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Cet article propose de s’arrêter sur les expériences contemporaines de voyages dans l’espace, fortement médiatisées et peu critiquées notamment en France, où le spationaute Thomas Pesquet fait office de véritable mascotte pour de nombreux politiciens, scientifiques, journalistes et enseignants. Le parti pris de ce travail consiste à défendre l’idée que la conquête spatiale, en tant qu’illusio, comporte une dimension spectaculaire de fétichisation et de sacralisation qui vient faire écran à la réalité sociale et politique contemporaine. Le progrès, dans sa dimension essentiellement techno-capitaliste, alors qu’il participe d’un vaste mouvement de décorporéité, apparaît pourtant comme l’ultime condition d’un devenir humain possible, en même temps qu’il accrédite l’idée que la planète Terre serait devenue inhabitable.

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The renal collecting duct plays a key role in control of ion and fluid homeostasis. Genes encoding for ion transporters, hormone receptors, or regulatory proteins specifically expressed in the collecting duct are mutated in several genetic diseases with altered blood pressure. Suitable cellular models expressing genes in a conditional way should represent attractive systems for structure-function analyses and generation of appropriate physiopathological models of related diseases. However, generation of such systems remains laborious and quite inefficient. We adapted and improved a conditional Cre-lox-inducible system in the highly differentiated aldosterone-sensitive rat cortical collecting duct (RCCD2) cell line. The inducible MerCreMer recombinase allowed tight control and high levels of transgene expression, whereas flanking a selection marker with two loxP sites strongly improved the selection procedure. We have used this system to conditionally express an enhanced green fluorescent protein-tagged human mineralocorticoid receptor. In the future, this will allow structure-function analyses as well as mineralocorticoid receptor trafficking studies in these epithelial cells, which retain the features of the native collecting duct. Improvements in the conditional Cre-lox expression system have potentially wide applications in other epithelial or nonepithelial cell lines. Cre recombinase; rat cortical collecting duct 2 cells; mineralocorticoid receptor; aldosterone

The production of beta-lactone through Lewis acid-promoted (2+2+ cycloaddition was investigated utilizing semiempirical (AM1/RHF and AM1/CI) and ab initio (HF/6-3)G* and MP2/6-31G*) computations. Ab initio and/or semiempirical studies on solvent and Lewis acid (BH3 and BF3) effects focused on the mechanism involving the prior formation of the C-C bond. At the HF/6-31G* level of theory the introduction of BF3 induced a reduction of the activation energy from 40.8 to 11.9 kcal/mol and computations performed with AM1/COSMO revealed that that the introduction of a solvent causes the formation of an earlier transition state.

If language and thought are often understood as mutually nourishing each other, the language of communication in politics appears as a form that opposes and obstructs the development of thought. Under these conditions, the quest for justice, truth and beauty, « sacred » purposes of a humanist conception of education, become the object of the hatred of a (political) power determined to desecrate them on the altar of a most dogmatic catechism, with the narrowest intellectual ambitions. Consequently, can we not say that political discourse obstructs the development of citizens’ thinking? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]