A Legal Regime for the Mining of Helium-3 on the Moon: U.S. Policy Options

Absent an agreed international legal framework, attempts by the United States or any other nation or private entity to acquire and bring to Earth significant quantities of He-3 could give rise to controversy and conflict. Consequently, it seems timely to revisit the issue of the legal regime potentially applicable to exploiting He-3 and other lunar resources. Part I of this Article will briefly discuss the technical and economic prospects for the develop of He-3-based fusion energy. Part II lays out the present legal situation concerning the exploitation of lunar resources such as He-3. Part III analyzes whether it is prudent for the United States to seek an international lunar resource regime. Concluding that it would be, Part IV provides possible policy options for the United States concerning the establishment of an international legal regime capable of facilitating the development of He-3-based fusion energy

Hypothesis exploration with visualization of variance.

BackgroundThe Consortium for Neuropsychiatric Phenomics (CNP) at UCLA was an investigation into the biological bases of traits such as memory and response inhibition phenotypes-to explore whether they are linked to syndromes including ADHD, Bipolar disorder, and Schizophrenia. An aim of the consortium was in moving from traditional categorical approaches for psychiatric syndromes towards more quantitative approaches based on large-scale analysis of the space of human variation. It represented an application of phenomics-wide-scale, systematic study of phenotypes-to neuropsychiatry research.ResultsThis paper reports on a system for exploration of hypotheses in data obtained from the LA2K, LA3C, and LA5C studies in CNP. ViVA is a system for exploratory data analysis using novel mathematical models and methods for visualization of variance. An example of these methods is called VISOVA, a combination of visualization and analysis of variance, with the flavor of exploration associated with ANOVA in biomedical hypothesis generation. It permits visual identification of phenotype profiles-patterns of values across phenotypes-that characterize groups. Visualization enables screening and refinement of hypotheses about variance structure of sets of phenotypes.ConclusionsThe ViVA system was designed for exploration of neuropsychiatric hypotheses by interdisciplinary teams. Automated visualization in ViVA supports 'natural selection' on a pool of hypotheses, and permits deeper understanding of the statistical architecture of the data. Large-scale perspective of this kind could lead to better neuropsychiatric diagnostics

CD74-dependent Deregulation of the Tumor Suppressor Scribble in Human Epithelial and Breast Cancer Cells

The γ subunit of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class II complex, CD74, is overexpressed in a significant proportion of metastatic breast tumors, but the mechanistic foundation and biologic significance of this phenomenon are not fully understood. Here, we show that when CD74 is overexpressed in human cancer and noncancerous epithelial cells, it interacts and interferes with the function of Scribble, a product of a well-known tumor suppressor gene. Furthermore, using epithelial cell lines expressing CD74 under the control of tetracycline-inducible promoter and quantitative high-resolution mass spectrometry, we demonstrate that, as a result of CD74 overexpression, the phosphorylation pattern of the C-terminal part of Scribble undergoes specific changes. This is accompanied with a translocation of the protein from the sites of cell-to-cell contacts at the plasma membrane to the cytoplasm, which is likely to effectively enhance the motility and invasiveness of the cancer cells. © 2013 Neoplasia Press, Inc. All rights reserved

The Shrinking Back: The Law of Biography

The Article argues that quotations of copyrighted material used as fact should be protected. The Article explores the relation between the legal law of biography and the literary theory of biography, focusing specifically on the use of unpublished materials in written biographies. The Article surveys the assumptions underlying copyright, fair use, and privacy doctrines. The Article critiques fair use solutions suggested by legal commentary and congressional action and sketches a different analysis, not involving fair use. The fact use proposal would shift the burden from proving fair use to proving that the quotations were not used as facts

The Transatlantic Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture and the Empire (Excerpt)

Departing from traditional approaches to colonial legal history, Mary Sarah Bilder argues that American law and legal culture developed within the framework of an evolving, unwritten transatlantic constitution that lawyers, legislators, and litigants on both sides of the Atlantic understood. The central tenet of this constitution--that colonial laws and customs could not be repugnant to the laws of England but could diverge for local circumstances--shaped the legal development of the colonial world. Focusing on practices rather than doctrines, Bilder describes how the pragmatic and flexible conversation about this constitution shaped colonial law: the development of the legal profession; the place of English law in the colonies; the existence of equity courts and legislative equitable relief; property rights for women and inheritance laws; commercial law and currency reform; and laws governing religious establishment. Using as a case study the corporate colony of Rhode Island, which had the largest number of appeals of any mainland colony to the English Privy Council, she reconstructs a largely unknown world of pre-Constitutional legal culture. Note: This abstract refers to the book The Transatlantic Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture and the Empire, by Mary Sarah Bilder. Available at this site for downloading is a brief excerpt from Introduction: The Transatlantic Constitution and the Colonial World, pp.1-3, 10-11. It is included here with permission of the copyright holder

The Lost Lawyers: Early American Legal Literates and Transatlantic Legal Culture

Paul C. Kurtz wrote well, spoke and argued eloquently, wore a nice suit, and carried a briefcase. As an observer noted, \u27He looked 100 percent like a lawyer and conducted himself as a lawyer. Being an actual practitioner of the law, however, does not make one a lawyer in modern America. Lawyer status is conferred only upon those who satisfy formal definitions based on professional education and bar admission. Not surprisingly, on July 7, 1998, Mr. Kurtz was arrested for passing himself off as a lawyer. Three hundred years earlier, an English lord similarly refused to confer lawyer status on the legal practitioners of Rhode Island. In September 1699, Richard Coote, the Earl of Bellomont, arrived in Rhode Island to investigate the colony. Bellomont\u27s Rhode Island visit did not go particularly well. He found little to praise about the colony. In particular, he condemned the men who practiced law. Bellomont disparaged the General Attorney (the Attorney General), John Pocock, as a poor illiterate mechanic, very ignorant, on whom they rely for his opinion and knowledge of the law. \u27 He criticized the former General Attorney, John Greene, as very corrupt and brutish, with no principles in religion. He added that those men who served as the Governor and Assistants also knew very little law. Bellomont was horrified that such legally illiterate men were elected year after year while several gentlemen most sufficient for estate, best capacitated and disposed for his Majesty\u27s service were neglected and maligned. This Article takes issue with Bellomont\u27s judgment - and with the conventional vision of the seventeenth-century colonial legal world as Law without Lawyers. Adding to a growing number of accounts that seek to rethink the ways in which we understand and discuss early legal practice, this Article argues that legal practitioners were a constant - and powerful - element of early Rhode Island legal culture. Moreover, this Article suggests that these Rhode Island legal practitioners operated not in a colonial vacuum but as creative participants in a transatlantic legal culture

Executive control: balancing stability and flexibility via the duality of evolutionary neuroanatomical trends

The concept of executive functions has a rich history and remains current despite increased use of other terms, including working memory and cognitive control. Executive functions have sometimes been equated with functions subserved by the frontal cortex, but this adds little clarity, given that we so far lack a comprehensive theory of frontal function. Pending a more complete mechanistic understanding, clinically useful generalizations can help characterize both healthy cognition and multiple varieties of cognitive impairment. This article surveys several hierarchical and autoregulatory control theories, and suggests that the evolutionary cytoarchitectonic trends theory provides a valuable neuroanatomical framework to help organize research on frontal structure-function relations. The theory suggests that paleocortical/ventrolateral and archicortical/dorsomedial trends are associated with neural network flexibility and stability respectively, which comports well with multiple other conceptual distinctions that have been proposed to characterize ventral and dorsal frontal functions, including the “initiation/inhibition,” “what/where,” and “classification/expectation” hypotheses

David Bilder: Getting to know epithelia inside and out

Bilder explores epithelial form and function in Drosophila using forward genetic screens