scholarly journals Recent Developments in the Design of Non-Biofouling Coatings for Nanoparticles and Surfaces

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 1007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Sanchez-Cano ◽  
Mónica Carril

Biofouling is a major issue in the field of nanomedicine and consists of the spontaneous and unwanted adsorption of biomolecules on engineered surfaces. In a biological context and referring to nanoparticles (NPs) acting as nanomedicines, the adsorption of biomolecules found in blood (mostly proteins) is known as protein corona. On the one hand, the protein corona, as it covers the NPs’ surface, can be considered the biological identity of engineered NPs, because the corona is what cells will “see” instead of the underlying NPs. As such, the protein corona will influence the fate, integrity, and performance of NPs in vivo. On the other hand, the physicochemical properties of the engineered NPs, such as their size, shape, charge, or hydrophobicity, will influence the identity of the proteins attracted to their surface. In this context, the design of coatings for NPs and surfaces that avoid biofouling is an active field of research. The gold standard in the field is the use of polyethylene glycol (PEG) molecules, although zwitterions have also proved to be efficient in preventing protein adhesion and fluorinated molecules are emerging as coatings with interesting properties. Hence, in this review, we will focus on recent examples of anti-biofouling coatings in three main areas, that is, PEGylated, zwitterionic, and fluorinated coatings.

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Muers ◽  
Rhiannon Grant

Recent developments in contemporary theology and theological ethics have directed academic attention to the interrelationships of theological claims, on the one hand, and core community-forming practices, on the other. This article considers the value for theology of attending to practice at the boundaries, the margins, or, as we prefer to express it, the threshold of a community’s institutional or liturgical life. We argue that marginal or threshold practices can offer insights into processes of theological change – and into the mediation between, and reciprocal influence of, ‘church’ and ‘world’. Our discussion focuses on an example from contemporary British Quakerism. ‘Threshing meetings’ are occasions at which an issue can be ‘threshed out’ as part of a collective process of decision-making. Drawing on a 2015 small-scale study (using a survey and focus group) of British Quaker attitudes to and experiences of threshing meetings, set in the wider context of Quaker tradition, we interpret these meetings as a space for working through – in context and over time – tensions within Quaker theology, practice and self-understandings, particularly those that emerge within, and in relation to, core practices of Quaker decision-making.


2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 31-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Brem ◽  
Björn Ivens

The fields of frugal and reverse innovation as well as sustainability and its management have received tremendous interest in recent times. However, there is little literature on how both fields are related to each other. Hence, this paper gives an overview of research in both areas and provides a view of the relationship between frugal and reverse innovation, sustainability management and performance constructs. The link between frugal and reverse innovation on the one hand and sustainability performance on the other hand is established through a differentiated perspective on dimensions representing different fields of sustainability management, i.e. the sustainability of resources used in value creation, the sustainability of the actual value creation processes, and the sustainability of the outcomes of value creation processes. Moreover, we also argue for a positive link between the three dimensions of sustainability management and a company’s market performance.


2019 ◽  
pp. 43-73
Author(s):  
Marie Muschalek

This chapter addresses the hybrid semi-civilian and semi-military institutional setting within which police codes of behavior emerged. On the one hand, police leadership held on tightly to military notions of etiquette, proper appearance, comradeship, and loyalty. This attitude became particularly apparent in police training. Not legal knowledge or administrational skills, but an imposing military habitus and access to lethal force were to provide the foundation for quality policing. On the other hand, being charged with civilian tasks, the policemen of the Landespolizei created a professional culture that increasingly introduced administrational techniques as modes of validation and legitimization. To them, it mattered that the job was done in accordance with an ever growing complex of decrees as well as that it was documented in proper form. In short, policemen were men of guns and paper—they injured and killed people “by the book.” This chapter returns to the significance of honor, demonstrating how the concern for proper appearance and performance was the most decisive factor in the emergence of a Landespolizei organizational culture.


Author(s):  
Cristina Raluca Gh. Popescu

With the main objective of determining the essential factors that incorporate or enhance innovative capital, the present study, based, on the one hand, on the evaluation of the literature, allowed identifying ten potential factors and centered, on the other hand, on the analysis represented by the linear regression facilitated displaying the interdependencies between these factors and performance, thus determining the overall meaning and intensity of their contribution. In order to identify general and essential trends, to eliminate the cyclical influences of innovative capital, the present study was conducted on the basis of public and free access data contained by Eurostat, the transparency and accessibility of information being very important criteria in defining a simple and successful model, applicable for assessing the contribution of intellectual capital, in general, and its most dynamic component of innovative capital to increasing the performance of organizations.


2008 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-252
Author(s):  
Freddie Rokem

This article reflects my current research, exploring the complex interactions between the discursive practices of theatre and performance on the one hand and philosophy on the other. Instead of beginning by trying to formulate the general principles for such an interaction, I examine actual encounters: direct face-to-face meetings and actual dialogues between philosophers and representatives of the Thespian professions. The earliest recorded encounter of this kind is in Plato's Symposium depicting the banquet in Agathon's house, celebrating his victory at the Lenaean theatre festival in 416 b.c., during which the celebrants spent the whole night eulogizing Eros. On this occasion Socrates and the two playwrights, Agathon and Aristophanes, interacted directly on several occasions.


1987 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-12
Author(s):  
Max Kemp

There has been unrest in our newspapers recently about standards of literacy in schools. To those of us who daily are in touch with children who have difficulties in learning to read and write, periodic public forays into the standards issues are usually unhelpful, unwarranted and uninformed. Comparisons between the standards of literacy achieved by different generations of school children are difficult to make, on the one hand because our functional literacy requirements differ from yesterday’s and on the other because the conditions of learning and performance in schools have undergone immense change during the last couple of generations.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (15) ◽  
pp. 5908
Author(s):  
Félix Calle ◽  
Ángela González-Moreno ◽  
Inmaculada Carrasco ◽  
Manuel Vargas-Vargas

Concerned about climate change, cooperatives in the wine sector are beginning to adapt their strategies, guided by cooperative principles that encompass high social responsibility and the pursuit of community values. In this context and focused on the analysis of the decisions that drive firms to be more environmentally sustainable, our goal is twofold. On the one hand, we wish to examine whether there exist differences between cooperative and non-cooperative firms as regards their environmental proactivity. On the other hand, we hope to demonstrate the diversity of behaviors within the category of cooperative firms, identifying the possible patterns of environmental proactivity in Spanish cooperatives in the wine sector. We first conducted a difference of means t-test for independent samples (n = 251; sampled in 2017)—cooperatives (51) vs. non cooperative firms (200)- and then a two-stage cluster analysis and a subsequent variance analysis, using SPSS 24. Our results show no significant differences between cooperative and non-cooperative firms concerning their environmental behavior and underlines the diversity within the cooperatives in the wine sector as regards their environmental proactivity, revealing the existence of proactive, preventive and activist patterns of behavior. These patterns also show differences in the motivations for their environmental behaviors and their assessment of financial performance.


2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Gamsa

AbstractThis article has two goals. It reflects on the recent developments and agenda of an approach to historical writing that is now becoming known by the name global microhistory, and it analyses the attention which this approach pays to individual lives. It also explores some of the challenges in writing the biography of a city alongside the life history of a person. The city is Harbin, a former Russian-managed railway hub in Manchuria, today a province capital in Northeast China. The person is Baron Roger Budberg (1867–1926), a physician of Baltic German origin who arrived in Harbin during the Russo-Japanese war and remained there until his death, leaving published works and unpublished correspondence in German and Russian. My forthcoming book about Budberg and Harbin challenges the distinction between writing “biography”, on the one hand, and “history”, on the other, while navigating between the “micro” and “macro” layers of historical enquiry.


2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (04) ◽  
pp. 1330006 ◽  
Author(s):  
PAULO VARGAS MONIZ

This report comprises two parts. On the one hand, I will, based on the talks at the CM4 parallel session "Quantum Cosmology and Quantum Effects in the Early Universe" which I chaired, point to interesting recent developments in quantum cosmology. On the other hand, some of the basics of supersymmetric quantum cosmology are briefly reviewed, pointing to promising lines of research to explore. I will start with the latter, finishing the report with the former.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 57-71
Author(s):  
Marta Gatti

The purpose of this article is, on the one hand, to describe EU support of the adoption of a corporate social responsibility policy by EU undertakings, both within and outside the EU borders. On the other hand, this article will focus on the most recent developments in the field of human rights reporting at national level and, in particular, on the French commitment to implement mechanisms to prevent infringements on human rights across the supply chain.


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