Changing Interpretations of the Establishment Clause: Financial Support of Religious Schools

In Wolman v. Walter, Justice Stevens voiced concem that the \u27high and impregnable\u27 wall between church and state, has been reduced to a \u27blurred, indistinct, and variable barrier.\u27 2 The court had sacrificed predictability for flexibility? While this may be true in some areas of Establishment Clause jurisprudence, it is no longer true in cases involving benefits to religious organizations. If the programs equally benefit both secular and similarly situated religious organizations, there is no violation of the Establishment Clause.4 Jackson v. Benson is an expression of this view. The Wisconsin Supreme Court, in upholding a program designed to provide tuition money to students attending private schools, followed the United States Supreme Court\u27s most recent expressions in this area and reached a result that it felt was in accord with the Court\u27s present view of the Establishment Clause. It appears that the Wisconsin court was right, for the Supreme Court recently decided not to grant certiora

A Minor Necessity: Minor Splicing Is Required in Murine Limb Development

Microcephalic osteodysplastic primordial dwarfism type-1 (MODI) is a rare congenital developmental disorder resulting in patients presenting with microcephaly, limb abnormalities, and growth retardation. This disease, along with the related Roifman Syndrome, results from mutations to the gene RNU4atac. This gene encodes for the U4atac small nuclear RNA (snRNA) which, along with four other snRNAs (U11, U12, U5, and U6atac) compose the small nuclear ribonucleoprotein (snRNP) complex called the minor spliceosome. Responsible for the excision of a subpopulation of introns (called minor introns), the minor spliceosome is known to play an essential role in eukaryotic limb development. However, while mutations in RNU4atac have been shown to decrease efficiency of minor splicing, a direct role of minor splicing in limb development has thus far only been implicated. Utilizing a RNU11 conditional knockout mouse, I demonstrate through a non-U4atac dependent animal model that minor splicing is required for proper development of the murine limb. Using skeletal analysis I reveal that minor splicing results in compromised development of the mouse limb, and that the severity of this developmental disruption increases along the proximodistal axis. Additionally, utilizing TUNEL assays alongside immunofluorescence I demonstrate that that minor splicing may play a role in maintenance of the proliferating progenitor cell population within the developing mouse limb

Speak Softly and Carry a Big Commerce Clause: General Motors Corp. v. Director of Revenue

The effect of General Motors Corp. v. Director of Revenue ( GM Corp. ) may well spread beyond the confines of the Missouri state line. Because the case applies United States Supreme Court precedent to a new constitutional problem, other states may look to it for aid in interpreting similar statutory provisions. There has, after all, been both judicial and scholarly debate concerning how strictly the Commerce Clause should be interpreted with regard to tax incentives and benefits.2 GM Corp. makes clear that the debate is over in Missouri. The Commerce Clause will function as a sword for Missouri courts to prevent Missouri from becoming involved in an interstate commerce braw

Fermi Detection of the Pulsar Wind Nebula HESS J1640-465

We present observations of HESS J1640-465 with the Fermi-LAT. The source is detected with high confidence as an emitter of high-energy gamma-rays. The spectrum lacks any evidence for the characteristic cutoff associated with emission from pulsars, indicating that the emission arises primarily from the pulsar wind nebula. Broadband modeling implies an evolved nebula with a low magnetic field resulting in a high gamma-ray to X-ray flux ratio. The Fermi emission exceeds predictions of the broadband model, and has a steeper spectrum, possibly resulting from a distinct excess of low energy electrons similar to what is inferred for both the Vela X and Crab pulsar wind nebulae.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in Ap

UHE nuclei propagation and the interpretation of the ankle in the cosmic-ray spectrum

We consider the stochastic propagation of high-energy protons and nuclei in the cosmological microwave and infrared backgrounds, using revised photonuclear cross-sections and following primary and secondary nuclei in the full 2D nuclear chart. We confirm earlier results showing that the high-energy data can be fit with a pure proton extragalactic cosmic ray (EGCR) component if the source spectrum is \propto E^{-2.6}. In this case the ankle in the CR spectrum may be interpreted as a pair-production dip associated with the propagation. We show that when heavier nuclei are included in the source with a composition similar to that of Galactic cosmic-rays (GCRs), the pair-production dip is not present unless the proton fraction is higher than 85%. In the mixed composition case, the ankle recovers the past interpretation as the transition from GCRs to EGCRs and the highest energy data can be explained by a harder source spectrum \propto E^{-2.2} - E^{-2.3}, reminiscent of relativistic shock acceleration predictions, and in good agreement with the GCR data at low-energy and holistic scenarios.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, submitted to A&A Letters (minor changes, two figures replaced, two references added

Drought and Small-Bodied Herbivores Modify Nutrient Cycling in The Semi-Arid Shortgrass Steppe

Climate change will increase the frequency of droughts over the next century, with severe consequences for ecosystem function in semi-arid grasslands. The shortgrass steppe (SGS) experiences some of the largest interannual variation in precipitation among terrestrial biomes and exhibits extremely high sensitivity to drought. Yet despite decades of research describing the consequences of drought for ecosystem function in the SGS, we currently have little information regarding the impact of drought on bioavailability of important nutrients other than nitrogen, the contribution of herbivores to bioavailable concentrations of these nutrients, and whether drought alters herbivore-derived nutrient cycling. To quantify the impacts of long-term drought and small-bodied herbivores on nutrient cycling and aboveground net primary production (ANPP), we factorially manipulated rainfall and herbivore presence in the SGS of northern Colorado. Specifically, we measured the impacts of drought and herbivores on bioavailability of ten important nutrients: aluminum, calcium, iron, potassium, magnesium, manganese, nitrate, phosphorus, sulfur, and zinc. We then correlated these nutrients with grass production to determine whether reduced plant growth under drought conditions causes a belowground buildup of nutrients. Drought reduced ANPP as expected, and also altered concentrations of many nutrients apart from N, which clustered in their drought response. In contrast, small-bodied herbivores did not affect ANPP or soil N. However, they did contribute to the bioavailable soil concentrations of two important nutrients: PO4-P and S. Importantly, drought generally did not modify the contribution of herbivores to nutrient cycling, suggesting that herbivores might be a critical component of biogeochemical cycling regardless of precipitation in semi-arid grasslands

Surgical Case Scheduling with sterilizing activity constraints

International audienc

Vertical Crustal Motion Derived from Satellite Altimetry and Tide Gauges, and Comparisons with DORIS Measurements

A somewhat unorthodox method for determining vertical crustal motion at a tide-gauge location is to difference the sea level time series with an equivalent time series determined from satellite altimetry, To the extent that both instruments measure an identical ocean signal, the difference will be dominated by vertical land motion at the gauge. We revisit this technique by analyzing sea level signals at 28 tide gauges that are colocated with DORIS geodetic stations. Comparisons of altimeter-gauge vertical rates with DORIS rates yield a median difference of 1.8 mm/yr and a weighted root-mean-square difference of2.7 mm/yr. The latter suggests that our uncertainty estimates, which are primarily based on an assumed AR(l) noise process in all time series, underestimates the true errors. Several sources of additional error are discussed, including possible scale errors in the terrestrial reference frame to which altimeter-gauge rates are mostly insensitive, One of our stations, Male, Maldives, which has been the subject of some uninformed arguments about sea-level rise, is found to have almost no vertical motion, and thus is vulnerable to rising sea levels. Published by Elsevier Ltd. on behalf of COSPAR

Field-induced axion emission via process e+e−→ae^+ e^- \to a in plasma

The annihilation into axion $e^+ e^- \to a$ is investigated in a plasma and an external magnetic field. This process via a plasmon intermediate state has a resonant character at a particular energy of the emitted axion. The emissivity by $e^+ e^- \to a$ is compared with the axion cyclotron emissivity.Comment: 8 pages, latex, 4 PS figure