A multichannel acoustically driven microfluidic chip to study particle-cell interactions

Microfluidic devices have emerged as important tools for experimental physiology. They allow to study the effects of hydrodynamic flow on physiological and pathophysiological processes, e.g., in the circulatory system of the body. Such dynamic in vitro test systems are essential in order to address fundamental problems in drug delivery and targeted imaging, such as the binding of particles to cells under flow. In the present work an acoustically driven microfluidic platform is presented in which four miniature flow channels can be operated in parallel at distinct flow velocities with only slight inter-experimental variations. The device can accommodate various channel architectures and is fully compatible with cell culture as well as microscopy. Moreover, the flow channels can be readily separated from the surface acoustic wave pumps and subsequently channel-associated luminescence, absorbance, and/or fluorescence can be determined with a standard microplate reader. In order to create artificial blood vessels, different coatings were evaluated for the cultivation of endothelial cells in the microchannels. It was found that 0.01% fibronectin is the most suitable coating for growth of endothelial monolayers. Finally, the microfluidic system was used to study the binding of 1 μm polystyrene microspheres to three different types of endothelial cell monolayers (HUVEC, HUVECtert, HMEC-1) at different average shear rates. It demonstrated that average shear rates between 0.5 s⁻¹ and 2.25 s⁻¹ exert no significant effect on cytoadhesion of particles to all three types of endothelial monolayers. In conclusion, the multichannel microfluidic platform is a promising device to study the impact of hydrodynamic forces on cell physiology and binding of drug carriers to endothelium.     

National structures for building and managing sport facilities: a comparative analysis of the Nordic countries

Abstract

Sport facilities are instrumental in keeping the population fit and healthy. Governments worldwide are thus engaged in devising policies, programs and projects for building such facilities, with the aim of providing citizens with opportunities for a healthy lifestyle. This feature is prominent in the Nordic countries, which have incorporated sport, leisure and physical activity into their universal welfare models. Understanding policies and politics for building sports facilities has therefore become a cornerstone in the understanding of conditions for sport and physical activity for all. In this paper, we investigate and compare the national structures for building and managing sports facilities in the Nordic countries, in order to add to the understanding of how policies and politics for building sport facilities can add to or hamper the sport-for-all ambitions salient in most of today’s western societies.     

Capturing information on technology convergence,international collaboration,and knowledge flow from patent documents: A case of information and communication technology

In addressing persistent gaps in existing theories, recent advances in data-driven research approaches offer novel perspectives and exciting insights across a spectrum of scientific fields concerned with technological change and the socio-economic impact thereof. The present investigation suggests a novel approach to identify and analyze the evolution of technology sectors, in this case, information and communications technology (ICT), considering international collaboration patterns and knowledge flows and spillovers via information inputs derived from patent documents.The objective is to utilize and explore information regarding inventors’ geo-location, technology sector classifications, and patent citation records to construct various types of networks. This, in turn, will open up avenues to discover the nature of evolutionary pathways in ICT trajectories and will also provide evidence of how the overall ICT knowledge space, as well as directional knowledge flows within the ICT space, have evolved differently. It is expected that this data-driven inquiry will deliver intuitive results for decision makers seeking evidence for future resource allocation and who are interested in identifying well-suited collaborators for the development of potential next-generation technologies. Further, it will equip researchers in technology management, economic geography, or similar fields with a systematic approach to analyze evolutionary pathways of technological advancements and further enable exploitation and development of new theories regarding technological change and its socio-economic consequences.     

Zwischen Seniorität und Alterität

Demographic changes are leading to an altered population structure and subsequently to changes in the age structure of potential participants in educational training. Adult education has reacted to this by developing special provisions for older participants and a concept of intergenerational learning provision for different generations. Arranging such intentional intergenerational processes is indeed no small task for adult education. This contribution will look at this challenge more closely. To this aim, the orientations of professional and non-professional adult educators and participants in intergenerational learning processes will be reconstructed in a qualitative investigation. It can be shown that the andragogic skill of adult educators is a pre-requisite for the facilitation of learning processes, which are explicitly intergenerational.     

Friedrich Schneider 75 Jahre Alt

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

The perpetrator's strategy as a crucial variable: a representative study of sexual abuse of girls and its sequelae in Switzerland

OBJECTIVE: Little is known about the long-term consequences of "soft" perpetrator strategies. The purpose of the present study is to assess the consequences of love-bargaining strategies compared to those involving force. METHOD: A representative sample of 980 women, aged 20 to 40 years, in the German-speaking part of Switzerland was asked questions regarding psychosomatic well-being, sexual actions, and perpetrator strategies, as well as motivations for tolerating long periods of abuse. The answers regarding strategies were factor analyzed. The effect on psychosomatic well-being was determined by means of stepwise regression analysis and correlation analysis. RESULTS: The prevalence of child sexual abuse (CSA) was 39.8% overall and 14.7% for severe abuse. Using the three variables love-bargaining strategy, self-blaming, and need for affection, an adjusted R2 of .44 was reached in the 3rd step as a dependent variable with a General Symptomatic Index (GSI) calculated from an abbreviated version of the SCL-90-R. The first of the three variables mentioned was by far the most influential. Force was not included in the equation but was closely correlated on a bivariate level with the SCL-90 partial scale "anxiety." CONCLUSIONS: The consequences of CSA produced by the use of soft strategies have been underestimated in the past.