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Concentrating on the works of German authors during from the last three quarters of the 17th Century, Westerhoff argues that there existed a prominent view of signs and signification in late 16th and 17th century Europe which can help to understand several puzzling aspects of baroque culture. The view, known as \"pansemioticism,\" constituted a fundamental part of the baroque conception of the world.

Westerhoff discusses some connections between a major philosophical project of the seventeenth century, the conception of a mathesis universalis, and the practice of baroque poetry.

This dissertation constitutes a discussion of Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka as contained in his six main philosophical works. It presents a synoptic presentation of the main topics Nagarjuna investigates. Particular emphasis is put on an analysis of the philosophical content of Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka. Apart from discussing the soundness of Nagarjuna's arguments for particular conclusions I also want to examine to which extent Nagarjuna's philosophy forms a coherent philosophical system rather than a collection of individual ideas. The dissertation consists of four parts. In the first part (chapter 2) I discuss the central concept of Madhyamaka philosophy, the notion of svabhadva. This is a notion of considerable complexity; for the purposes of understanding Nagarjuna's arguments I argue that it is particularly important to distinguish two of its conceptual dimensions: an ontological and a cognitive one. The second part (chapters 3 and 4) discusses some properties of the form of Nagarjuna's arguments, properties which are, however, also intricately connected with their contents attempting to establish the Madhyamaka theory of emptiness. The two topics investigated are the place of negation in Nagarjuna's philosophical assertions and his use of the argumentative framework known as the catuskoti or tetralemma. An analysis of the background of these formal aspects is indispensable for an understanding of Nagarjuna's arguments presented in the following chapters. The third part (chapters 5 to 9) discusses Nagarjuna's arguments dealing with particular topics, such as causation, motion, the self, epistemology, and language. Here Nagarjuna sets out to establish the absence of svabhava in areas which are particularly central to our cognitive interaction with the world. He investigates both the world around us (for the examples of causation and motion), the subjective world (the self) as well as the way in which the two are connected (by our epistemic faculties and by language). The final fourth part (chapter 10) attempts to present a concise synoptic overview of Nagarjuna's conclusions described in the preceding chapters and sets out to evaluate them from a systematic point of view. I also discuss how these various conclusions form a coherent philosophical whole and attempt to evaluate some of them in the light of the contemporary philosophical discussion.

A large proportion of the 6,000 genes present in the genome of Saccharomyces cerevisiae , and of those sequenced in other organisms, encode proteins of unknown function. Many of these genes are “silent,” that is, they show no overt phenotype, in terms of growth rate or other fluxes, when they are deleted from the genome. We demonstrate how the intracellular concentrations of metabolites can reveal phenotypes for proteins active in metabolic regulation. Quantification of the change of several metabolite concentrations relative to the concentration change of one selected metabolite can reveal the site of action, in the metabolic network, of a silent gene. In the same way, comprehensive analyses of metabolite concentrations in mutants, providing “metabolic snapshots,” can reveal functions when snapshots from strains deleted for unstudied genes are compared to those deleted for known genes. This approach to functional analysis, using comparative metabolomics, we call FANCY—an abbreviation for functional analysis by co-responses in yeast.

Background To date, women are most often diagnosed with bacterial vaginosis (BV) using microscopy based Nugent scoring or Amsel criteria. However, the accuracy is less than optimal. The aim of the present study was to confirm the identity of known BV-associated composition profiles and evaluate indicators for BV using three molecular methods. Methods Evaluation of indicators for BV was carried out by 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing of the V5-V7 region, a tailor-made 16S rRNA oligonucleotide-based microarray, and a PCR-based profiling technique termed IS-profiling, which is based on fragment variability of the 16S-23S rRNA intergenic spacer region. An inventory of vaginal bacterial species was obtained from 40 females attending a Dutch sexually transmitted infection outpatient clinic, of which 20 diagnosed with BV (Nugent score 7–10), and 20 BV negative (Nugent score 0–3). Results Analysis of the bacterial communities by 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing revealed two clusters in the BV negative women, dominated by either Lactobacillus iners or Lactobacillus crispatus and three distinct clusters in the BV positive women. In the former, there was a virtually complete, negative correlation between L. crispatus and L. iners . BV positive subjects showed cluster profiles that were relatively high in bacterial species diversity and dominated by anaerobic species, including Gardnerella vaginalis, and those belonging to the Families of Lachnospiraceae and Leptotrichiaceae . Accordingly, the Gini-Simpson index of species diversity, and the relative abundance Lactobacillus species appeared consistent indicators for BV. Under the conditions used, only the 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing method was suitable to assess species diversity, while all three molecular composition profiling methods were able to indicate Lactobacillus abundance in the vaginal microbiota. Conclusion An affordable and simple molecular test showing a depletion of the genus Lactobacillus in combination with an increased species diversity of vaginal microbiota could serve as an alternative and practical diagnostic method for the assessment of BV.

Systems biology is a vigorous and expanding discipline, in many ways a successor to genomics and perhaps unprecedented in its combination of biology with a great many other sciences, from physics to ecology, from mathematics to medicine, and from philosophy to chemistry.

We report the measured transverse momentum (pT) spectra of primary charged particles from pp, p-Pb and Pb-Pb collisions at a center-of-mass energy sNN−−−√=5.02 TeV in the kinematic range of 0.15 < pT< 50 GeV/c and |η| < 0.8. A significant improvement of systematic uncertainties motivated the reanalysis of data in pp and Pb-Pb collisions at sNN−−−√=2.76 TeV, as well as in p-Pb collisions at sNN−−−√=5.02 TeV, which is also presented. Spectra from Pb-Pb collisions are presented in nine centrality intervals and are compared to a reference spectrum from pp collisions scaled by the number of binary nucleon-nucleon collisions. For central collisions, the pT spectra are suppressed by more than a factor of 7 around 6–7 GeV/c with a significant reduction in suppression towards higher momenta up to 30 GeV/c. The nuclear modification factor RpPb, constructed from the pp and p-Pb spectra measured at the same collision energy, is consistent with unity above 8 GeV/c. While the spectra in both pp and Pb-Pb collisions are substantially harder at sNN−−−√=5.02 TeV compared to 2.76 TeV, the nuclear modification factors show no significant collision energy dependence. The obtained results should provide further constraints on the parton energy loss calculations to determine the transport properties of the hot and dense QCD matter.