Hasil untuk "Practical religion. The Christian life"

Bibek Adhikari, Rishab Rijal, Rakesh Yadav et al.

The search for extraterrestrial life has long been a primary focus of scientific exploration, driven by rapid advancements in technology and our understanding of the universe. The discovery of water on Mars has sparked significant interest, raising the question of whether life could exist on the planet. This study proposes a novel approach to simulate and illustrate the detection of life using a proof-of-life module integrated into a Mars rover. The module is an autonomous system capable of traveling to designated regions, excavating soil, collecting samples, and performing biochemical testing onboard the rover itself. The project is inherently multidisciplinary, integrating mechanical systems such as a drill mechanism and a vacuum system, alongside biochemical analysis for soil testing. The module is capable of successfully detecting the presence or absence of living components of life from the collected soil particles. This proof-of-life module serves as a proof-of-concept for autonomous life detection in extraterrestrial environments and lays the foundation for future exploration missions.

Michael A. Wahl

This article proposes that Pope John Paul II’s _Veritatis Splendor_ is a ressourcement encyclical that creatively retrieves insights from a movement to renew moral theology in a Christo-centric mode which had flourished in the decades immediately preceding Vatican II but dissipated soon after the Council. Although most clearly expressed in its often-neglected first chapter, in fact _Veritatis Splendor_’s Christocentric vision permeates the entire encyclical, including those portions often presumed to be purely philosophical, and lends the encyclical an internal coherence frequently overlooked. Reading _Veritatis Splendor_ as a work of ressourcement and attending to its first chapter as a constructive proposal for moral theology rather than a mere prologue to an analysis of disputed questions offers promising new pathways for receiving the encyclical three decades later.

R. Lukyanenko, O. Pastor, V. C. Storey

All aspects of our society, including the life sciences, need a mechanism for people working within them to represent the concepts they employ to carry out their research. For the information systems being designed and developed to support researchers and scientists in conducting their work, conceptual models of the relevant domains are usually designed as both blueprints for a system being developed and as a means of communication between the designer and developer. Most conceptual modelling concepts are generic in the sense that they are applied with the same understanding across many applications. Problems in the life sciences, however, are especially complex and important, because they deal with humans, their well-being, and their interactions with the environment as well as other organisms. This work proposes a systemist perspective for creating a conceptual model of a life scientist's problem. We introduce the notion of a system and then show how it can be applied to the development of an information system for handling genomic-related information. We extend our discussion to show how the proposed systemist perspective can support the modelling of precision medicine. This research recognizes challenges in life sciences research of how to model problems to better represent the connections between physical and digital worlds. We propose a new notation that explicitly incorporates systemist thinking, as well as the components of systems based on recent ontological foundations. The new notation captures important semantics in the domain of life sciences. It may be used to facilitate understanding, communication and problem-solving more broadly. We also provide a precise, sound, ontologically supported characterization of the term system, as a basic construct for conceptual modelling in life sciences.

Ligia F. Coelho, Lisa Kaltenegger, William Philpot et al.

When Carl Sagan and Ed Salpeter envisioned potential Sinkers, Floaters, and Hunters living in Jupiter's clouds in 1976 (C. Sagan & E. E. Salpeter 1976), the nature of life in Earth's atmosphere remained widely unknown. Decades later, research has revealed a remarkable variety of microorganisms in our atmosphere. However, the spectral features of airborne microbes as biomarkers for detecting atmospheric life remained a mystery. Here, we present the first reflectance spectra of biopigments of atmospheric microorganisms based on laboratory cultivars of seven microbial strains isolated from Earth's atmosphere. We show their distinct UV-resistant biosignatures and their impacts on models of diverse planetary scenarios, using Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) parameters. The reflectance of these biopigments from aerial bacteria creates the means to detect them on other Earth-like planets. It provides a paradigm shift that moves the search for life beyond the surface of a planet to ecosystems in atmospheres and clouds.

Jinsook Lee, Yann Hicke, Renzhe Yu et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted in educational contexts to provide personalized support to students and teachers. The unprecedented capacity of LLM-based applications to understand and generate natural language can potentially improve instructional effectiveness and learning outcomes, but the integration of LLMs in education technology has renewed concerns over algorithmic bias which may exacerbate educational inequities. In this review, building on prior work on mapping the traditional machine learning life cycle, we provide a holistic map of the LLM life cycle from the initial development of LLMs to customizing pre-trained models for various applications in educational settings. We explain each step in the LLM life cycle and identify potential sources of bias that may arise in the context of education. We discuss why current measures of bias from traditional machine learning fail to transfer to LLM-generated content in education, such as tutoring conversations because the text is high-dimensional, there can be multiple correct responses, and tailoring responses may be pedagogically desirable rather than unfair. This review aims to clarify the complex nature of bias in LLM applications and provide practical guidance for their evaluation to promote educational equity.

Samuel A. Donkor, Matthew E. Walsh, Alexander J. Titus

Computing in the life sciences has undergone a transformative evolution, from early computational models in the 1950s to the applications of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) seen today. This paper highlights key milestones and technological advancements through the historical development of computing in the life sciences. The discussion includes the inception of computational models for biological processes, the advent of bioinformatics tools, and the integration of AI/ML in modern life sciences research. Attention is given to AI-enabled tools used in the life sciences, such as scientific large language models and bio-AI tools, examining their capabilities, limitations, and impact to biological risk. This paper seeks to clarify and establish essential terminology and concepts to ensure informed decision-making and effective communication across disciplines.

E. B. Norman, A. Drobizhev, N. Gharibyan et al.

Recent discussions about the origin of the Gallium Anomaly have motivated a remeasurement of the half life of $^{71}$Ge. We have conducted three separate measurements using dedicated planar Ge detectors: one with $^{55}$Fe as a standard, one with $^{57}$Co as a standard, and one stand alone 71Ge measurement. Our results yield a half life of 11.468 +- 0.008 days, which is consistent with but significantly more precise than the currently accepted value. With this experiment, the potential explanation of the Gallium Anomaly being due to an unexpectedly long $^{71}$Ge half life has been ruled out, leaving the origin of the anomaly as an open question.

Ksatria Londong Patiung

The understanding of Christology is sometimes vague. Some think that Jesus only has the nature of God and does not have a human nature, while others think that Jesus is an ordinary human being. Therefore, believers must have a correct understanding based on the truth of God's Word. The Gospels testify about Jesus Christ and His ministry. This paper specifically explains Christology from the perspective of the Gospel of John with its uniqueness. The Gospel of John affirms the belief that Jesus is the Messiah and the Son of God (John 20:30-31). John emphasizes that Jesus has a special personal relationship with God that no one else has. In addition to affirming Jesus as the Messiah and the Son of God, John also affirms Jesus' recognition of Himself as the "Son of Man".  Therefore, all Christians should believe that Jesus is both true God and true man.  BAHASA INDOENSIA ABSTRACT: Pemahaman tentang Kristologi yang dimiliki orang Kristen kadang kala memiliki pemahaman yang kabur. Ada yang menganggap Yesus hanya memiliki natur Allah dan tidak memiliki natur manusia, ada pula yang menganggap Yesus sebagai manusia biasa. Oleh karena itu orang percaya harus memiliki pemahaman yang benar berdasarkan kebenaran Firman Allah. Kitab Injil menuliskan tentang Yesus Kristus dan pelayanan-nya. Tulisan ini khusus menjelaskan Kristologi dari sudut pandang Injil Yohanes dengan keunikannya. Injil Yohanes meneguhkan kepercayaan bahwa Yesus sebagai Mesias dan Anak Allah (Yoh. 20:30-31). Yohanes menekankan bahwa Yesus memiliki hubungan pribadi yang istimewa dengan Allah yang tidak dimiliki oleh siapa pun. Selain menegaskan Yesus sebagai Mesias dan Anak Allah, Yohanes juga menegaskan pengakuan Yesus akan diri-Nya sebagai “Anak Manusia”.  Untuk itu, semua orang Kristen harusnya memiliki kepercayaan bahwa Yesus adalah Allah sejati sekaligus manusia sejati.

M. Therese Lysaught

Table of Contents, _Journal of Moral Theology_ 12, no. 1

Manasvi Lingam, Claudio Grimaldi, Amedeo Balbi

To assess the number of life-bearing worlds in astrophysical environments, it is necessary to take the intertwined processes of abiogenesis (birth), extinction (death), and transfer of life (migration) into account. We construct a mathematical model that incorporates this trio of mechanisms and accordingly derive the probability distribution function and other statistical properties (e.g., mean) for the number of worlds with biospheres. We show that a given astrophysical setting may become eventually saturated with life if the rate of successful transfers of organisms is higher than the extinction rate of biospheres. Based on the available data, we suggest that this criterion might be fulfilled for star-forming clusters (and perhaps the Galactic bulge under optimal circumstances), thereby indicating that such regions could constitute promising abodes for hosting and detecting life.

Gerald E. Marsh

Modern developments in nonequilibrium thermodynamics have significant implications for the origins of life. The reasons for this are closely related to a generalized version of the second law of thermodynamics recently found for entropy production during irreversible evolution of a given system such as self-replicating RNA. This paper is intended to serve as an introduction to these developments.

Mark C Leake

Early Career Researcher (ECR) development is a dynamic challenge that tensions the urge to perform ground-breaking research against an ultimate practical aspiration of establishing an acceptable level of job security. There is no typical career path for an ECR, least of all in the area of the Physics of Life or Biophysics/Biological Physics. Being explicitly interdisciplinary across the physical-life sciences interface presents more opportunities for a multiplicity of career trajectories through different home academic institutions and departments, as well as offering a broader range of alternative future career trajectories in non-academic sectors. That said, there are key common features, such as the transient nature of fixed-term postdoc contracts, the substantial research and domestic challenges that these present, and the often overwhelming pressures of the realities of competition in the job market. In this short article I outline the key challenges to ECRs in the Physics of Life and discuss simple strategies to manage and potentially overcome them.

Keishu Utimula

Reproduction, development, and individual interactions are essential topics in artificial life. The cellular automata, which can handle these in a composite way, is highly restricted in its form and behavior because it represents life as a pattern of cells. In contrast, the virtual creatures proposed by Karl Sims have a very high degree of freedom in terms of morphology and behavior. However, they have limited expressive capacity in terms of those viewpoints. This study carefully extracts the characteristics of the cellular automata and Sims models to propose a new artificial life model that can simulate reproduction, development, and individual interactions while exhibiting high expressive power for morphology and behavior. The simulation was performed by sequentially reading a book with genetic information and repeatedly executing four actions: expansion, connection, disconnection, and transition. The virtual creatures in the proposed model exhibit unique survival strategies and lifestyles and acquire interesting properties in reproduction, development, and individual interactions while having freedom in morphology and behavior.

James Green, Tori Hoehler, Marc Neveu et al.

Ours could realistically be the generation to discover evidence of life beyond Earth. With this privileged potential comes responsibility. The magnitude of the question, "are we alone?", and the public interest therein, opens the possibility that results may be taken to imply more than the observations support, or than the observers intend. As life detection objectives become increasingly prominent in space sciences, it is essential to open a community dialog about how to convey information in a subject matter that is diverse, complicated, and has high potential to be sensationalized. Establishing best practices for communicating about life detection can serve to set reasonable expectations on the early stages of a hugely challenging endeavor, attach value to incremental steps along the path, and build public trust by making clear that "false starts" and "dead ends" are an expected and potentially productive part of the scientific process. Here, we endeavor to motivate and seed the discussion with basic considerations and offer an example of how such considerations might be incorporated and applied in a proof-of-concept-level framework. Everything mentioned herein, including the name of the confidence scale, is intended not as a prescription, but simply as the beginning of an important dialogue.

Daniel A. Morris

Review of Tom Angier, ed., _The Cambridge Companion to Natural Law Ethics_

Tom Westby, Christopher J. Conselice

We present a cosmic perspective on the search for life and examine the likely number of Communicating Extra-Terrestrial Intelligent civilizations (CETI) in our Galaxy by utilizing the latest astrophysical information. Our calculation involves Galactic star-formation histories, metallicity distributions, and the likelihood of stars hosting Earth-like planets in Habitable Zones, under specific assumptions which we describe as the Astrobiological Copernican Weak and Strong conditions. These assumptions are based on the one situation in which intelligent, communicative life is known to exist - on our own planet. This type of life has developed in a metal-rich environment and has taken roughly 5 Gyr to do so. We investigate the possible number of CETI based on different scenarios. At one extreme is the Weak Astrobiological Copernican principle - such that a planet forms intelligent life sometime after 5 Gyr, but not earlier. The other is the Strong Condition in which life must form between 4.5 to 5.5 Gyr, as on Earth. In the Strong Condition (a strict set of assumptions), there should be at least 36$_{-32}^{+175}$ civilizations within our Galaxy: this is a lower limit, based on the assumption that the average life-time, L, of a communicating civilization is 100 years (based on our own at present). If spread uniformly throughout the Galaxy this would imply that the nearest CETI is at most 17000$_{-10000}^{+33600}$ light-years away, and most likely hosted by a low-mass M-dwarf star, far surpassing our ability to detect it for the foreseeable future. Furthermore, the likelihood that the host stars for this life are solar-type stars is extremely small and most would have to be M-dwarfs, which may not be stable enough to host life over long timescales. We furthermore explore other scenarios and explain the likely number of CETI there are within our Galaxy based on variations of our assumptions.

Oliver Holmes, W. James

Christopher M. Kelly

The ninth edition of Aging: Concepts and Controversies, written by Harry R. Moody and Jennifer R. Sasser, utilizes what is by now a familiar structure for scholars who have used previous editions of this book. The authors link concepts with controversies in three broad domains of aging: the life course, health care, and socioeconomic trends. For each controversy, four or more perspectives from outside writers are presented; sometimes, but not always, these writings contradict one another. This pedagogical design makes this an ideal textbook for graduate students, as well as undergraduate students in honors programs, who are new to the study of aging. Moody and Sasser offer a valuable survey of the major issues in gerontology today from across the scientific and ideological spectrums. It is also worth noting that while the authors have updated some information in the ninth edition, the vast majority of the text is identical to that of the eighth edition. There is justification for much of this replication. Many of the issues identified by Moody and Sasser are perennial; the public policy dilemmas presented by an aging society, for example, have vexed government officials for decades. In addition, many of these readings are timeless and essential. An education in aging is incomplete without exposure to de Beauvoir’s “The Coming of Age,” Rowe and Kahn’s “Successful Aging,” and Erikson et al.’s “Vital Involvement in Old Age,” to name only the first three excerpted works. We gerontologists stand on the shoulders of giants and it is gratifying to see so many giants in our field represented here. At the same time, a careful parsing of the 2018 edition indicates that work needs to be done to bring future editions up to date. Some of this lies beyond the authors’ control, at the time of this edition’s writing, the 2016 election and its aftermath could not be anticipated. However, decisions made by the authors also compromise the timeliness of this book. In some cases, issues have evolved; the debate on health care rationing, which includes three articles written prior to 2000, seems particularly out of date. In some places, more room is needed for different perspectives; LGBTQ elders, for example, are underrepresented, which seems an oversight, given recent policy changes. In other words, instructors who use this book may find it necessary to supplement these readings to fill gaps in information. Moody and Sasser begin the first of three Basic Concepts sections of the book by grounding their approach to human aging in the life course perspective. Human beings have always recognized a progression of life stages, with the number of stages growing as societies became more complex, as in Erik Erikson’s description of eight developmental stages. Moody and Sasser go on to discuss traditional theories of aging (e.g., modernization theory, disengagement theory, and activity theory), mechanisms of physical aging (e.g., wear and tear; free radicals), and psychological adaptations to aging, such as Baltes & Baltes’s “selective optimization with compensation.” Every theory, the authors note, has its limits; none fully explains the variety of ways in which individuals experience old age. The first controversy in this section is “Does Old Age Have Meaning?” The answer appears to be a qualified “yes, if one knows where to look for it.” Transcendence, or generativity, as Moody and Sasser describe, is what makes us human, and it is up to older adults themselves whether that meaning is to be found in leisure, in religion and spirituality, or elsewhere. As the authors describe, the meaning of aging is changing as the stages of life have become more blurred and the writers sampled here have distinct ideas of what it means to “age well,” whether it is through continued activity (Rowe and Kahn) or reflection (Florida Scott-Maxwell). But all agree that old age is unlike any stage that has come before, in which one has exchanged an indefinite future or a finite one, as Simone de Beauvoir describes. Controversy 2 asks “Why Do Our Bodies Grow Old?” and begins with “The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay,” the cart built to run a hundred years to a day. It is an apt metaphor here, because while prolonging the human life span might sound appealing, a more practical objective is to compress morbidity, as described here by Fries and Crapo and by Mor. There are more than 300 biological theories of aging; however, as Moody and Sasser describe, we can distinguish 881225 JAGXXX10.1177/0733464819881225Journal of Applied GerontologyBook Review book-review2019

Atanas Stoychev Orachev

The available database from the Thracian lands allows us to understand how the prehistoric civilizational models began and how the principles of interacting between their two main structures — the village and the city have crystalized. Nowhere else in Europe it is possible to trace better the peculiarities throughout thousands of past years and outline the essential differences between rural and urban culture. And to understand the fundamental differences in worldviews, to look at the differences in everyday stereotypes and the ways in which peasants and citizens conceive, perceive and strive to organize the world. This is also illustrated by the available written information and monuments about one of the most ancient cultural heroes — Orpheus, which should not be associated with the Thracian Orphism postulates in Thracology. In fact, for the Thracian cattle-breeding community, the invention of agriculture, the cleansing of wicked deeds, the remedies for diseases and the redemption of God’s wrath were most important in order to ensure fertility of flocks, fields and people. It is significant that in the Bogomil Books and Legends, in the Bulgarian apocryphal works and folklore there are many Orpheus notions: about Good and Evil and the corresponding anthem-prayers; data on medicines, divinations and prayers; substances for the remission of sins; fortune-telling; and last but not least, prayers and blessings for fertility.