Vitamin D supplementation in the pediatric rheumatology clinic.

Vitamin D is capturing the attention of healthy and chronically ill populations for its potential skeletal and nonskeletal benefits. New information suggesting a role in immune modulation has led to a surge of interest among rheumatologists. Although the epidemiologic data are limited, it appears that many children with rheumatic conditions are at risk of vitamin D deficiency. However, understanding this phenomenon requires an appreciation for how vitamin D status is assessed, and options for supplementation. Although a "more-is-better" attitude is tempting when considering the medicinal effects of a nutritional supplement, we suggest a cautious approach and suggest that further studies are needed to clarify the potential benefits and risks among children with rheumatic conditions

Stasis in the Fossil Record as Confirmation of a Belief in Biblical Creation

A vast body of palaeontological observations points to the conclusion that all living things make their first appearance in the geological record as separate and finished organisms . To offset this true state of affairs from the often suggested existence of evolutionary links between different types of organisms, a division into four units of fossil assemblages is proposed that represent two pre-Flood and two post-Flood chief ecosystems. The pitfalls of polymorphism, when assigning species rank to fossils or when lumping distinct forms into one created species, are brought to notice. One perfectly modern member of the insect order Zoraptera is described from Caribbean amber

The Flood/Post-Flood Boundary in the Fossil Record

Fossil assemblages through most of the Phanerozoic are evaluated for the presence or absence of in situ life communities. It is shown that most of the water-laid deposits of Palaeozoic age must have been formed during approximately the first five months of the Biblical Flood year. From the appearance of emergence surfaces and briefly inhabited sediments and hardgrounds after the Carboniferous (Pennsylvanian) it is deduced that the transition from Floodlaid to post-Flood rocks took place at the turn from the late Palaeozoic era to the Permian period of the conventional time scale

Supercaloric functions for the porous medium equation in the fast diffusion case

We study a generalized class of supersolutions, so-called supercaloric functions to the porous medium equation in the fast diffusion case. Supercaloric functions are defined as lower semicontinuous functions obeying a parabolic comparison principle. We prove that bounded supercaloric functions are weak supersolutions. In the supercritical range, we show that unbounded supercaloric functions can be divided into two mutually exclusive classes dictated by the Barenblatt solution and the infinite point-source solution, and give several characterizations for these classes. Furthermore, we study the pointwise behavior of supercaloric functions and obtain connections between supercaloric functions and weak supersolutions.Comment: Corrected typographical errors and made minor notational adjustment