Search

L'articolo affronta il concetto di "fluidità" a partire dall'esperienza dell'International Workshop on Urbanism and Design che si è svolto da gennaio a marzo 2017 a Palermo: circa 80 studenti hanno sperimentato una metodologia di lavoro di collaborative urbanism and design sotto la responsabilità scientifica di Maurizio Carta e Dario Russo (Università di Palermo) e di Manuela Catania e Ero Pagla (Raffles Design Institute di Hong Kong).

This study is a symmetrical ethnography of the Czech development project Kola pro Afriku (Czech Bikes for Gambian Schools), which involves the collection, repairs, modification and shipment of old Czech bicycles to The Gambia. Once there, they are distributed to partner schools and offered to communing pupils. In my research, I mainly focus on the pivotal technology of the project, bicycles, and their performances. Drawing on classic ethnographies of development and (most importantly) on studies based on the actor-network theory (ANT), I gradually explore the bike collection process, their modifications and repairs, their shipment to The Gambia and their local operations. When doing so, I focus on the social topology of the bicycles and its transformations in the timespace. In this regard, the bicycles gradually appear as junk (i.e. a dysfunctional relict of stabilized networks), as a fluid collectivity and as individually fluid. Thereby, this study shows that technology transfers may lead not only to changes in the set of relations, of which the given object consists, but in the very modes, in which those relations arise. It is precisely these topological transformations that significantly contribute to the functioning of the project Kola pro Afriku. Key words: development cooperation,...

Surfactin, a secondary metabolite produced by Bacillus subtilis, is a surface active compound and antibiotic permeabilizing membrane bilayer. The aim of this study was to reveal the self-resistance strategy at the level of the lipid moiety of cytoplasmic membrane, which B. subtilis employs to combat surfactin in concentrations that are lethal for other bacterial species. Non-producing strain B. subtilis 168 was cultivated in the presence of two different sublethal concentrations of surfactin (350 a 650 µg/ml), which was isolated from the culture broth of B. subtilis ATCC 21332. Presence of surfactin in the medium resulted in a concentration dependent lag phase, which took 40 min (350 µg/ml) and 3 h (650 µg/ml), respectively. Afterwards, the culture grew with the altered doubling time of 44 min (350 µg/ml) and 126 min (650 µg/ml), respectively. Surfactin induced substantial changes in the phospholipid composition of the cytoplasmic membrane. The proportion of the major phospholipid component phosphatidylglycerol decreased and inversely, the level of phosphatidylethanolamine increased. Interestingly, the content of phosphatidic acid rose considerably in the presence of surfactin concentration causing stimulation of B. subtilis growth (350 µg/ml). Liposome leakage assay using phospholipids mimicking...

Lo scopo della presente ricerca è stato quello di valutare la capacità del medrossiprogesterone acetato di interferire sull'attività di alcune antracicline. I risultati hanno evidenziato che il medrossiprogesterone acetato potenzia l'attività di alcuni chemioterapici agendo sia sulla fluidità di membrana che sull'inibizione della depolarizzazione K indotta.