Impacts of new technologies on media usage and social behaviour in domestic environments

Technological infrastructure at home is changing continuously and is becoming increasingly interconnected. Media devices, including the TV set, provide access to the Internet and offer manifold opportunities to consume media on demand. Additionally, personal devices, such as smartphones, also enable flexible consumption and sharing of media. Questions about how these technologies change the user's media usage and how these changes affect the social structure of a household, however, remain largely unanswered. In order to gain insight into the adoption of new technologies into daily routines, we explored these changes in respect of people's media usage in a qualitative long-term Living Lab study. We will present findings regarding personal routines, flexible integration of new devices into existing practices, influences on households as social systems and related issues in device access and collective use. We will highlight potentials and conflicts regarding device shifts and roles; restrictions in device access; social influences in the living room; and individual changes in media consumption.     

Microenvironmental engineering: An effective strategy for tailoring enzymatic activities

Rationally, engineering a favorable physicochemical microenvironment for enzymes has recently emerged as an effective strategy to improve their catalytic performance. In this review, we discuss four microenvironmental effects according to the mechanism of action: localizing and excluding reactants and regulators, regulating microenvironmental pH, creating a water-like microenvironment, and increasing the local temperature. These mechanisms are enzyme-independent and can in principle be used in combination to tailor enzyme behaviors, offering new approaches to enabling, enhancing, and regulating enzyme catalysis in diverse applications without the need for genetic engineering.     

Fundamental dynamics of flow through carbon nanotube membranes

The flow of a model non-polar liquid through small carbon nanotubes is studied using non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulation. We explain how a membrane of small-diameter nanotubes can transport this liquid faster than a membrane consisting of larger-diameter nanotubes. This effect is shown to be back-pressure dependent, and the reasons for this are explored. The flow through the very smallest nanotubes is shown to depend strongly on the depth of the potential inside, suggesting atomic separation can be based on carbon interaction strength as well as physical size. Finally, we demonstrate how increasing the back-pressure can counter-intuitively result in lower exit velocities from a nanotube. Such studies are crucial for optimisation of nanotube membranes.     

Observations of quantized vorticity generated in superfluid 4He flow through 2-Μm-diameter orifices

A beam of charged vortex rings is used to study the vorticity present downstream from an array of 2-m-diameter orifices through which a steady flow of superfluid ⁴He is driven at known velocity and pressure head p. From the measured attentuation of the beam at low p, we infer a density of vortex line less than predicted by the Feynman critical velocity model. Possible explanations are considered. We find evidence that an interconnected tangle of vortices is formed above a certain value of p, which is in reasonable agreement with theory, at least for one orifice plate. Charge transfer and transient attenuation measurements indicate that this tangle decays in part into small vortex rings. These results are compared with an earlier experiment of Gamota.Research supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant DMR 72-02971.     

The Hydrophilic Loop of Arabidopsis PIN1 Auxin Efflux Carrier Harbors Hallmarks of an Intrinsically Disordered Protein

Much of plant development depends on cell-to-cell redistribution of the plant hormone auxin, which is facilitated by the plasma membrane (PM) localized PIN FORMED (PIN) proteins. Auxin export activity, developmental roles, subcellular trafficking, and polarity of PINs have been well studied, but their structure remains elusive besides a rough outline that they contain two groups of 5 alpha-helices connected by a large hydrophilic loop (HL). Here, we focus on the PIN1 HL as we could produce it in sufficient quantities for biochemical investigations to provide insights into its secondary structure. Circular dichroism (CD) studies revealed its nature as an intrinsically disordered protein (IDP), manifested by the increase of structure content upon thermal melting. Consistent with IDPs serving as interaction platforms, PIN1 loops homodimerize. PIN1 HL cytoplasmic overexpression in Arabidopsis disrupts early endocytic trafficking of PIN1 and PIN2 and causes defects in the cotyledon vasculature formation. In summary, we demonstrate that PIN1 HL has an intrinsically disordered nature, which must be considered to gain further structural insights. Some secondary structures may form transiently during pairing with known and yet-to-be-discovered interactors.     

Convergent and divergent responses to emotional displays of ingroup and outgroup.

In the present research, we test the assumption that emotional mimicry and contagion are moderated by group membership. We report two studies using facial electromyography (EMG; Study 1), Facial Action Coding System (FACS; Study 2), and self-reported emotions (Study 2) as dependent measures. As predicted, both studies show that ingroup anger and fear displays were mimicked to a greater extent than outgroup displays of these emotions. The self-report data in Study 2 further showed specific divergent reactions to outgroup anger and fear displays. Outgroup anger evoked fear, and outgroup fear evoked aversion. Interestingly, mimicry increased liking for ingroup models but not for outgroup models. The findings are discussed in terms of the social functions of emotions in group contexts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)