The Morality of Price/Quality and Ethical Consumerism

Hussain claims that ethical consumers are subject to democratic requirements of morality, whereas ordinary price/quality consumers are exempt from these requirements. In this paper, we demonstrate that Hussain’s position is incoherent, does not follow from the arguments he offers for it, and entails a number of counterintuitive consequences

Feasibility Study: Vertical Farm EDEN

Hundreds of millions of people around the world do not have access to sufficient food. With the global population continuing to increase, the global food output will need to drastically increase to meet demands. At the same time, the amount of land suitable for agriculture is finite, so it is not possibly to meet the growing demand by simply increasing the use of land. Thus, to be able to feed the entire global population, and continue to do so in the future, it will be necessary to drastically increase the food output per land area. One idea which has been recently discussed in the scientific community is called Vertical Farming (VF), which cultivates food crops on vertically stacked levels in (high-rise) buildings. The Vertical Farm, so it is said, would allow for more food production in a smaller area. Additionally, a Vertical Farm could be situated in any place (e.g. Taiga- or desert regions, cities), which would make it possible to reduce the amount of transportation needed to deliver the crops to the supermarkets. The technologies required for the Vertical Farm are well-known and already being used in conventional terrestrial greenhouses, as well as in the designs of bioregenerative Life Support Systems for space missions. However, the economic feasibility of the Vertical Farm, which will determine whether this concept will be developed or not, has not yet been adequately assessed. Through a Concurrent Engineering (CE) process, the DLR Institute for Space Systems (RY) in Bremen, aims to apply its know-how of Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) Technologies in space systems to provide valuable spin-off projects on Earth and to provide the first engineering study of a Vertical Farm to assess its economic feasibility

Visual-Inertial Mapping with Non-Linear Factor Recovery

Cameras and inertial measurement units are complementary sensors for ego-motion estimation and environment mapping. Their combination makes visual-inertial odometry (VIO) systems more accurate and robust. For globally consistent mapping, however, combining visual and inertial information is not straightforward. To estimate the motion and geometry with a set of images large baselines are required. Because of that, most systems operate on keyframes that have large time intervals between each other. Inertial data on the other hand quickly degrades with the duration of the intervals and after several seconds of integration, it typically contains only little useful information. In this paper, we propose to extract relevant information for visual-inertial mapping from visual-inertial odometry using non-linear factor recovery. We reconstruct a set of non-linear factors that make an optimal approximation of the information on the trajectory accumulated by VIO. To obtain a globally consistent map we combine these factors with loop-closing constraints using bundle adjustment. The VIO factors make the roll and pitch angles of the global map observable, and improve the robustness and the accuracy of the mapping. In experiments on a public benchmark, we demonstrate superior performance of our method over the state-of-the-art approaches

BLISTER Regulates Polycomb-Target Genes, Represses Stress-Regulated Genes and Promotes Stress Responses in Arabidopsis thaliana

Polycomb group (PcG) proteins are key epigenetic regulators of development. The highly conserved Polycomb repressive complex 2 (PRC2) represses thousands of target genes by trimethylating H3K27 (H3K27me3). Plant specific PcG components and functions are largely unknown, however, we previously identified the plant-specific protein BLISTER (BLI) as a PRC2 interactor. BLI regulates PcG target genes and promotes cold stress resistance. To further understand the function of BLI, we analyzed the transcriptional profile of bli-1 mutants. Approximately 40% of the up-regulated genes in bli are PcG target genes, however, bli-1 mutants did not show changes in H3K27me3 levels at all tested genes, indicating that BLI regulates PcG target genes downstream of or in parallel to PRC2. Interestingly, a significant number of BLI regulated H3K27me3 target genes is regulated by the stress hormone absciscic acid (ABA). We further reveal an overrepresentation of genes responding to abiotic stresses such as drought, high salinity, or heat stress among the up- regulated genes in bli mutants. Consistently, bli mutants showed reduced desiccation stress tolerance. We conclude that the PRC2 associated protein BLI is a key regulator of stress-responsive genes in Arabidopsis: it represses ABA-responsive PcG target genes, likely downstream of PRC2, and promotes resistance to several stresses such as cold and drought

BLISTER-regulated vegetative growth is dependent on the protein kinase domain of ER stress modulator IRE1A in Arabidopsis thaliana

The unfolded protein response (UPR) is required for protein homeostasis in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) when plants are challenged by adverse environmental conditions. Inositol-requiring enzyme 1 (IRE1), the bifunctional protein kinase / ribonuclease, is an important UPR regulator in plants mediating cytoplasmic splicing of the mRNA encoding the transcription factor bZIP60. This activates the UPR signaling pathway and regulates canonical UPR genes. However, how the protein activity of IRE1 is controlled during plant growth and development is largely unknown. In the present study, we demonstrate that the nuclear and Golgi-localized protein BLISTER (BLI) negatively controls the activity of IRE1A/IRE1B under normal growth condition in Arabidopsis. Loss-of-function mutation of BLI results in chronic up-regulation of a set of both canonical UPR genes and non-canonical UPR downstream genes, leading to cell death and growth retardation. Genetic analysis indicates that BLI-regulated vegetative growth phenotype is dependent on IRE1A/IRE1B but not their canonical splicing target bZIP60. Genetic complementation with mutation analysis suggests that the D570/K572 residues in the ATP-binding pocket and N780 residue in the RNase domain of IRE1A are required for the activation of canonical UPR gene expression, in contrast, the D570/K572 residues and D590 residue in the protein kinase domain of IRE1A are important for the induction of non-canonical UPR downstream genes in the BLI mutant background, which correlates with the shoot growth phenotype. Hence, our results reveal the important role of IRE1A in plant growth and development, and BLI negatively controls IRE1A’s function under normal growth condition in plants