Deconversion

Streib H. Deconversion. In: Rambo LR, Farhadian CE, eds. The Oxford Handbook on Religious Conversion. Oxford handbooks. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2014: 271-296.To include a chapter on deconversion in a handbook on conversion is not only appropriate, but, as I argue, necessary for various reasons: It is no longer possible to ignore the fact that a growing number of contemporaries chose to convert more than once in their lifetime; multiple conversions are unavoidable in cultures in which religion occurs no longer as singular in a mono-religious environment, but as plural. Multiple conversions, however, involve deconversion(s). While some contributions use the term “conversion” for both the disaffiliation and the re-affiliation, I focus on “deconversion” in order to include disaffiliations without re-affiliation – which responds to the growing attention to atheists and apostates in the US (cf. Streib & Klein, 2011). Disaffiliation processes constitute an independent field of study that deserves special scientific attention. And here, the term “deconversion” may serve as a reminder of the depth and intensity of biographical change and the new orientation of one’s life that eventually is associated with disaffiliation and is not reserved to conversion. In this chapter, I will start with a conceptualization of deconversion, discuss recent quantitative and qualitative research, and finally draw conclusions and suggest directions for future research

The sequence of rice chromosomes 11 and 12, rich in disease resistance genes and recent gene duplications

Background: Rice is an important staple food and, with the smallest cereal genome, serves as a reference species for studies on the evolution of cereals and other grasses. Therefore, decoding its entire genome will be a prerequisite for applied and basic research on this species and all other cereals. Results: We have determined and analyzed the complete sequences of two of its chromosomes, 11 and 12, which total 55.9 Mb (14.3% of the entire genome length), based on a set of overlapping clones. A total of 5,993 non-transposable element related genes are present on these chromosomes. Among them are 289 disease resistance-like and 28 defense-response genes, a higher proportion of these categories than on any other rice chromosome. A three-Mb segment on both chromosomes resulted from a duplication 7.7 million years ago (mya), the most recent large-scale duplication in the rice genome. Paralogous gene copies within this segmental duplication can be aligned with genomic assemblies from sorghum and maize. Although these gene copies are preserved on both chromosomes, their expression patterns have diverged. When the gene order of rice chromosomes 11 and 12 was compared to wheat gene loci, significant synteny between these orthologous regions was detected, illustrating the presence of conserved genes alternating with recently evolved genes. Conclusion: Because the resistance and defense response genes, enriched on these chromosomes relative to the whole genome, also occur in clusters, they provide a preferred target for breeding durable disease resistance in rice and the isolation of their allelic variants. The recent duplication of a large chromosomal segment coupled with the high density of disease resistance gene clusters makes this the most recently evolved part of the rice genome. Based on syntenic alignments of these chromosomes, rice chromosome 11 and 12 do not appear to have resulted from a single whole-genome duplication event as previously suggested

Lawson criterion for ignition exceeded in an inertial fusion experiment

For more than half a century, researchers around the world have been engaged in attempts to achieve fusion ignition as a proof of principle of various fusion concepts. Following the Lawson criterion, an ignited plasma is one where the fusion heating power is high enough to overcome all the physical processes that cool the fusion plasma, creating a positive thermodynamic feedback loop with rapidly increasing temperature. In inertially confined fusion, ignition is a state where the fusion plasma can begin "burn propagation" into surrounding cold fuel, enabling the possibility of high energy gain. While "scientific breakeven" (i.e., unity target gain) has not yet been achieved (here target gain is 0.72, 1.37 MJ of fusion for 1.92 MJ of laser energy), this Letter reports the first controlled fusion experiment, using laser indirect drive, on the National Ignition Facility to produce capsule gain (here 5.8) and reach ignition by nine different formulations of the Lawson criterion

Understanding religious conversion

New Havenxx, 240 p.; 24 c