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During decolonization and the Cold War, African students traveled to East Germany for education. Supporting these students, their decolonial ambitions, and development in their home countries was central to East German solidarity. Yet in the process, the students were drawn into a second educational task: reshaping how the East German public perceived race. Images of international students were published alongside newspaper articles about race as part of the state’s agenda to implement a new racial system, composed of distinct racial groups, defined as equals in terms of intelligence and capacity to learn and read. Also in the late 1950s, East German cultural policy shifted toward the notion of the socialist personality, directing figurative art to engage with the psyche. East German artists depicted foreign students in the style of Socialist Realism, reflecting the convergence of the political and aesthetic pressures of the time. This essay discusses how solidarity and antiracism entered the style of late Socialist Realism in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Contrary to the rationalistic, authoritative, and universalizing nature of the new racial system, paintings from this period demonstrate how solidarity and antiracism were differentiated in opinion, contradictory, and variable over time.

During decolonization and the Cold War, African students traveled to East Germany for education. Supporting these students, their decolonial ambitions, and development in their home countries was central to East German solidarity. Yet in the process, the students were drawn into a second educational task: reshaping how the East German public perceived race. Images of international students were published alongside newspaper articles about race as part of the state’s agenda to implement a new racial system, composed of distinct racial groups, defined as equals in terms of intelligence and capacity to learn and read. Also in the late 1950s, East German cultural policy shifted toward the notion of the socialist personality, directing figurative art to engage with the psyche. East German artists depicted foreign students in the style of Socialist Realism, reflecting the convergence of the political and aesthetic pressures of the time. This essay discusses how solidarity and antiracism entered the style of late Socialist Realism in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Contrary to the rationalistic, authoritative, and universalizing nature of the new racial system, paintings from this period demonstrate how solidarity and antiracism were differentiated in opinion, contradictory, and variable over time.

Capsaicin, the main pungent ingredient in 'hot chilli peppers, elicits a sensation of burning pain by selectively activating sensory neurons that convey information about noxious stimuli to the central nervous system. We have used an expression cloning strategy based on calcium influx to isolate a functional cDNA encoding a capsaicin receptor from sensory neurons. This receptor is a non-selective cation channel that is structurally related to members of the TRP family of ion channels. The cloned capsaicin receptor is also activated by increases in temperature in the noxious range, suggesting that it functions as a transducer of painful thermal stimuli in vivo.

The central question of this essay is: what politics, morality, and understandings of masculinity are recuperated by nostalgia for childhood play during postwar reconstruction in Germany? Looking at the oil painting Spielzeug [Toys] by German Expressionist Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, I argue that seemingly innocent, but faintly exotic objects, like the Noah's Ark toys depicted in the artwork, harbor colonial views of nature. The work is inseparable from a complex colonial practice of collecting, conservation, and regeneration. I support this discussion by placing Schmidt-Rottluff's views of nature and collecting into a constellation with those of critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno and the zoologist Bernhard Grzimek, whose popular television programs not only broadcasted images of African nature to German living rooms, but also shaped international environmental policy. This essay shifts its focus from the way that European artists engaged with the material culture of societies subject to colonial rule (i.e. cultural appropriation) to the ecological concern of how European society constructed and managed nature. I argue that the primitivist imaginary outlived the factual end of German colonialism at the time of World War I, becoming a nearly imperceptible commonplace solidified within memories of childhood.

By examining German colonialism within an expanded temporality, this paper implicitly rallies against two common mistaken assumptions: that the historical significance of German colonialism and the German colonial imaginary are restricted to the period before World War I (pre-1914) and their impact is less severe than those of the British and French empires.1 Schmidt-Rottluff’s fame dates to his student years at the Dresden University of Technology (1905-7), where he studied with Erich Haeckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Fritz Bleyl, other founders of Die Brücke. In 2021-2, following many decades of academic reckoning with the movement’s unsettling ambivalence, the Brücke-Museum in Berlin assembled the exhibition Whose Expression? The Brücke Artists and Colonialism in 2021-2 to further interrogate questions of cultural appropriation and the movement’s entanglement in the colonial apparatus of power.4 This important exhibition participated in recent efforts to decolonize Germany’s ethnographic museums, which has involved the restitution of the Benin Bronzes, the repatriation of human remains, and significant institutional rebranding. [...]the Great Depression, Noah’s Ark sets were among the most popular and widely exported goods (Fig. 2).8 Although toy historians agree the popularity of Noah’s Ark toy sets peaked in the 19th century, they were still widely available in Germany after 1945.

Pain-producing heat is detected by several classes of nociceptive sensory neuron that differ in their thermal response thresholds 1 , 2 , 3 . The cloned capsaicin receptor, also known as the vanilloid receptor subtype 1 (VR1), is a heat-gated ion channel that has been proposed to mediate responses of small-diameter sensory neurons to moderate (43 °C) thermal stimuli 4 , 5 . VR1 is also activated by protons, indicating that it may participate in the detection of noxious thermal and chemical stimuli in vivo . Here we identify a structurally related receptor, VRL-1, that does not respond to capsaicin, acid or moderate heat. Instead, VRL-1 is activated by high temperatures, with a threshold of ∼52 °C. Within sensory ganglia, VRL-1 is most prominently expressed by a subset of medium- to large-diameter neurons, making it a candidate receptor for transducing high-threshold heat responses in this class of cells. VRL-1 transcripts are not restricted to the sensory nervous system, indicating that this channel may be activated by stimuli other than heat. We propose that responses to noxious heat involve these related, but distinct, ion-channel subtypes that together detect a range of stimulus intensities.

My dissertation research seeks to understand how rural grassroots movements shape the local impacts of a peace deal. Specifically, I ask: What explains variation in community autonomy and influence in local peace implementation? A peace process creates a fragile, volatile political context that poses both threats and opportunities for rural communities impacted by conflict. I hypothesize that variation in the autonomy and influence of communities in a peace process can be explained by their relative levels of ‘regional integration’, defined as the degree of representative functions and legal authority that individual communities delegate to regional organizations. I focus on rural Afro-Colombian movements in the Pacific region of Colombia in the five year period following the signing of the 2016 Colombian peace agreement. I develop controlled comparisons in two regions of the department of Chocó, Atrato and Baudó. In each comparison, I assess the capacity of groups of communities to maintain their autonomy in the face of post-conflict insecurity created by FARC demobilization, and to advance their collective development interests in the participatory peacebuilding program PDET (Territorially-Focused Development Program). Overall, my empirical data suggest that the relative advantages of regional integration – organizational capacity, regional cohesion, external legitimacy – increase the ability of communities to shape local peace outcomes, although these advantages are mitigated to a degree by the tradeoffs of integration, namely democratic deficits and a lack of local independence.

White adipose tissue, once regarded as morphologically and functionally bland, is now recognized to be dynamic, plastic and heterogenous, and is involved in a wide array of biological processes including energy homeostasis, glucose and lipid handling, blood pressure control and host defence 1 . High-fat feeding and other metabolic stressors cause marked changes in adipose morphology, physiology and cellular composition 1 , and alterations in adiposity are associated with insulin resistance, dyslipidemia and type 2 diabetes 2 . Here we provide detailed cellular atlases of human and mouse subcutaneous and visceral white fat at single-cell resolution across a range of body weight. We identify subpopulations of adipocytes, adipose stem and progenitor cells, vascular and immune cells and demonstrate commonalities and differences across species and dietary conditions. We link specific cell types to increased risk of metabolic disease and provide an initial blueprint for a comprehensive set of interactions between individual cell types in the adipose niche in leanness and obesity. These data comprise an extensive resource for the exploration of genes, traits and cell types in the function of white adipose tissue across species, depots and nutritional conditions. A single-cell atlas of white adipose tissue from mouse and human reveals diverse cell types and similarities and differences across species and dietary conditions.

In human chronic kidney disease (CKD) the extent of renal tubulointerstitial fibrosis correlates with progressive loss of renal function. However, fibrosis can so far only be assessed by histology of kidney biopsies. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can provide information about tissue architecture, but its potential to assess fibrosis and inflammation in diseased kidneys remains poorly defined. We evaluated excised kidneys in a murine adenine-induced nephropathy model for CKD by MRI and correlated quantitative MRI parameters (T1, T2, and T2* relaxation times, apparent diffusion coefficient and fractional anisotropy) with histological hallmarks of progressive CKD, including renal fibrosis, inflammation, and microvascular rarefaction. Furthermore, we analyzed the effects of paraformaldehyde fixation on MRI parameters by comparing kidney samples before and after fixation with paraformaldehyde. In diseased kidneys T2 and T2* relaxation times, apparent diffusion coefficient and fractional anisotropy in the renal cortex and/or outer medulla were significantly different from those in control kidneys. In particular, T2 relaxation time was the best parameter to distinguish control and CKD groups and correlated very well with the extent of fibrosis, inflammatory infiltrates, tubular dilation, crystal deposition, and loss of peritubular capillaries and normal tubules in the renal cortex and outer medulla. Fixation with paraformaldehyde had no impact on T2 relaxation time and fractional anisotropy, whereas T1 times significantly decreased and T2* times and apparent diffusion coefficients increased in fixed kidney tissue. MRI parameters provide a promising approach to quantitatively assess renal fibrosis and inflammation in CKD. Especially T2 relaxation time correlates well with histological features of CKD and is not influenced by paraformaldehyde fixation of kidney samples. Thus, T2 relaxation time might be a candidate parameter for non-invasive assessment of renal fibrosis in human patients.

Circulating mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is receiving increasing attention as a danger-associated molecular pattern in conditions such as autoimmunity, cancer, and trauma. We report here that human lymphocytes [B cells, T cells, natural killer (NK) cells], monocytes, and neutrophils derived from healthy blood donors, as well as B cells from chronic lymphocytic leukemia patients, rapidly eject mtDNA as web filament structures upon recognition of CpG and non-CpG oligodeoxynucleotides of class C. The release was quenched by ZnCl₂, independent of cell death (apoptosis, necrosis, necroptosis, autophagy), and continued in the presence of TLR9 signaling inhibitors. B-cell mtDNA webs were distinct from neutrophil extracellular traps concerning structure, reactive oxygen species (ROS) dependence, and were devoid of antibacterial proteins. mtDNA webs acted as rapid (within minutes) messengers, priming antiviral type I IFN production. In summary, our findings point at a previously unrecognized role for lymphocytes in antimicrobial defense, utilizing mtDNA webs as signals in synergy with cytokines and natural antibodies, and cast light on the interplay between mitochondria and the immune system.