Theology, News and Notes - Vol. 11, No. 02

Theology News & Notes was a theological journal published by Fuller Theological Seminary from 1954 through 2014.https://digitalcommons.fuller.edu/tnn/1187/thumbnail.jp

Scoping the strengths and weaknesses of different auction and PES mechanisms for Countryside Stewardship

This is the final version. Available from Defra (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) via the link in this recordThe majority of farmers in England currently receive a fixed fee for managing their land under an agrienvironment scheme (Environmental Stewardship), which is based on an estimate of the typical income forgone by participating. The aim of this research is to explore alternative mechanisms for allocating agri-environment contracts with a view to achieving a more cost-efficient and effective use of funds. The focus is on reverse auctions, whereby farmers opt into a bidding process, offering to manage their land under prescribed management options at a price that more closely reflects their cost of doing so. The researchers have used a combination of laboratory experiments, simulation modelling and farmer workshops to consider the opportunity for efficiency gains, aspects of auction design and farmer responses to auctions. A secondary objective of the work is to explore opportunities for the private sector to engage in agrienvironment actions by leveraging match-funding where there are common goals and mutual benefits for private firms and society. This has entailed a review of the payment for ecosystem services (PES) literature and consultations with a number of relevant private firms. A particular focus for the latter has been the water companies, as they have already established some initiatives on PES around improving water quality

Repurposing Immunomodulatory Imide Drugs (IMiDs) in Neuropsychiatric and Neurodegenerative Disorders

Neuroinflammation represents a common trait in the pathology and progression of the major psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders. Neuropsychiatric disorders have emerged as a global crisis, affecting 1 in 4 people, while neurological disorders are the second leading cause of death in the elderly population worldwide (WHO, 2001; GBD 2016 Neurology Collaborators, 2019). However, there remains an immense deficit in availability of effective drug treatments for most neurological disorders. In fact, for disorders such as depression, placebos and behavioral therapies have equal effectiveness as antidepressants. For neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease, drugs that can prevent, slow, or cure the disease have yet to be found. Several non-traditional avenues of drug target identification have emerged with ongoing neurological disease research to meet the need for novel and efficacious treatments. Of these novel avenues is that of neuroinflammation, which has been found to be involved in the progression and pathology of many of the leading neurological disorders. Neuroinflammation is characterized by glial inflammatory factors in certain stages of neurological disorders. Although the meta-analyses have provided evidence of genetic/proteomic upregulation of inflammatory factors in certain stages of neurological disorders. Although the mechanisms underpinning the connections between neuroinflammation and neurological disorders are unclear, and meta-analysis results have shown high sensitivity to factors such as disorder severity and sample type, there is significant evidence of neuroinflammation associations across neurological disorders. In this review, we summarize the role of neuroinflammation in psychiatric disorders such as major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and bipolar disorder, as well as in neurodegenerative disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease, and introduce current research on the potential of immunomodulatory imide drugs (IMiDs) as a new treatment strategy for these disorders

Warming experiments elucidate the drivers of observed directional changes in tundra vegetation

Few studies have clearly linked long-term monitoring with insitu experiments to clarify potential drivers of observed change at a given site. This is especially necessary when findings from a site are applied to a much broader geographic area. Here, we document vegetation change at Barrow and Atqasuk, Alaska, occurring naturally and due to experimental warming over nearly two decades. An examination of plant cover, canopy height, and community indices showed more significant differences between years than due to experimental warming. However, changes with warming were more consistent than changes between years and were cumulative in many cases. Most cases of directional change observed in the control plots over time corresponded with a directional change in response to experimental warming. These included increases in canopy height and decreases in lichen cover. Experimental warming resulted in additional increases in evergreen shrub cover and decreases in diversity and bryophyte cover. This study suggests that the directional changes occurring at the sites are primarily due to warming and indicates that further changes are likely in the next two decades if the regional warming trend continues. These findings provide an example of the utility of coupling insitu experiments with long-term monitoring to accurately document vegetation change in response to global change and to identify the underlying mechanisms driving observed changes

First results from 2+1-Flavor Domain Wall QCD: Mass Spectrum, Topology Change and Chiral Symmetry with Ls=8L_s=8

We present results for the static interquark potential, light meson and baryon masses, and light pseudoscalar meson decay constants obtained from simulations of domain wall QCD with one dynamical flavour approximating the $s$ quark, and two degenerate dynamical flavours with input bare masses ranging from $m_s$ to $m_s/4$ approximating the $u$ and $d$ quarks. We compare these quantities obtained using the Iwasaki and DBW2 improved gauge actions, and actions with larger rectangle coefficients, on $16^3\times32$ lattices. We seek parameter values at which both the chiral symmetry breaking residual mass due to the finite lattice extent in the fifth dimension and the Monte Carlo time history for topological charge are acceptable for this set of quark masses at lattice spacings above 0.1 fm. We find that the Iwasaki gauge action is best, demonstrating the feasibility of using QCDOC to generate ensembles which are good representations of the QCD path integral on lattices of up to 3 fm in spatial extent with lattice spacings in the range 0.09-0.13 fm. Despite large residual masses and a limited number of sea quark mass values with which to perform chiral extrapolations, our results for light hadronic physics scale and agree with experimental measurements within our statistical uncertainties.Comment: RBC and UKQCD Collaborations. 82 pages, 34 figures Typos correcte

2+1 flavor domain wall QCD on a (2 fm)^3 lattice: light meson spectroscopy with Ls = 16

We present results for light meson masses and pseudoscalar decay constants from the first of a series of lattice calculations with 2+1 dynamical flavors of domain wall fermions and the Iwasaki gauge action. The work reported here was done at a fixed lattice spacing of about 0.12 fm on a 16^3\times32 lattice, which amounts to a spatial volume of (2 fm)^3 in physical units. The number of sites in the fifth dimension is 16, which gives m_{res} = 0.00308(4) in these simulations. Three values of input light sea quark masses, m_l^{sea} \approx 0.85 m_s, 0.59 m_s and 0.33 m_s were used to allow for extrapolations to the physical light quark limit, whilst the heavier sea quark mass was fixed to approximately the physical strange quark mass m_s. The exact rational hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm was used to evaluate the fractional powers of the fermion determinants in the ensemble generation. We have found that f_\pi = 127(4) MeV, f_K = 157(5) MeV and f_K/f_\pi = 1.24(2), where the errors are statistical only, which are in good agreement with the experimental values.Comment: RBC and UKQCD Collaborations. 17 pages, 14 figures. Typeset with ReVTEX4. v2: replaced with the version published in PRD with improved introductio

Acceleressence: Dark Energy from a Phase Transition at the Seesaw Scale

Simple models are constructed for "acceleressence" dark energy: the latent heat of a phase transition occurring in a hidden sector governed by the seesaw mass scale v^2/M_Pl, where v is the electroweak scale and M_Pl the gravitational mass scale. In our models, the seesaw scale is stabilized by supersymmetry, implying that the LHC must discover superpartners with a spectrum that reflects a low scale of fundamental supersymmetry breaking. Newtonian gravity may be modified by effects arising from the exchange of fields in the acceleressence sector whose Compton wavelengths are typically of order the millimeter scale. There are two classes of models. In the first class the universe is presently in a metastable vacuum and will continue to inflate until tunneling processes eventually induce a first order transition. In the simplest such model, the range of the new force is bounded to be larger than 25 microns in the absence of fine-tuning of parameters, and for couplings of order unity it is expected to be \approx 100 microns. In the second class of models thermal effects maintain the present vacuum energy of the universe, but on further cooling, the universe will "soon" smoothly relax to a matter dominated era. In this case, the range of the new force is also expected to be of order the millimeter scale or larger, although its strength is uncertain. A firm prediction of this class of models is the existence of additional energy density in radiation at the eV era, which can potentially be probed in precision measurements of the cosmic microwave background. An interesting possibility is that the transition towards a matter dominated era has occurred in the very recent past, with the consequence that the universe is currently decelerating.Comment: 10 pages, references adde

Baryon Number in Warped GUTs : Model Building and (Dark Matter Related) Phenomenology

In the past year, a new non-supersymmetric framework for electroweak symmetry breaking (with or without Higgs) involving SU(2)_L * SU(2)_R * U(1)_{B-L} in higher dimensional warped geometry has been suggested. In this work, we embed this gauge structure into a GUT such as SO(10) or Pati-Salam. We showed recently (in hep-ph/0403143) that in a warped GUT, a stable Kaluza-Klein fermion can arise as a consequence of imposing proton stability. Here, we specify a complete realistic model where this particle is a weakly interacting right-handed neutrino, and present a detailed study of this new dark matter candidate, providing relic density and detection predictions. We discuss phenomenological aspects associated with the existence of other light (<~ TeV) KK fermions (related to the neutrino), whose lightness is a direct consequence of the top quark's heaviness. The AdS/CFT interpretation of this construction is also presented. Most of our qualitative results do not depend on the nature of the breaking of the electroweak symmetry provided that it happens near the TeV brane.Comment: 61 pages, 12 figures; v2: minor changes; v3: Two additional diagrams in Fig. 10; a numerical factor corrected in section 16.1 (baryogenesis section), corresponding discussion slightly modified but qualitative results unchange

Identification of Combinatorial Patterns of Post-Translational Modifications on Individual Histones in the Mouse Brain

Post-translational modifications (PTMs) of proteins are biochemical processes required for cellular functions and signalling that occur in every sub-cellular compartment. Multiple protein PTMs exist, and are established by specific enzymes that can act in basal conditions and upon cellular activity. In the nucleus, histone proteins are subjected to numerous PTMs that together form a histone code that contributes to regulate transcriptional activity and gene expression. Despite their importance however, histone PTMs have remained poorly characterised in most tissues, in particular the brain where they are thought to be required for complex functions such as learning and memory formation. Here, we report the comprehensive identification of histone PTMs, of their combinatorial patterns, and of the rules that govern these patterns in the adult mouse brain. Based on liquid chromatography, electron transfer, and collision-induced dissociation mass spectrometry, we generated a dataset containing a total of 10,646 peptides from H1, H2A, H2B, H3, H4, and variants in the adult brain. 1475 of these peptides carried one or more PTMs, including 141 unique sites and a total of 58 novel sites not described before. We observed that these PTMs are not only classical modifications such as serine/threonine (Ser/Thr) phosphorylation, lysine (Lys) acetylation, and Lys/arginine (Arg) methylation, but also include several atypical modifications such as Ser/Thr acetylation, and Lys butyrylation, crotonylation, and propionylation. Using synthetic peptides, we validated the presence of these atypical novel PTMs in the mouse brain. The application of data-mining algorithms further revealed that histone PTMs occur in specific combinations with different ratios. Overall, the present data newly identify a specific histone code in the mouse brain and reveal its level of complexity, suggesting its potential relevance for higher-order brain functions

Observation of Parity Nonconservation in Moller Scattering

We report a measurement of the parity-violating asymmetry in fixed target electron-electron (Moller) scattering: A_PV = -175 +/- 30 (stat.) +/- 20 (syst.) parts per billion. This first direct observation of parity nonconservation in Moller scattering leads to a measurement of the electron's weak charge at low energy Q^e_W = -0.053 +/- 0.011. This is consistent with the Standard Model expectation at the current level of precision: sin^2\theta_W(M_Z)_MSbar = 0.2293 +/- 0.0024 (stat.) +/- 0.0016 (syst.) +/- 0.0006 (theory).Comment: Version 3 is the same as version 2. These versions contain minor text changes from referee comments and a change in the extracted value of Q^e_W and sin^2\theta_W due to a change in the theoretical calculation of the bremsstrahulung correction (ref. 16