Plastics are efficient materials for many purposes, e.g. packaging and construction, but are also associated with significant problems. These span from littering in forests and oceans, toxicity of additives, to the fundamental dependence on fossil resource for the production of the plastic material. This report aims to give an overview of the challenges for decarbonisation of plastics, i.e. moving

Background: Long-term insulin exposure has been implicated in breast cancer etiology, but epidemiological evidence remains inconclusive. The aims of this study were to investigate the association of insulin therapy with mammographic density (MD) as an intermediate phenotype for breast cancer and to assess associations with long-term elevated circulating insulin levels using a genetic score compris

Background: Individual patients differ in their psychological response when receiving a cancer diagnosis, in this case breast cancer. Given the same disease burden, some patients master the situation well, while others experience a great deal of stress, depression and lowered quality of life. Patients with high psychological resilience are likely to experience fewer stress reactions and better ada

Ultrafast manipulations of magnetic phases are eliciting increasing attention from the scientific community because potentially relevant to the understanding of nonequilibrium phase transitions and to novel technologies. Here, we focus on manipulations applied to magnetic impurities in metallic hosts. By considering small nanoring geometries, we show how currents can induce a dynamical switching b

Rules-based fiscal policy is under threat. Over the last two decades, it proved frustratingly complicated to strike the right balance between three essential properties of sound fiscal policy rules: simplicity, flexibility, and enforceability. Simplicity has been sacrificed to ensure that more contingent (i.e. flexible) rules remained enforceable. The resulting arrangements have failed to adequate

This paper highlights and assesses the importance of the role of economic shrinking for the long-term growth process in the developing world over the period 1951-2016. On the basis of descriptive analysis it shows that resilience to shrinking, even among the miracle economies in Pacific Asia, plays a more important role for successful catching up than economic growth per se. The paper then propose

This article analyses the particular energy transition of the Swedish iron and steel sector (1800- 1939),, a relevant actor in the European context during the nineteenth and twenteenth century. The Swedish iron and steel sector is an interesting case to analyse in the perspective of energy transition and the composition and change of the capital stock (classified by energy technology). An in-depth

Most patients with anti-glomerular basement membrane (anti-GBM) disease present with rapidly progressive glomerulonephritis with or without pulmonary haemorrhage; however, there are several variants and vigilance is necessary to make a correct diagnosis. Such variants include overlap with anti-neutrophil cytoplasm antibodies-associated vasculitis and membranous nephropathy as well as anti-GBM occu

Bullous pemphigoid (BP) is an autoimmune bullous disease, associated with autoantibodies directed against the hemidesmosomal components BP180 and BP230. In this study for the first time different laboratories have analyzed the autoantibody profile in the same group of 49 prospectively recruited BP patients. The results show that: 1) disease severity and activity correlated with levels of IgG again

Anti-glomerular basement membrane (anti-GBM) disease is a prototype of autoimmune disease. The disease can be transferred with the antibodies and there is a strong correlation with certain human leukocyte antigen (HLA) genes. The pathogenic epitope on the NC1 domain of the 3-chain of type IV collagen is well characterized and only antibodies against this epitope correlate with disease. The diagnos

Gastrostomy tube placements in children are associated with frequent postoperative complications. Children with gastrostomy tubes are frequent visitors to the emergency department and outpatient clinic. The aim of this study was to determine the incidence of postoperative gastrostomy complications and disclose if these were correlated to the patients' age and diagnosis. This is a prospective study

Focusing on the construction of the “refugee crisis” in mainstream daily newspapers in Sweden, Jordan, and Turkey in 2015, this chapter disentangles the crisis discourse into its specific components. Newspapers in the three countries focused on the “refugee crisis” as a source of concern for policy and politics at the local, national, and global levels. In comparing the discourses in the three con

Outer membrane vesicles (OMVs) play an important role in the persistence of Helicobacter pylori infection. Helicobacter OMVs carry a plethora of virulence factors, including catalase (KatA), an antioxidant enzyme that counteracts the host respiratory burst. We found KatA to be enriched and surface-associated in OMVs compared to bacterial cells. This conferred OMV-dependent KatA activity resulting

Apart from the skin surface, hair represents a significant tissue component with a capacity of bacterial interactions. New information can be obtained about hair function through the characterization of bacterial adherence, colonization, and responses to hair shafts per se. In this proof-of-principle study, we examine the growth kinetics of Gram-positive Staphylococcus aureus and Staphylococcus ep