Projects of devotion : energy exploration and moral ambition in the cosmoeconomy of oil and gas in the Western United States

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 715146. The authors also acknowledge the funding received to carry out this research from the Leverhulme Trust (ECF‐2013‐177) and the British Academy (EN150010).This article considers how people working in the oil and gas industry in Colorado perceive their involvement in energy exploration in relation to broader understandings of devotion, compassion, and outreach. I argue that although their energy projects may appear to merely echo companies’ formal promotional pitches, the oil field and corporate actors’ own moral ambitions reveal more-than-human cosmoeconomic visions of oil’s potentiality. This article thus demonstrates how multiple and diverging ethical registers intersect and inform the valuation of oil.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Associations of autozygosity with a broad range of human phenotypes

In many species, the offspring of related parents suffer reduced reproductive success, a phenomenon known as inbreeding depression. In humans, the importance of this effect has remained unclear, partly because reproduction between close relatives is both rare and frequently associated with confounding social factors. Here, using genomic inbreeding coefficients (F-ROH) for >1.4 million individuals, we show that F-ROH is significantly associated (p <0.0005) with apparently deleterious changes in 32 out of 100 traits analysed. These changes are associated with runs of homozygosity (ROH), but not with common variant homozygosity, suggesting that genetic variants associated with inbreeding depression are predominantly rare. The effect on fertility is striking: F-ROH equivalent to the offspring of first cousins is associated with a 55% decrease [95% CI 44-66%] in the odds of having children. Finally, the effects of F-ROH are confirmed within full-sibling pairs, where the variation in F-ROH is independent of all environmental confounding.Peer reviewe

New insights into the genetic etiology of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias

Characterization of the genetic landscape of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and related dementias (ADD) provides a unique opportunity for a better understanding of the associated pathophysiological processes. We performed a two-stage genome-wide association study totaling 111,326 clinically diagnosed/'proxy' AD cases and 677,663 controls. We found 75 risk loci, of which 42 were new at the time of analysis. Pathway enrichment analyses confirmed the involvement of amyloid/tau pathways and highlighted microglia implication. Gene prioritization in the new loci identified 31 genes that were suggestive of new genetically associated processes, including the tumor necrosis factor alpha pathway through the linear ubiquitin chain assembly complex. We also built a new genetic risk score associated with the risk of future AD/dementia or progression from mild cognitive impairment to AD/dementia. The improvement in prediction led to a 1.6- to 1.9-fold increase in AD risk from the lowest to the highest decile, in addition to effects of age and the APOE ε4 allele

The search for top at CDF

We present results on the search for the top quark in {bar p}p collisions at {radical}s = 1.8 TeV. The data sample collected during the 1988--89 run with the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) includes more than 4 pb{sup {minus}1}. We report here on an extension of previously published searches for the top quark in electron + jets and the dilepton channel electron-muon. The 95% confidence level limit on the top mass is 89 GeV/c{sup 2}

A deep proper-motion survey of the nearby open cluster Blanco 1ltlink href

We provide two comprehensive catalogues of positions and proper motions in the area of open cluster Blanco 1. The main catalogue, CtlgM, contains 6271 objects down to V∼ 18.5 and covers a circular ∼11 deg 2 area. The accuracy of CtlgM proper motions, at about 0.3-0.5masyr -1 for well-measured stars, permits an excellent segregation between the cluster and field stars. The vector-point diagram of proper motions indicates an estimated total of ∼165 cluster members among the stars in our sample, while 314 stars with σ μ < 2.5masyr -1 have membership probabilities P μ≥ 1 per cent. We also explored the astrometric potential of the Catalogue of Objects and Measured Parameters from All Sky Surveys (COMPASS) data base in order to obtain additional proper motions for fainter stars in the area of Blanco 1. This effort produced the second catalogue of proper motions, CtlgD, containing 11598 objects down to V∼ 21. A total of 4273 objects are common between the two catalogues. The accuracy of proper motions in CtlgD ranges from 1.0 to 6masyr -1. A combination of both proper-motion catalogues was instrumental in confirming that Blanco 1 contains a large population of M dwarfs (∼150 down to M5V - the limit of our survey). In many respects, Blanco 1 is a scaled down 'twin' of the Pleiades. The noted discrepancy between the distance from a new Hipparcos parallax of Blanco 1 and the cluster's photometric distance, at least partially, might be due to the apparent correlation between parallax and proper motion in right ascension for the ensemble of cluster members. © 2011 The Authors Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society © 2011 RAS.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe