Porites superfusa mortality and recovery from a bleaching event at Palmyra Atoll, USA.

BackgroundThe demography of a coral colony is not a binary trajectory of life and death. Based on the flexibility afforded by colonial organization, most reef-building corals employ a variety of dynamic survival strategies, including growth and shrinkage. The demographic flexibility affects coral size, shape and reproductive output, among other factors. It is thus critical to quantify the relative importance of key dynamics of recruitment, mortality, growth and shrinkage in changing the overall cover of coral on a reef.MethodsUsing fixed photographic quadrats, we tracked the patterns of change in the cover of one common central Pacific coral, Porites superfusa, before and after the 2009 ENSO event.ResultsCoral colonies suffered both whole and partial colony mortality, although larger colonies were more likely to survive. In subsequent years, recruitment of new colonies and regrowth of surviving colonies both contributed to the modest recovery of P. superfusa.DiscussionThis study is unique in its quantitative comparisons of coral recruitment versus regrowth during periods of areal expansion. Our data suggest that recovery is not limited simply to the long pathway of settlement, recruitment and early growth of new colonies but is accelerated by means of regrowth of already established colonies having suffered partial mortality

Evolutionary modes in protein observable space: the case of Thioredoxins

In this article, we investigated the structural and dynamical evolutionary behaviour of a set of ten thioredoxin proteins as formed by three extant forms and seven resurrected ones in laboratory. Starting from the crystallographic structures, we performed all-atom molecular dynamics simulations and compare the trajectories in terms of structural and dynamical properties. Interestingly, the structural properties related to the protein density (i.e. the number of residues divided by the excluded molecular volume) well describe the protein evolutionary behaviour. Our results also suggest that the changes in sequence as occurred during the evolution have affected the protein essential motions, allowing us to discriminate between ancient and extant proteins in terms of their dynamical behaviour. Such results are yet more evident when the bacterial, archaeal and eukaryotic thioredoxins are separately analysed

But consciousness isn't everything.

Comments on an article entitled `No Good News for DATA,' by Norman Lillegard in the Spring 1994 issue of `Cross Currents' magazine. Lillegard's stand that the android Commander Data in `Star Trek' fails to satisfy the biblical conception of persons; Lillegard's presentation of models that espouse functionalist theories of mind; Views of the essence of the human person

The Disingenuousness of the Jesus Legend in Popular Media

In America today, a major source of contention among theologians involves the Resurrection, a controversy that has ensued since historical times (1 Cor 15: 12-19 [KJV]). This essay will seek to develop a plausible response to the legend theory, a prevalent inconspicuous attack on the resurrection of Jesus and thus the foundation of Christianity, by addressing the question “Is Jesus like Santa Clause?” Thereby, providing evidence, which reveals the disingenuousness of the Jesus legend as portrayed in popular media by investigating the reality of the historical Jesus. In doing so, an examination of the miracle-claim will be presented through an a posteriori critique of the Resurrection. Pursuing to demonstrate credible witness to the resurrection of Jesus that supports the historicity of the miracle-claim and thus invalidates the legend theory and provide an appropriate response to the facade that Jesus is like Santa Clause as portrayed in popular media

Rigor Mortis and News obtained by the Body\u2019s Scientific Reconstruction of the Turin Shroud Man

After various tentative to artistically build a tridimensional form of the Turin Shroud (TS) Man, the authors faced the problem of the scientific construction of a 3D model of this Man with an accuracy of the order of 1 cm. It is well known that the TS wrapped a human body heavily tortured, but it is not easy to build a 3D model starting only from the 2D information shown on two body images visible on a linen sheet and on the hypothesis that these images really corresponds to a real man wrapped in it. The study showed that, while the two TS body images (frontal and dorsal) seem to appear not coherent with the image of a human body because distorted in many parts, these two images are perfectly coherent with the distortions provoked by a man wrapped in this linen sheet. This model confirmed the evident rigor mortis of the human body and evidenced the particular posture corresponding to the position on the cross that also showed a rotation never detected previously of the human body around his spine. The study of this 3D model partially confirmed previous results but also evidenced interesting news, like the position of the exit hole of the nail posed on the palm of the hand. The Gospels place the Resurrection in the early hours of Sunday, at least 36 hours after death. The effect of the preservation of rigidity up to this moment may be not consistent with the thanato-chronological alterations expected in a man in the same pre-mortal clinical condition, but this problem has been solved by the \u201cmixture of aloe and myrrh\u201d that allowed the preservation of the corpse, thus prolonging the rigor mortis for tens of hours. In fact, this body seems not to have undergone any significant putrefactive phenomenon

Modeling Repulsive Gravity with Creation

There is a growing interest in the cosmologists for theories with negative energy scalar fields and creation, in order to model a repulsive gravity. The classical steady state cosmology proposed by Bondi, Gold and Hoyle in 1948, was the first such theory which used a negative kinetic energy creation field to invoke creation of matter. We emphasize that creation plays very crucial role in cosmology and provides a natural explanation to the various explosive phenomena occurring in local (z<0.1) and extra galactic universe. We exemplify this point of view by considering the resurrected version of this theory - the quasi-steady state theory, which tries to relate creation events directly to the large scale dynamics of the universe and supplies more natural explanations of the observed phenomena. Although the theory predicts a decelerating universe at the present era, it explains successfully the recent SNe Ia observations (which require an accelerating universe in the standard cosmology), as we show in this paper by performing a Bayesian analysis of the data.Comment: The paper uses an old SNeIa dataset. With the new improved data, for example the updated gold sample (Riess et al, astro-ph/0611572), the fit improves considerably (\chi^2/DoF=197/180 and a probability of goodness-of-fit=18%