Professor Dr. Otto Kunkel, München, in memoriam

Katz v. United States is the king of Supreme Court surveillance cases. Written in 1967, it struck down the earlier regime of property rules, declaring that the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. The concurrence by Justice Harlan announced the new regime - court-issued warrants are required where there is an infringement on a person\u27s reasonable expectation of privacy. Together with the companion case Berger v. New York, Katz has stood for a grand conception of the Fourth Amendment as a bulwark against wiretaps and other emerging forms of surveillance. Professor Orin Kerr, in his excellent article, shows that this view of Katz fits badly with how courts now apply the Fourth Amendment to electronic surveillance and other new technology. Upon reading his own obituary, Mark Twain famously observed that reports of my death are greatly exaggerated. This Essay shows that the demise of Katz has actually been understated. Professor Kerr has correctly shown how the property regime has persisted where it helped the government, such as cases that hold that many kinds of surveillance are not searches under the Fourth Amendment. This Essay adds the insight that the property regime has actually been abandoned in many other respects since 1967, in ways that have dramatically aided government surveillance. In particular, as discussed in Part I, the 1967 abolition of the mere evidence rule has given the government unprecedented access to diaries, private papers, and other information of individuals. Examination of the case law and of new developments in telephone technology leads to a second insight. The shift to Voice over Internet Protocol phone calls means that the content of many telephone calls will likely be subject to routine recording in the near future. Because the Supreme Court has been so supportive of government access to stored records, Katz and Berger may soon be dead for their core facts, the content of phone calls

Frühpaläolithische Geröllartefakte vom Typ „Pebble tool" in Oberhessen?

researc

Emotion revealed through body motion: gender impact

Body motion is a rich and reliable source of information for daily life social cognition, interaction and non-verbal communication. Yet gender effects in body language reading are largely unknown, and a few previous findings are sparse and controversial. Investigation of gender impact on body language reading is of substantial value for clarification of the nature of neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders (such as autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, eating and anxiety disorders) characterized by aberrant social cognition. Many of these disorders are gender-specific: females and males are differently affected in terms of clinical picture, prevalence, and severity. The motivation of the present work was to clarify whether, and, if so, how gender affects body language reading in typically developing adults. We intended to make a step toward a framework for evaluation gender differences in the social brain in psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders. In our experiments, body motion was represented by a point-light technique as a set of dots on the joints of an otherwise invisible body. This helps to isolate information revealed by body motion from other visual cues (e.g., color, shape). In the first study (Sokolov et al., 2011), by using a three alternative-forced choice paradigm, participants had to indicate whether a display portrayed happy, neutral or angry knocking at a door. The findings show that gender affects accuracy rather than speed of body language reading. This effect, however, is modulated by emotional content of actions: males surpass in recognition accuracy of happy actions, whereas females tend to excel in recognition of hostile angry knocking movement. In the second study (Krüger et al., 2013), a similar pattern of results was found for subtle emotions expressed by point-light human locomotion: Males surpass females in recognition accuracy and readiness to respond to happy walking portrayed by female actors, whereas females tend to be better in recognition of angry locomotion expressed by male actors. In contrast to widespread beliefs about female superiority in social cognition, this work suggests that gender effects in body language reading are largely modulated by emotional content of actions. Further research should combine methods of social neuroscience to uncover neural circuits underlying gender differences in the social brain

BMC Zoology – a home for all zoological research in the BMC series

This editorial accompanies the launch of BMC Zoology, a new open access, peer-reviewed journal within the BMC series that considers manuscripts on all aspects of zoology. BMC Zoology will increase and disseminate zoological knowledge through the publication of original research, methodology, database, software and debate articles. With the launch of BMC Zoology, the BMC series closes a gap in its portfolio of subject-specific research journals and is now able to cover all aspects of animal research together with BMC Ecology, BMC Evolutionary Biology and BMC Veterinary Research

Натечные карбонатные новообразования набережной реки Туры: особенности строения и процессы формирования

International audienc

Developing limits for driving under cannabis

ABSTRACT Objective Development of a rational and enforceable basis for controlling the impact of cannabis use on traffic safety. Methods An international working group of experts on issues related to drug use and traffic safety evaluated evidence from experimental and epidemiological research and discussed potential approaches to developing per se limits for cannabis. Results In analogy to alcohol, finite (non-zero) per se limits for delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) in blood appear to be the most effective approach to separating drivers who are impaired by cannabis use from those who are no longer under the influence. Limited epidemiological studies indicate that serum concentrations of THC below 10 ng/ml are not associated with an elevated accident risk. A comparison of meta-analyses of experimental studies on the impairment of driving-relevant skills by alcohol or cannabis suggests that a THC concentration in the serum of 7-10 ng/ml is correlated with an impairment comparable to that caused by a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of 0.05%. Thus, a suitable numerical limit for THC in serum may fall in that range. Conclusions This analysis offers an empirical basis for a per se limit for THC that allows identification of drivers impaired by cannabis. The limited epidemiological data render this limit preliminary

The Fight against Cancer by Microgravity: The Multicellular Spheroid as a Metastasis Model

Cancer is a disease exhibiting uncontrollable cell growth and spreading to other parts of the organism. It is a heavy, worldwide burden for mankind with high morbidity and mortality. Therefore, groundbreaking research and innovations are necessary. Research in space under microgravity (µg) conditions is a novel approach with the potential to fight cancer and develop future cancer therapies. Space travel is accompanied by adverse effects on our health, and there is a need to counteract these health problems. On the cellular level, studies have shown that real (r-) and simulated (s-) µg impact survival, apoptosis, proliferation, migration, and adhesion as well as the cytoskeleton, the extracellular matrix, focal adhesion, and growth factors in cancer cells. Moreover, the µg-environment induces in vitro 3D tumor models (multicellular spheroids and organoids) with a high potential for preclinical drug targeting, cancer drug development, and studying the processes of cancer progression and metastasis on a molecular level. This review focuses on the effects of r- and s-µg on different types of cells deriving from thyroid, breast, lung, skin, and prostate cancer, as well as tumors of the gastrointestinal tract. In addition, we summarize the current knowledge of the impact of µg on cancerous stem cells. The information demonstrates that µg has become an important new technology for increasing current knowledge of cancer biology

Pre-Fibrillar α-Synuclein Mutants Cause Parkinson's Disease-Like Non-Motor Symptoms in Drosophila

Parkinson's disease (PD) is linked to the formation of insoluble fibrillar aggregates of the presynaptic protein α-Synuclein (αS) in neurons. The appearance of such aggregates coincides with severe motor deficits in human patients. These deficits are often preceded by non-motor symptoms such as sleep-related problems in the patients. PD-like motor deficits can be recapitulated in model organisms such as Drosophila melanogaster when αS is pan-neurally expressed. Interestingly, both these deficits are more severe when αS mutants with reduced aggregation properties are expressed in flies. This indicates that that αS aggregation is not the primary cause of the PD-like motor symptoms. Here we describe a model for PD in Drosophila which utilizes the targeted expression of αS mutants in a subset of dopadecarboxylase expressing serotonergic and dopaminergic (DA) neurons. Our results show that targeted expression of pre-fibrillar αS mutants not only recapitulates PD-like motor symptoms but also the preceding non-motor symptoms such as an abnormal sleep-like behavior, altered locomotor activity and abnormal circadian periodicity. Further, the results suggest that the observed non-motor symptoms in flies are caused by an early impairment of neuronal functions rather than by the loss of neurons due to cell death