The morphology, cytology and sexuality of the Homothallic Rhizopus sexualis (Smith) Callen

Rhizopus sexualis (Smith) comb. nov. is fully described morphologically. The most interesting points have proved to be (l) the production of zygospores ladderwise on one pair of zygophores; (2) that the regeneration of single suspensors has given only homo- thallic mycelium; (3) that both auxiliary ("Neben- sporangien") and normal sporangia are produced; (4) that plasma excretion occurs.The general cytology is described. No chromosomes are differentiated. No fusion of nuclei has been observed, even in zygospores several months old. Nuclei associate in pairs from the time of gametangium fusion, though it does not appear necessa.ry that each of a pair must come from a different gametangium. This association is still evident in the zygospores after several months, practically no nuclei being single. Some of the nuclei entering the zygospore degenerate. Germination of zygospores up to nineteen months old has not been obtained.Perfect hybrid zygospores have been obtained with Rhizopus nigricans (+)ve and (-)ve, mucor hiemalis (-)ve and Absidia cylindrospora (-)ve, and imperfect sexual reactions with a nunber of other species.Rhizopus sexualis appears to be of a predominantly (+)ve tendency; only one other such homothallic is known.Burgeff’s theory of changing sex is shown not to be consistent with events in Rhizopus sexualis. The conclusion is drawn, that the zygophores and progametangia are bisexual, though the sexuality of the gametangia has not been determined.It is finally suggested that fusion and reduction of the paired nuclei may take place on germination, though the possibility is envisaged, that the nuclei never fuse, and that there is only an association of nuclei

Bernard Lonergan’s Authentic Moral Subjectivity and Objectivity: A Solution to the Problem of the Culture of War and Peace in the Contemporary World.

The question that underpins every act of war and its effects negates the value of life and humanity. Yet, it is true that war is not inevitable. In place of practical mercy, one can easily see the problem lies not in the action per se, but in the activity of human consciousness which motivate this kind of pervasive influences. Animals which are pure brutes are known not to go for war. This is because they don’t imagine, think, reason, and conceive it at all. Human beings choose violence and war as ways of getting things reach their own scale of measure. In this pursuit, they seem to forget the faculty of moral judgment which should and ought to guide every human action. Thus, the problem of peace and war coils on the idea of moral self-rational judgment implicit in every conscious human act. It is this faculty, so to speak, that exonerates brute animals and human being in a sense that it command that every human act within and without should be mediated by meaning and motivated by objective values which are sought by authentic living of genuine attention, genuine intelligence, genuine reasonableness and finally genuine responsibility.   It is our intention in this paper to explain the cause of war in place of peace in the contemporary world. It further draws a true dichotomy between war and opposition which has been variously misunderstood. The paper offers practical solution to the state of war against peace which has dominated the contemporary global society. It highlights and explicitates how morally converted people would solve issues, even in place of opposition politically, socially, economically, and ideologically, without falling into the culture of violence which is a key to the current culture of death, of no future and of no peace. Finally, the paper suggest ways of embracing peace and solidarity which, as it will be see, begs the question to moral conversion.   Key words: Ethics of Value, Consciousness of human acts, Moral conversion, Peace and Ambience of harmony

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

Direct Evidence for the Importance of Small Animals to Prehistoric Diets: A Review of Coprolite Studies

Researchers tend to underestimate or ignore the importance of small animals to the prehistoric diet due to the difficulty of separating cultural from noncultural faunal debris excavated from sites. Human coprolite analyses (dessicated human feces) indicate prehistoric dietary consumption of small animals. The large number of coprolites analyzed from North America reveals direct ingestion of small animals and indicates that small animal remains from sites indeed reflect human dietary patterns. The coprolites reveal that reptiles, birds, bats, and a large variety of rodents were an important and prevalent component of the prehistoric diet