Cognitive Limits and the Beginning of Life

The question which moral status the embryo has is of great practical significance because the possibility to justify a governmental prohibition of a set of important therapeutical and scientific measures depends on a special and therefore legal protectable status of the embryo. The identity argument which is often used in this context cannot constitute this status due to its mere epistemic character under the condition of the determinism.health ethics, embryo, identity argument

The Ham Gram

A Ham Gram is an American-style pun-anagram crossword puzzle. Each clue sentence (of nine words or less) contains a concealed answer, as well as its overt synonym. In the examples below, the synonym is underlined, and the letters of the covert answer are capitalized; the answer is then given in parenthesis. Several varieties of clues can be distinguished

Fuel loading and flammability in the Mediterranean Basin woody species with different post-fire regenerative strategies

12 páginas, 5 figuras, 3 tablas.The flammability and combustibility of plant communities are determined by species features related to growth-form, structure and physiology. In some ecosystems, such as the Mediterranean ones, these characteristics may contribute to the existence of fire-prone species. We measured several parameters associated with the flammability and fuel loading of dominant woody species with different post-fire regenerative strategies ( seeders and non-seeders) in shrublands in the western Mediterranean Basin. Overall, seeder species show lower fuel load but are more prone to burning owing to a higher dead-to-live fuel ratio, live fine-fuel proportion and dead fine-fuel proportion. Moreover, they burst into flame at lower temperatures than non-seeders. In the Mediterranean Basin, most seeder species emerged mainly during the Quaternary, under a highly fluctuating Mediterranean climate and during recurrent fires. We propose that properties related to the combustibility and flammability of seeders may be the result of selective pressures associated with both fire and climate. These results suggest that ecosystems dominated by seeder species are more susceptible to fire risk than those dominated by non-seeder species in the Mediterranean Basin. Therefore, the proportion of these types of species resulting from previous fire or management history is likely to determine the characteristics of future fire events.We thank M. Jané, E. Martí, A. Vilà-Cabrera, J. Garcia, B. Moreira, S. Ribeiro and C. Beseler for helping in the field and in the laboratory work. Also, special thanks are due to J. Piñol for his advice and suggestions, and to J. Peñuelas and G. Alessio for supporting the flammability tests. This study was funded by the Department of Universities, Research and Information Society of the Generalitat de Catalunya, the European social funds, and the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología (MCYT) projects REN 2003–07198 and CGL2006–01293/BOS. It also contributes to the European research group (GDRE) ‘Mediterranean and mountain ecosystems in a changing world’ funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya and CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique). CEAM (Fundación Centro de Estudios Ambientales del Mediterráneo) is supported by the Generalitat Valenciana and Bancaixa.Peer reviewe

Bjerrum pairing correlations at charged interfaces

Electrostatic correlations play a fundamental role in aqueous solutions. In this letter, we identify transverse and lateral correlations as two mutually exclusive regimes. We show that the transverse regime leads to binding by generalization of Bjerrum pair formation theory, yielding binding constants from first-principle statistical-mechanical calculations. We compare our theoretical predictions with experiments on charged membranes and Langmuir monolayers and find good agreement. We contrast our approach with existing theories in the strong-coupling limit and on charged modulated interfaces, and discuss different scenarios that lead to charge reversal and equal-sign attraction by macro-ions.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure

A Large N400 but No BOLD Effect – Comparing Source Activations of Semantic Priming in Simultaneous EEG-fMRI

Numerous studies have reported neurophysiological effects of semantic priming in electroencephalography (EEG) and in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Because of differing methodological constraints, the comparability of the observed effects remains unclear. To directly compare EEG and fMRI effects and neural sources of semantic priming, we conducted a semantic word-picture priming experiment while measuring EEG and fMRI simultaneously. The visually presented primes were pseudowords, words unrelated to the target, semantically related words and the identical names of the target. Distributed source analysis of the event-related potentials (ERPs) successfully revealed a large effect of semantic prime-target relatedness (the N400 effect), which was driven by activations in a left-temporal source region. However, no significantly differing activations between priming conditions were found in the fMRI data. Our results support the notion that, for joint interpretations of existing EEG and fMRI studies of semantic priming, we need to fully appreciate the respective methodological limitations. Second, they show that simultaneous EEG-fMRI, including ERP source localization, is a feasible and promising methodological advancement for the investigation of higher-cognitive processes. Third, they substantiate the finding that, compared to fMRI, ERPs are often more sensitive to subtle cognitive effects