Comment: DNA as Property: Implications on the Constitutionality of DNA Dragnets

Joe Smith is a maintenance worker at County Hospital. One morning he reported to work to find an array of law enforcement vehicles and personnel scattered about the premises. He proceeded to his locker to prepare for work and was confronted by a policeman. Apparently an elderly female patient was sexually assaulted late one night during the previous week. The police officer informed Joe that all male employees were required to give a blood sample to rule out their implication in the assault. Joe was apprehensive and stated that because he worked first shift, he could not possibly have been involved. The police officer told Joe that a warrant would be obtained if he resisted. Reluctantly, Joe agreed, though he did not understand how a sample of his blood could help this investigation. Was Joe required to give this blood sample, and further, should he have been afforded any constitutional protections?\u

My God, My Choice: The Mature Minor Doctrine and Adolescent Refusal of Life-Saving or Sustaining Medical Treatment Based Upon Religious Beliefs

Adults, those over the age of eighteen, are presumed competent and therefore enjoy a certain level of autonomous decision-making free from outside intrusion. Those who have not reached the age of majority, on the other hand, are presumed incompetent, and thus require the aid of parents or guardians to assist in the decision-making process. Recent studies in adolescent development suggest that certain individuals, though not yet eighteen, have the requisite competence to make informed, autonomous medical decisions. In turn, some states have acknowledged the mature minor doctrine, which is based on the seemingly simple principle that minors who demonstrate a sufficient level of maturity ought to have their choices respected independent of third parties.Though many agree that certain adolescents reason on a level equal to that of young adults, debate surrounds the conclusion that minors should be permitted to consent to or refuse medical treatment especially when the choice has life or death consequences. A further complication exists when the decision is based upon religious beliefs. To date, the relevant literature focuses on parents' religious beliefs that influence medical decision making for their minor children, and minors' maturity to decide medical care for themselves. Although some courts and scholars have addressed these topics in the same document, little attention has been paid to the unique circumstances involved when adolescents attempt to refuse life-saving or sustaining medical treatment based upon their expressed religious beliefs. Failing to address the religious maturity of the minors in question creates the possibility that they will be permitted to die for beliefs that are not truly their own.The thesis of this paper is that under these circumstances practitioners must inquire into the authenticity of the religious beliefs of the adolescents. Because the religious upbringing of children is directed by the beliefs of their parents and ministers it is necessary to ensure that the adolescents have developed their own underlying and enduring aims and values. Thus, these adolescents should have the burden to demonstrate clearly and convincingly that they understand their beliefs, as well as the consequences of the medical decision. Only then can practitioners be sure that the minors, independent of third party influence or coercion, have the ability to make an autonomous decision to die for those beliefs in line with their true sense of well-being

Potential feedbacks between loss of biosphere integrity and climate change

Non-technical abstract Individual organisms on land and in the ocean sequester massive amounts of the carbon emitted into the atmosphere by humans. Yet the role of ecosystems as a whole in modulating this uptake of carbon is less clear. Here, we study several different mechanisms by which climate change and ecosystems could interact. We show that climate change could cause changes in ecosystems that reduce their capacity to take up carbon, further accelerating climate change. More research on – and better governance of – interactions between climate change and ecosystems is urgently required. Technical abstract Individual responses of terrestrial and marine species to future climate change will affect the capacity of the land and ocean to store carbon. How system-level changes in the integrity of the biosphere interact with climate change is more uncertain. Here, we explore the consequences of different hypotheses on the interactions between the climate–carbon system and the integrity of the terrestrial and marine biospheres. We investigate mechanisms including impairment of terrestrial ecosystem functioning due to lagged ecosystem responses, permafrost thaw, terrestrial biodiversity loss and impacts of changes in marine biodiversity on the marine biological pump. To investigate climate–biosphere interactions involving complex concepts such as biosphere integrity, we designed and implemented conceptual representations of these climate–biosphere interactions in a stylized climate–carbon model. We find that all four classes of interactions amplify climate change, potentially contributing up to an additional 0.4°C warming across all representative concentration pathway scenarios by the year 2100 and potentially turning the terrestrial biosphere into a net carbon source, although uncertainties are large. The results of this preliminary quantitative study call for more research on – and better integrated governance of – the interactions between climate change and biosphere integrity, the two core ‘planetary boundaries’.The research leading to these results has received funding from the Stordalen Foundation via the Planetary Boundary Research Network (PB.net), the Earth League’s EarthDoc programme, the Leibniz Association (project DOMINOES), European Research Council Synergy project Imbalance-P (grant ERC-2013-SyG-610028), European Research Council Advanced Investigator project ERA (grant ERC-2016-ADG-743080), Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG BE 6485/1-1), Project Grant 2014-589 from the Swedish Research Council Formas and a core grant to the Stockholm Resilience Centre by Mistra

Observing the Evolution of the Universe

How did the universe evolve? The fine angular scale (l>1000) temperature and polarization anisotropies in the CMB are a Rosetta stone for understanding the evolution of the universe. Through detailed measurements one may address everything from the physics of the birth of the universe to the history of star formation and the process by which galaxies formed. One may in addition track the evolution of the dark energy and discover the net neutrino mass. We are at the dawn of a new era in which hundreds of square degrees of sky can be mapped with arcminute resolution and sensitivities measured in microKelvin. Acquiring these data requires the use of special purpose telescopes such as the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), located in Chile, and the South Pole Telescope (SPT). These new telescopes are outfitted with a new generation of custom mm-wave kilo-pixel arrays. Additional instruments are in the planning stages.Comment: Science White Paper submitted to the US Astro2010 Decadal Survey. Full list of 177 author available at http://cmbpol.uchicago.ed

Intermediate and extreme mass-ratio inspirals — astrophysics, science applications and detection using LISA

Black hole binaries with extreme (gtrsim104:1) or intermediate (~102–104:1) mass ratios are among the most interesting gravitational wave sources that are expected to be detected by the proposed laser interferometer space antenna (LISA). These sources have the potential to tell us much about astrophysics, but are also of unique importance for testing aspects of the general theory of relativity in the strong field regime. Here we discuss these sources from the perspectives of astrophysics, data analysis and applications to testing general relativity, providing both a description of the current state of knowledge and an outline of some of the outstanding questions that still need to be addressed. This review grew out of discussions at a workshop in September 2006 hosted by the Albert Einstein Institute in Golm, Germany

Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene

This is the final version of the article. Available from National Academy of Sciences via the DOI in this record.We explore the risk that self-reinforcing feedbacks could push the Earth System toward a planetary threshold that, if crossed, could prevent stabilization of the climate at intermediate temperature rises and cause continued warming on a "Hothouse Earth" pathway even as human emissions are reduced. Crossing the threshold would lead to a much higher global average temperature than any interglacial in the past 1.2 million years and to sea levels significantly higher than at any time in the Holocene. We examine the evidence that such a threshold might exist and where it might be. If the threshold is crossed, the resulting trajectory would likely cause serious disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies. Collective human action is required to steer the Earth System away from a potential threshold and stabilize it in a habitable interglacial-like state. Such action entails stewardship of the entire Earth System-biosphere, climate, and societies-and could include decarbonization of the global economy, enhancement of biosphere carbon sinks, behavioral changes, technological innovations, new governance arrangements, and transformed social values.W.S. and C.P.S. are members of the Anthropocene Working Group. W.S., J.R., K.R., S.E.C., J.F.D., I.F., S.J.L., R.W. and H.J.S. are members of the Planetary Boundaries Research Network PB.net and the Earth League’s EarthDoc Programme supported by the Stordalen Foundation. T.M.L. was supported by a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award and the European Union Framework Programme 7 Project HELIX. C.F. was supported by the Erling– Persson Family Foundation. The participation of D.L. was supported by the Haury Program in Environment and Social Justice and National Science Foundation (USA) Decadal and Regional Climate Prediction using Earth System Models Grant 1243125. S.E.C. was supported in part by Swedish Research Council Formas Grant 2012-742. J.F.D. and R.W. were supported by Leibniz Association Project DOMINOES. S.J.L. receives funding from Formas Grant 2014-589. This paper is a contribution to European Research Council Advanced Grant 2016, Earth Resilience in the Anthropocene Project 743080

The Fourteenth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: First Spectroscopic Data from the extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey and from the second phase of the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment

The fourth generation of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-IV) has been in operation since July 2014. This paper describes the second data release from this phase, and the fourteenth from SDSS overall (making this, Data Release Fourteen or DR14). This release makes public data taken by SDSS-IV in its first two years of operation (July 2014-2016). Like all previous SDSS releases, DR14 is cumulative, including the most recent reductions and calibrations of all data taken by SDSS since the first phase began operations in 2000. New in DR14 is the first public release of data from the extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS); the first data from the second phase of the Apache Point Observatory (APO) Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE-2), including stellar parameter estimates from an innovative data driven machine learning algorithm known as "The Cannon"; and almost twice as many data cubes from the Mapping Nearby Galaxies at APO (MaNGA) survey as were in the previous release (N = 2812 in total). This paper describes the location and format of the publicly available data from SDSS-IV surveys. We provide references to the important technical papers describing how these data have been taken (both targeting and observation details) and processed for scientific use. The SDSS website (www.sdss.org) has been updated for this release, and provides links to data downloads, as well as tutorials and examples of data use. SDSS-IV is planning to continue to collect astronomical data until 2020, and will be followed by SDSS-V.Comment: SDSS-IV collaboration alphabetical author data release paper. DR14 happened on 31st July 2017. 19 pages, 5 figures. Accepted by ApJS on 28th Nov 2017 (this is the "post-print" and "post-proofs" version; minor corrections only from v1, and most of errors found in proofs corrected