Gods, Heroes, & Kings: The Battle for Mythic Britain

The islands of Britain have been a crossroads of gods, heroes, and kings-those of flesh as well as those of myth-for thousands of years. Successive waves of invasion brought distinctive legends, rites, and beliefs. The ancient Celts displaced earlier indigenous peoples, only to find themselves displaced in turn by the Romans, who then abandoned the islands to Germanic tribes, a people themselves nearly overcome in time by an influx of Scandinavians. With each wave of invaders came a battle for the mythic mind of the Isles as the newcomer\u27s belief system met with the existing systems of gods, legends, and myths.In Gods, Heroes, and Kings, medievalist Christopher Fee and veteran myth scholar David Leeming unearth the layers of the British Isles\u27 unique folkloric tradition to discover how this body of seemingly disparate tales developed. The authors find a virtual battlefield of myths in which pagan and Judeo-Christian beliefs fought for dominance, and classical, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, and Celtic narrative threads became tangled together. The resulting body of legends became a strange but coherent hybrid, so that by the time Chaucer wrote The Wife of Bath\u27s Tale in the fourteenth century, a Christian theme of redemption fought for prominence with a tripartite Celtic goddess and the Arthurian legends of Sir Gawain-itself a hybrid mythology.Without a guide, the corpus of British mythology can seem impenetrable. Taking advantage of the latest research, Fee and Leeming employ a unique comparative approach to map the origins and development of one of the richest folkloric traditions. Copiously illustrated with excerpts in translation from the original sources,Gods, Heroes, and Kings provides a fascinating and accessible new perspective on the history of British mythology. [From the publisher]https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/books/1066/thumbnail.jp

Evolution of binary stars and the effect of tides on binary populations

We present a rapid binary evolution algorithm that enables modelling of even the most complex binary systems. In addition to all aspects of single star evolution, features such as mass transfer, mass accretion, common-envelope evolution, collisions, supernova kicks and angular momentum loss mechanisms are included. In particular, circularization and synchronization of the orbit by tidal interactions are calculated for convective, radiative and degenerate damping mechanisms. We use this algorithm to study the formation and evolution of various binary systems. We also investigate the effect that tidal friction has on the outcome of binary evolution. Using the rapid binary code, we generate a series of large binary populations and evaluate the formation rate of interesting individual species and events. By comparing the results for populations with and without tidal friction we quantify the hitherto ignored systematic effect of tides and show that modelling of tidal evolution in binary systems is necessary in order to draw accurate conclusions from population synthesis work. Tidal synchronism is important but because orbits generally circularize before Roche-lobe overflow the outcome of the interactions of systems with the same semi-latus rectum is almost independent of eccentricity. It is not necessary to include a distribution of eccentricities in population synthesis of interacting binaries, however, the initial separations should be distributed according to the observed distribution of semi-latera recta rather than periods or semi-major axes.Comment: 36 pages, 12 figures, to be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Societ

INTEGRATE-Neo: A pipeline for personalized gene fusion neoantigen discovery

Abstract Motivation While high-throughput sequencing (HTS) has been used successfully to discover tumor-specific mutant peptides (neoantigens) from somatic missense mutations, the field currently lacks a method for identifying which gene fusions may generate neoantigens. Results We demonstrate the application of our gene fusion neoantigen discovery pipeline, called INTEGRATE-Neo, by identifying gene fusions in prostate cancers that may produce neoantigens. Availability and Implementation INTEGRATE-Neo is implemented in C ++ and Python. Full source code and installation instructions are freely available from https://github.com/ChrisMaherLab/INTEGRATE-Neo. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online. </jats:sec

Bipolar molecular outflows driven by hydromagnetic protostellar winds

We demonstrate that magnetically-collimated protostellar winds will sweep ambient material into thin, radiative, momentum-conserving shells whose features reproduce those commonly observed in bipolar molecular outflows. We find the typical position-velocity and mass-velocity relations to occur in outflows in a wide variety of ambient density distributions, regardless of the time histories of their driving winds.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, submitted to ApJ