Why are so many political leaders unethical and what can we do about it?

Republicans wonder how New Yorkers could have ever supported disgraced New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, amazed that his polling among state voters remained so high throughout almost the entirety of the scandals of 2020-21. Meanwhile, Democrats are flabbergasted at the strong levels of support former President Donald Trump continues to receive from conservative voters, despite his numerous moral miscues. The rise and fall of these politicians (as well as that of countless others) offers fascinating evidence on the ethics of our elected officials, and other things that don\u27t exist

High star formation rates as the origin of turbulence in early and modern disk galaxies

High spatial and spectral resolution observations of star formation and kinematics in early galaxies have shown that two-thirds are massive rotating disk galaxies with the remainder being less massive non-rotating objects. The line of sight averaged velocity dispersions are typically five times higher than in today's disk galaxies. This has suggested that gravitationally-unstable, gas-rich disks in the early Universe are fuelled by cold, dense accreting gas flowing along cosmic filaments and penetrating hot galactic gas halos. However these accreting flows have not been observed, and cosmic accretion cannot power the observed level of turbulence. Here we report on a new sample of rare high-velocity-dispersion disk galaxies we have discovered in the nearby Universe where cold accretion is unlikely to drive their high star-formation rates. We find that the velocity dispersion is most fundamentally correlated with their star-formation rates, and not their mass nor gas fraction, which leads to a new picture where star formation itself is the energetic driver of galaxy disk turbulence at all cosmic epochs.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, Supplimentary Info available at: http://pulsar.swin.edu.au/~agreen/nature/sigma_mean_arXiv.pdf. Accepted for publication in Natur

Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) Mission: Status at the Initiation of the Science Mapping Phase

The Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission, a component of NASA's Discovery Program, launched successfully from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on September 10, 2011. The dual spacecraft traversed independent, low-energy trajectories to the Moon via the EL-1 Lagrange point and inserted into elliptical, 11.5-hour polar orbits around the Moon on December 31, 2011, and January 1, 2012. The spacecraft are currently executing a series of maneuvers to circularize their orbits at 55-km mean altitude. Once the mapping orbit is achieved, the spacecraft will undergo additional maneuvers to align them into mapping configuration. The mission is on track to initiate the Science Phase on March 8, 2012

On the significance of population II Li6 abundances

We explore possible depletion factors for Li6 in the three stars where it has been detected. To this end, we assume that 6Li/H scales as 16O/H throughout the galactic evolution, an assumption motivated by the observations of a similar scaling for 9Be. We examine the uncertainties attached to this modeling of 6Li galactic evolution; we also incorporate a recent evaluation of the primordial production of 6Li. The depletion factor D6, for 6Li, in HD84937, is constrained to be less than 4 at 95% c.l.. This depletion factor is an extreme upper limit on the depletion factor for 7Li. We conclude that the primordial abundance of 7Li cannot be higher that twice the observed value, since no current stellar model is able to reproduce the observed trends of 7Li with temperature and metallicity, and yet deplete 7Li by more than a factor 2, while satisfying D6<4. All three 6Li observations are in excellent agreement with all standard expectations: Big-Bang nucleosynthesis with 2<$\eta_{10}$<6.5, and standard isochrones of 6Li survival. We discuss possible deviations from our assumption of 6Li/H scaling with 16O/H, due to alpha-alpha creation of 6Li in various sites. We notably reject stellar flares as a significant source of 6Li in HD84937.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figures, LaTeX. To appear in Ap

Revised Thickness of the Lunar Crust from GRAIL Data: Implications for Lunar Bulk Composition

High-resolution gravity data from GRAIL have yielded new estimates of the bulk density and thickness of the lunar crust. The bulk density of the highlands crust is 2550 kg m-3. From a comparison with crustal composition measured remotely, this density implies a mean porosity of 12%. With this bulk density and constraints from the Apollo seismic experiment, the average global crustal thickness is found to lie between 34 and 43 km, a value 10 to 20 km less than several previous estimates. Crustal thickness is a central parameter in estimating bulk lunar composition. Estimates of the concentrations of refractory elements in the Moon from heat flow, remote sensing and sample data, and geophysical data fall into two categories: those with refractory element abundances enriched by 50% or more relative to Earth, and those with abundances the same as Earth. Settling this issue has implications for processes operating during lunar formation. The crustal thickness resulting from analysis of GRAIL data is less than several previous estimates. We show here that a refractory-enriched Moon is not require

Selection of Antibody Responses Associated With Plasmodium falciparum Infections in the Context of Malaria Elimination.

In our aim to eliminate malaria, more sensitive tools to detect residual transmission are quickly becoming essential. Antimalarial antibody responses persist in the blood after a malaria infection and provide a wider window to detect exposure to infection compared to parasite detection metrics. Here, we aimed to select antibody responses associated with recent and cumulative exposure to malaria using cross-sectional survey data from Haiti, an elimination setting. Using a multiplex bead assay, we generated data for antibody responses (immunoglobulin G) to 23 Plasmodium falciparum targets in 29,481 participants across three surveys. This included one community-based survey in which participants were enrolled during household visits and two sentinel group surveys in which participants were enrolled at schools and health facilities. First, we correlated continuous antibody responses with age (Spearman) to determine which showed strong age-related associations indicating accumulation over time with limited loss. AMA-1 and MSP-119 antibody levels showed the strongest correlation with age (0.47 and 0.43, p < 0.001) in the community-based survey, which was most representative of the underlying age structure of the population, thus seropositivity to either of these antibodies was considered representative of cumulative exposure to malaria. Next, in the absence of a gold standard for recent exposure, we included antibody responses to the remaining targets to predict highly sensitive rapid diagnostic test (hsRDT) status using receiver operating characteristic curves. For this, only data from the survey with the highest hsRDT prevalence was used (7.2%; 348/4,849). The performance of the top two antigens in the training dataset (two-thirds of the dataset; n = 3,204)-Etramp 5 ag 1 and GLURP-R0 (area-under-the-curve, AUC, 0.892 and 0.825, respectively)-was confirmed in the test dataset (remaining one-third of the dataset; n = 1,652, AUC 0.903 and 0.848, respectively). As no further improvement was seen by combining seropositivity to GLURP-R0 and Etramp 5 ag 1 (p = 0.266), seropositivity to Etramp 5 ag 1 alone was selected as representative of current or recent exposure to malaria. The validation of antibody responses associated with these exposure histories simplifies analyses and interpretation of antibody data and facilitates the application of results to evaluate programs

Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL): Extended Mission and End-Game Status

The Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) [1], NASA s eleventh Discovery mission, successfully executed its Primary Mission (PM) in lunar orbit between March 1, 2012 and May 29, 2012. GRAIL s Extended Mission (XM) initiated on August 30, 2012 and was successfully completed on December 14, 2012. The XM provided an additional three months of gravity mapping at half the altitude (23 km) of the PM (55 km), and is providing higherresolution gravity models that are being used to map the upper crust of the Moon in unprecedented detail

Summary of the Results from the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter after Seven Years in Lunar Orbit

In June 2009 the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft was launched to the Moon. The payload consists of 7 science instruments selected to characterize sites for future robotic and human missions. Among them, the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) was designed to obtain altimetry, surface roughness, and reflectance measurements. The primary phase of lunar exploration lasted one year, following a 3-month commissioning phase. On completion of its exploration objectives, the LRO mission transitioned to a science mission. After 7 years in lunar orbit, the LOLA instrument continues to map the lunar surface. The LOLA dataset is one of the foundational datasets acquired by the various LRO instruments. LOLA provided a high-accuracy global geodetic reference frame to which past, present and future lunar observations can be referenced. It also obtained high-resolution and accurate global topography that were used to determine regions in permanent shadow at the lunar poles. LOLA further contributed to the study of polar volatiles through its unique measurement of surface brightness at zero phase, which revealed anomalies in several polar craters that may indicate the presence of water ice. In this paper, we describe the many LOLA accomplishments to date and its contribution to lunar and planetary science

Observations of Milky Way Dwarf Spheroidal galaxies with the Fermi-LAT detector and constraints on Dark Matter models

We report on the observations of 14 dwarf spheroidal galaxies with the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope taken during the first 11 months of survey mode operations. The Fermi telescope provides a new opportunity to test particle dark matter models through the expected gamma-ray emission produced by pair annihilation of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). Local Group dwarf spheroidal galaxies, the largest galactic substructures predicted by the cold dark matter scenario, are attractive targets for such indirect searches for dark matter because they are nearby and among the most extreme dark matter dominated environments. No significant gamma-ray emission was detected above 100 MeV from the candidate dwarf galaxies. We determine upper limits to the gamma-ray flux assuming both power-law spectra and representative spectra from WIMP annihilation. The resulting integral flux above 100 MeV is constrained to be at a level below around 10^-9 photons cm^-2 s^-1. Using recent stellar kinematic data, the gamma-ray flux limits are combined with improved determinations of the dark matter density profile in 8 of the 14 candidate dwarfs to place limits on the pair annihilation cross-section of WIMPs in several widely studied extensions of the standard model. With the present data, we are able to rule out large parts of the parameter space where the thermal relic density is below the observed cosmological dark matter density and WIMPs (neutralinos here) are dominantly produced non-thermally, e.g. in models where supersymmetry breaking occurs via anomaly mediation. The gamma-ray limits presented here also constrain some WIMP models proposed to explain the Fermi and PAMELA e^+e^- data, including low-mass wino-like neutralinos and models with TeV masses pair-annihilating into muon-antimuon pairs. (Abridged)Comment: 25 pages, 4 figures, accepted to ApJ, Corresponding authors: J. Cohen-Tanugi, C. Farnier, T.E. Jeltema, E. Nuss, and S. Profum