Unassailable Evidence Research Articles

Bornavirus Genes in the Human Genome: Bringing the New from the Old

The genomic era has provided unassailable evidence that humans have evolved from common ancestors we share with chimpanzees and (further back in time) with all other primates and with all other mammals. One class of this evidence is the presence of ancient viral genes that were spliced into the genomes of our prehuman ancestors and transmitted to us. Retroviruses are the classical exemplar of this phenomenon, but more recently genes derived from potentially pathogenic bornaviruses have been discovered in our genome. At least two of these genes have been coopted to provide important functions. The advent of humanity, due in part to capabilities generated by random genetic mechanisms, is describable in theological terms as creatio ex vetere—creation of the new from the old (from stardust and antecedent species). This concept is applicable to the biblical depiction of human development, as seen in the commissioning of humanity as the image of God. Genetic changes are usually innocuous but may generate either disease or new capabilities. The cost of evolution reflects the biblical theme that suffering precedes glory, of which the history of Jesus is paradigmatic. Our biological history argues against our tendency to self-glorification—our hubris—but can be seen, from a theological point of view, to be part of the divine plan by which a redeemed and transformed humanity will be raised to share in the very life of God.

Using Certification to Promote Uptake of Real-World Evidence by Payers.

Most randomized controlled trials are unable to generate information about a product's real-world effectiveness. Therefore, payers use real-world evidence (RWE) generated in observational studies to make decisions regarding formulary inclusion and coverage. While some payers generate their own RWE, most cautiously rely on RWE produced by manufacturers who have a strong financial interest in obtaining coverage for their products. We propose a process by which an independent body would certify observational studies as generating valid and unbiased estimates of the effectiveness of the intervention under consideration. This proposed process includes (a) establishing transparent criteria for assessment, (b) implementing a process for receipt and review of observational study protocols from interested parties, (c) reviewing the submitted protocol and requesting any necessary revisions, (d) reviewing the study results, (e) assigning a certification status to the submitted evidence, and (f) communicating the certification status to all who seek to use this evidence for decision making. Accrediting organizations such as the National Center for Quality Assurance and the Joint Commission have comparable goals of providing assurance about quality to those who look to their accreditation results. Although we recognize potential barriers, including a slowing of evidence generation and costs, we anticipate that processes can be streamlined, such as when familiar methods or familiar datasets are used. The financial backing for such activities remains uncertain, as does identification of organizations that might serve this certification function. We suggest that the rigor and transparency that will be required with such a process, and the unassailable evidence that it will produce, will be valuable to decision makers.

False promise and new hope: dead perpetrators, imagined documents and emergent archival evidence

When those accused of being high-level perpetrators of human rights abuse die before publicly yielding their secrets in legal and archival arenas, victims may simultaneously express relief about the perpetrator's demise and grief that, along with it, possible crucial information about the past is lost forever. Although the accused do not usually directly admit their actions and the teasing out of what actually happened is dependent upon the complex processes of cross-examination of their testimony and of records and other forms of evidence, victims project such moments of revelation onto the public act of holding accused perpetrators to account. In their deaths, the accused become forever-from-now-on unavailable and thus unassailable evidence – in essence; they are transformed into imagined documents that can never be cross-examined. In this construction, the would-be testimony of perpetrators is given epistemological validity over that of victims, offering up the false and unfulfillable promise of establishing a singular truth. Complicating this scenario, however, is the increasingly open-ended hope offered to victims, judicial processes and historians alike by the application of new forensic methods, for example, in the examination of gravesites and human remains, and by satellite footage, that are generating additional categories of evidence. Using the juridical and archival legacies of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the Yugoslav Wars as case studies, this article argues that when perpetrators die before giving legal testimony, survivors and victims’ families construct them as unavailable documents with imaginary agency to settle competing versions of history. Such imagined documents enter into a complex landscape of human rights archives that has heretofore been exclusively focused on tangible evidence. First, this article frames the case of Khmer Rouge leader Ieng Sary, charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes, who died before giving his testimony in a hybrid tribunal. In the face of diverse archival documentary evidence capable of presenting a more complete and complex picture of atrocities, it contemplates why survivors and victims’ family members placed high hopes on his potential testimony, essentially constructing him as a now-dead living document. Second, it explores a parallel case, that of the death of Slobodan Milošević while being tried by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), and argues that the notion of a dead perpetrator as imagined document has less sway when the public has the opportunity to hear the perpetrator defend himself, regardless of the perpetrator's own admission (or denial) of culpability. Third, it proposes the notion of imaginary documents. It argues that such imaginary documents challenge dominant conceptions of the evidentiary qualities of tangible records and the archival legacies of trauma by insisting on a more dynamic and holistic view of records that takes the affect of survivors and victims’ family members into account.

Revisiting the Branch Davidian Mass Suicide Debate

This paper revisits the controversy, recently revived by British religious studies scholar, Kenneth C. G. Newport, that the Branch Davidians had a theological rationale for mass suicide and likely set fire to their own home. Newport couples the theological argument with assertions of "unassailable evidence" regarding the government's reports as if no alternative explanation is plausible. The paper challenges Newport's claim to the "unassailable evidence" found in government reports. Despite his largely uncritical acceptance of the official version of events, the reliability of the government's case is hampered in a number of ways. These include, among other things: false or misleading statements by federal officials; lost, mishandled, and/or concealed evidence; an independent arson report that challenges the government's conclusions; the suppression of evidence through extensive redaction and the use of procedural rulings; and exclusion of evidence in the federal civil trial. I also contend that the tragic dénouement at Waco has to be viewed in the cultural context in which it emerged. Waco came to symbolize a deep political divide during a period of growing fears about "big government" and broad swaths of antigovernment sentiment, and, as such, served as a proxy for culture war battles in the early-to-mid 1990s. When examined against the backdrop of these disturbing machinations and conditions, the evidence supporting mass suicide at Mount Carmel is hardly unassailable.

Desertification in China: An assessment

Arid and semiarid China have experienced multiple arid phases throughout the Quaternary, and over the past five decades, there have been several periods with relatively high or low rates of desertification and rehabilitation. The causes of these changes and their historical trends have been debated by scientists because of their potentially huge significance for China, as well as for the global ecology and food supply. This paper reviews recent studies of desertification in different regions of arid and semiarid China. In general, the results of systematic monitoring, and analyses of the causes of desertification and the contemporaneous human impacts, suggest that desertification in China has been primarily caused by climate change, and particularly by strong wind regimes (with high sand transport potential) accompanied by decreased spring precipitation. Unfortunately, although numerous scientists have claimed that desertification in China is primarily due to human impacts; there is surprisingly little unassailable evidence to support this claim. The review presented in this paper show that desertification in China is likely to be controlled by climate change and geomorphological processes, even though human impacts have undeniably exacerbated their effects. Our arguments for both climate change and human activity as factors responsible for the observed changes in desertification rely primarily on inferences based on correlations between trends, thus future research must seek stronger and more direct evidence for the causal relationships that we have proposed as possibilities. This improved information is essential to provide a firm basis for future policy decisions on how best to combat desertification.

Hypertension and breast cancer: an association revisited?

Hypertension is without doubt a leading cause of morbidity and mortality, especially prevalent in the developed world. Unsurprisingly, the search for newer, better antihypertensive therapy is ever ongoing, whereas the older, more established drug treatments such as diuretics, beta-blockers, calcium antagonists and angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors continue to be the mainstay of current treatment guidelines for hypertension. In the main, as a group of drugs, their profiles and complications have been well established from decades of use as well as the many large trials conducted1, 2, 3 that provide unassailable evidence that antihypertensive therapy lowers cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. What is less clear is the relationship between hypertension treatment and overall mortality; indeed, not all studies demonstrate a significant decrease in overall mortality,4 whereas others report a reduction which is negated over time.2

Conquering the minds, conquering Iraq: The social production of misinformation in the United States – a case study

In the lead-up to the Iraq War, the Bush administration rallied the American public for war via claims that they held unassailable evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and through the insinuation that links existed between Iraq and al Qaeda, and Iraq and the 11 September 2001 attacks. Despite the introduction of compelling evidence that these claims were false, more than 18 months after the official end of the war half of the American population continued to believe that either weapons of mass destruction had been found or that Iraq possessed a developed program for creating them. The prevalence of these misperceptions suggests important questions: How and why could such a significant percentage of the population remain so misinformed? What was the social process leading to the widespread adoption of misinformation? And what were the political effects of these misperceptions? This article proposes an analytical model that outlines both the production of these misperceptions and their political ramifications. It argues that the misperceptions about the Iraq war were socially produced via a complex interaction between a variety of factors including: the general climate of fear in America in the post-9/11 era, Bush administration agenda-setting strategies, and brokering between the political and communication establishments.

Systemic hypertension and obstructive sleep apnoea.

This article is a review of the current evidence that links systemic hypertension with obstructive sleep apnoea. Whilst a causal association has been suspected for some time, the day to day variability of both blood pressure and sleep apnoea severity, and clustering of confounding cardiovascular risk factors in sleep apnoea patients has made this association difficult to prove. There is unassailable evidence that obstructive apnoeas raise blood pressure acutely in both animal models and humans, through a combination of autonomic and state dependent arousal with some mechanical influences, and these rises can be controlled by nasal continuous positive airway pressure. Thus, although repetitive apnoeas alter the blood pressure variability and raise sleeping blood pressure in patients with OSA and sophisticated animal models have demonstrated increases in daytime blood pressure after the onset of OSA in the short term, such effects on diurnal BP have yet to be proven in humans. Recent rigorously designed large epidemiological studies have proven an independent association between OSA and systemic hypertension in both general and sleep clinic populations, with closely matched case control series also reporting raised blood pressure in OSA patients. A direct temporal causal association between the onset of obstructive sleep apnoea and raised blood pressure is expected to be confirmed by longitudinal data from the continuing epidemiological population studies. Finally, several studies on the beneficial effects of nasal continuous positive airway pressure in reducing blood pressure in OSA patients have preliminary results in abstract form, with one published in full.

The precautionary principle and pesticides.

In 1998, Greenpeace, Natuur en Milieu(Nature and Environment), Milieudefensie(Environmental Defense), and the National ConsumersUnion presented a report about the possible risks andhazards associated with pesticide residues on fruitsand vegetables. Although these organizationsexplicitly denied having unassailable evidence on theharmful effects of pesticides, they claimed that bynow there are sufficient indications that pesticidesmay indeed lead to such health hazards. They used anappeal to the so-called precautionary principle tounderpin their claims. The committee officially incharge of deciding on the admission of pesticidesaccused the organizations of scaremongering. Afterdistinguishing three possible versions of theprecautionary principle, we then show that the fourorganizations used in their campaign an improperversion of the precautionary principle to convince thegeneral public.

Perspectives on ion permeation

Perspectives on ion permeation

Electron sterilization of sewage sludge: A real case comparison with other processes

The seventies and early eighties provided high expectations for the adoption of electron treatment of waste. Despite unassailable evidence of assured disinfection, more than a decade has passed and work continues to be concentrated in the laboratory. Reasons for the lack of commitment to build municipal systems are complex. An indication of underlying hurdles may be found form AECL's experience with a recent proposal on a Sludge Management Plan submitted to the City of Edmonton, Canada. A study of this case provides economic assessments of competing technologies and establishes electron sterilization as a competitive process.

Electron precipitation and related aeronomy of the Jovian thermosphere and ionosphere

Voyager ultraviolet spectrometer (UVS) measurements provided the first unassailable evidence for particle precipitation in the Jovian atmosphere. Strong Lyman and Werner band emissions at high latitudes indicate particle precipitation energy fluxes of about 10 ergs cm−2 s−1. On the other hand dayglow Lyman and Werner emissions at mid‐ and low‐latitudes may indicate additional particle precipitation fluxes on the order of 0.3 ergs cm−2 s−1 at all latitudes. Such particle precipitation can have significant aeronomical effects on the Jovian thermsophere and ionosphere. A one‐dimensional theoretical model is used to study these effects for the case of electron precipitation, although ion precipitation produces similar effects. Diffusion equations are solved for all the major neutral species and for H+, and photochemical solutions are given for the short lived ions. These neutral and ionospheric components of the model are coupled with the electron and ion energy equations and a two‐stream electron transport code that calculates the energy deposition of precipitating electrons (considered to be the precipitating particles) and photoelectrons. An independent calculation of the vertical neutral temperature is also obtained. The results of the model calculations can be broadly categorized as effects of electron precipitation (1) on the neutral composition and temperature of the thermosphere, and (2) on the composition and structure of the ionosphere. Auroral electron precipitation by 10‐keV electrons with a total energy flux of 10 ergs cm−2 s−1 produces 4.7×1011 H atoms cm−2 s−1 and 5 ergs cm−2 s−1 of heat, over 2 orders of magnitude larger than solar EUV processes that produce 3.3×109 H atoms cm−2 s−1 and 0.03 ergs cm−2 s−1 of heat. Thus, Jovian auroral H production coupled with aurorally driven meridional winds in the thermosphere can possibly explain the high concentration of atomic hydrogen in the low‐latitude Jovian upper atmosphere. Furthermore, aurorally produced changes in composition can create important feedback which affects the relative airglow efficiencies and heating rates in the high‐latitude thermosphere. In addition, ionization and vibrational heating of H2 from precipitation processes appear to play a central role in determining the structure of the high‐latitude ionosphere. Theoretical fits to the Voyager radio occultation electron density profiles at high latitudes suggest a 10‐keV electron aurora with an energy flux of 10 ergs cm−2 s−1 coupled with a height‐dependent H2 vibrational temperature that reaches 3000 K in the topside ionosphere.

Synthesis of 3-Methyl-5-(2,3,6-Trimethylphenyl)-1-penten-3-ol, an Algal Sesquiterpene

Abstract The isolation and structure elucidation of an alcohol from the air-dried Hawaiian alga Laurencia nidifica, was reported in 1976.1 Unassailable evidence for its identity as 3-methyl-5-(2,3,6-trimethylphenyl)-1-penten-3-01 (1), has been supplied by two syntheses, starting from 5,8-dimethyl-1-tetralone2 and from 2,6,6-trimethyl-2,4-cyclohexadienone,3 respectively. We now wish to describe our approach toward this interesting sesquiterpene.

The World Royal Jelly Industry: Present Status and Future Prospects

Ten years ago the term ‘royal jelly’ was hardly known outside beekeeping circles. The idea of royal jelly as a commercial hive product is still too new, and too explosive emotionally, for many people to be objective about it. The authors of this article have carried out a notable service in compiling data on the production, price, and uses of royal jelly in countries as far apart as France and Formosa, Canada and Korea, Israel and Italy. They also indicate the royal jelly ‘climate’ in different parts of the world. The boom started in some of the more advanced countries, but had already declined there before it reached the rest of the world. Informed opinion now seems to be fairly unanimous that royal jelly production could have a permanent future as a useful part of the beekeeping industry, provided unassailable evidence is forthcoming that it has useful medical properties. Until or unless such evidence is available its future must remain uncertain.

A tectonic window in south-western Iran.

From Dr. E. Lehner :— The peculiar conditions in the Niriz region, and especially at Kuh-i-Dalnashin, afford apparently unassailable evidence of the existence of a nappe of radiolarites and green rocks which was formed in Upper Cretaceous time. From my knowledge of published papers and of unpublished reports by the geologists of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company I believe that, for the whole disputed zone from Oman to the Mediteranean, no other case of equal merit has been made out in favour of such a nappe. It is therefore desirable that Dr. Gray's conclusions be put to every test. The paper does not explicitly deal with the roots of the composite radiolarite-green igneous nappe. It describes, however, in some detail the stratigraphical succession in the “Late Tertiary Overthrust Zone” and its south-eastern extension at Aghirq. Here the radiolarites are only thinly developed, as intercalations in the sandstones which mark the coming in of the Kirman facies of plant-bearing Jurassic. It would, therefore, seem obvious that the roots of the nappe must be looked for to the south of this zone, either in the Dehbid valley, which is covered by Neogene or Quaternary, or in a region now overridden by the late Tertiary thrusts. Yet in the sections (pl. ix) the Dehbid valley is shown as a gently folded monocline, and the drawing of the thrust zone does not admit the probability of a root zone underneath. Where does Dr. Gray assume the root to be ? The paper tentatively suggests a

The Theory of Hearing

I SHOULD like to express my agreement with the letters which Sir Richard Paget and Mr. Wilkinson have written (NATURE, July 19, p. 87) under the above heading. It seems to me that even if Prof. Scripture is right in stating that the movements of the vocal chords cannot be analysed, he is not justified in concluding that the aerial vibrations thus set up are not analysable either. There is, I believe, unassailable evidence that such a conclusion would be wrong; because all workers in this field from Helmholtz and McKendrick to Miller and Bevier are in agreement as to the success of such analysis. Their analyses differ somewhat, it is true, but individual and national peculiarities in vowel production probably account for these. With regard to the piano experiments, I fear that Prof. Scripture (NATURE, August 9, p. 194) has not appreciated the fact that his criticism of Sir R. A. S. Paget and Mr. Wilkinson, namely, that “what a person hears is chiefly what he expects to hear,” applies with equal force to himself.