Microalgae as a Sustainable, Natural-Oriented and Vegan Dermocosmetic Bioactive Ingredient: The Case of Neochloris oleoabundans

“Vegan” and “sustainable” characteristics are strong claim trends behind the development of innovative skincare, fragrances, and makeup products. This created a need in the market for compliant ingredients. To date, there have been no records evidencing the use of the microalgae Neochloris oleoabundans (NA) in dermocosmetics. Therefore, we studied the applicability of such a natural compound in this context. NA was cultivated, and the scavenging activity (SA) of the NA extracts was evaluated. The highest SA was from the aqueous extract (54.8% ± 2.1%), being higher than that of the positive control. Two hydrogels were prepared with 1.0% ammonium acryloyldimethyltaurate/VP copolymer: (1) control gel; and (2) gel with a 1.0% NA aqueous extract. In vivo experiments were performed in healthy male and female volunteers with skin phototypes of II–IV. The stratum corneum (SC) hydration and the transepidermal water loss (TEWL) were measured in the forearm of participants to determine their biocompatibility. This parameter was determined by skin bioengineering measurements, confirming that SC hydration and TEWL were not affected by the samples. The laser Doppler measurements results showed a delayed erythema onset in the sites, where the NA hydrogel was applied. The results confirmed the biocompatibility and the anti-inflammatory activity of an innovative ingredient derived from microalgae suitable for a natural and vegan lifestyle.

Alongside Slavery's Asides: Reverberations of Edward Young's The Revenge

In an 1847 lecture before the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem, William Wells Brown stated: “Were I about to tell you the evils of Slavery, to represent to you the Slave in his lowest degradation, I should wish to take you, one at a time, and whisper it to you. Slavery has never been represented; Slavery never can be represented.” In these oft-cited lines, Wells Brown makes a strong claim for the absolute impossibility of representing slavery. But I wish to pause and stay with his earlier suggestion that it might just be possible to tell about slavery in a whisper. Breaking through the fastidiousness of the audience, a whisper can bring the condition of slavery close.

Connecting Moral Status to Proper Legal Status

This chapter entertains three proposals as to the connection between an animal’s moral status and what legal status it ought to have. The first proposal is this strong claim: that an act wrongs an animal is a justification for criminalizing it. The second proposal is this moderate claim: that an act constitutes an injustice to an animal is a justification for criminalizing it. Both of these proposals can be vindicated if an argument for legal moralism that the author constructs, drawing on the work of Michael Moore, is sound. Meanwhile, Martha Nussbaum, Alasdair Cochrane, and Robert Garner have each argued for the second proposal. The chapter demonstrates that all four of these arguments are unsound. The third proposal is this claim: it is obligatory for legislators to eliminate any aspect of the law that facilitates the wronging of animals. This proposal, the author argues, is sound. Comparatively weak though this proposal is, the chapter extracts from it radical implications for animal ownership and state funding of medical research on animal subjects.

Offensive Speech, Religion, and the Limits of the Law

Is the government ever justified in restricting offensive speech? This question has become particularly important in relation to communications which offend the religious sensibilities of listeners. It is often argued that insulting a person’s beliefs is tantamount to disrespecting the believer; that insults are a form of hatred or intolerance; that the right to religious freedom includes a more specific right not to be insulted in one’s beliefs; that religious minorities have a particularly strong claim to be protected from offence; and that censorship of offensive speech is necessary for the prevention of social disorder and violence. None of those arguments is convincing. Offence is an unpleasant mental state caused when our expectations of being treated in a particular way are frustrated. Drawing on law and philosophy, the book argues that there is no moral right to be protected from offence and that, while freedom of religion is an important right which grounds negative and positive obligations for the state, it is unpersuasive to interpret constitutional and human rights provisions as including a right not to be caused offence. Rather, we have good reasons to think of public discourse as a space for the expression of all viewpoints about the ethical life, including those which some listeners will find offensive, as this is necessary to sustain a society’s capacity for self-reflection and change.

The Ethics of Studying the Origins of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identification

Research has a complicated and problematic history when it comes to the study of sexual and gender minorities (SGMs). Some past researchers exerted a great deal of effort, for example, to identify ways to treat people for homosexuality and to prevent the emergence of same-sex sexual interests. The same approach has prevailed with regard to the study of gender-variant people, namely those people who express a gender at odds with the gender socially expected of them as a matter of body type. Reconceptualizing the nature of sexual orientations and gender in more inclusive ways has led to significant changes in research involving sexual gender minorities, for both adults and minors. As a way of protecting SGMs from the effect of historical misunderstanding and possible misuse of research, some commentators have called for bans against the study of the origins of sexual orientation and gender identification and/or against the study of interventions that could modify sexual orientation or gender. It is unclear that absolute bans on these kinds of research are entirely defensible philosophically, but it is also important to frame research programs and priorities in line with the requirements of social justice. One can argue that research important to the welfare of sex and gender minorities has a strong claim to moral priority and support as a matter of status equality. This chapter will review and evaluate criticism of study of the origins of sexual and gender identification and make the case for framing research agendas in a way that serves status equality for SGMs.

The “most revolutionary” banner in British trade union history? Political identities and the birth, life, purgatory, and rebirth of the “red” Follonsby miners’ banner

The history and iconography of trade union banners has been surprisingly under-explored since it was first taken seriously as a subject of study in the early 1970s. The nostalgia evident in these early accounts for an age that seemed to contemporaries then to be fleeting seems particularly incongruous given the more recent reinvigoration of the trade union demonstration. This article seeks to redress the balance by focusing on the Follonsby miners’ lodge banner. First unveiled in 1928, in a pit village on the northern edge of Durham coalfield in northeast England, the Follonsby miners’ banner was later hailed as a foremost candidate for the most revolutionary trade union banner in British history. This unsubstantiated claim is important in itself, as mass trade unionism in Britain is characterized by moderation and a reluctance to engage in radical politics; an observation that broadly stands for the influential British coal miners’ unions and, more specifically, for the miners of the Durham coalfield itself.The article's argument has both narrow and broad dimensions. Narrowly, it argues that the Follonsby banner has a strong claim to be regarded as the most revolutionary in Britain, albeit with “revolutionary” understood in certain theoretical and context-specific ways. The broader argument develops the claim that the iconography of the Follonsby banner is more significant for what the process of interrogating its “revolutionary” credentials reveals about the complexities of the political culture of the mainstream British Left in the twentieth century and after. In this broader respect, the Follonsby banner—iconography, birth, life, purgatory, and rebirth—is more important for its curious representatives rather than its individuated existence as an “extreme revolutionary” outlier.

Johann Gottlieb Fichtes Auseinandersetzung mit der Idee einer induktiven Metaphysik im ersten Buch von Die Bestimmung des Menschen

This paper reconstructs the first book of Fichte’s Die Bestimmung des Menschen as an implicit critique by Fichte of the idea of an inductive metaphysics, an idea that was developed explicitly by some philosophers in the German-speaking world only in the second half of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. It becomes clear which basic premises of Fichte’s philosophy are responsible for the rejection of the idea of an inductive metaphysics. In particular, the idea of an inductive metaphysics cannot be reconciled with Fichte’s strong claim of certainty. This claim was abandoned by the proponents of inductive metaphysics in the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, allowing the idea of an inductive metaphysics to become a serious candidate for approaching metaphysics. The analysis of Fichte’s text also shows that it is crucial for inductive metaphysics to work out a measure of the ranking of rival explanatory hypotheses so that a rational decision between competing metaphysical theories based on inferences to the best explanation becomes possible.

Re-placing PStem in the prosodic hierarchy

A persistent issue for the Prosodic Hierarchy is what repertory of prosodic constituents is needed to define the commonly recurring domains for phonological processes. Even though there is a long tradition of work arguing in favor of up to three subphrasal constituents (Composite Group (CG), PWord and PStem), a body of recent work has argued in favor of a more parsimonious view of the repertory, making the strong claim that, at the subphrasal level, the Prosodic Hierarchy contains only one constituent, Phonological Word (PWord). Any additional subphrasal domains required by the phonology must be defined as recursions of PWord. This paper argues that PStem must find a place even in a parsimonious Prosodic Hierarchy. It cannot easily be replaced by recursive PWord or by a CG-PWord distinction. The cross-linguistic validity of a PStem-PWord distinction is supported by showing that it accounts for a robust cross-linguistic generalization concerning subphrasal phonological domains. Alternatives to PStem not only miss this generalization but also prove to be formally inadequate.

Does Legal Theory Have a Pluralism Problem?

Legal theory has been criticized by legal pluralists on the grounds that it has a “pluralism problem.” In a nutshell, legal theory’s pluralism problem stems from the fact that it explicitly or implicitly assumes the model of state law whenever it refers to law. This is problematic both because such a state-based conception of law fails to capture myriad nonstate forms of law existing in different contexts and because it runs the risk of supporting oppression in postcolonial contexts where indigenous laws are pushed out by colonial laws which conform to the (state-based) legal theoretical paradigm. This chapter focuses on the former, analytical, limb of legal theory’s pluralism problem by breaking the problem down into three specific claims; two which pluralists argue legal theory defends: a strong claim—that all law is necessarily state law; an intermediate claim—that state law is a paradigmatic or the “best” form of law; and one made by pluralists about legal theory: a weak claim that legal theory has unwarrantedly neglected nonstate forms of law. It analyzes each claim in turn reviewing the relevant claims in legal theory. It concludes that if legal theory does have a pluralism problem, and the analysis undertaken in this chapter suggests that it might in some respects, it is not a particularly profound one. As such, much of the resources of legal theory can be adopted to capture a wide variety of both extant and new emergent forms of nonstate law.

COVID-19 in Libya: Immunity and Protective Measures?

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a pandemic illness and so far, there are almost 8860331 confirmed infected cases worldwide concentrating mainly in Americas and Europe, whereas data are less prominent in African countries. In Libya, the preliminary reports revealed there are small numbers of COVID-19 confirmed cases, which subsequently showed only a steady rise with no yet a clear explanation. In way we might find a reason behind Libya having a relatively small number of COVID-19 cases, the literature therefore was searched for all relevant journal articles and published reports that dealt with COVID-19 outbreaks. According to the latest released data, the incidence rate of COVID-19 in Libya remained relatively low as compared to the other countries, where only 571 out of almost nine millions total confirmed cases across the globe were documented in Libya. Further, there is a strong claim that Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine, a part of national immunization program of many countries including Libya, might offer at least a partial protection against COVID-19. Cross-protective immunity triggered by other related viral infections is an additional immunological theory might explain the current low trend of COVID-19 epidemic in Libya.