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SUMMARYRegulation of the microbiota is critical to intestinal health yet the mechanisms employed by innate immunity remain unclear. Here we show that mice deficient in the C-Type-lectin receptor, Clec12a developed severe colitis, which was dependent on the microbiota. Fecal-microbiota-transplantation (FMT) studies into germfree mice revealed a colitogenic microbiota formed within Clec12a-/-mice that was marked by expansion of the gram-positive organism,Faecalibaculum rodentium. Treatment withF. rodentiumwas sufficient to worsen colitis in wild-type mice. Macrophages within the gut express the highest levels of Clec12a. Cytokine and sequencing analysis in Clec12a-/-macrophages revealed heighten inflammation but marked reduction in genes associated with phagocytosis. Indeed, Clec12a-/-macrophages are impaired in their ability to uptakeF. rodentium.Purified Clec12a had higher binding to gram-positive organisms such asF. rodentium. Thus, our data identifies Clec12a as an innate immune surveillance mechanism to control expansion of potentially harmful commensals without overt inflammation.

Social media is profoundly changing the way many people interact, and there are growing concerns that social media use is negatively affecting individual’s mental health. This chapter will review research which has correlated social media use to measures relating to depression, self-esteem, anxiety, and loneliness. Additionally, we review the reported benefits of using social media relating to mental health, such as enhanced self-expression, online support, and enhanced socializing capabilities. We then evaluate theories and models that have been proposed to explain the relationships between social media use and depression. In the final section, we highlight some methodological limitations with prior research and suggest future directions.

Social media is profoundly changing the way many people interact, and there are growing concerns that social media use is negatively affecting individual’s mental health. This chapter will review research which has correlated social media use to measures relating to depression, self-esteem, anxiety, and loneliness. Additionally, we review the reported benefits of using social media relating to mental health, such as enhanced self-expression, online support, and enhanced socializing capabilities. We then evaluate theories and models that have been proposed to explain the relationships between social media use and depression. In the final section, we highlight some methodological limitations with prior research and suggest future directions.

It has been suggested that neuro-diverse individuals may be particularly good at detecting online deception (Pick 2019). A small-scale exploratory study was conducted to investigate whether individuals with traits associated with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) were more or less accurate in spotting different types of fake news. A non-clinical sample of university students completed an online identification task, where both fake and real articles items were manipulated in terms of their emotive content. When individuals with low and high scores on the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (Baron-Cohen et al. 2001) were compared, there were no significant main effects on detection accuracy. However, there were two significant interactions, indicating an interesting relationship between message emotiveness, ASD and fake news detection. The results contribute to an understanding of how psychological differences, in particular ASD, may affect online judgements and will contribute to a developing body of work relating positive skills of neuro-diverse individuals to the cybersecurity industry.

The role of the human in cyber security is well acknowledged. Many cyber security incidents rely upon targets performing specific behavioural actions, such as opening a link within a phishing email. Cyber adversaries themselves are driven by psychological processes such as motivation, group dynamics and social identity. Furthermore, both intentional and unintentional insider threats are associated with a range of psychological factors, including cognitive load, mental wellbeing, trust and interpersonal relations. By incorporating psychology into cyber security education, practitioners will be better equipped with the skills they need to address cyber security issues. However, there are challenges in doing so. Psychology is a broad discipline, and many theories, approaches and methods may have little practical significance to cyber security. There is a need to sift through the literature to identify what can be applied to cyber security. There are also pedagogical differences in how psychology and cyber security are taught and also psychological differences in the types of student that may typically study psychology and cyber security. To engage with cyber security students, it is important that these differences are identified and positively addressed. Essential to this endeavor is the need to discuss and collaborate across the two disciplines. In this paper, we explore these issues and discuss our experiences as psychology and cyber security academics who work across disciplines to deliver psychology education to cyber security students, practitioners and commercial clients.

FACS profile for sorting naïve and memory CD4+ T cells. Representative gates for FACS setup used to separate naïve and memory CD4+ T cells. Spleen cells were separated based on forward and side scatter (P1 and P2). Dead cells (violet positive) were removed (P3), as were lineage/FITC positive (see methods) (P4), before CD4+ cells (y-axis, bottom left plot) were separated based on CD44 expression (x-axis, bottom left plot) to isolate naïve (CD44 low) and memory (CD44 high) populations. Bottom right plot shows alternate representation of CD44 expression. (PDF 353 kb)

Cis-regulatory analysis of genes differentially expressed (FDR ≤0.1) during aging by oPOSSUM-3. Table shows transcription factor binding sites found to be enriched in +/− 10 kb regions flanking transcription start site of target genes (excluding coding regions). See Methods for explanation of Z-score and Fisher p-value. (PPTX 42 kb)

Ceramides, serve as central mediators in sphingolipid metabolism and signaling pathways. They function in signaling events which induce apoptosis, cell cycle arrest, and autophagic responses. In cancer cells, ceramide levels are often suppressed by the up-regulation of ceramide-metabolizing enzymes or the down-regulation of ceramide-generating enzymes, resulting in increased cancer cell survival. Chemotherapeutic drugs and radiation therapy have been shown to increase intracellular ceramide levels leading to anti-cancer effects. Anti-cancer effects have also been seen in cancer cells with the use of exogenous short-chain ceramides. Our laboratory has synthesized a library of ceramide analogs and tested their effects on breast cancer cell lines. Analog 315 has been shown to be the most effective ceramide analog in our library. Here, we are reporting a large-scale synthesis of that analog is reported.

Cis-regulatory analysis of expanded gene list (FDR ≤0.1) by i-cisTarget. Table shows transcription factor binding sites and histone modifications found to be enriched in +/− 10 kb regions flanking transcription start site of target genes (excluding coding regions). Parenthesis indicate database from which enriched feature was derived. NES = Normalized Enrichment Score. PWM = Positional Weight Matrix. P-value calculated using hypergeometric test. (PPTX 56 kb)

The central thesis of this paper is that there is need to reinstitute the public purpose requirement for broadcast licensing. On that path, this paper develops an instrumentalist concept of democracy and from there expands to evaluate the ideological function of the press. With a conceptualization of democracy and the press's role established, this paper addresses what is interfering with the news media's ability to inform and educate the citizenry and the consequences of this corruption of media democracy. Recent deregulation and concentration of ownership of media, and controversies concerning the reporting of the war in Iraq have cast doubt on the independence of the press and the vitality and viability of American democracy. In this light, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's propaganda model (1988) deserves further consideration. It also is important to examine Karl Polanyi's protective response to the media democracy crisis: the citizenry's dramatic attempts to change the trajectory of news away from corporate serfdom to a renewed sense of public purpose. In addition, this paper contends that the retrenchment of the public interest standard makes it necessary to reestablish that standard based on a democracy criterion as a requirement for continued free use of the broadcast spectrum.

Background Transcriptomic studies hold great potential towards understanding the human aging process. Previous transcriptomic studies have identified many genes with age-associated expression levels; however, small samples sizes and mixed cell types often make these results difficult to interpret. Results Using transcriptomic profiles in CD14+ monocytes from 1,264 participants of the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (aged 55–94 years), we identified 2,704 genes differentially expressed with chronological age (false discovery rate, FDR ≤ 0.001). We further identified six networks of co-expressed genes that included prominent genes from three pathways: protein synthesis (particularly mitochondrial ribosomal genes), oxidative phosphorylation, and autophagy, with expression patterns suggesting these pathways decline with age. Expression of several chromatin remodeler and transcriptional modifier genes strongly correlated with expression of oxidative phosphorylation and ribosomal protein synthesis genes. 17% of genes with age-associated expression harbored CpG sites whose degree of methylation significantly mediated the relationship between age and gene expression (p

Comparison with previous mouse and human results. Rows performing comparison with data from current study include genes differentially expressed at FDR ≤0.1. * indicates value or gene from the current study differentially expressed at FDR 0.05 and ≤ 0.1. Bolded terms were identified in multiple comparisons. Parenthesis indicate total number of genes used for comparison. Note that genes beginning with LOC were removed from gene lists from the current study for these comparisons, as they had been removed from the other studies, and thus the totals are slightly lower than reported in Fig. 1. P-values were calculated using the hypergeometric test. (PPTX 44 kb)