Creationism and Intelligent Design

Until recently, little attention has been paid in the school classroom to creationism and almost none to intelligent design. However, creationism and intelligent design appear to be on the increase and there are indications that there are more countries in which schools are becoming battlegrounds over them. I begin by examining whether creationism and intelligent design are controversial issues, drawing on Robert Dearden’s epistemic criterion of the controversial and more recent responses to and defences of this. I then examine whether the notion of ‘worldviews’ in the context of creationism is a useful one by considering the film March of the Penguins. I conclude that the ‘worldviews’ perspective on creationism is useful for two reasons: first, it indicates the difficulty of using the criterion of reason to decide whether an issue is controversial or not; secondly, it suggests that standard ways of addressing the diversity of student views in a science classroom may be inadequate. I close by examining the implications of this view for teaching in science lessons and elsewhere, for example in religious education lessons and at primary level where subject divisions cannot be made in so clear-cut a manner

A Synthetic Adjuvant to Enhance and Expand Immune Responses to Influenza Vaccines

Safe, effective adjuvants that enhance vaccine potency, including induction of neutralizing Abs against a broad range of variant strains, is an important strategy for the development of seasonal influenza vaccines which can provide optimal protection, even during seasons when available vaccines are not well matched to circulating viruses. We investigated the safety and ability of Glucopyranosyl Lipid Adjuvant-Stable Emulsion (GLA-SE), a synthetic Toll-like receptor (TLR)4 agonist formulation, to adjuvant Fluzone® in mice and non-human primates. The GLA-SE adjuvanted Fluzone vaccine caused no adverse reactions, increased the induction of T helper type 1 (TH1)-biased cytokines such as IFNγ, TNF and IL-2, and broadened serological responses against drifted A/H1N1 and A/H3N2 influenza variants. These results suggest that synthetic TLR4 adjuvants can enhance the magnitude and quality of protective immunity induced by influenza vaccines

Post-mortem assessment in vascular dementia: advances and aspirations.

BACKGROUND: Cerebrovascular lesions are a frequent finding in the elderly population. However, the impact of these lesions on cognitive performance, the prevalence of vascular dementia, and the pathophysiology behind characteristic in vivo imaging findings are subject to controversy. Moreover, there are no standardised criteria for the neuropathological assessment of cerebrovascular disease or its related lesions in human post-mortem brains, and conventional histological techniques may indeed be insufficient to fully reflect the consequences of cerebrovascular disease. DISCUSSION: Here, we review and discuss both the neuropathological and in vivo imaging characteristics of cerebrovascular disease, prevalence rates of vascular dementia, and clinico-pathological correlations. We also discuss the frequent comorbidity of cerebrovascular pathology and Alzheimer's disease pathology, as well as the difficult and controversial issue of clinically differentiating between Alzheimer's disease, vascular dementia and mixed Alzheimer's disease/vascular dementia. Finally, we consider additional novel approaches to complement and enhance current post-mortem assessment of cerebral human tissue. CONCLUSION: Elucidation of the pathophysiology of cerebrovascular disease, clarification of characteristic findings of in vivo imaging and knowledge about the impact of combined pathologies are needed to improve the diagnostic accuracy of clinical diagnoses

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research

WatSen: design and testing of a prototype mid-IR spectrometer and microscope package for Mars exploration

We have designed and built a compact breadboard prototype instrument called WatSen: a combined ATR mid-IR spectrometer, fixed-focus microscope, and humidity sensor. The instrument package is enclosed in a rugged cylindrical casing only 26 mm in diameter. The functionality, reliability and performance of the instrument was tested in an environment chamber set up to resemble martian surface conditions. The effective wavelength range of the spectrometer is 6.2–10.3 μm with a resolution Δλ/λ = 0.015. This allows detection of silicates and carbonates, including an indication of the presence of water (ice). Spectra of clusters of grains < 1 mm across were acquired that are comparable with spectra of the same material obtained using a commercial system. The microscope focuses through the diamond ATR crystal. Colour images of the grains being spectroscopically analysed are obtainable with a resolution of ∼20 μm