Jacek R. Wiśniewski
Dec 1, 2014; 13:3497-3506
Research

Is there an end to the Central Bank of Libya crisis? 14 November 2024 — 3:00PM TO 4:00PM Anonymous (not verified) 6 November 2024 Online

Experts discuss implications for Libya’s economic governance.

In August this year, the Libyan Presidency Council moved to replace Libya’s longtime central bank governor, Sadiq al-Kabir. Kabir had been in position since September 2011, and in the period following the administrative division of Libya, he rose to prominence as one of the most influential figures on the Libyan political scene.

In the absence of a functioning relationship between executive and legislature, the Central Bank of Libya (CBL) took on many of the competencies of the ministry of finance and became an arbiter of which payments were made and when. In October, following UN-led and parallel back-channel negotiations, a new governor was selected and the CBL board of directors reconstituted.

In this webinar, experts will examine:

• What challenges will the new CBL leadership face?
• Can we expect significant changes for Libya’s economic governance?
• What are the implications for the balance of power between Libya’s rival power centres?

This webinar is organized in partnership with the North Africa Initiative (NAI) at the Foreign Policy Institute (FPI) of the Johns Hopkins Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.

John M. Dietschy
Aug 1, 2004; 45:1375-1397
Thematic Reviews

IJ Goldberg
Apr 1, 1996; 37:693-707
Reviews

Chatham House appoints Rob Yates as the new head of the Centre on Global Health Security News Release sysadmin 27 June 2019

Chatham House is pleased to announce that Rob Yates has been appointed as head of the Centre on Global Health Security.

Rebuilding trust is central to the UN’s future Expert comment NCapeling 25 March 2021

António Guterres is under scrutiny as he prepares to report on the future of the United Nations, with a renewed focus on trust, resilience and prevention.

The United Nations Secretary-General’s inbox is full as his organization celebrates its 75th anniversary. Trust must be rebuilt amid increased geo-political rivalry, North-South divisions, and sceptical citizens left behind by globalization. The international community has manifestly underinvested in institutional resilience and prevention. Better partnerships are needed with the private sector, and innovative forms of cross-regional cooperation fostered.

There are positive signs UN member states want things to change. They unanimously agreed a Political Declaration last September strongly reaffirming multilateralism, and they gave António Guterres one year to present a roadmap on how to respond, ‘building back better’ in the face of climate change and COVID-19.

A key challenge is to steer mandates and resources towards prevention. The World Bank-WHO Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, which eerily predicted the pandemic in its inaugural report in September 2019, reminds us successful prevention rests not on warning alone, but on aligned incentives for early action.

Geopolitical tensions persist

China has invested significantly in the multilateral system over the last decade, both in formal organizations such as the UN and the African Union, and in fostering a set of China-centred ‘mini-lateral’ fora such as the SCO, BRICS and BRI. It has also deepened its ties with Russia in the UN Security Council. Western countries both begrudgingly admire and deeply distrust China’s nimbleness in advancing its interests and values in this way but are divided on how to respond.

The Biden administration has recommitted itself to multilateral processes but US bilateral relations are likely to remain the main foreign policy driver. The UK has sought to convert the G7 into an enlarged summit-level meeting for democracies but Europe is divided over the wisdom of formalizing a group which may increase divisions with China, and some major democracies – India for example – have divergent approaches on issues such as trade protection.

An increase in cross-regional informal caucusing within the UN system to advance norms and progress around specific common objectives is likely. Guterres can encourage smaller powers to become ‘bridge builders’ sitting in the middle of a ‘Venn diagram’ of such new member state constellations at the UN.

Guterres can also build on the recent Abraham Accords to encourage cross-regional cultural, political and security relationships on the back of trade and investment, and map practical opportunities for strategic cooperation between China and the West in health and food security, climate and biodiversity, and global macroeconomic management, while fostering new normative frameworks to manage strategic competition in artificial intelligence (AI), big data, cyber resilience, gene-editing, and automation.

North-South mistrust

Realizing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and climate objectives rests in part in mobilizing the expertise and resources of sub-state actors such as business and city and regional authorities. However, developing countries remain wary of granting the UN Secretary-General a greater role in fostering partnerships with the private sector and mobilizing private finance, out of fear this may overshadow the global North’s promises to provide aid and create fairer trade and debt conditions.

In addition, African governments are expressing growing frustration at their continued lack of ‘agency’ in UN decision-making, the reneging of promises on climate financing by the global North, and the slow rollout of the COVAX facility to developing countries.

Progress may lie in two areas. First, developing country leadership of initiatives – such as the Friends Group on SDG financing established by the Jamaican and Canadian ambassadors to the UN – can help build trust and allay concerns, which is vital to incentivise transformative investment by sovereign wealth, pension, and insurance funds in pro-poor low carbon infrastructure in developing countries.

The second area is curating multi-stakeholder initiatives outside the UN framework and then linking them back to the organization once they have proven to be beneficial to both developed and developing countries. Successful initiatives such as the Vaccine Alliance can be a model of how to do this while not detracting from state obligations.

Scepticism among citizens

Trust in governance also needs rebuilding at the level of the individual citizen. Mobilized by populist movements and ‘fake news’ online, individuals left behind by the uneven economic benefits of globalization view governments and international organizations as unaccountable and lacking their interests at heart.

Guterres has called for a new ‘social contract’ between governments and their citizens, and for ‘Multilateralism 2.0’ to demonstrate a practical ‘hard interest’ as well as a ‘values’ case for why international cooperation inclusively benefits individuals as well as states. And technological innovation can also help citizens hold governments to account. As the first Secretary-General with a science and engineering background, Guterres has championed how technology enhances UN delivery of its objectives.

The pairing of artificial intelligence (AI) with satellites and drones for geospatial insight has been pioneered by both the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to help communities preserve ecosystems and agricultural productivity. The resultant data, accessible on smart phones and computers, enables civil society to measure governments’ promises against real-time progress, through monitoring greenhouse gas emissions from power stations.

Alongside trust and accountability, fostering inclusiveness is likely to be central to Guterres’ report as he navigates how the UN can legitimize multi-stakeholder partnerships, enhance transparency, and bring coherence to diverse ‘mini-lateral’ initiatives.

These themes are explored further in the forthcoming synthesis paper ‘Reflections on building more inclusive global governance: Ten insights into emerging practice’

Expert

Expert

Expert

Centrioles are key eukaryotic organelles that are responsible for the formation of cilia and flagella, and for organizing the microtubule network and the mitotic spindle in animals. Centriole assembly requires oligomerization of the essential protein spindle assembly abnormal 6 (SAS-6), which forms a structural scaffold templating the organization of further organelle components. A dimerization interaction between SAS-6 N-terminal “head” domains was previously shown to be essential for protein oligomerization in vitro and for function in centriole assembly. Here, we developed a pharmacophore model allowing us to assemble a library of low-molecular-weight ligands predicted to bind the SAS-6 head domain and inhibit protein oligomerization. We demonstrate using NMR spectroscopy that a ligand from this family binds at the head domain dimerization site of algae, nematode, and human SAS-6 variants, but also that another ligand specifically recognizes human SAS-6. Atomistic molecular dynamics simulations starting from SAS-6 head domain crystallographic structures, including that of the human head domain which we now resolve, suggest that ligand specificity derives from favorable Van der Waals interactions with a hydrophobic cavity at the dimerization site.

Artificial Intelligence Apps Risk Entrenching India’s Socio-economic Inequities Expert comment sysadmin 14 March 2018

Artificial intelligence applications will not be a panacea for addressing India’s grand challenges. Data bias and unequal access to technology gains will entrench existing socio-economic fissures.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is high on the Indian government’s agenda. Some days ago, Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the Wadhwani Institute for Artificial Intelligence, reportedly India’s first research institute focused on AI solutions for social good. In the same week, Niti Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant argued that AI could potentially add $957 billion to the economy and outlined ways in which AI could be a ‘game changer’.

During his budget speech, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley announced that Niti Aayog would spearhead a national programme on AI; with the near doubling of the Digital India budget, the IT ministry also announced the setting up of four committees for AI-related research. An industrial policy for AI is also in the pipeline, expected to provide incentives to businesses for creating a globally competitive Indian AI industry.

Narratives on the emerging digital economy often suffer from technological determinism — assuming that the march of technological transformation has an inner logic, independent of social choice and capable of automatically delivering positive social change. However, technological trajectories can and must be steered by social choice and aligned with societal objectives. Modi’s address hit all the right notes, as he argued that the ‘road ahead for AI depends on and will be driven by human intentions’. Emphasising the need to direct AI technologies towards solutions for the poor, he called upon students and teachers to identify ‘the grand challenges facing India’ – to ‘Make AI in India and for India’.

To do so, will undoubtedly require substantial investments in R&D, digital infrastructure and education and re-skilling. But, two other critical issues must be simultaneously addressed: data bias and access to technology gains.

While computers have been mimicking human intelligence for some decades now, a massive increase in computational power and the quantity of available data are enabling a process of ‘machine learning.’ Instead of coding software with specific instructions to accomplish a set task, machine learning involves training an algorithm on large quantities of data to enable it to self-learn; refining and improving its results through multiple iterations of the same task. The quality of data sets used to train machines is thus a critical concern in building AI applications.

Much recent research shows that applications based on machine learning reflect existing social biases and prejudice. Such bias can occur if the data set the algorithm is trained on is unrepresentative of the reality it seeks to represent. If for example, a system is trained on photos of people that are predominantly white, it will have a harder time recognizing non-white people. This is what led a recent Google application to tag black people as gorillas.

Alternatively, bias can also occur if the data set itself reflects existing discriminatory or exclusionary practices. A recent study by ProPublica found for example that software that was being used to assess the risk of recidivism in criminals in the United States was twice as likely to mistakenly flag black defendants as being at higher risk of committing future crimes.

The impact of such data bias can be seriously damaging in India, particularly at a time of growing social fragmentation. It can contribute to the entrenchment of social bias and discriminatory practices, while rendering both invisible and pervasive the processes through which discrimination occurs. Women are 34 per cent less likely to own a mobile phone than men – manifested in only 14 per cent of women in rural India owning a mobile phone, while only 30 per cent of India’s internet users are women.

Women’s participation in the labour force, currently at around 27 per cent, is also declining, and is one of the lowest in South Asia. Data sets used for machine learning are thus likely to have a marked gender bias. The same observations are likely to hold true for other marginalized groups as well.

Accorded to a 2014 report, Muslims, Dalits and tribals make up 53 per cent of all prisoners in India; National Crime Records Bureau data from 2016 shows in some states, the percentage of Muslims in the incarcerated population was almost three times the percentage of Muslims in the overall population. If AI applications for law and order are built on this data, it is not unlikely that it will be prejudiced against these groups.

(It is worth pointing out that the recently set-up national AI task force is comprised of mostly Hindu men – only two women are on the task force, and no Muslims or Christians. A recent article in the New York Times talked about AI’s ‘white guy problem’; will India suffer from a ‘Hindu male bias’?)

Yet, improving the quality, or diversity, of data sets may not be able to solve the problem. The processes of machine learning and reasoning involve a quagmire of mathematical functions, variables and permutations, the logic of which are not readily traceable or predictable. The dazzle of AI-enabled efficiency gains must not blind us to the fact that while AI systems are being integrated into key socio-economic systems, their accuracy and logic of reasoning have not been fully understood or studied.

The other big challenge stems from the distribution of AI-led technology gains. Even if estimates of AI contribution to GDP are correct, the adoption of these technologies is likely to be in niches within the organized sector. These industries are likely to be capital- rather than labour-intensive, and thus unlikely to contribute to large-scale job creation.

At the same time, AI applications can most readily replace low- to medium-skilled jobs within the organized sector. This is already being witnessed in the outsourcing sector – where basic call and chat tasks are now automated. Re-skilling will be important, but it is unlikely that those who lose their jobs will also be those who are being re-skilled – the long arch of technological change and societal adaptation is longer than that of people’s lives. The contractualization of work, already on the rise, is likely to further increase as large industries prefer to have a flexible workforce to adapt to technological change. A shift from formal employment to contractual work can imply a loss of access to formal social protection mechanisms, increasing the precariousness of work for workers.

The adoption of AI technologies is also unlikely in the short- to medium-term in the unorganized sector, which engages more than 80 per cent of India’s labor force. The cost of developing and deploying AI applications, particularly in relation to the cost of labour, will inhibit adoption. Moreover, most enterprises within the unorganized sector still have limited access to basic, older technologies – two-thirds of the workforce are employed in enterprises without electricity. Eco-system upgrades will be important but incremental. Given the high costs of developing AI-based applications, most start-ups are unlikely to be working towards creating bottom-of-the-pyramid solutions.

Access to AI-led technology gains is thus likely to be heavily differentiated – a few high-growth industries can be expected, but these will not necessarily result in the welfare of labour. Studies show that labour share of national income, especially routine labour, has been declining steadily across developing countries.

We should be clear that new technological applications themselves are not going to transform or disrupt this trend – rather, without adequate policy steering, these trends will be exacerbated.

Policy debates about AI applications in India need to take these two issues seriously. AI applications will not be a panacea for addressing ‘India’s grand challenges’. Data bias and unequal access to technology gains will entrench existing socio-economic fissures, even making them technologically binding.

In addition to developing AI applications and creating a skilled workforce, the government needs to prioritize research that examines the complex social, ethical and governance challenges associated with the spread of AI-driven technologies. Blind technological optimism might entrench rather than alleviate the grand Indian challenge of inequity and growth.

This article was originally published in the Indian Express.

Bero Roos
Theor. Probability and Math. Statist. 111 (), 137-151.
Abstract, references and article information

Stromal interaction molecule 1 (STIM1) plays a pivotal role in store-operated Ca2+ entry (SOCE), an essential mechanism in cellular calcium signaling and in maintaining cellular calcium balance. Because O-GlcNAcylation plays pivotal roles in various cellular function, we examined the effect of fluctuation in STIM1 O-GlcNAcylation on SOCE activity. We found that both increase and decrease in STIM1 O-GlcNAcylation impaired SOCE activity. To determine the molecular basis, we established STIM1-knockout HEK293 (STIM1-KO-HEK) cells using the CRISPR/Cas9 system and transfected STIM1 WT (STIM1-KO-WT-HEK), S621A (STIM1-KO-S621A-HEK), or T626A (STIM1-KO-T626A-HEK) cells. Using these cells, we examined the possible O-GlcNAcylation sites of STIM1 to determine whether the sites were O-GlcNAcylated. Co-immunoprecipitation analysis revealed that Ser621 and Thr626 were O-GlcNAcylated and that Thr626 was O-GlcNAcylated in the steady state but Ser621 was not. The SOCE activity in STIM1-KO-S621A-HEK and STIM1-KO-T626A-HEK cells was lower than that in STIM1-KO-WT-HEK cells because of reduced phosphorylation at Ser621. Treatment with the O-GlcNAcase inhibitor Thiamet G or O-GlcNAc transferase (OGT) transfection, which increases O-GlcNAcylation, reduced SOCE activity, whereas treatment with the OGT inhibitor ST045849 or siOGT transfection, which decreases O-GlcNAcylation, also reduced SOCE activity. Decrease in SOCE activity due to increase and decrease in O-GlcNAcylation was attributable to reduced phosphorylation at Ser621. These data suggest that both decrease in O-GlcNAcylation at Thr626 and increase in O-GlcNAcylation at Ser621 in STIM1 lead to impairment of SOCE activity through decrease in Ser621 phosphorylation. Targeting STIM1 O-GlcNAcylation could provide a promising treatment option for the related diseases, such as neurodegenerative diseases.

CD81 plays a central role in a variety of physiological and pathological processes. Recent structural analysis of CD81 indicates that it contains an intramembrane cholesterol-binding pocket and that interaction with cholesterol may regulate a conformational switch in the large extracellular domain of CD81. Therefore, CD81 possesses a potential cholesterol-sensing mechanism; however, its relevance for protein function is thus far unknown. In this study we investigate CD81 cholesterol sensing in the context of its activity as a receptor for hepatitis C virus (HCV). Structure-led mutagenesis of the cholesterol-binding pocket reduced CD81–cholesterol association but had disparate effects on HCV entry, both reducing and enhancing CD81 receptor activity. We reasoned that this could be explained by alterations in the consequences of cholesterol binding. To investigate this further we performed molecular dynamic simulations of CD81 with and without cholesterol; this identified a potential allosteric mechanism by which cholesterol binding regulates the conformation of CD81. To test this, we designed further mutations to force CD81 into either the open (cholesterol-unbound) or closed (cholesterol-bound) conformation. The open mutant of CD81 exhibited reduced HCV receptor activity, whereas the closed mutant enhanced activity. These data are consistent with cholesterol sensing switching CD81 between a receptor active and inactive state. CD81 interactome analysis also suggests that conformational switching may modulate the assembly of CD81–partner protein networks. This work furthers our understanding of the molecular mechanism of CD81 cholesterol sensing, how this relates to HCV entry, and CD81's function as a molecular scaffold; these insights are relevant to CD81's varied roles in both health and disease.

Le ventre est l’une des parties du corps où il est plus difficile de perdre de la graisse. Souvent, la meilleure solution pour arriver à perdre de la graisse à cet endroit précis du corps consiste à manger sainement et équilibré. Cependant, quels sont les aliments qui brûlent les graisses du ventre sans danger pour la […]

L’article Quels sont les aliments qui brûlent rapidement les graisses du ventre ? est apparu en premier sur Ortho Doc France.

VOLUME 289 (2014) PAGES 6604–6618In Fig. 4G, in the foxi1 panel, the images in Fig. 4G, i and l, corresponding to “smad1 MO” and “smad5 MO + samd1/9 mRNA” samples, respectively, were inadvertently reused during figure preparation. This error has now been corrected using images pertaining to each treatment and sample. This correction does not affect the results or conclusions of the work.jbc;295/52/18650/F4F1F4Figure 4G.

Business Development in Madagascar: How to Enable Entrepreneurialism 15 November 2017 — 12:00PM TO 1:00PM Anonymous (not verified) 9 November 2017 Chatham House, London

Central and Eastern Europe become hawkish on China Expert comment LJefferson 16 September 2022

The recent withdrawal of the Baltic countries from the ‘17+1’ format displays changing perceptions of China due to its ambiguity towards the war in Ukraine.

While the Russian invasion of Ukraine only confirmed Central and Eastern Europe’s views of Russia, it is also affecting their relations with China. Although the relationship was already complicated due to unfulfilled Chinese economic promises to CEE countries and growing indications of efforts to influence their domestic politics, China’s support for Russia is pushing Central and Eastern Europeans even further away.

This shift was highlighted, and formalized, recently by several countries in the region leaving the ‘17+1’ format, through which China cooperates with a group of countries from the region. The shifting attitudes towards China will also influence the relationship between the European Union as a whole and China.

A Trojan Horse that never was

When the format was launched in 2012 between 16 CEE countries at the time and China, the countries jumping on board expected a wave of Chinese investment and an opportunity to diversify mostly west-bound trade.

These hopes never fully materialized as Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI) in CEE has been generally lower compared to the rest of Europe and China never became an important export destination for any of the countries. The growing disillusionment and concern about Chinese security threats has led to some of the countries speaking up about the perceived perils of closer cooperation.

The first to withdraw from what had become ‘17+1’ by 2021 was Lithuania, which also took an interest in strengthening ties with Taiwan and allowed it to open a Taiwanese representative office in Vilnius. This triggered a breakdown in the bilateral relations with China. As a retaliatory response, China blocked Lithuanian imports and imports from other EU states containing inputs from Lithuania, leading the EU to launch an official dispute at the WTO.

War in Ukraine

Since the invasion started, CEE countries have been dealing with large numbers of Ukrainian refugees, organizing shipments of military equipment to Ukraine, and at the same time worrying whether they could be next on Russia’s list.

However, the concerns and security environment that these countries face seems to be almost entirely disregarded by China. On the sidelines of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, Xi and Putin signed the joint communiqué in which China backed Moscow’s demands to reverse NATO borders to the pre-1997 situation, completely disregarding CEE’s security interests.

China’s implicit support for Russia after the invasion has sowed deep mistrust of its respect for the sovereignty of other nations. The Chinese diplomatic apparatus clearly noticed this changing mood among CEE governments and sent a special envoy to eight capitals in April-May tasked with ‘eliminating misunderstandings regarding Russia-Ukraine conflict’.

However, the trip was not particularly successful. The delegation failed to secure high-level meetings, with the most prominent case being the Polish minister of foreign affairs declining to meet Huo Yuzhen, the Chinese Special Councilor for CEEC cooperation. Given that Andrzej Duda, President of Poland, was the only head of an EU state who attended the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony just before the Russian invasion in February, the change in attitudes is clear.

Following the envoy’s visit to the Czech Republic, the Czech parliament’s foreign affairs committee unanimously approved a resolution calling for the country to quit the ‘16+1’ format and the government is expected to act upon it in the near future. Meanwhile, Latvia and Estonia recently jointly announced that they would no longer be participating in the cooperation framework, turning it into ‘14+1’.

A British YouTube star and professional wrestling superfan showed off his knowledge by breaking the Guinness World Record for the most WWE wrestlers identified by their entrance music in one minute.

Making the Most of Today’s Cloud-First Approach to Running HPC and AI Workloads With Penguin Scyld Cloud Central™ Bursting to cloud has long been used to complement on-premises HPC capacity […]

The post Penguin Computing Scyld Cloud Central™: A New Cloud-First Approach to HPC and AI Workloads appeared first on HPCwire.

Tsuneya Ikezu
Oct 2, 2024; 44:e1170242024-e1170242024
Symposium

Xinying Guo
Oct 23, 2024; 44:e0727242024-e0727242024
Cellular

Umut Güçlü
Jul 8, 2015; 35:10005-10014
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

Thalamocortical pathways from the rodent ventral posterior (VP) thalamic complex to the somatosensory cerebral cortex areas are a key model in modern neuroscience. However, beyond the intensively studied projection from medial VP (VPM) to the primary somatosensory area (S1), the wiring of these pathways remains poorly characterized. We combined micropopulation tract-tracing and single-cell transfection experiments to map the pathways arising from different portions of the VP complex in male mice. We found that pathways originating from different VP regions show differences in area/lamina arborization pattern and axonal varicosity size. Neurons from the rostral VPM subnucleus innervate trigeminal S1 in point-to-point fashion. In contrast, a caudal VPM subnucleus innervates heavily and topographically second somatosensory area (S2), but not S1. Neurons in a third, intermediate VPM subnucleus innervate through branched axons both S1 and S2, with markedly different laminar patterns in each area. A small anterodorsal subnucleus selectively innervates dysgranular S1. The parvicellular VPM subnucleus selectively targets the insular cortex and adjacent portions of S1 and S2. Neurons in the rostral part of the lateral VP nucleus (VPL) innervate spinal S1, while caudal VPL neurons simultaneously target S1 and S2. Rostral and caudal VP nuclei show complementary patterns of calcium-binding protein expression. In addition to the cortex, neurons in caudal VP subnuclei target the sensorimotor striatum. Our finding of a massive projection from VP to S2 separate from the VP projections to S1 adds critical anatomical evidence to the notion that different somatosensory submodalities are processed in parallel in S1 and S2.

Perivascular mural cells including vascular smooth cells (VSMCs) and pericytes are integral components of the vascular system. In the central nervous system (CNS), pericytes are also indispensable for the blood–brain barrier (BBB), blood–spinal cord barrier, and blood–retinal barrier and play key roles in maintaining cerebrovascular and neuronal functions. However, the functional specifications of pericytes between CNS and peripheral organs have not been resolved at the genetic and molecular levels. Hence, the generation of reliable CNS pericyte-specific models and genetic tools remains very challenging. Here, we report a new CNS pericyte marker in mice. This putative cation-transporting ATPase 13A5 (Atp13a5) marker was identified through single-cell transcriptomics, based on its specificity to brain pericytes. We further generated a knock-in model with both tdTomato reporter and Cre recombinase. Using this model to trace the distribution of Atp13a5-positive pericytes in mice, we found that the tdTomato reporter reliably labels the CNS pericytes, including the ones in spinal cord and retina but not peripheral organs. Interestingly, brain pericytes are likely shaped by the developing neural environment, as Atp13a5-positive pericytes start to appear around murine embryonic day 15 (E15) and expand along the cerebrovasculature. Thus, Atp13a5 is a specific marker of CNS pericyte lineage, and this Atp13a5-based model is a reliable tool to explore the heterogeneity of pericytes and BBB functions in health and diseases.

A major operation to distribute seeds and tools has been launched in the Central African Republic to support [...]

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is organizing its first-ever Global Conference on Animal Health Innovation, Reference Centres and Vaccines from 23 to 25 September at FAO headquarters [...]

Read more at http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/aroundthemall/2011/06/dancing-splash-mob-floods-the-natural-history-museum In an effort to celebrate World Oceans Day, organizers planned a "splash" mob at the National Museum of Natural History's Sant Ocean Hall.

During the restorations, visitors will be able to see the famous site via a temporary walkway, which officials will use to study the flow of foot traffic

The new research could change history's understanding of the sprawling trade network that connected Europe and the Middle East to East Asia

People using the library in the Arts and Culture Centre in St. John's are being forced to use alternate entrances due to an unsafe staircase in front of the building.

Mosquito-borne disease is a major global public health issue. One path toward the development of evidence-based strategies to limit mosquito biting is the study of the mosquito nervous system—in particular, the sensory systems that drive biting behavior. The central nervous system of insects consists of the brain and the ventral nerve cord. Here, we describe a protocol for dissecting, immunofluorescent labeling, and imaging both of these structures in the mosquito. This protocol was optimized for Aedes aegypti and works well on Anopheles gambiae tissue. It has not been tested in other mosquito species, but we anticipate that it would work on a range of mosquitoes, and, if not, our protocol will provide a starting point from which to optimize. Notably, a limited number of antibodies cross-react with Ae. aegypti proteins. This protocol is intended for use with validated antibodies and can also be used to test new antibodies as they are generated. It has been successfully used to visualize protein tags, such as green fluorescent protein, that have been introduced into the mosquito to amplify or detect their presence.

The technique of visualizing axon pathways in the embryonic ventral nerve cord using antibody labeling has been fundamental to our understanding of the genetic and developmental mechanisms underlying nervous system wiring in Drosophila. High-resolution microscopic examination of the ventral nerve cord remains an essential component of many experiments in Drosophila developmental neuroscience. Although it is possible to examine the ventral nerve cord in intact whole-mount embryos, to collect the highest-quality images it is often useful to isolate the nervous system away from the other embryonic tissues through embryo dissection. This protocol describes methods for dissecting ventral nerve cords from Drosophila embryos that have been fixed and stained via immunofluorescence or horseradish peroxidase (HRP) immunohistochemistry. The process of making fine dissection needles for this purpose from electrolytically sharpened tungsten wire is also described. Dissected and mounted ventral nerve cords can be examined and imaged using a variety of microscopy techniques including differential interference contrast (DIC) optics, epifluorescence, or confocal microscopy.

Tammy Roberts, Home Base's executive director, said before these services launched, there was "no place for youth to go" other than the emergency room or to RCMP cells. 

Inflation, an increase to the debt limit, and a series of mega-projects have been focuses of the municipal election in Regina.

The Prince Edward Island Fire Marshals Office has concluded its investigation into a massive fire at Valley Truss and Metal in Kensington in October.

Steven Myers, who has been Prince Edward Island's housing minister for just over a month, says the Community Outreach Centre will remain at its current location on Charlottetown's Park Street whether city councillors like it or not.

More than 14 months after flooding caused by heavy rainfall forced the Ottawa Birth and Wellness Centre to shut down its birthing unit, it's once again welcoming expecting families.

A heartfelt initiative is taking root in some small towns across eastern Ontario where light and hydro poles are being adorned with banners that pay tribute to local veterans.

The Pinecrest Queensway and Somerset West health centres are aiming to get a slice of $370 million of provincial funding to operate centres focused on addictions recovery and links to supportive housing.