Dissecting Carotenoid from Structural Components of Carotenoid-Based Coloration: A Field Experiment with Great Tits (Parus major)

Carotenoid-based yellowish to red plumage colors are widespread visual signals used in sexual and social communication. To understand their ultimate signaling functions, it is important to identify the proximate mechanism promoting variation in coloration. Carotenoid-based colors combine structural and pigmentary components, but the importance of the contribution of structural components to variation in pigment-based colors (i.e., carotenoid-based colors) has been undervalued. In a field experiment with great tits (Parus major), we combined a brood size manipulation with a simultaneous carotenoid supplementation in order to disentangle the effects of carotenoid availability and early growth condition on different components of the yellow breast feathers. By defining independent measures of feather carotenoid content (absolute carotenoid chroma) and background structure (background reflectance), we demonstrate that environmental factors experienced during the nestling period, namely, early growth conditions and carotenoid availability, contribute independently to variation in yellow plumage coloration. While early growth conditions affected the background reflectance of the plumage, the availability of carotenoids affected the absolute carotenoid chroma, the peak of maximum ultraviolet reflectance, and the overall shape, that is, chromatic information of the reflectance curves. These findings demonstrate that environment-induced variation in background structure contributes significantly to intraspecific variation in yellow carotenoid-based plumage coloration.

The Failure of Silence and the Manipulation of Memory: How Spain's pact of oblivion has failed to rid the country of its troubled past

This thesis is an analysis of Spain’s development from dictatorship to democracy in light of the trauma that it endured during the Spanish Civil War of 1936 – 1939 and the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, which lasted until 1975. Drawing from the work of Maurice Halbwachs and Pierre Nora, this thesis seeks to use the concepts of collective memory and lieux de mémoire to analyze what role memory has played in Spanish society from 1939 to the present day. Theanalysis begins with an overview of the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s ensuing dictatorship in order to establish an understanding of the trauma endured by Spain and its people. Of importance will be the manner in which the presentation of history became manipulated anddistorted under Franco as the dictator sought to control the country’s collective memory. With this background in mind, the thesis then turns to analyze how the memory of Spain’s past has affected the country’s development in two eras: during its transition to democracy in the 1970s and in the present day. Of central importance is the pact of silence that was established during the transition to democracy, which was a tacit agreement among the Spanish people to notdiscuss the past. This pact of silence still clouds Spain’s memory today and affects modern discourse concerning the past. Yet it is clear that Spain has not been reconciled to its past, as the provocation of history inevitably results in tension and controversy. The central contention of this thesis is that the pact of silence that surrounds Spain’s past has not eliminated the trauma of the Civil War and dictatorship, as demonstrated by the controversy stirred up by people, groups and places in the present day. This contention has repercussions for the study of history as a whole, as it indicates that the past cannot be muted in order to achievereconciliation; rather, it suggests that we must engage the past in order to be reconciled to it.

Botanical drugs, synergy, and network pharmacology: forth and back to intelligent mixtures

For centuries the science of pharmacognosy has dominated rational drug development until it was gradually substituted by target-based drug discovery in the last fifty years. Pharmacognosy stems from the different systems of traditional herbal medicine and its "reverse pharmacology" approach has led to the discovery of numerous pharmacologically active molecules and drug leads for humankind. But do botanical drugs also provide effective mixtures? Nature has evolved distinct strategies to modulate biological processes, either by selectively targeting biological macromolecules or by creating molecular promiscuity or polypharmacology (one molecule binds to different targets). Widely claimed to be superior over monosubstances, mixtures of bioactive compounds in botanical drugs allegedly exert synergistic therapeutic effects. Despite evolutionary clues to molecular synergism in nature, sound experimental data are still widely lacking to support this assumption. In this short review, the emerging concept of network pharmacology is highlighted, and the importance of studying ligand-target networks for botanical drugs is emphasized. Furthermore, problems associated with studying mixtures of molecules with distinctly different pharmacodynamic properties are addressed. It is concluded that a better understanding of the polypharmacology and potential network pharmacology of botanical drugs is fundamental in the ongoing rationalization of phytotherapy.

The new insight into dynamic crossover in glass forming liquids from the apparent enthalpy analysis

One of the most intriguing phenomena in glass forming systems is the dynamic crossover (T(B)), occurring well above the glass temperature (T(g)). So far, it was estimated mainly from the linearized derivative analysis of the primary relaxation time τ(T) or viscosity η(T) experimental data, originally proposed by Stickel et al. [J. Chem. Phys. 104, 2043 (1996); J. Chem. Phys. 107, 1086 (1997)]. However, this formal procedure is based on the general validity of the Vogel-Fulcher-Tammann equation, which has been strongly questioned recently [T. Hecksher et al. Nature Phys. 4, 737 (2008); P. Lunkenheimer et al. Phys. Rev. E 81, 051504 (2010); J. C. Martinez-Garcia et al. J. Chem. Phys. 134, 024512 (2011)]. We present a qualitatively new way to identify the dynamic crossover based on the apparent enthalpy space (H(a)(') = dlnτ/d(1/T)) analysis via a new plot lnH(a)(') vs. 1∕T supported by the Savitzky-Golay filtering procedure for getting an insight into the noise-distorted high order derivatives. It is shown that depending on the ratio between the "virtual" fragility in the high temperature dynamic domain (m(high)) and the "real" fragility at T(g) (the low temperature dynamic domain, m = m(low)) glass formers can be splitted into two groups related to f < 1 and f > 1, (f = m(high)∕m(low)). The link of this phenomenon to the ratio between the apparent enthalpy and activation energy as well as the behavior of the configurational entropy is indicated.