Plague Persistence in Western Europe: A Hypothesis

Historical sources documenting recurrent plagues of the “Second Pandemic” usually focus on urban epidemic mortality. Instead, plague persists in remote, rural hinterlands: areas less visible in the written sources of late medieval Europe. Plague spreads as fleas move from relatively resistant rodents, which serve as “maintenance hosts,” to an array of more susceptible rural mammals, now called “amplifying hosts.” Using sources relevant to plague in thinly populated Central and Western Alpine regions, this paper postulates that Alpine Europe could have been a region of plague persistence via its population of wild rodents, particularly the Alpine marmot

The Forensic Tradition in Milan’s Civic Mortality Registers

From the late fourteenth to the seventeenth century, many Italian cities and towns responded to recurrent plague by keeping municipal death registers. Different in content and character from the most celebrated form of early modern mortality records, the London Bills of Mortality, Italian authorities named, rather than counted, persons who died. This municipal practice illustrates the invention of secular death investigation systems in an era of recurring plague. Milan’s uniquely detailed civic death registers, 1452 to 1525, display the underlying forensic character of such record-keeping, rather than the public health context in which such records have long been understood. Diagnosing the cause and manner of death, the fundamental objective of forensic medical inquiries, exposed epistemological uncertainties that academic medicine largely avoided for the entirety of the early modern era. How could one be certain that a death was caused by a particular affliction? Our death investigation practices are now far more sophisticated, but in the current, tenacious SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, we still struggle to measure and record the human costs of crisis mortality

TMG 1 (2014): Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death, ed. Monica Green

The plague organism (Yersinia pestis) killed an estimated 40% to 60% of all people when it spread rapidly through the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe in the fourteenth century: an event known as the Black Death. Previous research has shown, especially for Western Europe, how population losses then led to structural economic, political, and social changes. But why and how did the pandemic happen in the first place? When and where did it begin? How was it sustained? What was its full geographic extent? And when did it really end? Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World is the first book to synthesize the new evidence and research methods that are providing fresh answers to these crucial questions. It was only in 2011, thanks to ancient DNA recovered from remains unearthed in London’s East Smithfield cemetery, that the full genome of the plague pathogen was identified. This single-celled organism probably originated 3000-4000 years ago and has caused three pandemics in recorded history: the Justinianic (or First) Plague Pandemic, around 541-750; the Black Death (Second Plague Pandemic), conventionally dated to the 1340s; and the Third Plague Pandemic, usually dated from around 1894 to the 1930s. This ground-breaking book brings together scholars from the humanities and social and physical sci­ences to address the question of how recent work in genetics, zoology, and epi­de­miology can enable a rethinking of the Black Death\u27s global reach and its larger historical significance. It forms the inaugural double issue of The Medieval Globe, a new journal sponsored by the Program in Medieval Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This issue of The Medieval Globe is published with the support of the World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh.https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/medieval_globe/1000/thumbnail.jp

Subcortical brain atrophy persists even in HAART-regulated HIV disease

The purpose of this study was to determine the pattern and extent of caudate nucleus and putamen atrophy in HIV-infected men with well-controlled immune status and viral replication. 155 men underwent structural brain magnetic resonance imaging; 84 were HIV-infected and 71 were uninfected controls. MRI data were processed using the Fully Deformable Segmentation routine, producing volumes for the right and left caudate nucleus and putamen, and 3-D maps of spatial patterns of thickness. There was significant atrophy in the HIV-infected men in both the caudate and putamen, principally in the anterior regions. The volume of the basal ganglia was inversely associated with the time since first seropositivity, suggesting that either there is a chronic, subclinical process that continues in spite of therapy, or that the extent of the initial insult caused the extent of atrophy

Quantum entanglement and disentanglement of multi-atom systems

We present a review of recent research on quantum entanglement, with special emphasis on entanglement between single atoms, processing of an encoded entanglement and its temporary evolution. Analysis based on the density matrix formalism are described. We give a simple description of the entangling procedure and explore the role of the environment in creation of entanglement and in disentanglement of atomic systems. A particular process we will focus on is spontaneous emission, usually recognized as an irreversible loss of information and entanglement encoded in the internal states of the system. We illustrate some certain circumstances where this irreversible process can in fact induce entanglement between separated systems. We also show how spontaneous emission reveals a competition between the Bell states of a two qubit system that leads to the recently discovered "sudden" features in the temporal evolution of entanglement. An another problem illustrated in details is a deterministic preparation of atoms and atomic ensembles in long-lived stationary squeezed states and entangled cluster states. We then determine how to trigger the evolution of the stable entanglement and also address the issue of a steered evolution of entanglement between desired pairs of qubits that can be achieved simply by varying the parameters of a given system.Comment: Review articl

Global Trends in Marine Plankton Diversity across Kingdoms of Life

35 pages, 18 figures, 1 table, supplementary information https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2019.10.008.-- Raw reads of Tara Oceans are deposited at the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA). In particular, newly released 18S rRNA gene metabarcoding reads are available under the number ENA: PRJEB9737. ENA references for the metagenomics reads corresponding to the size fraction < 0.22 μm (for prokaryotic viruses) analyzed in this study are included in Gregory et al. (2019); see their Table S3. ENA references for the metagenomics reads corresponding to the size fraction 0.22-1.6/3 μm (for prokaryotes and giruses) correspond to Salazar et al. (2019) (see https://zenodo.org/record/3473199). Imaging datasets from the nets are available through the collaborative web application and repository EcoTaxa (Picheral et al., 2017) under the address https://ecotaxa.obs-vlfr.fr/prj/412 for regent data, within the 3 projects https://ecotaxa.obs-vlfr.fr/prj/397, https://ecotaxa.obs-vlfr.fr/prj/398, https://ecotaxa.obs-vlfr.fr/prj/395 for bongo data, and within the 2 projects https://ecotaxa.obs-vlfr.fr/prj/377 and https://ecotaxa.obs-vlfr.fr/prj/378 for WP2 data. A table with Shannon values and multiple samples identifiers, plus a table with flow cytometry data split in six groups are available (https://doi.org/10.17632/p9r9wttjkm.1). Contextual data from the Tara Oceans expedition, including those that are newly released from the Arctic Ocean, are available at https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.875582The ocean is home to myriad small planktonic organisms that underpin the functioning of marine ecosystems. However, their spatial patterns of diversity and the underlying drivers remain poorly known, precluding projections of their responses to global changes. Here we investigate the latitudinal gradients and global predictors of plankton diversity across archaea, bacteria, eukaryotes, and major virus clades using both molecular and imaging data from Tara Oceans. We show a decline of diversity for most planktonic groups toward the poles, mainly driven by decreasing ocean temperatures. Projections into the future suggest that severe warming of the surface ocean by the end of the 21st century could lead to tropicalization of the diversity of most planktonic groups in temperate and polar regions. These changes may have multiple consequences for marine ecosystem functioning and services and are expected to be particularly significant in key areas for carbon sequestration, fisheries, and marine conservationTara Oceans (which includes both the Tara Oceans and Tara Oceans Polar Circle expeditions) would not exist without the leadership of the Tara Ocean Foundation and the continuous support of 23 institutes (https://oceans.taraexpeditions.org/). We further thank the commitment of the following sponsors: CNRS (in particular Groupement de Recherche GDR3280 and the Research Federation for the Study of Global Ocean Systems Ecology and Evolution FR2022/Tara Oceans-GOSEE), the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Genoscope/CEA, the French Ministry of Research, and the French Government “Investissements d’Avenir” programs OCEANOMICS (ANR-11-BTBR-0008), FRANCE GENOMIQUE (ANR-10-INBS-09-08), MEMO LIFE (ANR-10-LABX-54), the PSL∗ Research University (ANR-11-IDEX-0001-02), as well as EMBRC-France (ANR-10-INBS-02). Funding for the collection and processing of the Tara Oceans data set was provided by NASA Ocean Biology and Biogeochemistry Program under grants NNX11AQ14G, NNX09AU43G, NNX13AE58G, and NNX15AC08G (to the University of Maine); the Canada Excellence research chair on remote sensing of Canada’s new Arctic frontier; and the Canada Foundation for Innovation. We also thank agnès b. and Etienne Bourgois, the Prince Albert II de Monaco Foundation, the Veolia Foundation, Region Bretagne, Lorient Agglomeration, Serge Ferrari, Worldcourier, and KAUST for support and commitment. The global sampling effort was enabled by countless scientists and crew who sampled aboard the Tara from 2009–2013, and we thank MERCATOR-CORIOLIS and ACRI-ST for providing daily satellite data during the expeditions. We are also grateful to the countries who graciously granted sampling permission. We thank Stephanie Henson for providing ocean carbon export data and are also grateful to the other researchers who kindly made their data available. We thank Juan J. Pierella-Karlusich for advice regarding single-copy genes. C.d.V. and N.H. thank the Roscoff Bioinformatics platform ABiMS (http://abims.sb-roscoff.fr) for providing computational resources. C.B. acknowledges funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program (grant agreement 835067) as well as the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard University for a scholar’s fellowship during the 2016-2017 academic year. M.B.S. thanks the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (award 3790) and the National Science Foundation (awards OCE#1536989 and OCE#1829831) as well as the Ohio Supercomputer for computational support. S.G.A. thanks the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (CTM2017-87736-R), and J.M.G. is grateful for project RT2018-101025-B-100. F.L. thanks the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF) as well as the EMBRC platform PIQv for image analysis. M.C.B., D.S., and J.R. received financial support from the French Facility for Global Environment (FFEM) as part of the “Ocean Plankton, Climate and Development” project. M.C.B. also received financial support from the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel of Brazil (CAPES 99999.000487/2016-03)Peer Reviewe

A many-analysts approach to the relation between religiosity and well-being

The relation between religiosity and well-being is one of the most researched topics in the psychology of religion, yet the directionality and robustness of the effect remains debated. Here, we adopted a many-analysts approach to assess the robustness of this relation based on a new cross-cultural dataset (N=10,535 participants from 24 countries). We recruited 120 analysis teams to investigate (1) whether religious people self-report higher well-being, and (2) whether the relation between religiosity and self-reported well-being depends on perceived cultural norms of religion (i.e., whether it is considered normal and desirable to be religious in a given country). In a two-stage procedure, the teams first created an analysis plan and then executed their planned analysis on the data. For the first research question, all but 3 teams reported positive effect sizes with credible/confidence intervals excluding zero (median reported β=0.120). For the second research question, this was the case for 65% of the teams (median reported β=0.039). While most teams applied (multilevel) linear regression models, there was considerable variability in the choice of items used to construct the independent variables, the dependent variable, and the included covariates

A Many-analysts Approach to the Relation Between Religiosity and Well-being

The relation between religiosity and well-being is one of the most researched topics in the psychology of religion, yet the directionality and robustness of the effect remains debated. Here, we adopted a many-analysts approach to assess the robustness of this relation based on a new cross-cultural dataset (N = 10, 535 participants from 24 countries). We recruited 120 analysis teams to investigate (1) whether religious people self-report higher well-being, and (2) whether the relation between religiosity and self-reported well-being depends on perceived cultural norms of religion (i.e., whether it is considered normal and desirable to be religious in a given country). In a two-stage procedure, the teams first created an analysis plan and then executed their planned analysis on the data. For the first research question, all but 3 teams reported positive effect sizes with credible/confidence intervals excluding zero (median reported β = 0.120). For the second research question, this was the case for 65% of the teams (median reported β = 0.039). While most teams applied (multilevel) linear regression models, there was considerable variability in the choice of items used to construct the independent variables, the dependent variable, and the included covariates

Evaluating the Effects of SARS-CoV-2 Spike Mutation D614G on Transmissibility and Pathogenicity.

Global dispersal and increasing frequency of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein variant D614G are suggestive of a selective advantage but may also be due to a random founder effect. We investigate the hypothesis for positive selection of spike D614G in the United Kingdom using more than 25,000 whole genome SARS-CoV-2 sequences. Despite the availability of a large dataset, well represented by both spike 614 variants, not all approaches showed a conclusive signal of positive selection. Population genetic analysis indicates that 614G increases in frequency relative to 614D in a manner consistent with a selective advantage. We do not find any indication that patients infected with the spike 614G variant have higher COVID-19 mortality or clinical severity, but 614G is associated with higher viral load and younger age of patients. Significant differences in growth and size of 614G phylogenetic clusters indicate a need for continued study of this variant