Frozen Subjectivity: Vulnerability and Aesthetics at the End of the World

The reaction of the nitrogen atom (N) in its first electronically excited state (2D) with cyanoacetylene (HC3N) has been investigated under single-collision conditions by using the crossed molecular beam method with mass spectrometric detection at a collision energy of 31 kJ mol−1. With the support of electronic structure calculations, we found that this reaction proceeds via the barrierless addition of the N(2D) atom to the carbon–carbon triple bond of HC3N, followed by the formation of a cyclic intermediate adduct HC(N)CCN, which dissociates to C(N)CCN + H products or isomerises to a more stable intermediate HNCCCN by H-migration and ring-opening processes. The long-lived HNCCCN complex produces the linear 3Σg – ground state dicyanocarbene (NCCCN) radical plus atomic hydrogen through a barrierless unimolecular dissociation accompanied by a negligible competitive channel forming the NCCCN radical (1A1) with a bent C 2v structure plus H. The main product of this neutral-neutral reaction is the 3NCCCN radical that could be a potential precursor to form other nitriles (C2N2, C3N) or more complex organic species in planetary atmospheres, such as that of Titan and Pluto, in cometary comas, and in UV irradiated interstellar environments.

Abstract: In this article, I propose one way of understanding the expression “feminist epistemology.” I begin from the premise that improper philosophical attention has been paid to the implications of what I call The Fact of Preconditions for Agency: that moral and rational agents become such only through a long, deliberate, and intensive process of intervention and teaching, a process that requires commitments of time, effort and emotion on the part of other agents. I contend that this is a sufficiently important aspect of what it is to be a person that accounting for its philosophical implications may have repercussions not only for moral and political theory, but for epistemology as well. I contend further that, given the current configuration of social possibilities, a theory that acknowledges this Fact might appropriately be deemed “feminist.”My argument is presented in four segments. In Section II, I show how such a theory could be feminist by providing a discussion of categories of social identity; in Section III, I show how such a theory could be epistemology by describing a strategy of argument from parity. In Section IV, I apply this strategy to a case from political philosophy to show why its counter‐intuitive implications do not provide good grounds for rejecting the suggested redistricting. And in Section V, I apply the same strategy to a case from epistemology to bring out how it might lead to a theory that might legitimately claim to be feminist epistemology.

Delores Knipp’s textbook Understanding Space Weather and the Physics Behind It provides a comprehensive resource for space physicists teaching in a variety of academic departments to introduce space weather to advanced undergraduates. The book benefits from Knipp’s extensive experience teaching introductory and advanced undergraduate physics courses at the U.S. Air Force Academy. The fundamental physics concepts are clearly explained and are connected directly to the space physics concepts being discussed. To expand upon the relevant basic physics, current research areas and new observations are highlighted, with many of the chapters including contributions from a number of leading space physicists. The textbook is written in the style of university physics texts, such as Halliday et al. [2005], in that each chapter is filled with color diagrams, photos, callouts, and sidebars that contain brief digressions on real-life examples of the concepts being discussed, worked problem examples, and Pause for Inquiry questions that help students assess their understanding. Space physics, as we know, is the field of space science that studies the structure and dynamics of the Sun’s atmosphere and its interaction with everything inside the solar system (from planetary atmospheres and magnetospheres to asteroids, comets, and dust) as well as its interaction with the local interstellar medium. The Sun’s supersonically flowing magnetized solar wind carves out a bubble in the local interstellar medium called the heliosphere. Understanding the physical processes important for the heliosphere requires knowledge of plasma physics, a field that is often not taught at the undergraduate level. With our increasing reliance on space technology, global communication and navigation systems, and continental-scale power grids, we now realize that the Sun significantly influences the Earth’s space environment, with societal and technological implications. Because of all of these factors, space weather has emerged from the field of space physics as an independent area of study. The goal of the textbook is extremely ambitious, and the scope of topics covered is comprehensive. Each chapter begins with a list of concepts that students should already understand and a list of concepts discussed in the text. At the end of each chapter is a list of keywords and equations that were introduced, answers to the Pause for Inquiry questions posed throughout the chapter, and references and suggestions for further reading. Although students are expected to have studied calculus, mechanics, thermodynamics, and electricity and magnetism, the text provides background on all of the undergraduatelevel physics pertaining to space weather concepts. The textbook is clearly designed for advanced undergraduates in that much of the fundamental physics is reviewed as opposed to being assumed knowledge. In addition, many of the fundamental plasma physics topics normally included in graduate textbooks are introduced but are not fully developed or derived. For example, in the chapter that introduces the solar wind structure, an outline of Eugene Parker’s theory is presented, but instead of doing the full derivation of the solar wind structure (as is often done in graduate space physics texts), the path to the solution is provided by a flow chart diagram with the final results (such as the class of solutions of the solar wind velocity for different temperatures as a function of radial distance from the Sun) given as figures. This deliberate target of advanced undergraduate students and the book’s organization for that audience clearly distinguish Understanding Space Weather from other hybrid audience advancedundergraduateand beginning-graduate-level introductory space physics textbooks. The textbook’s three sections are presented in a logical order. The first section describes the structure and physics of the space environment, including the quiescent Sun; the solar wind; and Earth’s magnetosphere, ionosphere, and atmosphere. Along the way, the important concepts of radiation,

Reviewed by: The Secrets of Generation: Reproduction in the Long Eighteenth Century ed. by Raymond Stephanson and Darren N. Wagner Karen Harvey Raymond Stephanson and Darren N. Wagner, eds. The Secrets of Generation: Reproduction in the Long Eighteenth Century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. xviii + 560 pp. Ill. $90.00 ( 978-1-4696-4). The eighteenth-century term "generation," as the editors of this volume point out, has no modern equivalent. Connoting human, animal, and plant reproduction, embryology, reproductive health and heredity, the term is capacious in ways that the closest modern equivalent "reproduction"—simply is not. And generation did not only concern the physical body. The soul, mind, and emotions were all engaged in the processes of generation. Moreover, the working together of the physical, material, and immaterial in the processes of generation—if we can make such distinctions for this period—were the concern of philosophers and politicians, scientists and satirists. "Little wonder," the editors of this volume note, "that reproduction in its broadest sense should have claimed so significant a space in the public imaginary" (p. 9). The Secrets ofGeneration amply captures this capacious understanding of "generation." The book is organized in four thematic sections. "Generation, Species, Breeding," including essays on blood, race, and incest, demonstrates that ideas about how generation worked held broader political and philosophical implications. The chapters in "Fetus, Child, Mother" explore the relationship between mother and child, understandings of personhood, and the violence and deformity that could occur during gestation. The section, "Pathologies, Body Parts, Display," considers how new medical and aesthetic practices shaped representations of the reproductive organs (the female pelvis, the ovary, and the penis) and indeed of the whole body (whether fat or lean, alive or dead). The final section, "Attitudes, Tropes, Satire," considers how fruitful the topic of generation was for a range of printed texts and imaginative writers, from Aristotle's Masterpiece to midwifery books to verse satires. [End Page 446] Twenty-two fascinating chapters written by scholars from several disciplines explore generation in a number of guises, from the medical to the literary, the biological to the economic. Space necessarily precludes a discussion of every chapter but each one discusses an aspect of generation in creative and engaging ways. Readers will learn about both medical and lay theories about conception and gestation, about attitudes to the roles that men and women played in generation, about the changing ways that the human body was represented and about which particular aspects of the process of generation made eighteenth-century men and women laugh. The risk for such a wide-ranging volume on such a topic is that the final product becomes a collection of disparate studies. Yet the editors have done a wonderful job of crafting a coherent volume that illustrates but also adds to the richness of this field. Given that the volume covers the whole of the eighteenth century, some discussion of change in the Introduction would have helped readers situate the various chapters and gain a sense of the contours of the several momentous transformations over this period (for example, nervous science, anatomy, and changing ideas about gender that affected how people understood the specific contributions that men and women made to conception). Nevertheless, this minor omission is outweighed by undoubted richness of the chapters. Throughout these chapters, a number of important recurring themes emerge. Several chapters ask what happened when generation went wrong or failed, thereby illuminating deeper understandings of the processes of reproduction and the body more generally. A second theme is the link between the body and mind and the many ways in which this affected the process of generation, not least the development of the unborn. The relationship between new knowledge and new ways of visualizing the body is a third and fruitful theme. Overall, then, the themes raised by these chapters touch not only upon reproduction but relate to our broader understanding of the processes and representation of the body in the long eighteenth century. This book will be essential reading for those interested in the history of reproduction, but any scholar working on the history of the body would do well to consult within its pages. Karen Harvey University...

Today a completely new type of reality – «digital reality» – is being formed, which entails new challenges for individuals and society. Deep involvement in digital reality and the active use of its technical mediators creates a load on the psychophysics of the individual, which, especially in the stage of active growth, not only deforms behavioral patterns, but can also influence the formation of brain structures. Educational practices, through which society helped the individual to form their identity, lose their former certainty in the digital dimension. As a response to these challenges at the turn of the XX-XXI centuries, the concept of information hygiene was formed within the medical sciences, describing ways to minimize the destructive effects of the information environment. However, developed for a narrow field, this concept does not take into account the fact that psychophysical transformations under the influence of destructive influences of modern media threaten to destroy the basic constants of the human body. Positivist medicine, due to the specificity of its subject, does not see the eschatological horizon of the problem, on which the contours of our «posthuman future» are already clearly outlined. At this point, philosophy can and should recall that at the dawn of European civilization, medicine was inseparably an ethical program: a single set of practices – ascetic, hygienic, and mental-aimed not only at minimizing destructive influences but also at discovering and cultivating the individual's own humanity. Thus, in this article, the concept of information hygiene is thematized taking into account its historical and philosophical implications. On the one hand, it is intended to reflect the current specifics of the challenges, on the other – to take into account the experience of preventing destructive influences, practiced by late-antique philosophers in the status of «healers of the soul». For the empirical verification of this concept, the authors performed the following experiment. A group of first-year students were asked to spend a day without the Internet and describe their feelings and thoughts. The analysis of spontaneous ways to overcome deep involvement in digital reality allowed us to identify the most adequate forms of minimizing its destructive influences: avoidance of active leisure in the real world. These forms were in tune with the late-antique practices of self-care in the editorial office of the Epicurean school. This broader ethical consideration of information hygiene opens the way for theming a comprehensive approach to the problem of human survival in the face of digital reality

The high reflection of land vegetation in the near-infrared, the vegetation red edge (VRE), is often cited as a spectral biosignature for surface vegetation on exoplanets. The VRE involves only a few percentage change in reflectivity for a disk-integrated observation of present-day Earth. Here we show that the strength of Earth's VRE has increased over the past ∼500 million years of land plant evolution and may continue to increase as solar luminosity increases and the planet warms, until either vegetation coverage is reduced, or the planet's atmosphere becomes opaque to light reflected off the surface. Early plants such as mosses and liverworts, which dominated the land 500-400 million years ago, produce a weaker VRE, approximately half as strong as that of modern vegetation. We explore how the changes in land plants, as well as geological changes such as ice coverage during ice ages and interglacial periods, influence the detectability of the VRE through Earth's geological past. Our results show that the VRE has varied through the evolutionary history of land plants on Earth and could continue to change into the future if hotter climate conditions became dominant, encouraging the spread of vegetation. Our findings suggest that older and hotter Earth-like planets are good targets for the search for a VRE signature. In addition, hot exoplanets and dry exoplanets with some water could be the best targets for a successful vegetation biosignature detection. As well as a strong red edge, lower cloud fractions and low levels of atmospheric water vapor on such planets could make it easier to detect surface features in general.

Foodborne microorganisms capable of causing human diseases are exposed to a wide range of physical and chemical stresses in the environment. Exposure of cells to extreme, yet sublethal, preharvest and postharvest conditions can result in habituation or adaptation, which may subsequently afford protection against otherwise lethal stresses. The genetic basis for production of acid-shock proteins and heat-shock proteins as well as other intracellular and extracellular factors that play a role in the development of tolerance and cross protection to environmental stresses has been studied extensively, the focus largely being directed toward Escherichia coli and Salmonella. Less is known about habituation of other foodborne pathogens and spoilage microorganisms in extreme alkaline environments. Exposure of cells to sublethal concentrations of alkaline cleaners and sanitizers routinely used in food processing plants, for example, creates conditions for alkaline habituation which may result in cross protection against heat or other pasteurization or preservation technologies used in the food industry. This paper briefly reviews the genetic basis for development of tolerance of foodborne pathogens to extreme pH conditions and discusses some of the practical implications in foods and food processing environments.

Our planet's atmosphere framework is mind boggling. Various segments, similar to environment, sea, ocean and land ice impact one another and cause common atmosphere minor departure from a scope of timescales from months to decades. Especially for the long timescales, the sea assumes a basic job. The three rudiments that direct Earth's atmosphere, and our condition. These are: (a) sun based warming of the planet adjusted by vitality misfortune to space; (b) air, sea, land, and ice reactions to warming which give criticisms that either relieve or complement planetary temperature changes; and (c) provincial natural frameworks which have intrinsic examples of atmosphere fluctuation directed by their exceptional physical-substance organic conditions. These frameworks react to the planetary vitality offset and furthermore collaborate with each other by means of teleconnections.

On Earth, we are shielded by the planet's magnetic field and atmosphere from the majority of particles that make up the space radiation environment. Even so, everyone on Earth is exposed to low levels of radiation every day, from the food we eat to the air we breathe. But in space, astronauts are exposed to varied and increased levels of radiation that are different from those on Earth. Three major sources contribute to the space radiation environment: particles trapped in Earth's magnetic field, solar energetic particles from the Sun, and galactic cosmic rays. The primary focus of Artemis missions from a space radiation perspective is developing the capability to accurately monitor the deep space radiation environment and its effect on the human body. Artemis missions will provide a unique opportunity to evaluate the hazards astronauts will face in a true deep space environment, before embarking on the years-long journey to Mars.

Emerging from Wuhan, China, SARS-CoV-2 is the new global threat that killed millions of people, and many are still suffering. This pandemic has not only affected people but also caused economic crisis throughout the world. Researchers have shown good progress in revealing the molecular insights of SARS-CoV-2 pathogenesis and developing vaccines, but effective treatment against SARS-CoV-2-infected patients are yet to be found. Several vaccines are available and used in many countries, while many others are still in clinical or preclinical studies. However, this involves a long-term process, considering the safety procedures and requirements and their long-term protection capacity and in different age groups are still questionable. Therefore, at present, the drug repurposing of the existing therapeutics previously designed against other viral diseases seems to be the only practical approach to mitigate the current situation. The safety of most of these therapeutic agents has already been tested. Recent clinical reports revealed promising therapeutic efficiency of several drugs such as remdesivir, tenofovir disoproxil fumarate, azithromycin, lopinavir/ritonavir, chloroquine, baricitinib, and cepharanthine. Besides, plasma therapies were used to treat patients and prevent fatal outcomes. Thus, in this article, we have summarized the epidemiological and clinical data from several clinical trials conducted since the beginning of the pandemic, emphasizing the efficiency of the known agents against SARS-CoV-2 and their harmful side effects on the human body as well as their environmental implications. This review shows a clear overview of the current pharmaceutical perspective on COVID-19 treatment.

Molecular dications are important metastable species present in a variety of environments including, but not restricted to, planetary atmospheres and the human body when submitted to radiation. On the other hand, symmetric molecular dications cannot be separated from the cation corresponding to the molecule broken in half (e.g. and N+) in stantard mass spectrometers. The DETOF technique allows one to identify the symmetric molecular dication, obtaining absolute cross sections related to their production. Results for dications of molecular nitrogen, molecular oxygen, ethylene and benzene are discussed here, giving emphasis on the mechanisms behind their production. It is seen that, while most metastable molecular dications result from a combination of direct double ionization and Auger-like processes, and represent so-called pure cases, where the dication is produced only by, respectively, double direct ionization or post-collisional Auger-like decay.

Protein is a macronutrient that is responsible for multiple functions in the human body and is made up of twenty amino acids. Nine amino acids are not synthesized in the human body and require dietary ingestion to prevent deficiency. These essential amino acids are easily obtained through animal-based proteins but can be in limited quantities through plant-based protein sources. With the obesity epidemic rising, great attention has turned to plant-based protein diets and their health and environmental implications. The differences in plant and animal protein sources have been explored for their effects on general health, sarcopenia, and muscle performance. This review discusses the benefits and drawbacks of a plant-based diet, as well as some of the latest literature on muscle protein synthesis between animal- and plant-based dietary intakes of protein. High meat consumption is associated with increased saturated fat intake and lower dietary fiber intake. As a result, meat consumption is correlated with obesity, heart disease, metabolic syndrome, and gastrointestinal cancers. However, animal-based diets contain higher amounts of leucine and other essential amino acids which are associated with increased anabolic potential and muscle protein synthesis. Yet, multiple studies show conflicting results on the true benefits of animal-based diets, suggesting total protein intake may be the best predictor for preserving lean muscle mass and increasing muscle performance. While many studies support animal protein sources superior to plant-based diets on intracellular anabolic signaling, other studies show conflicting results regarding the true benefit of animal-based protein diets on overall performance and effect on sarcopenia. The health benefits seem to favor plant-based protein sources; however, further research is needed to examine the effects of protein from plant- and animal-based diets on muscle mass and protein synthesis.

Toothpaste plays a pivotal role in oral and dental hygiene. This cross-sectional study not only investigates the constituents of toothpastes available in the market and their frequency across different brands but also delves into the potential side effects, irritations, or unfavourable outcomes of these constituents, emphasizing the broader health and environmental implications. The largest of the five major chain markets in each district of Istanbul was visited, and adult toothpastes were included in this study. All the constituents that make up the toothpaste were individually recorded in an Excel database. Subsequently, literature regarding the purposes, toxic and potential side effects of each ingredient was gathered using databases such as Google Scholar, PubMed and ScienceDirect. The percentages of these ingredients' occurrence among all the toothpastes were calculated, and the ingredients were categorized into 15 distinct groups based on their usage purposes. There were 160 different varieties of toothpaste belonging to 19 different brands on the market shelves. Although a total of 244 different ingredients were identified, only 78 of them were included in the study. Among the analysed toothpaste types, 105 of them were found to contain 1450 ppm fluoride, whilst 26 toothpaste variants were discovered to have fluoride levels below this value. Among the various ingredients analysed, particular attention was drawn to commonly debated compounds in oral care products. Specifically, titanium dioxide was found in 68% (n = 111) of the varieties, sodium lauryl sulphate in 67% (n = 108) and paraben in 2% (n = 4), respectively. Whilst certain ingredients may raise concerns for potential side effects and health considerations within the human body, the toothpaste has long been regarded as an indispensable tool for maintaining optimal oral and dental health. However, gaining a deeper understanding and conducting research on each constituent that comprises the toothpaste, as well as raising awareness in this regard, holds significant importance for human health.

A novel bisphenol A alternative, DD-70, may negatively affect haemostasis through cyclooxygenase 1 inhibition.

Through the eyes of Autonomous Vehicles – using laser scanning technology to engage the public via the analysis of journeys seen from a different perspective.