The Ministry of the Word in These Trying Times

Periods of adversity in the life of the Church and the world always involve a special challenge to the ministry of the Word. The present era of spiritual, social, and economic distress is no exception. Within the memory of the generation now living there has never been a general situation demanding more earnest attention, single-hearted concentration, and enlightened action on the part of God\u27s ambassadors on earth than that created by the developments of these trying times

Paper Session I-C - MIKROBA -Mission Opportunity for Microgravity Payloads

The MIKROBA-system (MIKRO-g with BAlloon drop capsules) is a new facility in the German Microgravity Programme providing reduced gravity at a level \u3c, 10~^ g for time periods of approximately 57 - 60 seconds. The drop capsule is attached to a stratospheric balloon (volume » 600.000 cubic meter) and will be carried up to altitudes between 40 and 45 km. After reaching its floating altitude the capsule will be released via telecommand. During the free-fall inside the capsule microgravity condition is realized. The aerodynamic drag (induced by increasing air density and velocity of the capsule especially at the end of the drop phase) is compensated by a controlable cold gas thrust system. Parachute acitivation at altitudes between 20 and 14 km terminates the period of microgravity and guarantees a soft landing. When the main parachute is deployed at 3 km altitude th.e capsule tilts to horizontal position and two airbags will be inflated and damp the touch down shock. The capsule is returned by helicopter or car to the launch site

p53 activity contributes to defective interfollicular epidermal differentiation in hyperproliferative murine skin.

Background- The role of p53 in the pathogenesis of skin diseases such as plaque-type psoriasis has long been questioned but never resolved. Objectives- In this study we set out to determine the contribution of p53 activity to defective interfollicular epidermal skin differentiation in a murine hyperproliferative skin model. Methods- We used the tamoxifen-inducible K14MycER mouse model which exhibits abnormal epidermal differentiation in response to high MYC activity, crossed with p53 knock-out mice. Results- We show that genetic deletion of p53 leads to improvements in granular layer formation. Furthermore, we show that p53 activity regulates down-stream expression of Keratin 6a, Pparb/d and Pparg and is regulated upstream by retinoic acid signalling-dependent mechanisms. Conclusion- We conclude aberrant non-apoptotic p53 activity contributes, in-part, to abnormal differentiation and granular layer defects.This work was supported by the Prof. Fiona M. Watt via the MRC, Wellcome Trust, CRUK, EU FP7 programme, the University of Cambridge, Hutchison Whampoa Ltd. This work was also supported by A/ Prof. Ian M. Smyth and Monash University.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Wiley via http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/bjd.1404

Separated Oscillatory Fields for High-Precision Penning Trap Mass Spectrometry

Ramsey's method of separated oscillatory fields is applied to the excitation of the cyclotron motion of short-lived ions in a Penning trap to improve the precision of their measured mass. The theoretical description of the extracted ion-cyclotron-resonance line shape is derived out and its correctness demonstrated experimentally by measuring the mass of the short-lived $^{38}$Ca nuclide with an uncertainty of $1.6\cdot 10^{-8}$ using the ISOLTRAP Penning trap mass spectrometer at CERN. The mass value of the superallowed beta-emitter $^{38}$Ca is an important contribution for testing the conserved-vector-current hypothesis of the electroweak interaction. It is shown that the Ramsey method applied to mass measurements yields a statistical uncertainty similar to that obtained by the conventional technique ten times faster.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, 0 table

Phasing for medical sequencing using rare variants and large haplotype reference panels.

Motivation: There is growing recognition that estimating haplotypes from high coverage sequencing of single samples in clinical settings is an important problem. At the same time very large datasets consisting of tens and hundreds of thousands of high-coverage sequenced samples will soon be available. We describe a method that takes advantage of these huge human genetic variation resources and rare variant sharing patterns to estimate haplotypes on single sequenced samples. Sharing rare variants between two individuals is more likely to arise from a recent common ancestor and, hence, also more likely to indicate similar shared haplotypes over a substantial flanking region of sequence.Results: Our method exploits this idea to select a small set of highly informative copying states within a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) phasing algorithm. Using rare variants in this way allows us to avoid iterative MCMC methods to infer haplotypes. Compared to other approaches that do not explicitly use rare variants we obtain significant gains in phasing accuracy, less variation over phasing runs and improvements in speed. For example, using a reference panel of 7420 haplotypes from the UK10K project, we are able to reduce switch error rates by up to 50% when phasing samples sequenced at high-coverage. In addition, a single step rephasing of the UK10K panel, using rare variant information, has a downstream impact on phasing performance. These results represent a proof of concept that rare variant sharing patterns can be utilized to phase large high-coverage sequencing studies such as the 100 000 Genomes Project dataset.</br

Relativistic quark models of baryons with instantaneous forces

This is the first of a series of three papers treating light baryon resonances (up to 3 GeV) within a relativistically covariant quark model based on the three-fermion Bethe-Salpeter equation with instantaneous two- and three-body forces. In this paper we give a unified description of the theoretical background and demonstrate how to solve the Bethe-Salpeter equation by a reduction to the Salpeter equation. The specific new features of our covariant Salpeter model with respect to the usual nonrelativistic quark model are discussed in detail. The purely theoretical results obtained in this paper will be applied numerically to explicit quark models for light baryons in two subsequent papers

Soft X-ray coronal spectra at low activity levels observed by RESIK

The quiet-Sun X-ray emission is important for deducing coronal heating mechanisms, but it has not been studied in detail since the Orbiting Solar Observatory (OSO) spacecraft era. Bragg crystal spectrometer X-ray observations have generally concentrated on flares and active regions. The high sensitivity of the RESIK (REntgenovsky Spectrometer s Izognutymi Kristalami) instrument on the CORONAS-F solar mission has enabled the X-ray emission from the quiet corona to be studied in a systematic way for the first time. Our aim is to deduce the physical conditions of the non-flaring corona from RESIK line intensities in several spectral ranges using both isothermal and multithermal assumptions. We selected and analyzed spectra in 312 quiet-Sun intervals in January and February 2003, sorting them into 5 groups according to activity level. For each group, the fluxes in selected spectral bands have been used to calculate values parameters for the best-fit that lead to a intensities characteristic of each group. We used both isothermal and multitemperature assumptions, the latter described by differential emission measure (DEM) distributions. RESIK spectra cover the wavelength range (3.3-6.1 A). This includes emission lines of highly ionized Si, S, Cl, Ar, and K, which are suitable for evaluating temperature and emission measure, were used. The RESIK spectra during these intervals of very low solar activity for the first time provide information on the temperature structure of the quiet corona. Although most of the emission seems to arise from plasma with a temperature between 2MK and 3MK, there is also evidence of a hotter plasma (T approx. 10MK) with an emission measure 3 orders smaller than the cooler component. Neither coronal nor photospheric element abundances appear to describe the observed spectra satisfactorily.Comment: Submitting 1 Latex and 7 figure file

Ion dynamics in perturbed quadrupole ion traps

Published versio

Evolution of carbon fluxes during initial soil formation along the forefield of Damma glacier, Switzerland

Soil carbon (C) fluxes, soil respiration and dissolved organic carbon (DOC) leaching were explored along the young Damma glacier forefield chronosequence (7-128years) over a three-year period. To gain insight into the sources of soil CO2 effluxes, radiocarbon signatures of respired CO2 were measured and a vegetation-clipping experiment was performed. Our results showed a clear increase in soil CO2 effluxes with increasing site age from 9±1 to 160±67gCO2-Cm−2year−1, which was linked to soil C accumulation and development of vegetation cover. Seasonal variations of soil respiration were mainly driven by temperature; between 62 and 70% of annual CO2 effluxes were respired during the 4-month long summer season. Sources of soil CO2 effluxes changed along the glacier forefield. For most recently deglaciated sites, radiocarbon-based age estimates indicated ancient C to be the dominant source of soil-respired CO2. At intermediate site age (58-78years), the contribution of new plant-fixed C via rhizosphere respiration amounted up to 90%, while with further soil formation, heterotrophically respired C probably from accumulated ‘older' soil organic carbon (SOC) became increasingly important. In comparison with soil respiration, DOC leaching at 10cm depth was small, but increased similarly from 0.4±0.02 to 7.4±1.6gDOCm−2year−1 over the chronosequence. A strong rise of the ratio of SOC to secondary iron and aluminium oxides strongly suggests that increasing DOC leaching with site age results from a faster increase of the DOC source, SOC, than of the DOC sink, reactive mineral surfaces. Overall, C losses from soil by soil respiration and DOC leaching increased from 9±1 to 70±17 and further to 168±68gCm−2year−1 at the <10, 58-78, and 110-128year old sites. By comparison, total ecosystem C stocks increased from 0.2 to 1.1 and to 3.1kgCm−2 from the young to intermediate and old sites. Therefore, the ecosystem evolved from a dominance of C accumulation in the initial phase to a high throughput system. We suggest that the relatively strong increase in soil C stocks compared to C fluxes is a characteristic feature of initial soil formation on freshly exposed rock