Faith in the Anthropocene: Contested Theologies of Nature and Political Attitudes on Environmental Stewardship

This dissertation improves upon past understanding of politics, religion, and nature through a close exploration of the role Christian theology plays in opinion formation. It does so by probing the varieties of religiously motivated environmental stewardship and religious attitudes towards anthropogenic changes of nature. The dissertation also develops new methodological tools to better understand the role of faith during the Anthropocene. The study employs a mixed-method approach which compares analysis of denominational proclamations about global warming with in-person clergy interviews and survey data collected from two American heartland states. The survey data primarily focuses on climate change, with genetically modified organisms as an additional example of humans altering the natural order. Unique to this dissertation are new measurements of Christian theologies about the human relationship with the created order, which clarify an enduring debate over religion and the environment. In particular, theology encouraging dominion over nature has almost vanished from religious consciousness. Instead, the key theological distinction is between stewardship as resource management and stewardship as preservation. These theological distinctions help explain acceptance or resistance to anthropogenic changes to nature and they illuminate important differences in policy preferences around climate change, global warming, and other science-driven policy area

Use and Access in the New Ecology of Public Messaging

The use of social media and other communication technologies have created a new ecology of public messaging. As it is a core task of government to inform its residents about risks, public managers and emergency managers, specifically, must understand this new ecology if they are to effectively communicate with the public. A challenge of this new media environment is the differential access of members of the community to various technologies. Partial proportional odds regression (PPO) provides a strategy that is useful to separate effects of access from effects of use. This article illustrates the use of PPO regression to separate access and use effects based on a survey which followed a series of severe weather events in the spring of 2016. The survey includes an address-based sample of residents in the state of Oklahoma to ask about the use of various communication technologies to share information about the weather system (among other subjects). We find that age and work status are related to access while income, gender, race and exposure to extreme weather are related to use of various communication media. This information provides emergency managers with a stronger foundation for developing a portfolio of information options for their communities

An Update on Arginase Inhibitors and Inhibitory Assays

International audienceAbstract: Arginase, which converts arginine into ornithine and urea, is a promising therapeutic target. Arginase is involved in cardiovascular diseases, parasitic infections and, through a critical role in immunity, in some cancers. There is a need to develop effective arginase inhibitors and therefore efforts to identify and optimize new inhibitors are increasing. Several methods of evaluating arginase activity are available, but few directly measure the product. Radiometric assays need to separate urea and dying reactions require acidic conditions and sometimes heating. Hence, there are a variety of different approaches available, and each approach has its own limits and benefits. In this review, we provide an update on arginase inhibitors, followed by a discussion on available arginase assays and alternative methods, with a focus on the intrinsic biases and parameters that are likely to impact results

Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology

The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology was an initiative to independently replicate selected experiments from a number of high-profile papers in the field of cancer biology. In the end 50 experiments from 23 papers were repeated. The final two outputs from the project recount in detail the challenges the project team encountered while repeating these experiments ('Challenges for assessing replicability in preclinical cancer biology': https://elifesciences.org/articles/67995), and report the results of a meta-analysis that combined the results from all the experiments ('Investigating the replicability of preclinical cancer biology': https://elifesciences.org/articles/71601). The project was a collaboration between the Center for Open Science and Science Exchange with all papers published by eLife