The Uneasy Entente Between Insanity and Mens Rea: Beyond \u3ci\u3eClark v. Arizona\u3c/i\u3e

There is uneasy tension in the criminal law between the doctrines of mens rea and the defense of legal insanity. Last term, the Supreme Court addressed both these issues, but failed to clarify the relation between them. Using a wide range of interdisciplinary materials, this article discusses the broad doctrinal, theoretical, and normative issues concerning responsibility that arise in this context. We clarify the meaning of mental disorder, mens rea and legal insanity, the justification for and the relation between the latter two, and the relation among all three. Next we consider the reasoning in Clark, and for the most part find it wanting. Then we turn to the constitutionality and wisdom of abolishing or limiting mens rea and legal insanity. We conclude that although it is probably constitutional to abolish legal insanity, robust doctrines of mens rea and the insanity defense itself must be maintained to insure that the criminal law imposes fair blame and punishment. We next canvas the alternatives to legal insanity, including the most contemporary, reasoned academic proposal, and find all insufficient to achieve justice. Finally, we respond to the increasing challenges to responsibility generated by new scientific findings about human behavior, especially by the new neuroscience, and suggest that these findings do not undermine core conceptions of personhood and responsibility

Anomalous fluctuations of active polar filaments

Using a simple model, we study the fluctuating dynamics of inextensible, semiflexible polar filaments interacting with active and directed force generating centres such as molecular motors. Taking into account the fact that the activity occurs on time-scales comparable to the filament relaxation time, we obtain some unexpected differences between both the steady-state and dynamical behaviour of active as compared to passive filaments. For the statics, the filaments have a {novel} length-scale dependent rigidity. Dynamically, we find strongly enhanced anomalous diffusion.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

The Uneasy Entente Between Insanity and Mens Rea: Beyond \u3ci\u3eClark v. Arizona\u3c/i\u3e

There is uneasy tension in the criminal law between the doctrines of mens rea and the defense of legal insanity. Last term, the Supreme Court addressed both these issues, but failed to clarify the relation between them. Using a wide range of interdisciplinary materials, this article discusses the broad doctrinal, theoretical, and normative issues concerning responsibility that arise in this context. We clarify the meaning of mental disorder, mens rea and legal insanity, the justification for and the relation between the latter two, and the relation among all three. Next we consider the reasoning in Clark, and for the most part find it wanting. Then we turn to the constitutionality and wisdom of abolishing or limiting mens rea and legal insanity. We conclude that although it is probably constitutional to abolish legal insanity, robust doctrines of mens rea and the insanity defense itself must be maintained to insure that the criminal law imposes fair blame and punishment. We next canvas the alternatives to legal insanity, including the most contemporary, reasoned academic proposal, and find all insufficient to achieve justice. Finally, we respond to the increasing challenges to responsibility generated by new scientific findings about human behavior, especially by the new neuroscience, and suggest that these findings do not undermine core conceptions of personhood and responsibility

Magnetic Helicity in Sphaleron Debris

We develop an analytical technique to evaluate the magnetic helicity in the debris from sphaleron decay. We show that baryon number production leads to left-handed magnetic fields, and that the magnetic helicity is conserved at late times. Our analysis explicitly demonstrates the connection between sphaleron-mediated cosmic baryogenesis and cosmic magnetogenesis.Comment: 9 pages, 1 figure. v2: Minor revisions; matches published version in Physical Review

Screening of charged spheroidal colloidal particles

We study the effective screened electrostatic potential created by a spheroidal colloidal particle immersed in an electrolyte, within the mean field approximation, using Poisson--Botzmann equation in its linear and nonlinear forms, and also beyond the mean field by means of Monte Carlo computer simulation. The anisotropic shape of the particle has a strong effect on the screened potential, even at large distances (compared to the Debye length) from it. To quantify this anisotropy effect, we focus our study on the dependence of the potential on the position of the observation point with respect with the orientation of the spheroidal particle. For several different boundary conditions (constant potential, or constant surface charge) we find that, at large distance, the potential is higher in the direction of the large axis of the spheroidal particle

Ion Trap Mass Spectrometers for Identity, Abundance and Behavior of Volatiles on the Moon

NASA GSFC and The Open University (UK) are collaborating to deploy an Ion Trap Mass Spectrometer on the Moon to investigate the lunar water cycle. The ITMS is flight-proven throughthe Rosetta Philae comet lander mission. It is also being developed under ESA funding to analyse samples drilled from beneath the lunar surface on the Roscosmos Luna-27 lander (2025).Now, GSFC and OU will now develop a compact ITMS instrument to study the near-surface lunar exosphere on board a CLPS Astrobotic lander at Lacus Mortis in 2021

Accurate Transfer Maps for Realistic Beamline Elements: Part I, Straight Elements

The behavior of orbits in charged-particle beam transport systems, including both linear and circular accelerators as well as final focus sections and spectrometers, can depend sensitively on nonlinear fringe-field and high-order-multipole effects in the various beam-line elements. The inclusion of these effects requires a detailed and realistic model of the interior and fringe fields, including their high spatial derivatives. A collection of surface fitting methods has been developed for extracting this information accurately from 3-dimensional field data on a grid, as provided by various 3-dimensional finite-element field codes. Based on these realistic field models, Lie or other methods may be used to compute accurate design orbits and accurate transfer maps about these orbits. Part I of this work presents a treatment of straight-axis magnetic elements, while Part II will treat bending dipoles with large sagitta. An exactly-soluble but numerically challenging model field is used to provide a rigorous collection of performance benchmarks.Comment: Accepted to PRST-AB. Changes: minor figure modifications, reference added, typos corrected

Robotic Lunar Landers For Science And Exploration

NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory have been conducting mission studies and performing risk reduction activities for NASA s robotic lunar lander flight projects. In 2005, the Robotic Lunar Exploration Program Mission #2 (RLEP-2) was selected as an ESMD precursor robotic lander mission to demonstrate precision landing and determine if there was water ice at the lunar poles; however, this project was canceled. Since 2008, the team has been supporting SMD designing small lunar robotic landers for science missions, primarily to establish anchor nodes of the International Lunar Network (ILN), a network of lunar geophysical nodes. Additional mission studies have been conducted to support other objectives of the lunar science community. This paper describes the current status of the MSFC/APL robotic lunar mission studies and risk reduction efforts including high pressure propulsion system testing, structure and mechanism development and testing, long cycle time battery testing, combined GN&C and avionics testing, and two autonomous lander test articles