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This text is a short intellectual biography written in memory of Per Aage Brandt (1944–2021). I present some of the main tenets of his scientific endeavor, artistic practice, and scholarly entrepreneurship.

AIM: To appraise clinical and aesthetic outcomes of connective tissue grafts (CTG) and platelet rich fibrin (PRF) in managing marginal gingival recession METHODS AND MATERIALS: Five patients each with at least two contralateral Miller's Class I and/or Class II recession lesions underwent treatment in a case series with a randomised split-mouth design. Each site was paired with a similar contralateral lesion and randomly assigned to the CTG (control) or PRF (test) treatment. Probing depth, recession depth, recession width, clinical attachment level, keratinised tissue width and gingival thickness were recorded and the data compared. Photographs were taken at baseline and at 24-weeks to evaluate aesthetics using the Pink Esthetic Score (PES). A questionnaire was used to assess patient satisfaction with treatment outcomes. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: Both treatment options resulted in improved clinical measurements but CTGs demonstrated improvements at a greater number of sites than PRF (60% to 30% respectively). The aesthetic scores improved at four sites for both CTGs and PRF with only one site in each group scoring lower, whilst elsewhere scores did not change. Patients were satisfied with the aesthetic outcomes. Both CTGs and PRF membranes can be effective in treating gingival recession, improving clinical and aesthetic outcomes.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory is by and large a theory of what (abstract) concepts are, how they are structured, and how this structure is acquired — i.e., by mapping of structure from one more concrete or sensory-motor specific domain to another more abstract domain. Conceptual metaphors therefore rest on “cross-domain mappings.” The claims to the effect that our abstract concepts are metaphorically structured and that cross-domain mappings constitute one of the fundamental cognitive meaning-making processes are empirical and can therefore be put to the test. In this paper, I will critically assess Conceptual Metaphor Theory as a theory of concepts in light of recent experimental findings. Many such findings provide evidence for the psychological reality of cross-domain mappings, i.e., that structure activated in one domain actually can perform cognitive tasks carried out in another domain. They do not, however, support the claim that the structure of our (abstract) concepts is still metaphorical, as Lakoff and Johnson claim — that is to say, that our mind actually does perform cross-domain mappings when we process conventional conceptual metaphors such as “Death is Rest” or “Love is a Journey.” Two conclusions can be drawn from this: (1) it is necessary to distinguish between cross-domain mappings (which are psychologically real) and the metaphoric structure of our concepts (which is not, in the sense that such concepts do not any longer activate cross-domain mappings when processed); (2) Conceptual Metaphor Theory is not an adequate theory of concepts. I will therefore sketch another more viable theory of concepts where the structure of our concepts is defined as the fullecologyof their situations of use, which includes the kind of situations (objects, agents, interactions) they apply to and the kind of emotional, cognitive, bodily, and behavioral responses they elicit. On this view, the contents of our concepts are to be considered as vague predicates, with vague extensions, which take on a specific form in their situation of use.

International audience; The REvolutionary Approaches and Devices for Nucleic Acid analysis (READNA) project received 12 million s funding under the European Union Framework Programme 7 from 1st June 2008 to 30th November 2012. The 19 project partners from both academia and industry from in total 7 countries had a project budget of 16 Ms with which they have discovered, created and developed a huge body of insights into nucleic acid analysis. Results have been presented widely in publications and in innumerous public presentations. Results have been moved to spin-offs such as the Olink enrichment kits (now sold by Agilent as Haloplex) and are findingtheir way to the market, such as the Oxford Nanopore MinIon sequencer that was first released to early-access user sites in 2014.

The present work is an attempt to bring meaning to the fore of not only empirical aesthetics but also experimental aesthetics. We have addressed meaning in terms of attention-grabbing perceptual structure, doing so in the strong sense of structure; i.e., structure understood as a pure spatial relation between shapes, independently of what objects these shapes represent. The structures we investigate are the so-called non-generic configurations that obtain between objects seen from a unique vantage point. In the paper, we first introduce the notion of non-genericity, in general, and its use in visual art in particular, where it is claimed to affect the visual brain as an attention grabber. We then present an experiment we have designed to test the effect of such a relation on the visual brain, and we give evidence to the effect that non-generic configurations in pictures do attract attention significantly more than their generic counterparts. Non-genericity can therefore be considered as one among other pictorial techniques artists dispose of to construct perceptual meaning in vision.

This article addresses the phenomenology of aesthetic experience. It first, critically, considers one of the most influential approaches to the psychophysics of aesthetic perception, viz. neuroaesthetics. Hereafter, it outlines constitutive tenets of aesthetic perception in terms of a particular intentional relation to the object. The argument comes in three steps. First, I show the inadequacies of the neuroaesthetics of beauty in general and Semir Zeki’s and V.J. Ramachandran’s versions of it in particular. The neuroaesthetics of beauty falls short, because it develops hypotheses of aesthetic experience which have no consequences for the understanding of what art is, that is, how artists produce visual meaning effects in their works. This is so because they make the rewarding feeling of beauty the cornerstone of aesthetic experience. Next, I show why and how aesthetic experience should be defined relative to its object and the tools for meaning-making specific to that object, and not relative to the feeling (of beauty) it may elicit. Finally, I sketch the import this fact may have on a research program in empirical aesthetics.

The paper considers the phenomenology of aesthetic experience as “twofold” in a sense akin to Wollheim’s (Painting as an art. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1987). However, as regards the perception of artworks proper, the notion of twofoldness needs further specification. In the wake of Wollheim, the philosophy of pictorial representation has addressed the second, ‘configurational’ aspect of twofoldness in rather vague terms without addressing the aesthetic or pictorial function of this correlate of aesthetic perception. I shall talk about such co-awareness as “design-seeing” and assign two decisive properties to pictorial design. First, I will point to a depicting property of design that is a distinctive property of pictures. Design in pictures is such that it can depict two (or, in rare cases, even more) fully consistent objects without the picture becoming ambiguous. Next, I’ll show that the design structure of a painting is not simply a structure in virtue of which something is represented to the eye, but also in virtue of which meaning is conveyed to the eye. If I am right in considering the design level of pictures as a genuine platform for meaning making, then seeing-in doubled with design seeing occurs every time lines and shapes do not only depict, but also mean something

Circulating microRNAs in human serum have increasingly been recognized as stable markers for cancer detection. However, there is still a lack of miRNome wide studies over a long period of time with respect to pathogenic processes. We obtained serum samples from the janus serum bank collected prior and after diagnosis of lung cancer. We analyzed the abundance of 904 miRNAs in serum from eight cancer patients at three time points and from six healthy control individuals. Based on the identified miRNA signatures, hierarchical clustering and a self-organizing map identified three major clusters including one cluster containing most of the of the pre-diagnostic samples, a second cluster with mainly post-diagnostic samples, and a third cluster with mainly control samples. Correlation analyses showed that although the profiles were generally stable over several years, most obvious changes of the miRNA pattern seem to occur at a time close to diagnosis. Our findings support the idea that a developing lung cancer might be detectable years prior to diagnosis through a specific miRNA signature and that this signature changes during tumor development.

Background— Today, mutations in more than 30 different genes have been found to cause inherited cardiomyopathies, some associated with very poor prognosis. However, because of the genetic heterogeneity and limitations in throughput and scalability of current diagnostic tools up until now, it is hardly possible to genetically characterize patients with cardiomyopathy in a fast, comprehensive, and cost-efficient manner. Methods and Results— We established an array-based subgenomic enrichment followed by next-generation sequencing to detect mutations in patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) and dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM). With this approach, we show that the genomic region of interest can be enriched by a mean factor of 2169 compared with the coverage of the whole genome, resulting in high sequence coverage of selected disease genes and allowing us to define the genetic pathogenesis of cardiomyopathies in a single sequencing run. In 6 patients, we detected disease-causing mutations, 2 microdeletions, and 4 point mutations. Furthermore, we identified several novel nonsynonymous variants, which are predicted to be harmful, and hence, might be potential disease mutations or modifiers for DCM or HCM. Conclusions— The approach presented here allows for the first time a comprehensive genetic screening in patients with hereditary DCM or HCM in a fast and cost-efficient manner.

Instead of considering key concepts of narratology such as focalization (perspective) or mode of narration (teller vs. reflector, as Franz K. Stanzel has it) simply as criteria for a typology of texts, this paper intends to activate them as ‘symbolic forming tools’ or ‘means of meaning making’ in literary art. The fundamental claim is that an author can activate or apply them in various ways—experimenting with them—in order to obtain given meaning effect within one and the same text. Through analysis of examples it is shown how authors' variations on the focalization, the narrative mode, and the granularity axes produce semiotic effects amenable to systematic characterization. A recurrent concern in the paper is the representation of consciousness in literary art.