Introduction
Suicide is an intriguing act of the human being. The reasons behind the violation of an instinct for survival is far from being understood. Besides, the emergence of assisted dying is ...raising even more questions about the concept of rational suicide, defined as a well-thought-out decision to die by whom is mentally competent.
Objectives
Understand the concept of rational suicide, in parallel with suicide, by exploring the views on this debate over the years and elucidating the relationship with mental disorders, mental capacity and patient’s rights.
Methods
Literature review performed on PubMed and Google Scholar databases, using the keywords “rational suicide”, “assisted death”, “suicide”, “phenomenology”, “mental capacity” and “responsibility for life”.
Results
The theological condemnations of suicide – as sin or crime – were put aside with psychiatric development in the last century. Durkheim was the first important precursor of the contemporary view - suicide is a form of mental illness (psychosis or depression) not compatible with rational deliberation. With the increasingly open debate on assisted dying, this vision is being tested by cases of terminally ill patients subjected to experiences that many wouldn’t choose to tolerate. Moral right to self-determination and needless suffering are examples of arguments in favor of rational suicide.
Conclusions
The need for an open discussion about rational suicide is raising, specifically in relation to psychiatric disorders, mainly to resolve the conflict between the duty of care of psychiatrists and the autonomy of patients.
Disclosure
No significant relationships.
Introduction
Psychedelics - including LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), psilocybin, DMT (N, N-dimethyltryptamine), ayahuasca and mescaline - have an ancient history across various civilizations. In ...1950, after LSD’s discovery by Hofmann, psychedelics enjoyed a short-lived relationship with psychiatry, before prohibitive legislature emerging in response to the recreational use in the mid-1960s. However, the last decade has witnessed a renewed scientific interest in psychedelics - a phenomenon referred to as the ‘Psychedelic Renaissance’.
Objectives
Review the pharmacology of psychedelic drugs and the latest evidence of its therapeutic potentials in anxiety, mood and addictive disorders.
Methods
Literature review performed on PubMed and Google Scholar databases, using the keywords “psychedelics”, “hallucinogens”, “d-lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD)”, “psilocybin”, “ayahuasca”, “mescaline”, “DMT (N,N-dimethyltryptamine)”.
Results
The psychedelics or “classic hallucinogens” can be subdivided into three sub-classes: the plant-derived tryptamines (psilocybin and ibogaine) and phenethylamines (mescaline), and the semisynthetic ergolines (LSD). The therapeutic potentials are mediated by an agonist action on 5-HT2A receptors expressed in frontal and paralimbic structures involved in mood and emotion regulation, introspection, interoception and self-consciousness. Stimulation of 5-HT2ARincreases the glutamatergic tone and neuroplasticity and is accompanied by reduced amygdala activity, reducing anxiety. Experimental, open-label, and RCTs showed anxiolytic, antidepressive, and antiaddictive effects with psychedelics. As examples, psilocybin and LSD reduced anxiety and depression in cancer patients and symptoms of alcohol and tobacco dependence, and ayahuasca reduced depression in treatment-resistant depression.
Conclusions
Despite the promising effects of psychedelics on anxiety, depression and addiction, the evidence is still preliminary, waiting for long-term studies with bigger samples.
Conflict of interest
No significant relationships.
We show that the gravitational phase space for the near-horizon region of a bifurcate, axisymmetric Killing horizon in any dimension admits a 2D conformal symmetry algebra with central charges ...proportional to the area. This extends the construction of Haco et. al. J. High Energy Phys. 12 (2018) 098JHEPFG1029-847910.1007/JHEP12(2018)098 to generic Killing horizons appearing in solutions of Einstein's equations and motivates a holographic description in terms of a 2D conformal field theory. The Cardy entropy in such a field theory agrees with the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of the horizon, suggesting a microscopic interpretation. A set of appendixes is included in the Supplemental Material that provides examples and further details of the calculations presented in the main text.
Laser-induced forward transfer (LIFT) is a printing technique based on the action of a laser pulse that is focused on a thin film of a precursor ink for getting the transfer of a droplet onto a ...receiver substrate. The experiments presented in this article aim to demonstrate the ability of LIFT to produce electronic circuits on paper, a substrate that is flexible, cheap and recyclable. Tests were conducted to study the printing of conductive tracks with an Ag ink. The printing of a suspension of carbon nanofibers was also studied to demonstrate the ability of LIFT for printing inks with particles with some microns in size that provoke inkjet nozzles to clog. As a proof-of-concept of the LIFT possibilities, both inks were used to print entirely by LIFT a functional humidity sensor on a piece of paper. All the LIFT experiments were performed with a Nd:YAG laser that delivers pulses of a few hundreds of ns in an attempt to approach the technique to laser systems that are already introduced in many production lines for marking and labeling.
This randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled trial tested the hypothesis that 20mg of melatonin before and during the first cycle of adjuvant chemotherapy for breast cancer (ACBC) reduced the ...side effects associated with cognitive impairment. We evaluated the effects of melatonin on cognition, depressive symptoms and sleep quality, and whether these effects were related to serum levels of Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF) and its receptor, tropomyosin kinase B (TrkB). Thirty-six women were randomly assigned to receive melatonin or placebo for 10 days. To evaluate cognitive performance, we used the Trail-Making-Test Parts A and B (A-B), Rey Auditory-Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT), Controlled Oral Word Association Test (COWAT) and an inhibitory task type Go / No-Go. Our results revealed that melatonin improved executive function on TMT scores, enhanced episodic memory (immediate and delayed) and recognition on RAVLT, and increased verbal fluency in the orthographic COWAT. The TMT-A-B(A-B) were negatively correlated with baseline levels of TrkB and BDNF, respectively. At the end of treatment, changes in TrkB and BDNF were inversely associated with depressive symptoms and sleep quality, but not with the TMT scores. These results suggest a neuroprotective effect of melatonin to counteract the adverse effects of ACBC on cognitive function, sleep quality and depressive symptoms.
Pathogens are hypothesized to play an important role in the maintenance of tropical forest plant species richness. Notably, species richness may be promoted by incomplete filling of niche space due ...interactions of host populations with their pathogens. A potentially important group of pathogens are endophytic fungi, which asymptomatically colonize plants and are diverse and abundant in tropical ecosystems. Endophytes may alter competitive abilities of host individuals and improve host fitness under stress, but may also become pathogenic. Little is known of the impacts of endophytes on niche-space filling of their hosts.Here we evaluate how a widespread fungal endophyte infecting a common tropical palm influences its recruitment and survival in natural ecosystems, and whether this impact is modulated by the abiotic environment, potentially constraining host niche-space filling. Iriartea deltoidea dominates many wet lowland Neotropical forests. Diplodia mutila is a common asymptomatic endophyte in mature plants; however, it causes disease in some seedlings. We investigated the effects of light availability on D. mutila disease expression.We found I. deltoidea seedlings to preferentially occur under shady conditions. Correspondingly, we also found that high light triggers endophyte pathogenicity, while low light favors endosymbiotic development, constraining recruitment of endophyte-infested seedlings to shaded understory by reducing seedling survival in direct light. Pathogenicity of D. mutila under high light is proposed to result from light-induced production of H(2)O(2) by the fungus, triggering hypersensitivity, cell death, and tissue necrosis in the palm. This is the first study to demonstrate that endophytes respond to abiotic factors to influence plant distributions in natural ecosystems; and the first to identify light as a factor influencing where an endophyte is placed on the endosymbiont-pathogen continuum. Our findings show that pathogens can indeed constrain niche-space filling of otherwise successful tropical plant species, providing unoccupied niche space for other species.
Endophytes are mutualistic symbionts within healthy plant tissues. In this study we isolated Bacillus spp. from seeds of several varieties of maize. Bacillus amyloliquifaciens or Bacillus subtilis ...were found to be present in all maize varieties examined in this study. To determine whether bacteria may produce antifungal compounds, generally lipopeptides in Bacillus spp., bacterial cultures were screened for production of lipopeptides. Lipopeptides were extracted by acid precipitation from liquid cultures of Bacillus spp. Lipopeptide extracts from Bacillus spp. isolated from Indian popcorn and yellow dent corn showed inhibitory activity against Fusarium moniliforme at 500μg per disk. Using MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry we detected the presence of antifungal iturin A, fengycin and bacillomycin in these isolates. PCR amplification also showed the presence of genes for iturin A and fengycin. B. subtilis (SG_JW.03) isolated from Indian popcorn showed strong inhibition of Arabidopsis seed mycoflora and enhanced seedling growth. We tested for the induction of defence gene expression in the host plant after treatment of plants with B. subtilis (SG_JW.03) and its lipopeptide extract using RT-qPCR. Roots of Indian popcorn seedlings treated with a suspension of B. subtilis (SG_JW.03) showed the induction of pathogenesis-related genes, including PR-1 and PR-4, which relate to plant defence against fungal pathogens. The lipopeptide extract alone did not increase the expression of these pathogenesis-related genes. Based on our study of maize endophytes, we hypothesize that, bacterial endophytes that naturally occur in many maize varieties may function to protect hosts by secreting antifungal lipopeptides that inhibit pathogens as well as inducing the up-regulation of pathogenesis-related genes of host plants (systemic acquired resistance).
Spanish consumers have a strong preference for Iberian meat products, as they perceive them to be of extra sensorial and nutritional quality. The production of these meat products depends on multiple ...variables, such as genetics, livestock production systems and, above all, the feed provided. The aim of this paper is to study the preferences of Spanish consumers for the various types of Iberian dry-cured ham, analysing whether they are willing to pay the premium required by the highest-quality products. The methodological approach combined a sensory analysis and a choice-based conjoint experiment with obtained through tasting sessions in Extremadura (SW of Spain). Findings of the sensory test have shown that there are significant differences in odour, texture and taste, explained mainly by the type of feed pigs were fed. The main results of the choice experiment have also shown that the type of feed is the most preferred attribute by consumers, in line with the sensory analysis.
•Sensory evaluation and sensory analysis were used to compare various types of Iberian dry-cured ham.•Sensory analysis found that consumers prefer dry-cured hams from pigs raised in the traditional “montanera” system.•Type of feed is the most important attribute while % Iberian breed is the one with the lowest importance.•Participants are willing to pay the highest premium price to buy acorn-fed Iberian ham.
Accurately ranking images and multimedia objects are of paramount relevance in many retrieval and learning tasks. Manifold learning methods have been investigated for ranking mainly due to their ...capacity of taking into account the intrinsic global manifold structure. In this paper, a novel manifold ranking algorithm is proposed based on the hypergraphs for unsupervised multimedia retrieval tasks. Different from traditional graph-based approaches, which represent only pairwise relationships, hypergraphs are capable of modeling similarity relationships among a set of objects. The proposed approach uses the hyperedges for constructing a contextual representation of data samples and exploits the encoded information for deriving a more effective similarity function. An extensive experimental evaluation was conducted on nine public datasets including diverse retrieval scenarios and multimedia content. Experimental results demonstrate that high effectiveness gains can be obtained in comparison with the state-of-the-art methods.
•A model is presented for the simulation of the interaction of fluids and solids.•The solids are modeled with the Discrete Element Sphero–polyhedra Method.•The fluid is modeled with the Lattice ...Boltzmann Method with multiphase and multicomponent fluids.•The model can be used in problems such as the hydraulic fracturing and animal propulsion.
In the present paper a coupling law between the Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) for fluids and the Discrete Element Method (DEM) is introduced to study problems involving the interaction between fluids and solid (rigid) structures. The DEM particles are modelled with the sphero–polyhedra method, allowing the representation of general shapes, even non-convex ones. The method is rigorously validated by an extensive simulation plan measuring the lift and drag coefficients for several geometries and comparing the results with previous studies. The method also includes some optimization techniques which are described in the paper. Finally, simulations of DEM particles with shapes of animals (dolphins and ducks) are carried out interacting with multiphase and multicomponent LBM fluids, and many realistic features of this interaction such as buoyancy, sonic wave propagation and fluid displacement are shown to qualitatively match observations. Some issues with the coupling law are identified for future research studies on the proposed method. The results show the potential of the method to be used in the simulation of a wide range of phenomena found in sectors such as the mining and oil industries and disciplines such as medicine and biology.
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