The search for salvation: lay faith in Scotland, 1480-1560

The subject of Scottish lay religious faith in the eighty years prior to the Reformation of 1559-60 is one in which a variety of concepts and concerns emerge. The choice which has been made reflects the constraints of time and space. Some attempt has also been made to address those areas which have been overlooked by historians, or rarely discussed, such as the role of Mary in lay religious faith. It was necessary to explain lay images of the afterlife in order to understand the path which laypeople chose to attain salvation, so chapters on the Day of Judgement, heaven, hell and purgatory should be seen as the context for understanding the chapters on God, Mary and Jesus. The first chapters discusses the Day of Judgement, an event which must be understood in order to interpret all lay religious attitudes and actions. The basic assumption of the Scots was that all people would be judged at the Day of Judgement, so decisions were made on earth in terms of their understanding of God's expectations on this final day. There were, in effect, two "Days of Judgement", a particular and a general one. An understanding of the nature of these two Days of Judgement illuminates understanding of the laity's conception of the function of purgatory, in particular, and also the importance to salvation of church rituals such as the Eucharist, as well as saintly and human intercession after death. Part of the thesis discusses heaven, hell and purgatory, those states of being which were the laity's future after death

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead