Interpreting the Intentional Inaccessibility of the Early Modern Roman Catholic Church

Many may wonder why, in the modern day, the Roman Catholic Church continues to incorporate Latin, a now barely extant language, into its canonic religious rituals and public services. However, to understand whether there is a latently malicious intent lurking beneath this esoteric tradition, we must look back to the 1545 Council of Trent, in which these traditions were first canonized. This choice on the part of the Catholic Church helped incense the Protestant Reformation’s criticisms against the Church for exclusivizing the very religion its followers were practicing. This paper investigates the origins of the Catholic Church’s suppressive practices against the religious knowledge of the masses and how this tactic backfired on their intentions

Maude: specification and programming in rewriting logic

Maude is a high-level language and a high-performance system supporting executable specification and declarative programming in rewriting logic. Since rewriting logic contains equational logic, Maude also supports equational specification and programming in its sublanguage of functional modules and theories. The underlying equational logic chosen for Maude is membership equational logic, that has sorts, subsorts, operator overloading, and partiality definable by membership and equality conditions. Rewriting logic is reflective, in the sense of being able to express its own metalevel at the object level. Reflection is systematically exploited in Maude endowing the language with powerful metaprogramming capabilities, including both user-definable module operations and declarative strategies to guide the deduction process. This paper explains and illustrates with examples the main concepts of Maude's language design, including its underlying logic, functional, system and object-oriented modules, as well as parameterized modules, theories, and views. We also explain how Maude supports reflection, metaprogramming and internal strategies. The paper outlines the principles underlying the Maude system implementation, including its semicompilation techniques. We conclude with some remarks about applications, work on a formal environment for Maude, and a mobile language extension of Maude

Lessons from local governance and collective action efforts to manage irrigation withdrawals in Kansas

This study evaluates four groundwater management plans to increase the understanding of how local governance and collective action can be effectively implemented to manage irrigation withdrawals in Kansas. The results of our analysis demonstrate five key lessons that highlight the challenges of collective action efforts to manage common-pool resources in a developed country setting. First, the four management plans generally follow Ostrom’s design principles for collective action. However, there are important areas—particularly boundaries and allocations definition—where the management plans could be improved to better align with Ostrom’s design principles. Second, a majority of farmers agree that action is needed to reduce the rate of aquifer depletion but management plans have not substantially reduced water use. Third, management plans that allow for voluntary participation have not received more support than those that require mandatory compliance, perhaps due to the classic free-rider problem. Fourth, there is no clear evidence that heterogeneous benefits from management explain support within a management area. Fifth, groundwater users generally perceive that they have an acceptable level of information. Our analysis highlights the significant challenges facing successful collective action efforts to manage water in the USA. and that the efforts are most likely to be successful when they are small-scale, mandatory, and involve users in the formation process

Uncertainty Quantification at the Microscale: A Data-Driven Multi-Scale Approach

Data-driven formulations are currently developed to deal with the complexity of the multiphysics governing the response of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) to external stimuli and can be extremely helpful. Such devices are in fact characterized by a hierarchy of length and timescales, which are difficult to fully account for in a purely model-based approach. In this work, we specifically refer to a (single-axis) Lorentz force micro-magnetometer designed for navigation purposes. Due to an alternating current flowing in a slender mechanical part (beam) and featuring an ad hoc set frequency, the microsystem is driven into resonance so that its sensitivity to the magnetic field is improved. A reduced-order physical model was formerly developed for the aforementioned movable part of the device; this model was then used to feed and speed up a multi-physics and multi-objective topology optimization procedure, aiming to design a robust and performing magnetometer. The stochastic effects, which are responsible for the scattering in the experimental data at the microscale, were not accounted for in such a model-based approach. A recently proposed formulation is here discussed and further extended to allow for such stochastic effects. The proposed multi-scale deep learning approach features: at the material scale, a convolutional neural network adopted to learn the scattering in the mechanical properties of polysilicon, induced by its morphology; and, at the device scale, two feedforward neural networks, one adopted to upscale the mechanical properties, while the other learns a microstructure-informed mapping between the geometric imperfections induced by the microfabrication process and the effective response of the movable part of the magnetometer. The data-driven models are linked through the physical model to provide a kind of hybrid solution to the problem. Results relevant to different neural network architectures are here discussed, along with a proposal to frame the approach as a multi-fidelity, uncertainty quantification procedure

Sensitive and specific detection of explosives in solution and vapour by surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy on silver nanocubes

Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) has been widely utilised as a sensitive analytical technique for the detection of trace levels of organic molecules. The detection of organic compounds in the gas phase is particularly challenging due to the low concentration of adsorbed molecules on the surface of the SERS substrate. This is particularly the case for explosive materials, which typically have very low vapour pressures, limiting the use of SERS for their identification. In this work, silver nanocubes (AgNCs) were developed as a highly sensitive SERS substrate with very low limit-of-detection (LOD) for explosive materials down to the femtomolar (10−15 M) range. Unlike typical gold-based nanostructures, the AgNCs were found suitable for the detection of both aromatic and aliphatic explosives, enabling detection with high specificity at low concentration. SERS studies were first carried out using a model analyte, Rhodamine-6G (Rh-6G), as a probe molecule. The SERS enhancement factor was estimated as 8.71 × 1010 in this case. Further studies involved femtomolar concentrations of 2,4-dinitrotoluene (DNT) and nanomolar concentrations of 1,3,5-trinitroperhydro-1,3,5-triazine (RDX), as well as vapour phase detection of DNT

Clock genes, pancreatic function and diabetes

Circadian physiology is responsible for the temporal regulation of metabolism to optimize energy homeostasis throughout the day. Disturbances in the light/dark cycle, sleep/wake schedule, or feeding/activity behavior can affect the circadian function of the clocks located in the brain and peripheral tissues. These alterations have been associated with impaired glucose tolerance and type 2 diabetes. Animal models with molecular manipulation of clock genes and genetic studies in humans also support these links. It has been demonstrated that the endocrine pancreas has an intrinsic self-sustained clock, and recent studies have revealed an important role of clock genes in pancreatic β cells, glucose homeostasis, and diabetes.This work was supported by grants from the Ministerio de Economía (BFU2013-42789)This work was supported by grants from Generalitat Valenciana (PROMETEO/2011/080

Apparent slip mechanism between two spheres based on solvent rheology: Theory and implication for the shear thinning of non-Brownian suspensions

Analytical results for the apparent slip between two spheres in a simple biviscous model of a shear thinning fluid are presented. Velocity profiles and apparent slip lengths along the surfaces are analyzed in order to characterize the physical mechanism. It is shown that in this non-Newtonian model, the effect of shear-thinning limited to high-shear rates in the interstitial regions between close spheres can be alternatively interpreted as the onset of an apparent shear-rate dependent slippage effect. The results of the theory compare well with experiments from the literature showing the presence of surface slip on a particle approaching a planar wall. In terms of implications on suspensions rheology, the present results bridge the ’hidden’ solvent shear-thinning theory [A. Va ́zquez-Quesada et al. , Phys. Rev. Lett., 117, 108001-5 (2016)] with slip-based models presented recently in [M. Kroupa et al., Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. 19, 5979-5984 (2017)] as a possible explanation on the mechanism behind the shear-thinning in hard-sphere non-Brownian suspensions

Benign Bilateral Adenomyoepithelioma of the Mammary Gland in a Ring-tailed Lemur (Lemur catta)

Naturally occurring mammary tumours are uncommon in prosimians. A 20-year-old female ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta) developed bilateral enlargement of the mammary glands. Surgical removal revealed that both masses were comprised of multiple nodules and cystic areas that entirely replaced the normal glands. Histologically, a benign neoplastic biphasic cellular proliferation, composed of luminal–epithelial and basal–myoepithelial components, was identified. Immunohistochemical analysis for expression of cytokeratin (CK) AE1/AE3, CK7, CK5 + 8, CK14, vimentin, p63 and 14-3-3σ highlighted the biphasic nature of the neoplasm. A low mitotic count, low Ki67 labelling index, expression of oestrogen receptor-α, lack of expression of human epidermal growth factor receptor and a 3-year disease-free period without recurrence supported the benign nature of the tumour. Macroscopically, histologically and immunohistochemically this neoplasm resembled benign adenomyoepithelioma of the breast in women. This is the first complete report of a naturally occurring mammary tumour in a ring-tailed lemur