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Under authoritarian regimes, citizen-led NGOs such as environmental NGOs (ENGOs) often operate under close scrutiny of the government. While this presents a challenge to a single ENGO, we propose here - in line with existing research on network effects - that there are opportunities for multiple ENGOs to coordinate and thus work in ways that supersede government controls, affect public opinion, and contribute to policy revision and/or creation. In this paper, we specifically examine the possibility that the gamut of citizen-based ENGOs in China are coordinating. Based on network analysis of ENGOs web pages as well as interviews with more than a dozen ENGO leaders between 2014 and 2016, we find that ENGOs have few direct and public connections to each other, but social media sites and personal connections offline provide a crucial function in creating bridges. A closer examination of these bridges reveals, however, that they can be substantive to the environmental discussion or functional to the dissemination of web page information but typically not both. In short, ENGOs in China are not directly connected but rather are connected in a way that responds to the available social media and the government's censorship practices.

Traumatic Brain injury-induced disturbances in mitochondrial fission-and-fusion dynamics have been linked to the onset and propagation of neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration. However, cell-type-specific contributions and crosstalk between neurons, microglia, and astrocytes in mitochondria-driven neurodegeneration after brain injury remain undefined. We developed a human three-dimensional in vitro triculture tissue model of a contusion injury composed of neurons, microglia, and astrocytes and examined the contributions of mitochondrial dysregulation to neuroinflammation and progression of injury-induced neurodegeneration. Pharmacological studies presented here suggest that fragmented mitochondria released by microglia are a key contributor to secondary neuronal damage progression after contusion injury, a pathway that requires astrocyte-microglia crosstalk. Controlling mitochondrial dysfunction thus offers an exciting option for developing therapies for TBI patients.

The nucleus reuniens of the thalamus (RE) is a key component of an extensive network of hippocampal and cortical structures and is a fundamental substrate for cognition. A common misconception is that RE is a simple relay structure. Instead, a better conceptualization is that RE is a critical component of a canonical higher-order cortico-thalamo-cortical circuit that supports communication between the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the hippocampus (HC). RE dysfunction is implicated in several clinical disorders including, but not limited to Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia, and epilepsy. Here, we review key anatomical and physiological features of the RE based primarily on studies in rodents. We present a conceptual model of RE circuitry within the mPFC-RE-HC system and speculate on the computations RE enables. We review the rapidly growing literature demonstrating that RE is critical to, and its neurons represent, aspects of behavioral tasks that place demands on memory focusing on its role in navigation, spatial working memory, the temporal organization of memory, and executive functions.

Background: The opioid epidemic is an ongoing public health emergency, exacerbated in recent years by the introduction and rising prevalence of synthetic opioids. The National EMS Scope of Practice Model was changed in 2017 to recommend allowing basic life support (BLS) clinicians to administer intranasal (IN) naloxone. This study examines local IN naloxone administration rates for 4 years after the new recommendation, and Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) scores and respiratory rates before and after naloxone administration. Methods: This retrospective cohort study evaluated naloxone administrations between April 1st 2017 and March 31st 2021 in a mixed urban-suburban EMS system. Naloxone dosages, routes of administration, and frequency of administrations were captured along with demographic information. Analysis of change in the ratio of IN to intravenous (IV) naloxone administrations per patient was performed, with the intention of capturing administration patterns in the area. Analyses were performed for change over time of IN naloxone rates of administration, change in respiratory rates, and change in GCS scores after antidote administration. ALS and BLS clinician certification levels were also identified. Bootstrapping procedures were used to estimate 95% confidence intervals for correlation coefficients. Results: Two thousand and ninety patients were analyzed. There was no statistically significant change in the IN/parenteral ratio over time (p = 0.79). Repeat dosing increased over time from 1.2 ± 0.4 administrations per patient to 1.3 ± 0.5 administrations per patient (r = 0.078, 95% CI: 0.036 − 0.120; p = 0.036). Mean respiratory rates before (mean = 12.6 − 12.6, r = −0.04, 95% CI: −0.09 − 0.01; p = 0.1) and after (mean = 15.2 − 14.9, r = −0.03, 95% CI: −0.08 − 0.01; p = 0.172) naloxone administration have not changed. While initial GCS scores have become significantly lower, GCS scores after administration of naloxone have not changed (initial median GCS 10 − 6, p < 0.001; final median GCS 15 – 15, p = 0.23). Conclusions: Current dosing protocols of naloxone appear effective in the era of synthetic opioids in our region, although patients may be marginally more likely to require repeat naloxone doses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With democratic governance under threat in the United States and abroad, legal scholars have endeavored to defend the institutions considered integral to a well-functioning democracy. According to an increasing number of civil procedure scholars, civil litigation should be included among those institutions, with many contending that litigation performs several important "democratic" functions. This Article draws on political theory to explicate and evaluate this emerging democratic defense of civil litigation, as well as to situate the defense in the broader context of democratic argumentation about non-representative institutions in legal theory. Democracy is just as complex as any other normative concept, and that complexity pervades the democratic defense of civil litigation. Not only do civil procedure scholars identify several distinct democratic functions that litigation ostensibly serves, establishing several distinct potential connections between the institution and democracy; they also rely (often implicitly) on several distinct conceptions of the ideal to draw those connections. More specifcally, when the democratic defense runs up against litigation's many incontrovertibly non-majoritarian features, proponents tend to resort to what political theorists have described as less political conceptions of democracy--that is, conceptions that see democracy less as a procedure for negotiating persistent disagreements between competing segments of society through ongoing contestation over political power and more as a set of social activities further removed from the exercise of political power or even a set of substantive moral ends to be imposed via that power once and for all. This Article argues that such depoliticization of democracy has considerable drawbacks in the civil justice context. In recent decades, the institution of civil litigation has come under assault from both the right and the left. Yet the less political conceptions of democracy underwriting signifcant facets of the democratic defense are unlikely to vindicate litigation against those attacks. For, in order to assimilate litigation to other, representative institutions, the democratic defense must subsume disparate, often-competing values under the single heading of "democracy." Such confation not only elides the many inevitable tradeoffs between those values, but also distracts us from what's distinctive and most valuable about litigation--what functions litigation can perform but other political institutions can't. And without a clear sense of litigation's unique role in our political system, defenders of litigation will struggle to parry calls for civil justice "reform," which on a wide range of policy issues--from arbitration to aggregate litigation to private enforcement--often posit a set of alternative institutions that supposedly serve the same purposes as litigation, only better. In its tendency to depoliticize democracy, the democratic defense of civil litigation refects similar trends in recent legal theory. This Article shows how scholars of both private and public law increasingly invoke democracy to justify the work of non-representative institutions such as courts and administrative agencies but rely on less political conceptions of the ideal to do so. Such depoliticization risks obscuring the institutions' most distinctive normative contributions, as well as the inevitable conficts between those contributions and other fundamental values, including a democratic commitment to popular sovereignty. Absent consensus about how to resolve such conficts, the best we may be able to do is to render nonrepresentative institutions such as litigation more accountable to other, representative institutions that are better situated to negotiate persistent disagreements about fundamental values. Democratic defenses of litigation and other non-representative institutions, by contrast, attempt to account for those institutions' non-majoritarian qualities at the steep price of taking much of the disagreement--and thus much of the politics--out of democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With democratic governance under threat in the United States and abroad, legal scholars have endeavored to defend the institutions considered integral to a well-functioning democracy. According to an increasing number of civil procedure scholars, civil litigation should be included among those institutions, with many contending that litigation performs several important "democratic" functions. This Article draws on political theory to explicate and evaluate this emerging democratic defense of civil litigation, as well as to situate the defense in the broader context of democratic argumentation about non-representative institutions in legal theory. Democracy is just as complex as any other normative concept, and that complexity pervades the democratic defense of civil litigation. Not only do civil procedure scholars identify several distinct democratic functions that litigation ostensibly serves, establishing several distinct potential connections between the institution and democracy; they also rely (often implicitly) on several distinct conceptions of the ideal to draw those connections. More specifically, when the democratic defense runs up against litigation's many incontrovertibly non-majoritarian features, proponents tend to resort to what political theorists have described as less "political" conceptions of democracy--that is, conceptions that see democracy less as a procedure for negotiating persistent disagreements between competing segments of society through ongoing contestation over political power and more as a set of social activities further removed from the exercise of political power or even a set of substantive moral ends to be imposed via that power once and for all. This Article argues that such depoliticization of democracy has considerable drawbacks in the civil justice context. In recent decades, the institution of civil litigation has come under assault from both the right and the left. Yet the less political conceptions of democracy underwriting significant facets of the democratic defense are unlikely to vindicate litigation against those attacks. For, in order to assimilate litigation to other, representative institutions, the democratic defense must subsume disparate, often-competing values under the single heading of "democracy." Such conflation not only elides the many inevitable tradeoffs between those values, but also distracts us from what's distinctive and most valuable about litigation--what functions litigation can perform but other political institutions can't. And without a clear sense of litigation's unique role in our political system, defenders of litigation will struggle to parry calls for civil justice "reform," which on a wide range of policy issues--from arbitration to aggregate litigation to private enforcement--often posit a set of alternative institutions that supposedly serve the same purposes as litigation, only better. In its tendency to depoliticize democracy, the democratic defense of civil litigation reflects similar trends in recent legal theory. This Article shows how scholars of both private and public law increasingly invoke democracy to justify the work of non-representative institutions such as courts and administrative agencies but rely on less political conceptions of the ideal to do so. Such depoliticization risks obscuring the institutions' most distinctive normative contributions, as well as the inevitable conflicts between those contributions and other fundamental values, including a democratic commitment to popular sovereignty. Absent consensus about how to resolve such conflicts, the best we may be able to do is to render non-representative institutions such as litigation more accountable to other, representative institutions that are better situated to negotiate persistent disagreements about fundamental values. Democratic defenses of litigation and other non-representative institutions, by contrast, attempt to account for those institutions' non-majoritarian qualities at the steep price of taking much of the disagreement--and thus much of the politics--out of democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Behavioral flexibility allows individuals to adapt to situations in which rewards and goals change. Potentially addictive drugs may impair flexible decision-making by altering brain mechanisms that compute reward expectancies, thereby facilitating maladaptive drug use. To investigate this hypothesis, we tested the effects of oxycodone exposure on rats in two complementary learning and memory tasks that engage distinct learning strategies and neural circuits. Rats were trained first in either a spatial or a body-turn discrimination on a radial maze. After initial training, rats were given oxycodone or vehicle injections in their home cages for 5 d. Reversal learning was tested 36 h after the final drug exposure. We hypothesized that if oxycodone impaired behavioral flexibility, then drug-exposed rats should learn reversals more slowly than controls. Oxycodone exposure impaired spatial reversal learning when reward contingencies changed rapidly, but not when they changed slowly. During rapid reversals, oxycodone-exposed rats required more trials to reach criterion, made more perseverative errors, and were more likely to make errors after correct responses than controls. Oxycodone impaired body-turn reversal learning in similar patterns. Limited exposure to oxycodone reduced behavioral flexibility when rats were tested in a drug-free state, suggesting that impaired decision-making is an enduring consequence of oxycodone exposure.