Dynamical Boson Stars

The idea of stable, localized bundles of energy has strong appeal as a model for particles. In the 1950s John Wheeler envisioned such bundles as smooth configurations of electromagnetic energy that he called {\em geons}, but none were found. Instead, particle-like solutions were found in the late 1960s with the addition of a scalar field, and these were given the name {\em boson stars}. Since then, boson stars find use in a wide variety of models as sources of dark matter, as black hole mimickers, in simple models of binary systems, and as a tool in finding black holes in higher dimensions with only a single killing vector. We discuss important varieties of boson stars, their dynamic properties, and some of their uses, concentrating on recent efforts.Comment: 79 pages, 25 figures, invited review for Living Reviews in Relativity; major revision in 201

Scholarly publishing depends on peer reviewers

The peer-review crisis is posing a risk to the scholarly peer-reviewed journal system. Journals have to ask many potential peer reviewers to obtain a minimum acceptable number of peers accepting reviewing a manuscript. Several solutions have been suggested to overcome this shortage. From reimbursing for the job, to eliminating pre- publication reviews, one cannot predict which is more dangerous for the future of scholarly publishing. And, why not acknowledging their contribution to the final version of the article published? PubMed created two categories of contributors: authors [AU] and collaborators [IR]. Why not a third category for the peer-reviewer

Comparative genomics of the tardigrades <i>Hypsibius dujardini</i> and <i>Ramazzottius varieornatus</i>

Tardigrada, a phylum of meiofaunal organisms, have been at the center of discussions of the evolution of Metazoa, the biology of survival in extreme environments, and the role of horizontal gene transfer in animal evolution. Tardigrada are placed as sisters to Arthropoda and Onychophora (velvet worms) in the superphylum Panarthropoda by morphological analyses, but many molecular phylogenies fail to recover this relationship. This tension between molecular and morphological understanding may be very revealing of the mode and patterns of evolution of major groups. Limnoterrestrial tardigrades display extreme cryptobiotic abilities, including anhydrobiosis and cryobiosis, as do bdelloid rotifers, nematodes, and other animals of the water film. These extremophile behaviors challenge understanding of normal, aqueous physiology: how does a multicellular organism avoid lethal cellular collapse in the absence of liquid water? Meiofaunal species have been reported to have elevated levels of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) events, but how important this is in evolution, and particularly in the evolution of extremophile physiology, is unclear. To address these questions, we resequenced and reassembled the genome of H. dujardini, a limnoterrestrial tardigrade that can undergo anhydrobiosis only after extensive pre-exposure to drying conditions, and compared it to the genome of R. varieornatus, a related species with tolerance to rapid desiccation. The 2 species had contrasting gene expression responses to anhydrobiosis, with major transcriptional change in H. dujardini but limited regulation in R. varieornatus. We identified few horizontally transferred genes, but some of these were shown to be involved in entry into anhydrobiosis. Whole-genome molecular phylogenies supported a Tardigrada+Nematoda relationship over Tardigrada+Arthropoda, but rare genomic changes tended to support Tardigrada+Arthropoda