In contrast to bilaterian animals, non‐bilaterian mitochondrial genomes contain atypical genes, often attributed to horizontal gene transfer (HGT) as an ad hoc explanation. Although prevalent in plants, HGT into animal mitochondrial genomes is rare, lacking suitable explanatory models for their occurrence. HGT of the mismatch DNA repair gene (mtMutS) from giant viruses to octocoral (soft corals and their kin) mitochondrial genomes provides a model for how barriers to HGT to animal mitochondria may be overcome. A review of the (...) available literature suggests that this HGT was mediated by an alveolate endosymbiont infected with a lysogenic phycodnavirus that enabled insertion of the homing endonuclease containing mtMutS into octocoral mitochondrial genomes. We posit that homing endonuclease domains and similar selfish elements play a crucial role in such inter‐domain gene transfers. Understanding the role of selfish genetic elements in HGT has the potential to aid development of tools for manipulating animal mitochondrial DNA. (shrink)

Organisms actively compete for environmental resources. They assess their surroundings, estimate how much energy they need for particular goals, and then realize the optimum variant. They take measures to control certain environmental resources. They perceive themselves and can distinguish between “self” and “non-self.” Current empirical data on all domains of life indicate that unicellular organisms such as bacteria, archaea, giant viruses, and protozoa as well as multicellular organisms such as animals, fungi, and plants coordinate and organize their essential (...) life functions through signaling processes. Signaling allows for real life coordination and organization and is a communicative action in which speciesspecific behavioral patterns and sign repertoires are used. Cells, tissues, organs, and organisms that communicate share several key levels that are essential to all life forms and which serve as a uniform tool for investigating biocommunication. (shrink)

Yemeni writer Ahmed Qāsim al-Arīqī, in addition to his profession as a pharmacist, is a writer who has made a name for himself in the country's literary field, especially in the last fifteen years. A prolific writer, al-Arīqī is the author of poetry collections as well as stories and novels that emphasise awareness of the traditional issues of the Yemeni people. He has published "Maḳāmāt al-'Arīḳī" (2006), "Ġalṭṭetu Ḳalem" (2012), "Qurāt al-S̱-S̱elj" (2017), "Ta'riyya" (2018), "Zurbet al-Yumnā" (2018), "Da'wat al-Ḥuḳūl" (2019), (...) "Zuhr al-Ġarām" and "Sīret al-Kūbī" (2022). His novel "Yawma Māta al-Shaytan" (The Day Satan Died) was published electronically by Hindāwī Publishing House in 2022. The novel, which is approximately 120 pages, is written in six chapters. There are eleven passages in the first and fourth chapters, thirteen in the second and sixth chapters, twelve in the third chapter, and eight in the fifth chapter. The novel is about the adventures of a member of the army named Marwan Naji, who was wounded in the war between the Houthi militia and the Yemeni army, and after nine months in a coma, opens his eyes in a perfect world dominated by biological and technological advances. Symbolising the treatment of selfishness and various narcissisms with advanced vaccines through the death of Satan, the author describes Marwan's adventures in his world, which he sometimes describes as the realm of the jinn, in a very simple language, while not failing to criticise reality in its various political, social and religious dimensions. In fact, Marwan's world of imagination and fantasy is the main story of the novel, but not the only one. The author also includes the stories of family members in Marwan's world of turmoil, destruction, massacre, war and victory, giving the reader the opportunity to compare both worlds. While his mother Gusoun, his wife Hamide and his daughter Fatma, who later got engaged in time after being widowed, are the female characters of his real world, Professor Mari and Mariana, one of his seven wives, are the other important characters of his imaginary world. Gusûn is a devoted mother who does not leave the bedside of her comatose son, prays for him day and night and tries to do everything she can for his recovery. Gusûn, who is listened to at home to a certain extent, scolds her grandchildren to prevent the breakup of her son's home because of inheritance, defends that the existing wealth still belongs to her son and reminds them that she will not hesitate to spend money for his recovery. Gusûn's daughter-in-law Hamide also takes care of her husband, who shows no signs of recovery. Hamide, who is not as patient as her mother-in-law, is also a jealous woman. On the other hand, although both of them display false religious tendencies that have no relation with real life, Gusûn is more prone to the superstitious approaches put forward and adopted in the name of religion. Fatma is also a widow who, although she has the will to take care of her children and live her life alone, has been engaged for a long time to her uncle's son Münir, who, like her, took part in anti-regime demonstrations and whose love she believes in. Fatma, who is more conscious than her grandmother and mother, is not alien to the issues that society complains about and often participates in women's movements organised against the government. Professor Mari, one of the two important characters belonging to Marwan's imaginary world, is a psychologist and the chief physician of a large hospital who treats jealousy, anger, lying and selfishness, which are considered dangerous viruses, with vaccines developed by scientists. Professor Mari, who is personally involved in Marwan's treatment, also chairs the committee that records his memory and projects all his memories on a giant screen. Mariana, on the other hand, monitors Marwan's behaviour and thoughts through a biological chip to control the effect of the vaccines given to him, criticises him through the tragic images projected on the screen and provides information that will facilitate his adaptation to his new world. In the article, in which the author's main published works are briefly introduced along with a broad summary of the novel, the social messages that an author, who is not indifferent to the realities of the geography he lives in, tries to give directly and indirectly with a language far from locality, are tried to be determined through the mentioned female characters. It is seen that the desire to become a single nation by making; love, brotherhood, friendship and peace dominant lies behind the author's novelisation of the dream of an ideal world symbolised by the death of Satan. (shrink)

This work analyzes and characterizes the spread of the COVID-19 disease in Mexico, using complex networks and optimization approaches. Specifically, we present two methodologies based on the principle of the rupture for the GC and Newton's law of motion to quantify the robustness and identify the Mexican municipalities whose population causes a fast spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Specifically, the first methodology is based on several characteristics of the original version of the Vertex Separator Problem, and the second is based (...) on a new mathematical model. By solving VSP, we can find nodes that cause the rupture of the giant component. On the other hand, solving the NLM can find more influential nodes for the entire system’s development. Specifically, we present an analysis using a coupled social network model with information about the main characteristics of the contagion and deaths caused by COVID-19 in Mexico for 19 months. This work aims to show through the approach of complex networks how the spread of the disease behaves, and, thus, researchers from other areas can delve into the characteristics that cause this behavior. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted immense work on the investigation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Rapid, accurate, and consistent interpretation of generated data is thereby of fundamental concern. Ontologies––structured, controlled, vocabularies––are designed to support consistency of interpretation, and thereby to prevent the development of data silos. This paper describes how ontologies are serving this purpose in the COVID-19 research domain, by following principles of the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry and by reusing existing ontologies such as the Infectious Disease Ontology (...) (IDO) Core, which provides terminological content common to investigations of all infectious diseases. We report here on the development of an IDO extension, the Virus Infectious Disease Ontology (VIDO), a reference ontology covering viral infectious diseases. We motivate term and definition choices, showcase reuse of terms from existing OBO ontologies, illustrate how ontological decisions were motivated by relevant life science research, and connect VIDO to the Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO). We next use terms from these ontologies to annotate selections from life science research on SARS-CoV-2, highlighting how ontologies employing a common upper-level vocabulary may be seamlessly interwoven. Finally, we outline future work, including bacteria and fungus infectious disease reference ontologies currently under development, then cite uses of VIDO and CIDO in host-pathogen data analytics, electronic health record annotation, and ontology conflict-resolution projects. (shrink)

Viruses have generally been thought of as infectious agents. New data on mimivirus, however, suggests a reinterpretation of this thought. Earth’s biosphere seems to contain many more viruses than previously thought and they are relevant in the maintenance of ecosystems and biodiversity. Viruses are not considered to be alive because they are not free-living entities and do not have cellular units. Current hypotheses indicate that some viruses may have been the result of genomic reduction of cellular (...) life forms. However, new studies relating to the origins of biological systems suggest that viruses could also have originated during the transition from First to the Last Universal Common Ancestor. Within this setting, life has been established as chemical informational system and could be interpreted as a macrocode of multiple layers. The first entity to acquire these features was the First Universal Common Ancestor that evolved to an intermediate ancestral that could be named T-LUCA and be equated to Woese’s concept of progenotes. T-LUCA may have remained as undifferentiated subsystems with viruses-like structures. The net result is that both cellular life forms and viruses shared protein synthesis apparatuses. In short, virus is a strategy of life reached by two paths: T-LUCAs like entities and the reduction of cellular life forms. (shrink)

Though viruses have generally been characterized by their pathogenic and more generally harmful effects, many examples of mutualistic viruses exist. Here I explain how the idea of mutualistic viruses has been defended in recent virology, and I explore four important conceptual and practical consequences of this idea. I ask to what extent this research modifies the way scientists might search for new viruses, our notion of how the host immune system interacts with microbes, the development of (...) new therapeutic approaches, and, finally, the role played by the criterion of autonomy in our understanding of living things. Overall, I suggest that the recognition of mutualistic viruses plays a major role in a wider ongoing revision of our conception of viruses. (shrink)

The story of David and Goliath is one of the most famous biblical stories. It had an impact on many branches of contemporary art. It is also an inevitable part of religious education and general education in all schools. Knowing the fact that the Church Fathers have an essential part in the lives of many Christians today (in the Orthodox Church, they were role models from the very beginning), it is interesting to see how did they, these original theologians, read (...) and interpret the story of David and Goliath. Was it for them, in the time when the Bible was the most sacred book for all, important as it is for us today? Did people during the sports events of that time talk on the markets about the underdog who struck the giant? Additionally, if one looks at the ancient Greek and Hebrew text, one will find out that the Hebrew version, which was used as the source for most modern translations, is 40% longer than the Greek one. Could the works of the Fathers help us to determine which version of the story is the Holy Scripture for Christians today? (shrink)

Viruses have been virtually absent from philosophy of biology. In this editorial introduction, we explain why we think viruses are philosophically important. We focus on six issues, and we show how they relate to classic questions of philosophy of biology and even general philosophy.

Viruses have generally been thought of as infectious agents. New data on mimivirus, however, suggests a reinterpretation of this thought. Earth’s biosphere seems to contain many more viruses than previously thought and they are relevant in the maintenance of ecosystems and biodiversity. Viruses are not considered to be alive because they are not free-living entities and do not have cellular units. Current hypotheses indicate that some viruses may have been the result of genomic reduction of cellular (...) life forms. However, new studies relating to the origins of biological systems suggest that viruses could also have originated during the transition from First to the Last Universal Common Ancestor. Within this setting, life has been established as chemical informational system and could be interpreted as a macrocode of multiple layers. The first entity to acquire these features was the First Universal Common Ancestor that evolved to an intermediate ancestral that could be named T-LUCA and be equated to Woese’s concept of progenotes. T-LUCA may have remained as undifferentiated subsystems with viruses-like structures. The net result is that both cellular life forms and viruses shared protein synthesis apparatuses. In short, virus is a strategy of life reached by two paths: T-LUCAs like entities and the reduction of cellular life forms. (shrink)

We review the findings of Cho et al.(1) on the crystal structure of a p53 tumor suppressor‐DNA complex. The core DNA binding domain of p53 folds into a structure termed a β‐sandwich, which organizes two loops and a loop‐sheet‐helix structure on one surface of p53 to interact with the consensus DNA recognition sequence of p53. These structures help to explain the functions of wild‐type p53 and the effects of tumor‐associated mutations on p53 DNA binding, transactivation and suppression of cellular proliferation.

The evolving Ebola epidemic in West Africa is unprecedented in its size and scope, requiring the rapid mobilization of resources. It is too early to determine all of the ethical challenges associated with the outbreak, but these should be monitored closely. Two issues that can be discussed are the decision to implement and evaluate unregistered agents to determine therapeutic or prophylactic safety and efficacy and the justification behind this decision. In this paper, I argue that it is not compassionate use (...) that justifies this decision and suggest three lines of reasoning to support the decision. (shrink)

A crucially important part of the biosphere – the virosphere – is too often overlooked. Inclusion of the virosphere into the global picture of protein structure space reveals that 63 protein domain superfamilies in viruses do not have any structural and evolutionary relatives in modern cellular organisms. More than half of these have functions which are not virus‐specific and thus might be a source of new folds and functions for cellular life. The number of viruses on the planet (...) exceeds that of cells by an order of magnitude and viruses evolve up to six orders of magnitude faster. As a result, cellular species are subject to a constitutive ‘flow‐through’ of new viral genetic material. Due to this and the relaxed evolutionary constraints in viruses, the transfer of domains between host‐to‐virus could be a mechanism for accelerated protein evolution. The virosphere could be an engine for the genesis of protein structures, and may even have been so before the last universal common ancestor of cellular life. (shrink)

The existing literature on the development of recombinant DNA technology and genetic engineering tends to focus on Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer's recombinant DNA cloning technology and its commercialization starting in the mid-1970s. Historians of science, however, have pointedly noted that experimental procedures for making recombinant DNA molecules were initially developed by Stanford biochemist Paul Berg and his colleagues, Peter Lobban and A. Dale Kaiser in the early 1970s. This paper, recognizing the uneasy disjuncture between scientific authorship and legal invention (...) in the history of recombinant DNA technology, investigates the development of recombinant DNA technology in its full scientific context. I do so by focusing on Stanford biochemist Berg's research on the genetic regulation of higher organisms. As I hope to demonstrate, Berg's new venture reflected a mass migration of biomedical researchers as they shifted from studying prokaryotic organisms like bacteria to studying eukaryotic organisms like mammalian and human cells. It was out of this boundary crossing from prokaryotic to eukaryotic systems through virus model systems that recombinant DNA technology and other significant new research techniques and agendas emerged. Indeed, in their attempt to reconstitute 'life' as a research technology, Stanford biochemists' recombinant DNA research recast genes as a sequence that could be rewritten thorough biochemical operations. The last part of this paper shifts focus from recombinant DNA technology's academic origins to its transformation into a genetic engineering technology by examining the wide range of experimental hybridizations which occurred as techniques and knowledge circulated between Stanford biochemists and the Bay Area's experimentalists. Situating their interchange in a dense research network based at Stanford's biochemistry department, this paper helps to revise the canonized history of genetic engineering's origins that emerged during the patenting of Cohen-Boyer's recombinant DNA cloning procedures. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 30, Issue 2, pp 223 - 235 Scholarship on _Leviathan_ has not fully explored the distinctive pattern of language that Hobbes used to invoke the central conceit of the treatise—“that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH.” This note highlights an earlier instance of that rare linguistic construction, one that presented a similar image of political monstrosity several years before Hobbes’s metaphor was published. _Verses in Honour of the Reverend and Learned Judge of the Law, Judge Jenkin_ celebrated the (...) jurist David Jenkins as a royalist martyr in the fight against “That Giant monster call’d a multitude.” It is possible that the pamphlet might have circulated among the network of English exiles in France, offering Hobbes a linguistic model with which to reconceptualize the early modern understanding of political community. (shrink)

Giant bones unearthed throughout the Mesoamerican countryside provoked early modern thinkers to grapple with the earth’s ages, partially syncretizing Nahua histories of human conquest with Spanish colonial medicinal and natural historical knowledge. European naturalists’ willingness to accept the giant remains required them to embrace localized Mesoamerican cosmologies. The fossilized landscape provided evidence that conquest and eradication had happened before at the hands of the peoples whom the Spaniards had conquered in turn. Lost from early modern collections and failing (...) to translate far beyond New Spain during the sixteenth century, the giant remains highlight the possibilities and challenges of integrating Mesoamerican knowledge into the global history of science, with an emphasis on emplaced thinking, medicine and the body, and deeper temporal frameworks. Moving beyond itinerary histories to globalizing cosmologies in the history of science can better explain the compromises Europeans and Mesoamericans were required to make to enter into a syncretic intellectual contract, as well as the non-European concept of time that came with local reckonings with the human and more-than-human natural world. (shrink)

"The author tells a history of the study of cancer-causing viruses from the early twentieth century to the development of an HPV vaccine for cervical cancer in 2006. He profiles the "cancer virus hunters" who made breakthroughs in tumor virology"--.

This essay explores how the scientific community interpreted the discoveries of extinct giant birds during the mid-nineteenth century on the islands of New Zealand and Madagascar. It argues that the Aepyornis of Madagascar was understood through the moa of New Zealand because of the rise of global networks and theories. Indeed, their global connections made giant birds a sensation among the scientific community and together forged theories and associations not possible in isolation. In this way, this paper argues (...) for a closer look at how the creation of science emerged from a world framework that involved multiple sites of discovery and interpretation that continually influenced and reshaped scientific theories. It also stresses the importance of local naturalists in participating in this global exchange of knowledge. (shrink)

The essay is a comparative look at Descartes' and Pascal's epistemology. For so vast a topic, I shall confine myself to comparing three crucial epistemological topics, through which I hope to evince Descartes' and Pascal's differences and points of contact. Firstly, I will concentrate on the philosophers' engagement with skepticism, which, for each, had different functions and motivations. Secondly, the thinkers' relation to Reason shall be examined, since it is the fulcrum of their thought—and the main aspect that separates them. (...) Lastly, I will examine each philosopher's theist epistemology; this section, of course, will focus on how and by what means Descartes and Pascal set out to prove God's existence. The latter aspect shall take us back to each philosopher's relationship to Doubt: the title, " The Giants of Doubt ", in fact, implies a fundamental link between Descartes and Pascal through Doubt. In addition, and most importantly, the contrast between the two thinkers' epistemology inaugurates a decisive scission in modern thought of enormous repercussion: Descartes' sturdy rationalism initiated the great branch of modern scientific inquiry , while Pascal's appeal to the power of intuition and feelings would eventually be the precursor of the reaction to the enlightenment that invested Europe by the second half of the eighteenth century. This departure of thought, which in my view may be traced back to them, has not been the common conceit of the history of philosophy: the reaction to the enlightenment has customarily been regarded as stemming from its internal contradictions or at best from its more radical doctrines. The essay shall show that these strands of thought were both parallel and born out of the antithetical epistemologies of Descartes and Pascal. (shrink)

This article draws on Jacques Derrida’s and Roberto Esposito’s conceptualisations of the immunitarian paradigm to analyse the Slovenian crime novel _The Virus_. In the first part, we examine the links between neoliberalism and the rise of the Slovenian authoritarian state during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. In the second part, we show that the neoliberal ethos is expressed in the figure of the self-serving and self-disciplined detective, in the nature of desocialised and privatised crime, and in the figure (...) of the self-righteous criminal. Although the actions of the detective and the criminal are autoimmunitarian, both function – paradoxically – as guardians of the common good by pursuing private interests. In the final section, we deconstruct the binary oppositions underlying the dual status of murdered victims, who are simultaneously criminally responsible and possess an unusual (non-heteronormative) or pathological sexual identity. (shrink)

ABSTRACT During the current COVID-19 pandemic, we are experiencing physical viruses infecting our bodies, virtual viruses infecting our computers, and symbolic viruses infecting our thinking. This essay takes up each of these interruptions in a collective attempt to better understand how we are rhetorically and where we might go politically from here.

Los virus nuevos han sido una constante desde el surgimiento de la vida en la Tierra. Estos virus pueden llegar a infectar a los seres humanos y producir pandemias, como la causada por el virus sars-cov-2. Los virus son parte inevitable de la naturaleza; sin embargo, las actividades humanas son las que determinan su contagio, por lo que es posible desarrollar estrategias para detectar y controlar brotes de enfermedades emergentes y prevenir nuevas pandemias.

Using the principles and sometimes the conclusions of his teacher Adolf Stöhr, Cleve insists that he is giving a philosophical interpretation and not simply a philological reconstruction of these Pre-Socratics. The philosophers have been divided into 1) "Religious Reformers", 2) "Philosophers of Nature", 3) "Champions of Culture Politics"—"The Glossomorphics". There will certainly be disagreement on some of Cleve's interpretations but it must be said that Cleve carries through his philosophical reconstruction with admirable lucidity and consistency though, occasionally, some of his (...) criticisms of the "philologists" are rather waspish. Nevertheless, this is a splendid and important study which is a tribute to the author's erudition and insight.—D. J. B. (shrink)

Los principales patógenos víricos que podemos ad­quirir ingiriendo alimentos contaminados son los norovirus, el virus de la hepatitis A y el virus de la hepatitis E que se propagan principalmente a través de la vía fecal oral. En los últimos años, la incidencia de brotes de transmisión alimentaria causados por estos patógenos ha experimentado un aumento considerable, en parte debido al comercio globalizado y a los cambios en los hábitos de consumo. Las matrices alimentarias que mayor riesgo representan para el (...) consumidor son los moluscos bivalvos, ve­getales de IV gama, frutas tipo baya y platos listos para comer. Actualmente las técnicas moleculares son las más habituales para la detección de estos patógenos en alimentos, aunque toda­vía existen dudas acerca del significado de la presencia de estos genomas víricos en términos de seguridad alimentaria. La infec­tividad de estos patógenos en alimentos viene también determi­nada por su elevada persistencia ambiental y por su resistencia a los tratamientos aplicados para la conservación de los alimentos. (shrink)

Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, raises an interesting philosophical issue, namely, how can one be in touch with past things if they no longer exist? It provides us with a way to address this issue by outlining an ontological view according to which past things still exist within a four-dimensional world. Although one cannot be in touch with past things by means of ordinary perception, one can do so by combining perception and memory. In this sense, In Search (...) of Lost Time helps us to reconcile a four-dimensionalist ontology according to which things have both spatial and temporal parts with a realist phenomenology according to which experience gives us access to things as they are. In so doing, Proust’s masterpiece allows us to shed some light on what it means for a subject of experience to exist in a four-dimensional world. (shrink)

As the Zika virus pandemic continues to bring worry and fear to health officials and medical scientists, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO) have recommended that residents of the Zika-infected countries, e.g., Brazil, and those who have traveled to the area should delay having babies which may involve artificial contraceptive, particularly condom. This preventive policy, however, is seemingly at odds with the Roman Catholic Church’s position on the contraceptive. As least since the promulgation of (...) Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae, the Church has explicitly condemned artificial birth control as intrinsic evil. However, the current pontiff, Pope Francis, during his recent visit to Latin America, remarked that the use of artificial contraception may not be in contradiction to the teaching of Humanae Vitae while drawing a parallel between the current Zika Crisis and the 1960’s Belgian Congo Nun Controversy. The pope mentioned that the traditional ethical principle of the lesser of two evils may be the doctrine that justified the exceptions. The authors of this paper attempt to expand the theological rationale of the pope’s suggestion. In so doing, the authors rely on casuistical reasoning as an analytic tool that compares the Belgian Congo Nun case and the given Zika case, and suggest that the former is highly similar to, if not the same as, the latter in terms of normative moral feature. That is, in both cases the use of artificial contraception is theologically justified in reference to the criteria that the doctrine of the lesser of two evils requires. The authors wish that the paper would provide a solid theological-ethical ground based on which condom-use as the most immediate and effective preventive measure can be recommended in numerous Catholic hospitals as well as among Catholic communities in the world, particularly the most Zika-affected and largest Catholic community in the world, Brazil – 123 million present Brazilian citizens are reported to be Roman Catholic. (shrink)

Athenaeus preserves an intriguing description by the otherwise unknown writerMoschion of a giant grain-ship, the Syracusia, built by Hiero II of Syracuse in thelater third century B.C.1 The account is extremely circumstantial. Besides a fulldescription of the ship's layout, Moschion gives such details as the name of thearchitect , the size of the construction-force , the construction time , details of the launching arrangements devised byArchimedes, and even the procedure for judging crimes committed on board.

Athenaeus preserves an intriguing description by the otherwise unknown writerMoschion of a giant grain-ship, the Syracusia, built by Hiero II of Syracuse in thelater third century B.C.1 The account is extremely circumstantial. Besides a fulldescription of the ship's layout, Moschion gives such details as the name of thearchitect, the size of the construction-force, the construction time, details of the launching arrangements devised byArchimedes, and even the procedure for judging crimes committed on board.

In 1937, a group of researchers in Nazi Germany began investigating tobacco mosaic virus with the hope of using the virus as a model system for understanding gene behavior in higher organisms. They soon developed a creative and interdisciplinary work style and were able to continue their research in the postwar era, when they made significant contributions to the history of molecular biology. This group is significant for two major reasons. First, it provides an example of how researchers were able (...) to produce excellent scientific research in the midst of dictatorship and war. Coupled with the group's ongoing success in postwar Germany, the German TMV investigators provide a dramatic example of how scientific communities deal with adversity as well as rapid political and social change. Second, since the researchers focused heavily on TMV, their story allows us to analyze how an experimental system other than phage contributed to the emergence of molecular biology. (shrink)

We have investigated the nonlinear low-frequency microwave absorption of an ensemble of small metallic grains. Earlier Zhou et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 77, 1958 (1996)] have proved that linear absorption by such a system is due to a mesoscopic relaxation mechanism for which important contribution is from the grains with small level spacings between the ground state and the first excited state. Here we have shown further that such grains are anomalously sensitive to the field amplitude and the distribution of (...) level spacings. Since such a behavior depends on external magnetic field, we expect the appearance of a giant nonlinear magnetoresistance, as well as a very strong temperature dependence of the nonlinear microwave conductivity. (shrink)

Herbert, Dilinie The Zika virus has dominated the news media and captured the attention of the international community. Epidemic disease has become the mainstay of public health emergencies in our recent past with Ebola virus in West Africa and now Zika virus in Latin America. An unexpected and troubling feature of this current outbreak is the high incidence of birth defects and neurological health complications. As scientists investigate a possible causal link, health authorities as well as Catholic Church leaders are (...) involved in communicating how women and the wider community should make decisions about their health, reproduction and pregnancy. A morally appropriate, culturally sensitive and socially inclusive approach to managing the immanent risk should be the priority. (shrink)