Media Portrayal of GM Science and Citrus Greening in State and National Newspapers

Huanglongbing (HLB), commonly known as citrus greening, is a bacterial disease severely affecting the profitability and continuation of the citrus industry in Florida and is threatening the citrus industry in other states as well. Currently, the disease only can be managed, not cured. Gene-based therapies, such as GM science, have been identified as a viable long-term solution. However, consumer acceptance of genetically modified food is low and their understanding and acceptance of new technologies is largely dependent on what they receive through mass media. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to understand news coverage of both citrus greening and gene modification science. This content analysis studied news articles of either citrus greening or gene modification science in national and state-specific newspapers and identified that while citrus greening is not highly covered by newspapers, it is accurately described via appropriate terminology. Genetic modification science is more commonly a topic of news coverage and is somewhat neutral and balanced in coverage. This research shows that source use in media coverage of gene modification science is balanced, but sources are most commonly chosen from organizations with a directed opinion or position on the topic

Identifying Publics in Citrus Producing States to Address the Issue of Citrus Greening

Citrus greening is a critical issue facing the agricultural industry in the United States. The disease has been identified in residential and commercial areas, and there is a need to identify best practices in communicating with the public about the disease. The Situational Theory of Publics (STOPs) uses audience segmentation to determine how to best communicate with target consumers and was used to guide this study. The purpose of the study was to determine the types of publics present in the citrus producing states of Florida, California, and Texas as they relate to citrus greening. An online survey was completed by 1,541 respondents in the states of interest. The majority of respondents in all three states had low issue involvement and high knowledge related to citrus greening. The publics were categorized as active, aware, aroused, and inactive, and differences were noted across demographic categories. There were also differences in the types of publics present across states; Florida had the largest percent of active publics. Communication in Florida should use calls to action to encourage specific behaviors from the active public, but agricultural communicators in Texas and California need to focus messages and campaigns on increasing issue involvement related to citrus greening. Future research should test messages about citrus greening using focus groups to gain a greater understanding of consumers’ information seeking behaviors related to the disease

The Oscillating Universe: an Alternative to Inflation

The aim of this paper is to show, that the 'oscillating universe' is a viable alternative to inflation. We remind that this model provides a natural solution to the flatness or entropy and to the horizon problem of standard cosmology. We study the evolution of density perturbations and determine the power spectrum in a closed universe. The results lead to constraints of how a previous cycle might have looked like. We argue that most of the radiation entropy of the present universe may have originated from gravitational entropy produced in a previous cycle. We show that measurements of the power spectrum on very large scales could in principle decide whether our universe is closed, flat or open.Comment: revised version for publication in Classical and Quantum Gravity, 23 pages, uuencoded compressed tarred Latex file with 7 eps figures included, fig.8 upon reques

A Mixed-Methods Comparison of Self-Reported and Conversational Trust in Science

The development of science and technology highly relies on public trust in science. However, previous studies have shown that the public trust may vary across different scientific issues. This research explored how the public trust in science varied between a general and context specific environment. A convergent mixed-methods design was conducted. The results indicated participants’ self-reported general trust in in science did not change significantly between two measures. However, in conversation four major themes related to distrust were revealed. Future research is recommended to further explore how trust in science evolves in conversation and among different contexts

Tissue-specific expression of high-voltage-activated dihydropyridine-sensitive L-type calcium channels

The cloning of the cDNA for the α1 subunit of L-type calcium channels revealed that at least two genes (CaCh1 and CaCh2) exist which give rise to several splice variants. The expression of mRNA for these α1 subunits and the skeletal muscle α2/δ, β and γ subunits was studied in rabbit tissues and BC3H1 cells. Nucleic-acid-hybridization studies showed that the mRNA of all subunits are expressed in skeletal muscle, brain, heart and aorta. However, the α1-, β- and γ-specific transcripts had different sizes in these tissues. Smooth muscle and heart contain different splice variants of the CaCh2 gene. The α1, β and γ mRNA are expressed together in differentiated but not in proliferating BC3H1 cells. A probe specific for the skeletal muscle α2/δ subunit did not hybridize to poly(A)-rich RNA from BC3H1 cells. These results suggest that different splice variants of the genes for the α1, β and γ subunits exist in tissues containing L-type calcium channels, and that their expression is regulated in a coordinate manner

Anisotropic 'hairs' in string cosmology

In this letter we investigate whether the isotropy problem is naturally solved in inflationary cosmologies inspired by string theory, so called pre-big-bang cosmologies. We find that, in contrast to what happens in the more common 'potential inflation' models, initial anisotropies do not decay during pre-big-bang inflation.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figur

Overview and application of the Mitscherlich equation and its extensions to estimate the soil nitrogen pool fraction associated with crop yield and nitrous oxide emission.

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Testing Lorentz Invariance Violation with WMAP Five Year Data

We consider different renormalizable models of Lorentz invariance violation. We show that the limits on birefringence of the propagation of cosmic microwave background photons from the five year data of the Wilkinson microwave anisotropy probe (WMAP) can be translated into a limit of Lorentz symmetry violation. The obtained limits on Lorentz invariance violation are stronger than other published limits. We also cast them in terms of limits on a birefringent effective photo "mass" and on a polarization dependence of the speed of light.Comment: 5 pages, references and discussions added, results unchanged, accepted for publications in PR

An illustrative analysis of atypical gas production profiles obtained from in vitro digestibility studies using fecal inoculum

14 páginas, 2 tablas, 6 figuras.Gas production profiles typically show a monotonically increasing monophasic pattern. However, atypical gas production profiles exist whereby at least two consecutive phases of gas production or additional extraneous features that distort the typical profile are present. Such profiles are more likely to occur with the use of a fecal inoculum and are much less well described. The presence of multiple phases or non-descript extraneous features makes it difficult to apply directly recommended modeling approaches such as standard response functions or classical growth functions. To overcome such difficulties, extensions of the Mitscherlich equation and a numerical modeling option also based on the Mitscherlich are explored. The numerical modeling option uses an estimate of relative rate obtained from the smoothed data profile and an estimate of maximum gas produced together with any lag time information drawn from the raw data to construct a simple Mitscherlich equation. In summary, this article illustrates the analysis of atypical gas production profiles obtained using a fecal inoculum and explores the methodology of numerical modeling to reconstruct equivalent typical growth-like trends.This research was funded in part by The Canada Research Chairs program, grant number 045867 (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Ottawa)

Loop amplitudes in gauge theories: modern analytic approaches

This article reviews on-shell methods for analytic computation of loop amplitudes, emphasizing techniques based on unitarity cuts. Unitarity techniques are formulated generally but have been especially useful for calculating one-loop amplitudes in massless theories such as Yang-Mills theory, QCD, and QED.Comment: 34 pages. Invited review for a special issue of Journal of Physics A devoted to "Scattering Amplitudes in Gauge Theories." v2: typesetting macro error fixe