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T‐bet is the lineage‐specifying transcription factor for CD4+ TH1 cells. T‐bet has also been found in other CD4+ T cell subsets, including TH17 cells and Treg, where it modulates their functional characteristics. However, we lack information on when and where T‐bet is expressed during T cell differentiation and how this impacts T cell differentiation and function. To address this, we traced the ontogeny of T‐bet‐expressing cells using a fluorescent fate‐mapping mouse line. We demonstrate that T‐bet is expressed in a subset of CD4+ T cells that have naïve cell surface markers and transcriptional profile and that this novel cell population is phenotypically and functionally distinct from previously described populations of naïve and memory CD4+ T cells. Naïve‐like T‐bet‐experienced cells are polarized to the TH1 lineage, predisposed to produce IFN‐γ upon cell activation, and resist repolarization to other lineages in vitro and in vivo. These results demonstrate that lineage‐specifying factors can polarize T cells in the absence of canonical markers of T cell activation and that this has an impact on the subsequent T‐helper response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the American civic religion is to be distrustful of government, feelings of discontent regarding our systems of criminal investigation and adjudication feel historic. And while those systems are capable of great carnage en route, the endgame is, ultimately, criminal punishment. Yet before punishment can be imposed, every prosecution--and therefore every defendant--is meant to encounter a potential "circuit breaker": the jury. I propose that we re-inject this democratic voice into our criminal adjudications, but through an entirely novel structure: the defendant (and perhaps the prosecutor) would have the choice of invoking a jury empowered to 'veto' any judicial sentence. By carefully designing the ex post system, including to discourage over-invocation, we could provide more democratic results in individual cases, hold prosecutors to their charging threats, and obtain a meaningful sense of whether--as many of us believe--our institutions of criminal justice are dangerously out of touch with popular conceptions of what ought to be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mg(super.2+)-dependent compaction and folding of yeast tRNA(super.Phe) and the catalytic domain of the Bacillus subtilis RNase P RNA have been studied using synchrotron-based small-angle X-ray scattering. It was found that there is strong support for the cooperative Mg(super.2+)-binding model to account for the stability of a tertiary RNA.

A young defense attorney earns his client, charged in federal court with bank robbery, a jury acquittal. (It's the attorney's first.) One would expect the impartial judge to thank the jury for its service. Instead, this one harangues both jury and defense attorney ("entailing changes in his complexion from red to purple to dead white"), publicly rails against the verdict, attempts to bar the jurors from future service, refuses to release the defendant, and successfully prods prosecutors to bring a duplicative state prosecution that would end in conviction for the same crime. To anyone who respects the rule of law--or at the very least to anyone who respects the American jury--this should be deeply troubling. Yet when it took place in a Chicago federal courtroom in December 1953, state prosecutors leapt at the federal judge's call. And when the appeal of the duplicative state prosecution reached the United States Supreme Court, the defendant lost 5-4. Criminal practitioners know that result as Bartkus v. Illinois, 359 U.S. 121 (1959), a rule of double-jeopardy "dual sovereignty" that the Court reaffirmed in 2019. But next to nobody appreciates how it began in that Chicago federal courtroom. That history comes to life in the unpublished notes of the remarkable defense lawyer. It is a story that underscores just how wrongheaded is the legal rule, and that makes vivid the abuse of judicial power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]