Can homeopathic verum and placebo globules be distinguished by UV spectroscopy?

Purpose: Homeopathic preparations are used in homeopathy and anthroposophically extended medicine. Previous studies described differences in UV transmission between homeopathic preparations of CuSO4 and controls. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether statistically significant differences can be found between homeopathic verum and placebo globules by UV spectroscopy. Methods: Verum (aconitum 30c, calcium carbonate/quercus e cortice) and placebo globules used in two previous clinical trials were dissolved in distilled water at 10mg/ml 20-23h prior to the measurements. Absorbance was measured at 190 – 340nm with a Shimadzu UV-1800 double beam spectrophotometer. Duplicates of each sample were measured in a randomized order 4 times on each of the 5 measurement days. To correct for differences between measurement days, average absorbance of all samples on one day was deduced from absorbance of the individual samples. The Kruskal-Wallis test was used to determine group differences between the samples, and finally the coding of the samples was revealed. Results: First analysis showed significant differences (p≤0.05) in average UV absorbance at 200 – 290nm between the samples and a tendency of a correlation (p≤0.1) between absorbance and globule weight. More results will be presented at the conference. Conclusion: Since the absorbance of the samples at the wavelengths between 200 and 290nm was small, a number of aspects had to be considered and should be corrected for if they are present when performing UV spectroscopy on homeopathic globules: 1. Exact weighing of the globules. 2. Measurement error of the spectrophotometer at small absorbances. 3. Drift of the spectrophotometer during a measurement day. 4. Differences between measurement days. The question remains what caused the differences in absorbance found in these experiments: the use of the original material for the production of the verum globules, differences in the production of verum and placebo globules, or other context factors.

The Jews in India and Far East : (being a reprint of articles contributed to "Church and Synagoge" with appendices)

by J. Henry Lord

An initiative for participatory monitoring of large scale acquisitions: Opportunities and results thus far

Increasing commercial pressures on land are provoking fundamental and far-reaching changes in the relationships between people and land. Much knowledge on land-oriented investments projects currently comes from the media. Although this provides a good starting point, lack of transparency and rapidly changing contexts mean that this is often unreliable. The International Land Coalition, in partnership with Oxfam Novib, Centre de coopération internationale en recherche agronomique pour le développement (CIRAD), University of Pretoria, Centre for Development and Environment of the University of Bern (CDE), and GIZ, started to compile an inventory of land-related investments. This project aims to better understand the extent, trends and impacts of land-related investments by supporting an ongoing and systematic stocktaking exercise of the various investment projects currently taking place worldwide. It involves a large number of organizations and individuals working in areas where land transactions are being made, and able to provide details of such investments. The project monitors land transactions in rural areas that imply a transformation of land use rights from communities and smallholders to commercial use, and are made both by domestic and foreign investors (private actors, governments, government-back private investors). The focus is on investments for food or agrofuel production, timber extraction, carbon trading, mineral extraction, conservation and tourism. A novel way of using ITC to document land acquisitions in a spatially explicit way and by using an approach called “crowdsourcing” is being developed. This approach will allow actors to share information and knowledge directly and at any time on a public platform, where it will be scrutinized in terms of reliability and cross checked with other sources. Up to now, over 1200 deals have been recorded across 96 countries. Details of such transactions have been classified in a matrix and distributed to over 350 contacts worldwide for verification. The verified information has been geo-referenced and represented in two global maps. This is an open database enabling a continued monitoring exercise and the improvement of data accuracy. More information will be released over time. The opportunities arise from overcoming constraints by incomplete information by proposing a new way of collecting, enhancing and sharing information and knowledge in a more democratic and transparent manner. The intention is to develop interactive knowledge platform where any interested person can share and access information on land deals, their link to involved stakeholders, and their embedding into a geographical context. By making use of new ICT technologies that are more and more in the reach of local stakeholders, as well as open access and web-based spatial information systems, it will become possible to create a dynamic database containing spatial explicit data. Feeding in data by a large number of stakeholders, increasingly also by means of new mobile ITC technologies, will open up new opportunities to analyse, monitor and assess highly dynamic trends of land acquisition and rural transformation.

A steerable UV laser system for the calibration of liquid argon time projection chambers

A number of liquid argon time projection chambers (LAr TPCs) are being built or are proposed for neutrino experiments on long- and short baseline beams. For these detectors, a distortion in the drift field due to geometrical or physics reasons can affect the reconstruction of the events. Depending on the TPC geometry and electric drift field intensity, this distortion could be of the same magnitude as the drift field itself. Recently, we presented a method to calibrate the drift field and correct for these possible distortions. While straight cosmic ray muon tracks could be used for calibration, multiple coulomb scattering and momentum uncertainties allow only a limited resolution. A UV laser instead can create straight ionization tracks in liquid argon, and allows one to map the drift field along different paths in the TPC inner volume. Here we present a UV laser feed-through design with a steerable UV mirror immersed in liquid argon that can point the laser beam at many locations through the TPC. The straight ionization paths are sensitive to drift field distortions, a fit of these distortion to the linear optical path allows to extract the drift field, by using these laser tracks along the whole TPC volume one can obtain a 3D drift field map. The UV laser feed-through assembly is a prototype of the system that will be used for the MicroBooNE experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL).

The special Sm core structure of the U7 snRNP: far-reaching significance of a small nuclear ribonucleoprotein

The polypeptide composition of the U7 small nuclear ribonucleoprotein (snRNP) involved in histone messenger RNA (mRNA) 3' end formation has recently been elucidated. In contrast to spliceosomal snRNPs, which contain a ring-shaped assembly of seven so-called Sm proteins, in the U7 snRNP the Sm proteins D1 and D2 are replaced by U7-specific Sm-like proteins, Lsm10 and Lsm11. This polypeptide composition and the unusual structure of Lsm11, which plays a role in histone RNA processing, represent new themes in the biology of Sm/Lsm proteins. Moreover this structure has important consequences for snRNP assembly that is mediated by two complexes containing the PRMT5 methyltransferase and the SMN (survival of motor neurons) protein, respectively. Finally, the ability to alter this polypeptide composition by a small mutation in U7 snRNA forms the basis for using modified U7 snRNA derivatives to alter specific pre-mRNA splicing events, thereby opening up a new way for antisense gene therapy.

Di genorṭe welṭ oder šwerer men nemṭ zich fir gringer helfṭ Goṭ : ašpagil naie windrlichi niṭšeche of Pûrîm ; wos hoṭ zich farlofin in ṭf maskwiṭer land ; tzum unṭerhalṭ far allerlei menṭšin gilernṭi in och imgilernṭi

Digitalisat der Ausg. Lemberg, 1865

Lider-zamelbukh far der yidisher shul un familie : 85 lider far a drayshṭimign kor (oykh far solo) ; miṭ baglayṭung fun piane

tsuzamngeshṭelṭ fun Z. Kiselgof