Intuitive Consequences Research Articles

Anti-aging formula protects skin from oxidative stress-induced senescence through the inhibition of CXCR2 expression

Ethnopharmacological relevanceThe skin is affected by endogenous and exogenous factors, which are the intuitive consequence expression of aging. Aging not only affects the aesthetics of the skin but also causes the decline of skin functions, leading to many skin diseases and even skin cancer. Anti-aging formula (AAF) has various biological effects such as antioxidants, regulation of intestinal flora metabolism, anti-aging, and memory improvement. However, it is not clarified whether it could be anti-aging of the skin and the anti-aging mechanism. Aim of the studyThis study aimed to investigate whether AAF could prevent skin from oxidative stress-induced senescence and explore the underlying molecular mechanisms. Materials and methodsA mouse skin oxidative stress aging model was established based on ultraviolet (UV) irradiation, and parameters such as skin water content, melanogenesis, wrinkle production, pathological changes, and aging marker proteins were measured to elucidate whether AAF has an anti-aging effect on the skin. Subsequently, transcriptome sequencing (RNA-Seq) was used to identify target genes. An in vitro cellular senescence model was established to assess the role of AAF against cellular oxidative stress senescence by detecting senescence-related markers, while the specific mechanism of action of AAF in delaying skin senescence was elucidated by silencing or overexpression of targets. ResultsIn vivo experiments demonstrated that AAF significantly increased skin water content, reduced skin sensitivity and melanin content, slowed wrinkles, improved UV-induced epidermal thickening, increased collagen fiber content, improved elastic fiber morphology, and reduced the expression of senescence proteins P21 and P16 in skin tissues. The RNA-Seq results identified chemokine receptor 2 (CXCR2) as one of the potential targets for delaying skin senescence. In vitro experiments showed that AAF markedly improved the aging phenotype, and knockdown or overexpression experiments verified the essential role of CXCR2 in the skin senescence process. Mechanistic studies suggested that AAF inhibited the P38/P53 pathway by reducing CXCR2 expression, which improved the aging phenotype, reduced oxidative damage, and ultimately delayed cellular senescence. ConclusionThe results reveal that AAF protects skin from oxidative stress-induced senescence by regulating the expression of critical target CXCR2, reducing P38 protein phosphorylation, and inhibiting P53 pathway activation. These discoveries implicate the potential of AAF in the protection of skin aging disease.

Effects of migrating mesopelagic fishes on the biological carbon pump

Mesopelagic fishes and invertebrates contribute to the biological carbon pump (BCP) through direct and indirect effects on the gravitational, diffusive, and migrant (active) fluxes. Here, we analyzed the effect of these organisms on total carbon export and sequestration using an idealized depth-resolved food-web model. We constrained a baseline scenario with observations from the Red Sea where mesopelagic fishes perform extensive diel vertical migration (DVM), presumably making them particularly important in carbon export. Our results are consistent with previous studies suggesting that mesopelagic fishes fuel a hotspot of heterotrophic activity in the mesopelagic zone of the Red Sea. While the supply of new nutrients to the euphotic zone is of first order in framing total carbon export and sequestration, we found 2 modulating effects of fish DVM. First, DVM enhances carbon sequestration because active carbon flux attenuates less than the gravitational and diffusive fluxes, and also because migrators fuel the gravitational flux deep into the mesopelagic zone. Secondly, through microbial food-web cascades, fish predation affects the relative contribution of the active and the passive fluxes with non-linear, less intuitive consequences for carbon export and sequestration. These food-web cascades involve a surprisingly large variation in the depth of the euphotic zone that is associated with a ‘diatom nutrient trap’ at the bottom of the euphotic zone.

Ties That Remind: Known Family Connections to Past Events as Salience Cues and Collective Memory of Stalin’s Repressions of the 1930s in Contemporary Russia

Building on ideas of Halbwachs and others regarding how families shape collective memory, we argue that known family connections to past events serve as salience cues. Due to kin preference (humans’ tendency to empathize with family members more than strangers), awareness that a relative participated in a specific past event increases its visibility, moral relevance, and emotional resonance, compared to that of the vast number of other historical occurrences, with intuitive consequences for whether and how the event is remembered in the present. We illustrate this effect of known family connections to the past by analyzing whether and how contemporary Russians recall a controversial episode from the Soviet period: Stalin’s repressions of the 1930s. We use qualitative data from focus groups and unusually detailed survey data, collected in 2010, to illustrate this property of recognized family connections to a past mass trauma. We also propose four distinct components of perceptions of past events: awareness, knowledge, importance, and moral valence. Our findings confirm the strong influence of known family ties to victims, which exhibit more consistent connections to memories of the repressions than do other factors, although family socialization through childhood discussions, cohort differences, education, and exposure to official narratives also matter.

Intra-subject sample size effects in plantar pressure analyses.

BackgroundRecent work using large datasets (>500 records per subject) has demonstrated seemingly high levels of step-to-step variation in peak plantar pressure within human individuals during walking. One intuitive consequence of this variation is that smaller sample sizes (e.g., 10 steps per subject) may be quantitatively and qualitatively inaccurate and fail to capture the variance in plantar pressure of individuals seen in larger data sets. However, this remains quantitatively unexplored reflecting a lack of detailed investigation of intra-subject sample size effects in plantar pressure analysis.MethodsHere we explore the sensitivity of various plantar pressure metrics to intra-subject sample size (number of steps per subject) using a random subsampling analysis. We randomly and incrementally subsample large data sets (>500 steps per subject) to compare variability in three metric types at sample sizes of 5–400 records: (1) overall whole-record mean and maximum pressure; (2) single-pixel values from five locations across the foot; and (3) the sum of pixel-level variability (measured by mean square error, MSE) from the whole plantar surface.ResultsOur results indicate that the central tendency of whole-record mean and maximum pressure within and across subjects show only minor sensitivity to sample size >200 steps. However, <200 steps, and particularly <50 steps, the range of overall mean and maximum pressure values yielded by our subsampling analysis increased considerably resulting in potential qualitative error in analyses of pressure changes with speed within-subjects and in comparisons of relative pressure magnitudes across subjects at a given speed. Our analysis revealed considerable variability in the absolute and relative response of the single pixel centroids of five regions to random subsampling. As the number of steps analysed decreased, the absolute value ranges were highest in the areas of highest pressure (medial forefoot and hallux), while the largest relative changes were seen in areas of lower pressure (the midfoot). Our pixel-level measure of variability by MSE across the whole-foot was highly sensitive to our manipulation of sample size, such that the range in MSE was exponentially larger in smaller subsamples. Random subsampling showed that the range in pixel-level MSE only came within 5% of the overall sample size in subsamples of >400 steps. The range in pixel-level MSE at low subsamples (<50) was 25–75% higher than that of the full datasets of >500 pressure records per subject. Overall, therefore, we demonstrate a high probability that the very small sample sizes (n < 20 records), which are routinely used in human and animal studies, capture a relatively low proportion of variance evident in larger plantar pressure data set, and thus may not accurately reflect the true population mean.

Controlling Through‐Space and Through‐Bond Exchange Pathways in Bis‐Cobaltocenes for Molecular Spintronics

AbstractPinching molecules via chemical strain suggests intuitive consequences, such as compression at the pinched site and clothespin‐like opening of other parts of the structure. If this opening affects two spin centers, it should result in reduced communication between them. We show that for naphthalene‐bridged biscobaltocenes with competing through‐space and through‐bond pathways, the consequences of pinching are far less intuitive: despite the known dominance of through‐space interactions, the bridge plays a much larger role for exchange spin coupling than previously assumed. Based on a combination of chemical synthesis, structural, magnetic, and redox characterization, and a newly developed theoretical pathway analysis, we can suggest a comprehensive explanation for this non‐intuitive behavior. These results are of interest for molecular spintronics, as naphthalene‐linked cobaltocenes can form wires on surfaces for potential spin‐only information transfer.

Controlling Through‐Space and Through‐Bond Exchange Pathways in Bis‐Cobaltocenes for Molecular Spintronics

Pinching molecules via chemical strain suggests intuitive consequences, such as compression at the pinched site and clothespin‐like opening of other parts of the structure. If this opening affects two spin centers, it should result in reduced communication between them. We show that for naphthalene‐bridged biscobaltocenes with competing through‐space and through‐bond pathways, the consequences of pinching are far less intuitive: despite the known dominance of through‐space interactions, the bridge plays a much larger role for exchange spin coupling than previously assumed. Based on a combination of chemical synthesis, structural, magnetic, and redox characterization, and a newly developed theoretical pathway analysis, we can suggest a comprehensive explanation for this non‐intuitive behavior. These results are of interest for molecular spintronics, as naphthalene‐linked cobaltocenes can form wires on surfaces for potential spin‐only information transfer.

The mutual effect of a carbonyl polar bond and an endocyclic oxygen on the 1 JC-F coupling constant of fluorinated six-membered rings.

The 1 JC-F coupling constant can be useful to probe the conformational landscape of organofluorine compounds and the intramolecular interactions governing the stereochemistry of these compounds. Neighboring oxygen electron lone pairs and a carbonyl group relative to a C─F bond affect this coupling constant in an opposite way, and therefore, analysis of the interactions involving these entities simultaneously indicates which effect dominates 1 JC-F . Spin-spin coupling constant calculations for a series of fluorinated tetrahydropyrans, cyclohexanones, and dihydropyran-3-ones indicated that an electrostatic/dipolar interaction between the C─F and C═O bonds is more important than the steric interaction between the C─F bond and the oxygen electron lone pairs. An intuitive consequence of such outcome is that this interaction not only drives the coupling constant but can also be taken into account when aiming at the stereochemical control of functionalized organofluorine compounds.

Contextuality Scenarios Arising from Networks of Stochastic Processes

An empirical model is a generalization of a probability space. It consists of a simplicial complex of subsets of a class 𝒳 of random variables such that each simplex has an associated probability distribution. The ensuing marginalizations are coherent, in the sense that the distribution on a face of a simplex coincides with the marginal of the distribution over the entire simplex. An empirical model is called contextual if its distributions cannot be obtained by marginalizing a joint distribution over 𝒳. Contextual empirical models arise naturally in quantum theory, giving rise to some of its counter -intuitive statistical consequences. In this paper, we present a different and classical source of contextual empirical models: the interaction among many stochastic processes. We attach an empirical model to the ensuing network in which each node represents an open stochastic process with input and output random variables. The statistical behaviour of the network in the long run makes the empirical model generically contextual and even strongly contextual.

Cognitive Penetration and the Perception of Art

There are good, even if inconclusive reasons to think that cognitive penetration of perception occurs: that cognitive states like belief causally affect, in a relatively direct way, the contents of perceptual experience. The supposed importance of—indeed as it is suggested here, what is definitive of—this possible phenomenon is that it would result in important epistemic and scientific consequences. One interesting and intuitive consequence entirely unremarked in the extant literature concerns the perception of art. Intuition has it that knowledge about art changes how one aesthetically evaluates artworks. A profound explanation of this intuitive fact is that perceptual experiences vary with artistic expertise. Cognitive penetration provides an explanatory mechanism for this latter effect. What one knows or otherwise thinks about art may affect, in one of two ways sketched below, how one perceives art. Differences in aesthetic evaluation may follow, either because high-level aesthetic properties can be perceptually represented or because they causally depend on low-level perceptible properties. All of this lends credence to the hypothesis that the expert better judges art because she better perceives art. And she better perceives art because she better knows art.

Desacuerdos, paridad epistémica e incoherencia

Conciliatory views on disagreement claim that one should “split the difference” between the epistemic peers’ opinions. Nevertheless, when they apply to the disagreement on conciliatory positions themselves, they give incoherent instructions. A semi-conciliatory position is one that accepts that the peers’ opinions are part of the whole body of evidence relevant in these situations. If one adopts this kind of view, all cases that seems to favor conciliatory views can be explained, and without compromising with the anti–intuitive consequences conciliatory positions have. In particular, a semi-conciliatory view is not condemned to give incoherent instructions when applied to disagreement about it.

Etchemendy and Bolzano on Logical Consequence

In a series of publications beginning in the 1980s, John Etchemendy has argued that the standard semantical account of logical consequence, due in its essentials to Alfred Tarski, is fundamentally mistaken. He argues that, while Tarski's definition requires us to classify the terms of a language as logical or non-logical, no such division is guaranteed to deliver the correct extension of our pre-theoretical or intuitive consequence relation. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, Tarski's account is claimed to be incapable of explaining an essential modal/epistemological feature of consequence, namely, its necessity and apriority. Bernard Bolzano (1781–1848) is widely recognized as having anticipated Tarski's definition in his Wissenschaftslehre (or Theory of Science) of 1837. Because of the similarities between his account and Tarski's, Etchemendy's arguments have also been extended to cover Bolzano. The purpose of this article is to consider Bolzano's theory in the light of these criticisms. We argue that, due to important differences between Bolzano's and Tarski's theories, Etchemendy's objections do not apply immediately to Bolzano's account of consequence. Moreover, Bolzano's writings contain the elements of a detailed philosophical response to Etchemendy.

Entre el humanismo cívico y el liberalismo de izquierda

I shall begin by exposing the «humanist» criticism of leftwing liberalism and analizing W. Kymlicka's left liberal response to it, while highlighting its coincidences with classical republicanism. I shall then argue that, even if we accept Kymlicka's response, leftwing liberalism is still problematic due to its difficulty in generating political participation. Liberal separation of ethics and politics renders political participation in unjust societies pointless. In order to surmount this problem, we need to resort to the intrinsic value of participation, as humanists do, while avoiding a defense of participation for its own sake, that would carry counter intuitive consequences, as shown by Kymlicka in his defense of liberalism. With a view to avoiding the problems of both liberalism and humanism, I shall draw an analogy between friendship and political relationships and propose a definition of the latter that will show we need not incur the dangers of appealing to religious or national identities or the like in order make political participation intrinsicly valuable.

Maximizing Long-Term Cumulative Returns

Maximizing long-term returns is widely ignored by mainstream financial theory, which focuses mainly on mean variance optimization. To maximize long-term cumulative returns, investors need only maximize the geometric expected return of their portfolio. It is a virtual certainty that over the long-term the geometric expected return will provide an extremely accurate estimate of the annualized cumulative return. A simple mathematical proof is described. Some counter intuitive consequences for investing are illustrated using simple numerical examples. Basic directions to apply the strategy to real life investing are included. Although little known, the cumulative return maximization strategy will likely appeal to down-to-earth investors, due to its sound mathematical foundation, and its meaningful, tangible results.

Intuitive consequences of the Revision Theory of Truth

Frege, G. 1892a. Ober Begriff und Gegenstand. Vierteljahrsschrift fiir wissenschafliche Philosophie 16: 192-205. Translated as 'On concept and object' in Frege 1952, to which page numbers refer. Frege, G. 1892b. Ober Sinn und Bedeutung. Zeitschrift fiir Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 100: 25-50. Translated as 'On sense and meaning' in Frege 1952, to which page numbers refer. Frege, G. 1893. Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, begriffsschriftlich abgeleitet, I. Jena: H. Pohle.

Intuitive consequences of the Revision Theory of Truth

Intuitive consequences of the Revision Theory of Truth

Error, malpractice, and the problem of universals.

This article begins with a criticism of McIntyre and Gorovitz's account of medical error. Their theory implies that error, at least sometimes, is a necessary consequence of the inductive character of medical inquiry. The counter intuitive consequences of this account suggest that the issues surrounding induction may not be the most fertile area for developing a coherent interpretation of medical error. Given these shortcomings, I develop a new theory which assumes that the best philosophical soil for constructing a theory of medical error is the problem of universals. I then explain the problem and how the medical universal functions within arguments concerning diagnosis and treatment. A Wittgensteinian solution to the problem is presented which emphasizes the "borderline" character of some, if not many, medical judgments. Next, an argument is offered to establish that questions of medical error are not purely professional questions. This is because the theories used to make such professional judgments permit borderline cases even under the best circumstances. Finally, while there are a number of legitimate responses to this situation, I recommend one which involves legislative action.