Neuropathy is the most common and debilitating complication of diabetes and results in pain, decreased motility, and amputation. Diabetic neuropathy encompasses a variety of forms whose impact ranges from discomfort to death. Hyperglycemia induces oxidative stress in diabetic neurons and results in activation of multiple biochemical pathways. These activated pathways are a major source of damage and are potential therapeutic targets in diabetic neuropathy. Though therapies are available to alleviate the symptoms of diabetic neuropathy, few options are available to eliminate the root causes. The immense physical, psychological, and economic cost of diabetic neuropathy underscore the need for causally targeted therapies. This review covers the pathology, epidemiology, biochemical pathways, and prevention of diabetic neuropathy, as well as discusses current symptomatic and causal therapies and novel approaches to identify therapeutic targets.

Regulatory T (Treg) cells induce an immunosuppressive microenvironment that is a major obstacle for successful tumor immunotherapy. Dissecting the regulatory mechanisms between energy metabolism and functionality in Treg cells will provide insight toward developing novel immunotherapies against cancer. Here we report that human naturally occurring and tumor-associated Treg cells exhibit distinct metabolic profiles with selectivity for glucose metabolism compared with effector T cells. Treg-mediated accelerated glucose consumption induces cellular senescence and suppression of responder T cells through cross-talk. TLR8 signaling selectively inhibits glucose uptake and glycolysis in human Treg cells, resulting in reversal of Treg suppression. Importantly, TLR8 signaling-mediated reprogramming of glucose metabolism and function in human Treg cells can enhance anti-tumor immunity in vivo in a melanoma adoptive transfer T cell therapy model. Our studies identify mechanistic links between innate signaling and metabolic regulation of human Treg suppression, which may be used as a strategy to advance tumor immunotherapy.

Situations can be seen as having attributes or qualities in much the same way as people have traits. The structure of people's perceptions of these situation qualities was explored. A comprehensive list of adjectives that might describe situations was generated, and people rated situations using samples of the words. Across several samples of words and participants and several analytic methods, four factors show up regularly (positivity, negativity, productivity, and ease of negotiation). In a second study, it was shown that these factors predict the way in which people freely sort situations. The conceptual nature of these factors and of situation qualities is discussed, with particular emphasis on how people's goals and perceived outcomes influence their perceptions of situations. Copyright # 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.The concept of the situation has long held a central place in social and personality psychology. It is traditional in these fields to divide the forces that influence behaviour into those internal to the person, such as personality traits and motivations, and those residing in the external situation, such as social norms or environmental cues. A great deal of comprehensive descriptive and taxonomic work has been done on the 'internal' factors (see John & Srivastava, 1999, for a review). There is also a large literature on how people perceive these internal factors in others (for an overview, see Gilbert, 1998). There is less work of this sort regarding situations. Situational variables do, of course, serve as important variables in a large number of social psychological studies, but almost always in terms of a specific factor thought to impact upon some other variable or process of interest. It is rare that the situation itself and the perception of it are the focus of study.Comprehensive descriptive studies of situations do exist (for examples, see Magnusson, 1981), as do studies of the perception of situations (e.g. Cantor, Mischel, & Schwartz, 1982;Champagne & Pervin, 1987;Forgas, 1976). Unfortunately, much of this work exists outside of the mainstream of social psychology, the field typically most associated with situational factors. Recently, Funder (2001), Hogan and Roberts (2000), and Rozin (2001) all criticized social psychology for lacking a taxonomy of social situations (cf. Asch, 1952;Frederickson, 1972;Pervin, 1978;Rozin, 2001 have been notable exceptions to this trend (e.g. Argyle, Furnham, & Graham, 1981;Kelley et al., 2003), 1 but it is probably noncontroversial to say that social psychology lacks a generally accepted taxonomy of situations. The importance of this type of descriptive work for social psychology has been discussed at length by Rozin (2001).Much of the taxonomic work that has been done on situations has been conducted by personality psychologists (and by researchers working in environmental and organizational psychology). Personality psychologists realized in the 1970s that the expression of personality traits and other human attributes depends in part on the...

This article presents a scale that measures chronic individual differences in people's uncertainty about their ability to understand and detect cause-and-effect relationships in the social world: the Causal Uncertainty Scale (CUS). The results of Study 1 indicated that the scale has good internal and adequate test-retest reliability. Additionally, the results of a factor analysis suggested that the scale appears to be tapping a single construct. Study 2 examined the convergent and discriminant validity of the scale, and Studies 3 and 4 examined the predictive and incremental validity of the scale. The importance of the CUS to work on depressives' social information processing and for basic research and theory on human social judgment processes is discussed.

Data about biodiversity are either scattered in many databases or reside on paper or other media not amenable to interactive searching. The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is a framework for facilitating the digitization of biodiversity data and for making interoperable an as-yet-unknown number of biodiversity databases that are distributed around the globe. In concert with other existing efforts, GBIF will catalyze the completion of a Catalog of the Names of Known Organisms and will develop search engines to mine the vast quantities of biodiversity data. It will be an outstanding tool for scientists, natural resource managers, and policy-makers.