Mary and Feminism

Throughout the centuries pious Christians have outdone themselves in praising the Holy Virgin with extravagant titles. A look in any collection of the praises of Mary will reveal such titles as: mountain, because Mary\u27s virtue elevates her over all other saints; cloud, because she protects us from the heat of God\u27s wrath; cistern, oyster, and elephant. The twentieth century, however, may be the first century to claim the distinction of suggesting a pejorative therionimic for the Blessed Virgin, namely, that of goat—a Judas goat, who leads her sisters along the path of slavery to traditional, stereotyped roles for women. This observation is not offered in a frivolous vein. It is intended to call attention to certain difficulties concerning Mary\u27s relation to modern women that have arisen from the revival of the women\u27s movement in the latter part of the twentieth century, so to speak, in the wake of the second wave of feminism

Robust unravelings for resonance fluorescence

Monitoring the fluorescent radiation of an atom unravels the master equation evolution by collapsing the atomic state into a pure state which evolves stochastically. A robust unraveling is one that gives pure states that, on average, are relatively unaffected by the master equation evolution (which applies once the monitoring ceases). The ensemble of pure states arising from the maximally robust unraveling has been suggested to be the most natural way of representing the system [H.M. Wiseman and J.A. Vaccaro, Phys. Lett. A {\bf 250}, 241 (1998)]. We find that the maximally robust unraveling of a resonantly driven atom requires an adaptive interferometric measurement proposed by Wiseman and Toombes [Phys. Rev. A {\bf 60}, 2474 (1999)]. The resultant ensemble consists of just two pure states which, in the high driving limit, are close to the eigenstates of the driving Hamiltonian $\Omega\sigma_{x}/2$. This ensemble is the closest thing to a classical limit for a strongly driven atom. We also find that it is possible to reasonably approximate this ensemble using just homodyne detection, an example of a continuous Markovian unraveling. This has implications for other systems, for which it may be necessary in practice to consider only continuous Markovian unravelings.Comment: 12 pages including 5 .eps figures, plus one .jpg figur

A PXY-Mediated Transcriptional Network Integrates Signaling Mechanisms to Control Vascular Development in Arabidopsis

Vascular meristems generate the majority of biomass in higher plants. They constitute a bifacial stem cell population from which xylem and phloem are specified on opposing sides by positional signals. The PHLOEM INTERCALATED WITH XYLEM (PXY) receptor kinase promotes vascular cell division and organisation. However, how these functions are specified and integrated is unknown. Here, a putative PXY-mediated transcriptional regulatory network comprised of 690 transcription factor-promoter interactions was mapped. Among these interactions was a feed-forward loop containing transcription factors WUSCHEL HOMEOBOX RELATED 14 (WOX14) and TARGET OF MONOPTEROS 6 (TMO6), which each regulate the expression of a third transcription factor, LATERAL ORGAN BOUNDARIES DOMAIN 4 (LBD4). PXY signalling in turn regulates the WOX14, TMO6, LBD4 loop to control vascular proliferation. Genetic interaction between LBD4 and PXY suggests that LBD4 marks the phloem-procambium boundary, thus defining the shape of the vascular bundle. These data collectively support a novel mechanism that influences recruitment of cells into the phloem lineage, and defines the role of PXY signalling in this context to the arrangement of vascular tissue

Collapse of non-spherically symmetric scalar field distributions

In the present work the collapse scenario of some exact non-spherical models with a minimally coupled scalar field is studied. Scalar field collapse with planar as well as toroidal, cylindrical and pseudoplanar symmetries have been investigated. It is shown that the scalar field may have collapsing modes even if it has the equation of state corresponding to that of a dark energy.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures; Accepted for publication in Gen Relativ Gravit (2011

A suberized exodermis is required for tomato drought tolerance.

Plant roots integrate environmental signals with development using exquisite spatiotemporal control. This is apparent in the deposition of suberin, an apoplastic diffusion barrier, which regulates flow of water, solutes and gases, and is environmentally plastic. Suberin is considered a hallmark of endodermal differentiation but is absent in the tomato endodermis. Instead, suberin is present in the exodermis, a cell type that is absent in the model organism Arabidopsis thaliana. Here we demonstrate that the suberin regulatory network has the same parts driving suberin production in the tomato exodermis and the Arabidopsis endodermis. Despite this co-option of network components, the network has undergone rewiring to drive distinct spatial expression and with distinct contributions of specific genes. Functional genetic analyses of the tomato MYB92 transcription factor and ASFT enzyme demonstrate the importance of exodermal suberin for a plant water-deficit response and that the exodermal barrier serves an equivalent function to that of the endodermis and can act in its place

Detector Description and Performance for the First Coincidence Observations between LIGO and GEO

For 17 days in August and September 2002, the LIGO and GEO interferometer gravitational wave detectors were operated in coincidence to produce their first data for scientific analysis. Although the detectors were still far from their design sensitivity levels, the data can be used to place better upper limits on the flux of gravitational waves incident on the earth than previous direct measurements. This paper describes the instruments and the data in some detail, as a companion to analysis papers based on the first data.Comment: 41 pages, 9 figures 17 Sept 03: author list amended, minor editorial change

50 years of Arabidopsis research: Highlights and future directions

The year 2014 marked the 25th International Conference on Arabidopsis Research. In the 50 yr since the first International Conference on Arabidopsis Research, held in 1965 in Göttingen, Germany, > 54 000 papers that mention Arabidopsis thaliana in the title, abstract or keywords have been published. We present herein a citational network analysis of these papers, and touch on some of the important discoveries in plant biology that have been made in this powerful model system, and highlight how these discoveries have then had an impact in crop species. We also look to the future, highlighting some outstanding questions that can be readily addressed in Arabidopsis. Topics that are discussed include Arabidopsis reverse genetic resources, stock centers, databases and online tools, cell biology, development, hormones, plant immunity, signaling in response to abiotic stress, transporters, biosynthesis of cells walls and macromolecules such as starch and lipids, epigenetics and epigenomics, genome-wide association studies and natural variation, gene regulatory networks, modeling and systems biology, and synthetic biology