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This article examines the organisation of collaborative digital methods and data projects in the context of engaged research-led teaching in the humanities. Drawing on interviews, field notes, projects and practices from across eight research groups associated with the Public Data Lab (publicdatalab.org), it provides considerations for those interested in undertaking such projects, organised around four areas: composing (1) problems and questions; (2) collectives of inquiry; (3) learning devices and infrastructures; and (4) vernacular, boundary and experimental outputs. Informed by constructivist approaches to learning and pragmatist approaches to collective inquiry, these considerations aim to support teaching and learning through digital projects which surface and reflect on the questions, problems, formats, data, methods, materials and means through which they are produced.

In this paper we present the outcomes of a research aimed at designing a new visual model for the analysis and presentation of data of genetic criticism carried out in collaboration between researchers in information design and literary scholars of the project [name of the project redacted for blind review]. The design process involved three moments: gathering of information for the definition of design requirements, prototyping the networks and conducting preliminarily evaluations, and producing and evaluating ten network visualizations. The presented process is rich in insights about the collaboration between design researchers and scholars involved in digital humanities.

To solve emerging problems, design uses new technologies to introduce “technofixes” (Hankey & Tuszynski, 2017) that are created to improve society in various capacities. The dissolution of technology, described as “ubiquitous computing”, brings with its pervasiveness a series of consequences to the constant production of personal data online (Greene, 2019; Manovich, 2012) that tech companies have now access to. Such data created new relationships between users, tech companies and their affiliates that are far from being settled, where scandals such as Cambridge Analytica provided visibility to the issue. The lack of awareness in this system, and the efforts in designing smooth and efficient experiences at the expense of clarity, raised questions in the public and legislators. The article explores, through literature review, if non-efficiency in design could be a viable way to make users reflect when using design products. As the antithesis to efficiency, we propose the term “friction”, a lens through which existing definitions of friction in design will be analyzed, introducing the concepts of “diegetic friction” and “extra-diegetic friction” as a possible taxonomy of design interventions.

Wikipedia represents an open and collaborative encyclopedic environment, and is one of the main sources of information today. The information is encoded, among other formats, in graphics and data visualizations. The source of such pieces of information is various — some are taken from governmental sources, or reports published under Creative Commons licenses, others are created and uploaded by the platform users. Given the current UI of the Wikipedia platform, however, most of these contents are relegated to small thumbnails, making them difficult to read. In the research presented here we propose an open toolkit for the design of data visualizations in small spaces — such as thumbnails — conceived for the project’s contributors. By engaging with the design of visualizations for the platform and contributing to the project, it was possible to identify good practices that were then synthesized in a toolkit openly accessible to all contributors.

In this study, superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs) were engineered with an organic coating composed of low molecular weight heparin (LMWH) and bovine serum albumin (BSA), providing heparin-based nanoparticle systems (LMWH@SPIONs). The purpose was to merge the properties of the heparin skeleton and an inorganic core to build up a targeted theranostic nanosystem, which was eventually enhanced by loading a chemotherapeutic agent. Iron oxide cores were prepared via the co-precipitation of iron salts in an alkaline environment and oleic acid (OA) capping. Dopamine (DA) was covalently linked to BSA and LMWH by amide linkages via carbodiimide coupling. The following ligand exchange reaction between the DA-BSA/DA-LMWH and OA was conducted in a biphasic system composed of water and hexane, affording LMWH@SPIONs stabilized in water by polystyrene sulfonate (PSS). Their size and morphology were investigated via dynamic light scattering (DLS) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM), respectively. The LMWH@SPIONs’ cytotoxicity was tested, showing marginal or no toxicity for samples prepared with PSS at concentrations of 50 µg/mL. Their inhibitory activity on the heparanase enzyme was measured, showing an effective inhibition at concentrations comparable to G4000 (N-desulfo-N-acetyl heparin, a non-anticoagulant and antiheparanase heparin derivative; Roneparstat). The LMWH@SPION encapsulation of paclitaxel (PTX) enhanced the antitumor effect of this chemotherapeutic on breast cancer cells, likely due to an improved internalization of the nanoformulated drug with respect to the free molecule. Lastly, time-domain NMR (TD-NMR) experiments were conducted on LMWH@SPIONs obtaining relaxivity values within the same order of magnitude as currently used commercial contrast agents.

Porous materials are ubiquitous systems with a large variety of applications from catalysis to polymer science, from soil to life science, from separation to building materials. Many relevant systems of biological or synthetic origin exhibit a hierarchy, defined as spatial organization over several length scales. Their characterization is often elusive, since many techniques can only be employed to probe a single length scale, like the nanometric or the micrometric levels. Moreover, some multiscale systems lack tridimensional order, further reducing the possibilities of investigation. 129Xe nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) provides a unique and comprehensive description of multiscale porous materials by exploiting the adsorption and diffusion of xenon atoms. NMR parameters like chemical shift, relaxation times, and diffusion coefficient allow the probing of structures from a few angstroms to microns at the same time. Xenon can evaluate the size and shape of a variety of accessible volumes such as pores, layers, and tunnels, and the chemical nature of their surface. The dynamic nature of the probe provides a simultaneous exploration of different scales, informing on complex features such as the relative accessibility of different populations of pores. In this review, the basic principles of this technique will be presented along with some selected applications, focusing on its ability to characterize multiscale materials.

The sensitization of scintillation was investigated in crosslinked polymeric composite materials loaded with luminescent gold clusters aggregates acting as sensitizers, and with organic dye rhodamine 6G as the emitting species. The evolution in time of the excited states population in the systems is described by a set of coupled rate equations, in which steady state solution allowed obtainment of an expression of the sensitization efficacy as a function of the characteristic parameters of the employed luminescent systems. The results obtained indicate that the realization of sensitizer/emitter scintillating complexes is the strategy that must be pursued to maximize the sensitization effect in composite materials.

Data produced by humans and machines is more and more heterogeneous, visual, and location based. This availability inspired in the last years a number of reactions from researchers, designers, and artists that, using different visual manipulations techniques, have attempted at repurposing this material to add meaning and design new perspectives with specific intentions. Three different approaches are described here: the design of interfaces for exploring satellite footage in novel ways, the analysis of urban esthetics through the visual manipulation of collections of user-generated contents, and the enrichment of geo-based datasets with the selection and rearrangement of web imagery.

Highly controlled polymers and nanostructures are increasingly translated from the lab to the industry. Together with the industrialization of complex systems from renewable sources, a paradigm change in the processing of plastics and rubbers is underway, requiring a new generation of analytical tools. Here, we present the recent developments in time domain NMR (TD-NMR), starting with an introduction of the methods. Several examples illustrate the new take on traditional issues like the measurement of crosslink density in vulcanized rubber or the monitoring of crystallization kinetics, as well as the unique information that can be extracted from multiphase, nanophase and composite materials. Generally, TD-NMR is capable of determining structural parameters that are in agreement with other techniques and with the final macroscopic properties of industrial interest, as well as reveal details on the local homogeneity that are difficult to obtain otherwise. Considering its moderate technical and space requirements of performing, TD-NMR is a good candidate for assisting product and process development in several applications throughout the rubber, plastics, composites and adhesives industry.

This article details a correction to article Lawson, S, Gray, J and Mauri, M 2016 Opening the Black Box of Scholarly Communication Funding: A Public Data Infrastructure for Financial Flows in Academic Publishing. Open Library of Humanities, 2(1): e10, pp. 1–35, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.16995/olh.72

‘Public access to publicly funded research’ has been one of the rallying calls of the global open access movement. Governments and public institutions around the world have mandated that publications supported by public funding sources should be publicly accessible. Publishers are experimenting with new models to widen access. Yet financial flows underpinning scholarly publishing remain complex and opaque. In this article we present work to trace and reassemble a picture of financial flows around the publication of journals in the UK in the midst of a national shift towards open access. We contend that the current lack of financial transparency around scholarly communication is an obstacle to evidence-based policy-making – leaving researchers, decision-makers and institutions in the dark about the ­systemic implications of new financial models. We conclude that ­obtaining a more joined up picture of financial flows is vital as a means for researchers, ­institutions and others to understand and shape changes to the ­sociotechnical systems that underpin scholarly communication.

Super paramagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPION) were augmented by both hyaluronic acid (HA) and bovine serum albumin (BSA), each covalently conjugated to dopamine (DA) enabling their anchoring to the SPION. HA and BSA were found to simultaneously serve as stabilizing polymers of Fe3O4·DA-BSA/HA in water. Fe3O4·DA-BSA/HA efficiently entrapped and released the hydrophobic cytotoxic drug paclitaxel (PTX). The relative amount of HA and BSA modulates not only the total solubility but also the paramagnetic relaxation properties of the preparation. The entrapping of PTX did not influence the paramagnetic relaxation properties of Fe3O4·DA-BSA. Thus, by tuning the surface structure and loading, we can tune the theranostic properties of the system.

A porous single-crystal collects xenon atoms from the gas phase and orients them macroscopically, as highlighted by hyperpolarized xenon NMR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABCB4/MDR3, a member of the ABC superfamily, is an ATP-dependent phosphatidylcholine translocator expressed at the canalicular membrane of hepatocytes. Defects in the ABCB4 gene are associated with rare biliary diseases. It is essential to understand the mechanisms of its canalicular membrane expression in particular for the development of new therapies. The stability of several ABC transporters is regulated through their binding to PDZ (PSD95/DglA/ZO-1) domain-containing proteins. ABCB4 protein ends by the sequence glutamine-asparagine-leucine (QNL), which shows some similarity to PDZ-binding motifs. The aim of our study was to assess the potential role of the QNL motif on the surface expression of ABCB4 and to determine if PDZ domain-containing proteins are involved. We found that truncation of the QNL motif decreased the stability of ABCB4 in HepG2-transfected cells. The deleted mutant ABCB4-ΔQNL also displayed accelerated endocytosis. EBP50, a PDZ protein highly expressed in the liver, strongly colocalized and coimmunoprecipitated with ABCB4, and this interaction required the QNL motif. Down-regulation of EBP50 by siRNA or by expression of an EBP50 dominant-negative mutant caused a significant decrease in the level of ABCB4 protein expression, and in the amount of ABCB4 localized at the canalicular membrane. Interaction of ABCB4 with EBP50 through its PDZ-like motif plays a critical role in the regulation of ABCB4 expression and stability at the canalicular plasma membrane.

Abstract This study assessed fluoride (F) and sodium trimetaphosphate (TMP) release into artificial saliva from varnishes containing 0%, 2.5%, and 5% NaF, supplemented or not with 5% TMP. The varnishes were applied on polyester sheets (n = 8/group), and F and TMP released into artificial saliva were measured for up to 24 hours. The amount of F and TMP released were directly related to NaF and TMP concentrations in the varnishes. The highest F release was seen for 5% NaF and 5% NaF + 5% TMP, whereas 5% TMP released the highest amount of TMP. However, the simultaneous addition of NaF and TMP to varnishes significantly reduced the amount of F and TMP released from the products.

Abstract Water electrolysis is by far the most appealing method to produce green hydrogen. Among the possible technologies, Anion Exchange Membrane (AEM) water electrolyzers are promising in the medium term, as they make it possible to avoid critical and noble materials as catalyst components. However, AEMs are still lacking in performance and stability, which has become the current research focus. Here, we report the facile and inexpensive chemical modification of polyketone (PK) with a functional unit encompassing morpholinium as the positively charged group, and the fabrication of self‐standing membranes. The synthesis products are investigated with an ensemble of physico‐chemical and spectroscopic techniques, including solid‐state and time‐domain NMR, FT‐IR, and thermal analysis. The membranes show good Ion Exchange Capacity values in the range 1.48–2.24 mmol g−1. A preliminary electrolysis test shows that the PK‐based membrane has performance comparable to that of a commercial one.