Optimism born out of circumstance

Cilia born out of shock and stress.

Primary cilia are cell surface sensory organelles, whose dysfunction underlies various human genetic diseases collectively termed ciliopathies. A new study in The EMBO Journal by Villumsen et al now reveals how stress–response pathways converge to stimulate ciliogenesis by modulating protein composition of centriolar satellites. Better understanding of these mechanisms should bring us closer to...

Brain complexity born out of criticality

In this essay we elaborate on recent evidence demonstrating the presence of a second order phase transition in human brain dynamics and discuss its consequences for theoretical approaches to brain function. We review early evidence of criticality in brain dynamics at different spatial and temporal scales, and we stress how it was necessary to unify concepts and analysis techniques across scales...

Circumstance Elaboration Joint Joint Example Elaboration Elaboration Condition Circumstance

Researchers in discourse have long hypothesized that the nuclei of a rhetorical structure tree provide a good summary of the text for which that tree was built. In this paper, I discuss a psy-cholinguistic experiment that validates this hypothesis , but that also shows that the distinction between nuclei and satellites is not suucient if we want to build summaries of very high quality. I empiri...

Magic moment? Maternal marriage for children born out of wedlock.

To test the existence of the "magic moment" for parental marriage immediately post-birth and to inform policies that preferentially encourage biological over step parent marriage, this study estimates the incidence and stability of maternal marriage for children born out of wedlock. Data came from the National Survey of Family Growth on 5,255 children born non maritally. By age 15, 29 % of chil...

War Crimes of Circumstance and Convenience