The Impact of Elements of Self-Defense and Objective Versus Subjective Instructions on Jurors\u27 Verdicts for Battered Women Defendants

Battered woman defendants\u27 claims of self-defense have often been viewed as not fitting the classic definition of self-defense. Vignettes of a legal case varied the explicitness of the threat made to the woman by her partner before she killed him, whether she had the opportunity to retreat, and objective versus subjective instructions by the judge. College students (N = 399) chose a verdict, identified variables that influenced their verdicts, and completed attitudinal measures. The opportunity for retreat increased the probability of a guilty verdict by 5 times. Objective juror instructions increased the odds of a guilty verdict by almost 2 times. Explicitness versus implicitness of the threat did not affect verdict choice nor did attitudes of mock jurors. Verdict choice was more influenced by details about the abuse than personal traits of the husband or wife or reports from authorities

A universal field equation for dispersive processes in heterogeneous media

When formulated properly, most geophysical transport-type process involving passive scalars or motile particles may be described by the same space-time nonlocal field equation which consists of a classical mass balance coupled with a space-time nonlocal convective/dispersive flux. Specific examples employed here include stretched and compressed Brownian motion, diffusion in slit-nanopores, subdiffusive continuous-time random walks (CTRW), super diffusion in the turbulent atmosphere and dispersion of motile and passive particles in fractal porous media. Stretched and compressed Brownian motion, which may be thought of as Brownian motions run with nonlinear clocks, are defined as the limit processes of a special class of random walks possessing nonstationary increments. The limit process has a mean square displacement that increases as t α+1 where α < -1 is a constant. If α = 0 the process is classical Brownian, if α > 0 we say the process is compressed Brownian while if α < 0 it is stretched. The Fokker-Planck equations for these processes are classical ade's with dispersion coefficient proportional to t α. The Brownian-type walks have fixed time step, but nonstationary spatial increments that are Gaussian with power law variance. With the CTRW, both the time increment and the spatial increment are random. The subdiffusive Fokker-Planck equation is fractional in time for the CTRW's considered in this article. The second moments for a Levy spatial trajectory are infinite while the Fokker-Planck equation is an advective-dispersive equation, ade, with constant diffusion coefficient and fractional spatial derivatives. If the Lagrangian velocity is assumed Levy rather than the position, then a similar Fokker-Planck equation is obtained, but the diffusion coefficient is a power law in time. All these Fokker-Planck equations are special cases of the general non-local balance law. © 2010 Springer-Verlag

Protocadherin-1 is essential for cell entry by New World hantaviruses

International audienceThe zoonotic transmission of hantaviruses from their rodent hosts to humans in North and South America is associated with a severe and frequently fatal respiratory disease, hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS)1,2. No specific antiviral treatments for HPS are available, and no molecular determinants of in vivo susceptibility to hantavirus infection and HPS are known. Here we identify the human asthma-associated gene protocadherin-1 (PCDH1)3-6 as an essential determinant of entry and infection in pulmonary endothelial cells by two hantaviruses that cause HPS, Andes virus (ANDV) and Sin Nombre virus (SNV). In vitro, we show that the surface glycoproteins of ANDV and SNV directly recognize the outermost extracellular repeat domain of PCDH1-a member of the cadherin superfamily7,8-to exploit PCDH1 for entry. In vivo, genetic ablation of PCDH1 renders Syrian golden hamsters highly resistant to a usually lethal ANDV challenge. Targeting PCDH1 could provide strategies to reduce infection and disease caused by New World hantaviruses