A silent unheard voice in the Old Testament: The Cushite woman whom Moses married in Numbers 12:1–10

Most of the time, women’s names are not mentioned, words are not put in their mouths or they are not allowed to say a word, and their achievements are behind the scene in the narratives. Passages that mention the presence and contribution of African women in the Bible are especially neglected, perhaps because there are few African women biblical scholars and also deep prejudices against women. References to the African wife of Moses (Numbers 12) are so scanty in the Bible that very few critical biblical scholars noticed them. The purpose of this article is to discuss critically the narrative of the Cushite woman whom Moses married and her marginalisation by the author of the story in Numbers 12:1-10. The narrator of the text did not only refuse to give her a name, there is no single word put in her mouth despite the dominant and significant role her presence played in the narrative. Why is she silent and what does her silence mean? The answers to these questions are discussed in this article

Twistor methods for AdS5

We consider the application of twistor theory to five-dimensional anti-de Sitter space. The twistor space of AdS$_5$ is the same as the ambitwistor space of the four-dimensional conformal boundary; the geometry of this correspondence is reviewed for both the bulk and boundary. A Penrose transform allows us to describe free bulk fields, with or without mass, in terms of data on twistor space. Explicit representatives for the bulk-to-boundary propagators of scalars and spinors are constructed, along with twistor action functionals for the free theories. Evaluating these twistor actions on bulk-to-boundary propagators is shown to produce the correct two-point functions.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figures. v2: typos fixed, published versio

On tree amplitudes of supersymmetric Einstein-Yang-Mills theory

We present a new formula for all single trace tree amplitudes in four dimensional super Yang-Mills coupled to Einstein supergravity. Like the Cachazo-He-Yuan formula, our expression is supported on solutions of the scattering equations, but with momenta written in terms of spinor helicity variables. Supersymmetry and parity are both manifest. In the pure gravity and pure Yang-Mills sectors, it reduces to the known twistor-string formulae. We show that the formula behaves correctly under factorization and sketch how these amplitudes may be obtained from a four-dimensional (ambi)twistor string.Comment: 14 pages, no figures. v2: erroneous formulae removed, improved discussion of factorizatio

Parent-of-origin-specific allelic associations among 106 genomic loci for age at menarche.

Age at menarche is a marker of timing of puberty in females. It varies widely between individuals, is a heritable trait and is associated with risks for obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, breast cancer and all-cause mortality. Studies of rare human disorders of puberty and animal models point to a complex hypothalamic-pituitary-hormonal regulation, but the mechanisms that determine pubertal timing and underlie its links to disease risk remain unclear. Here, using genome-wide and custom-genotyping arrays in up to 182,416 women of European descent from 57 studies, we found robust evidence (P < 5 × 10(-8)) for 123 signals at 106 genomic loci associated with age at menarche. Many loci were associated with other pubertal traits in both sexes, and there was substantial overlap with genes implicated in body mass index and various diseases, including rare disorders of puberty. Menarche signals were enriched in imprinted regions, with three loci (DLK1-WDR25, MKRN3-MAGEL2 and KCNK9) demonstrating parent-of-origin-specific associations concordant with known parental expression patterns. Pathway analyses implicated nuclear hormone receptors, particularly retinoic acid and γ-aminobutyric acid-B2 receptor signalling, among novel mechanisms that regulate pubertal timing in humans. Our findings suggest a genetic architecture involving at least hundreds of common variants in the coordinated timing of the pubertal transition

Genetic association study of QT interval highlights role for calcium signaling pathways in myocardial repolarization.

The QT interval, an electrocardiographic measure reflecting myocardial repolarization, is a heritable trait. QT prolongation is a risk factor for ventricular arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death (SCD) and could indicate the presence of the potentially lethal mendelian long-QT syndrome (LQTS). Using a genome-wide association and replication study in up to 100,000 individuals, we identified 35 common variant loci associated with QT interval that collectively explain ∼8-10% of QT-interval variation and highlight the importance of calcium regulation in myocardial repolarization. Rare variant analysis of 6 new QT interval-associated loci in 298 unrelated probands with LQTS identified coding variants not found in controls but of uncertain causality and therefore requiring validation. Several newly identified loci encode proteins that physically interact with other recognized repolarization proteins. Our integration of common variant association, expression and orthogonal protein-protein interaction screens provides new insights into cardiac electrophysiology and identifies new candidate genes for ventricular arrhythmias, LQTS and SCD

Heat Stress Enhances the Accumulation of Polyadenylated Mitochondrial Transcripts in Arabidopsis thaliana

Background: Polyadenylation of RNA has a decisive influence on RNA stability. Depending on the organisms or subcellular compartment, it either enhances transcript stability or targets RNAs for degradation. In plant mitochondria, polyadenylation promotes RNA degradation, and polyadenylated mitochondrial transcripts are therefore widely considered to be rare and unstable. We followed up a surprising observation that a large number of mitochondrial transcripts are detectable in microarray experiments that used poly(A)-specific RNA probes, and that these transcript levels are significantly enhanced after heat treatment. Methodology/Principal Findings: As the Columbia genome contains a complete set of mitochondrial genes, we had to identify polymorphisms to differentiate between nuclear and mitochondrial copies of a mitochondrial transcript. We found that the affected transcripts were uncapped transcripts of mitochondrial origin, which were polyadenylated at multiple sites within their 39region. Heat-induced enhancement of these transcripts was quickly restored during a short recovery period. Conclusions/Significance: Our results show that polyadenylated transcripts of mitochondrial origin are more stable than previously suggested, and that their steady-state levels can even be significantly enhanced under certain conditions. As many microarrays contain mitochondrial probes, due to the frequent transfer of mitochondrial genes into the genome

Perturbative gravity at null infinity

We describe a theory that lives on the null conformal boundary of asymptotically flat space-time, and whose states encode the radiative modes of (super)gravity. We study the induced action of the BMS group, verifying that the Ward identity for certain BMS supertranslations is equivalent to Weinberg's soft graviton theorem in the bulk. The subleading behaviour of soft gravitons may also be obtained from a Ward identity for certain superrotation generators in the extended BMS algebra proposed by Barnich & Troessaert. We show that the theory computes the complete classical gravitational S-matrix, perturbatively around the Minkowski vacuum.Comment: 14 pages, no figures. v2: typos corrected, references adde

Ambitwistor strings and the scattering equations at one loop

Ambitwistor strings are chiral, infinite tension analogues of conventional string theory whose target space is the space of complex null geodesics and whose spectrum consists exclusively of massless states. At genus zero, these strings underpin the Cachazo-He-Yuan formulae for tree level scattering of gravitons, gluons and scalars. In this paper we extend these formulae in a number of directions. Firstly, we consider Ramond sector vertex operators and construct simple amplitudes involving space-time fermions. These agree with tree amplitudes in ten dimensional supergravity and super Yang--Mills. We then show that, after the usual GSO projections, the ambitwistor string partition function is modular invariant. We consider the scattering equations at genus one, and calculate one loop scattering amplitudes for NS-NS external states in the Type II ambitwistor string. We conjecture that these give new representations of (the integrand of) one loop supergravity amplitudes and we show that they have the expected behaviour under factorization of the worldsheet in both non--separating and separating degenerations.Comment: 34 pages, no figures. v2: improvements to discussion, references update