schizotypy and conversion to psychosis in 4 different types of samples: general population, clinical risk samples according to UHR and/or basic symptom criteria, genetic (familial) risk, and clinical samples at-risk for a nonpsychotic schizophrenia-spectrum diagnosis. These prospective studies underline the value of schizotypy in high-risk research, but also point to the lack of evidence needed to better define the position of the construct of schizotypy within a developmental psychopathology perspective of emerging psychosis and schizophrenia-spectrum disorders.

The Learning Affect Monitor (LAM) - A computer-based system integrating quantitative and qualitative assessment of affective states in daily life.

The Learning Affect Monitor (LAM) is a new computer-based assessment system integrating basic dimensional evaluation and discrete description of affective states in daily life, based on an autonomous adapting system. Subjects evaluate their affective states according to a tridimensional space (valence and activation circumplex as well as global intensity) and then qualify it using up to 30 adjective descriptors chosen from a list. The system gradually adapts to the user, enabling the affect descriptors it presents to be increasingly relevant. An initial study with 51 subjects, using a 1 week time-sampling with 8 to 10 randomized signals per day, produced n = 2,813 records with good reliability measures (e.g., response rate of 88.8%, mean split-half reliability of .86), user acceptance, and usability. Multilevel analyses show circadian and hebdomadal patterns, and significant individual and situational variance components of the basic dimension evaluations. Validity analyses indicate sound assignment of qualitative affect descriptors in the bidimensional semantic space according to the circumplex model of basic affect dimensions. The LAM assessment module can be implemented on different platforms (palm, desk, mobile phone) and provides very rapid and meaningful data collection, preserving complex and interindividually comparable information in the domain of emotion and well-being.

Plasminogen activator inhibitor 1 and plasminogen activator inhibitor 2 in various disease states.

The association of increased PA-inhibitor (PAI) activity and of PAI-1 and PAI-2 antigen levels with different pathological conditions was studied in a collective of over 300 patients. PAI-1 and PAI-2 levels were measured by specific radioimmunoassays. A good correlation was observed of PAI activity with PAI-1 antigen (r = 0.718; p less than 0.0001) but not with PAI-2 (r = 0.070; n.s.). Both in the controls and in the patients, PAI activity and PAI-1 antigen showed an extremely large range of values. PAI activity ranged from 0.5 to 68 U/ml and PAI-1 antigen from 6 to 600 ng/ml. Increased PAI activity and PAI-1 antigen was observed in patients with malignant tumors, cardiovascular or thromboembolic disease, in the postoperative phase, with hepatic insufficiency, after trauma and after extracorporeal circulation. The large spectrum of disease states with increased PAI activity and PAI-1 antigen reinforces previous suggestions that PAI-1 is an acute phase reactant. After extracorporeal circulation, PAI activity and PAI-1 concentrations strongly increased within one hour, remained elevated for at least one week and returned to preoperation values within 7 days. PAI-2 values ranged from below detection limit (15 ng/ml), observed in half of the plasmas, to 485 ng/ml in a pregnant woman. High values of PAI-2 were only observed in pregnancy.

Predicting human resting-state functional connectivity from structural connectivity

In the cerebral cortex, the activity levels of neuronal populations are continuously fluctuating. When neuronal activity, as measured using functional MRI (fMRI), is temporally coherent across 2 populations, those populations are said to be functionally connected. Functional connectivity has previously been shown to correlate with structural (anatomical) connectivity patterns at an aggregate level. In the present study we investigate, with the aid of computational modeling, whether systems-level properties of functional networks-including their spatial statistics and their persistence across time-can be accounted for by properties of the underlying anatomical network. We measured resting state functional connectivity (using fMRI) and structural connectivity (using diffusion spectrum imaging tractography) in the same individuals at high resolution. Structural connectivity then provided the couplings for a model of macroscopic cortical dynamics. In both model and data, we observed (i) that strong functional connections commonly exist between regions with no direct structural connection, rendering the inference of structural connectivity from functional connectivity impractical; (ii) that indirect connections and interregional distance accounted for some of the variance in functional connectivity that was unexplained by direct structural connectivity; and (iii) that resting-state functional connectivity exhibits variability within and across both scanning sessions and model runs. These empirical and modeling results demonstrate that although resting state functional connectivity is variable and is frequently present between regions without direct structural linkage, its strength, persistence, and spatial statistics are nevertheless constrained by the large-scale anatomical structure of the human cerebral cortex.