Mindfulness meditation represents a mental training framework for cultivating the state of mindful awareness in daily life. Recently, there has been a surge of interest in how mindfulness meditation ...improves human health and well‐being. Although studies have shown that mindfulness meditation can improve self‐reported measures of disease symptomatology, the effect that mindfulness meditation has on biological mechanisms underlying human aging and disease is less clear. To address this issue, we conducted the first comprehensive review of randomized controlled trials examining the effects of mindfulness meditation on immune system parameters, with a specific focus on five outcomes: (1) circulating and stimulated inflammatory proteins, (2) cellular transcription factors and gene expression, (3) immune cell count, (4) immune cell aging, and (5) antibody response. This analysis revealed substantial heterogeneity across studies with respect to patient population, study design, and assay procedures. The findings suggest possible effects of mindfulness meditation on specific markers of inflammation, cell‐mediated immunity, and biological aging, but these results are tentative and require further replication. On the basis of this analysis, we describe the limitations of existing work and suggest possible avenues for future research. Mindfulness meditation may be salutogenic for immune system dynamics, but additional work is needed to examine these effects.
This paper attempts to understand further the working of values in ethics and religion. Its premise is that the psyche is organized by its internal objects, and that understanding the effective ...working of values therefore requires understanding the relevant internal objects. It begins with a brief outline of the history of internal objects in the thought of Freud, Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott and Loewald, and suggests that they are best thought of as "phenomenological" in nature, meaning that, whether conscious or unconscious, they appear in the mind without an enduring substrate. Using the thought of Loewald and of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas in particular, it suggests that the functioning of "allegory" offers an important avenue to understanding how certain internal objects act to organize the psyche hierarchically on a basis of values including ethical ones. "Religious objects" may then be understood as a subclass of "allegorical objects", acting analogously to Levinas's "face of the other" and experienced as giving access to "transcendent" (commanding) values. Such values are not adequately described by traditional accounts of a superego and require a deepening of the psychoanalytic dialogue with philosophy.
The properties of atomically monodisperse noble metal nanoclusters (NCs) are intricately intertwined with their precise molecular formula. The vast majority of size-specific NC syntheses start from ...the reduction of the metal salt and thiol ligand mixture. Only in gold was it recently shown that ligand-exchange could induce the growth of NCs from one atomically precise species to another, a process of yet unknown reversibility. Here, we present a process for the ligand-exchange-induced growth of atomically precise silver NCs, in a biphasic liquid–liquid system, which is particularly of interest because of its complete reversibility and ability to occur at room temperature. We explore this phenomenon in-depth using Ag35(SG)18 SG = glutathionate and Ag44(4-FTP)30 4-FTP = 4-fluorothiophenol as model systems. We show that the ligand-exchange conversion of Ag35(SG)18 into Ag44(4-FTP)30 is rapid (<5 min) and direct, while the reverse process proceeds slowly through intermediate cluster sizes. We adapt a recently developed theory of reverse Ostwald ripening to model the NCs’ interconvertibility. The model’s predictions are in good agreement with the experimental observations, and they highlight the importance of small changes in the ligand–metal binding energy in determining the final equilibrium NC size. On the basis of the insight provided by this model, we demonstrated experimentally that by varying the choice of ligands, ligand-exchange can be used to obtain different sized NCs. The findings in this work establish ligand-exchange as a versatile tool for tuning cluster sizes.
Freud's understanding of science allowed no origin for commitment to ethical values except via the superego. Recently, some psychoanalysts have found a more persuasive source in the thought of ...Emmanuel Levinas. In this paper, using in particular Viviane Chetrit-Vatine's notion of "matricial space," I attempt to look further at the implications of Levinas's idea of "transcendence," not as something special but as the ordinary horizon of seriously-held ethical values. To work as such, it must involve an affective dimension. Referencing Derrida's Adieu for Levinas, I discuss this in terms of different meanings of the word "love," in particular a certain sort of love for the unique "being" of the other, rather than for his or her "doing."
Identification of the novel (E)-N'-((2-chloro-7-methoxyquinolin-3-yl)methylene)-3-(phenylthio)propanehydrazide scaffold 18 has led to the development of a new series of biologically active hydrazide ...compounds. The parent compound 18 and new quinoline derivatives 19-26 were prepared from the corresponding quinoline hydrazones and substituted carboxylic acids using EDC-mediated peptide coupling reactions. Further modification of the parent compound 18 was achieved by replacement of the quinoline moiety with other aromatic systems. All the newly synthesized compounds were evaluated for their anti-cancer activity against the SH-SY5Y and Kelly neuroblastoma cell lines, as well as the MDA-MB-231 and MCF-7 breast adenocarcinoma cell lines. Analogues 19 and 22 significantly reduced the cell viability of neuroblastoma cancer cells with micromolar potency and significant selectivity over normal cells. The quinoline hydrazide 22 also induced G₁ cell cycle arrest, as well as upregulation of the p27(kip1) cell cycle regulating protein.
In this study, we describe the synthesis and molecular properties of anthranilamide-based short peptides which were synthesised via ring opening of isatoic anhydride in excellent yields. These short ...peptides were incorporated as low molecular weight gelators (LMWG), bola amphiphile, and C
-symmetric molecules to form hydrogels in low concentrations (0.07-0.30% (w/v)). The critical gel concentration (CGC), viscoelastic properties, secondary structure, and fibre morphology of these short peptides were influenced by the aromaticity of the capping group or by the presence of electronegative substituent (namely fluoro) and hydrophobic substituent (such as methyl) in the short peptides. In addition, the hydrogels showed antibacterial activity against S. aureus 38 and moderate toxicity against HEK cells in vitro.
Solving the atomic structure of metallic clusters is fundamental to understanding their optical, electronic, and chemical properties. Herein we present the structure of the largest aqueous gold ...cluster, Au146(p-MBA)57 (p-MBA: para-mercaptobenzoic acid), solved by electron micro-diffraction (MicroED) to subatomic resolution (0.85 Å) and by X-ray diffraction at atomic resolution (1.3 Å). The 146 gold atoms may be decomposed into two constituent sets consisting of 119 core and 27 peripheral atoms. The core atoms are organized in a twinned FCC structure, whereas the surface gold atoms follow a C2 rotational symmetry about an axis bisecting the twinning plane. The protective layer of 57 p-MBAs fully encloses the cluster and comprises bridging, monomeric, and dimeric staple motifs. Au146(p-MBA)57 is the largest cluster observed exhibiting a bulk-like FCC structure as well as the smallest gold particle exhibiting a stacking fault.
Freud and Idealization Black, David M.
British Journal of Psychotherapy,
August 2022, 2022-08-00, 20220801, Volume:
38, Issue:
3
Book Review, Journal Article
The power of Dante's Divine Comedy is unmistakable, but surprising in view of its theological structure and assumptions that are no longer current among most modern readers. This paper suggests that ...its power derives from the deep psychological truthfulness with which Dante deals with the painful personal crisis that underlies the poem and is his starting point. It attempts to clarify what may have constituted that crisis, and why the structure of the Comedy, and in particular its use of two guides, Virgil and Beatrice, who might be thought a somewhat incompatible pairing, point significantly to the nature of the solution Dante arrived at. In particular it suggests that the puzzling fictions to do with Statius in the Purgatorio are a clue to Dante's own difficulties in bridging the classical and Christian traditions, and that his highly original solution to these difficulties, by no means conforming to conventional Christian orthodoxy in the 13th/14th century, was needed with special urgency in a time of pervasive civil conflict.
We report the first results of ultraviolet photodissociation (UVPD) mass spectrometry of trapped monolayer-protected cluster (MPC) ions generated by electrospray ionization. Gold clusters ...Au25(pMBA)18 and Au36(pMBA)24 (pMBA = para-mercaptobenzoic acid) were analyzed in both the positive and negative modes. Whereas activation methods including collisional- and electron-based methods produced relatively few fragment ions, even a single ultraviolet pulse (at λ = 193 nm) caused extensive fragmentation of the positively charged clusters. Upon photoactivation using a low number of laser pulses, the staple motifs of both clusters were cleaved and stripped of the protecting ligand portions without removal of any contained gold atoms. This striking process involved Au–S and C–S bond cleavages via a pathway made possible by 6.4 eV photon absorption. Monomer evaporation (neutral gold atom loss) occurred upon exposure to multiple pulses, resulting in a size series of bare gold-cluster ions. All tandem mass spectrometric methods produced the singly charged ring tetramer ion, Au4(pMBA)4 + Na+, for each cluster.
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