Religious Elite Cues, Internal Division, and the Impact of Pope Francis' Laudato Si'

What impact do cues from religious elites have on followers, particularly when religious communities are internally divided? Could religious elites promote internal consensus, or would their cues stoke further internal polarization? This article utilizes the release of Pope Francis's encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si', to explore these questions. A unique survey experiment, conducted on a nationally representative sample of Catholic voters in the United States in late 2015, tests the impact of Francis' message relative to a similar message from unidentified environmental elites. In keeping with other studies of Laudato's impact in the United States, findings reveal real, but nuanced, effects from Francis' environmental cue. The Francis cue did impact conservatives and high religiosity Catholics, but these effects were not distinct from those on other Catholics in the sample, suggesting limitations in promoting consensus. Instead, responses to a Francis cue varied sharply depending on pre-existing views of Francis' leadership.

Evolution of anticipatory effects mediated by epigenetic changes

Anticipatory effects mediated by epigenetic changes occur when parents modify the phenotype of their offspring by making epigenetic changes in their gametes guided by information from an environmental cue. To investigate when do anticipatory effects mediated by epigenetic changes evolve in a fluctuating environment, I use an individual based simulation model with explicit genetic architecture. The model allows for the population to respond to environmental changes by evolving within generation plasticity, bet-hedging, or track the environment with genetic adaptation, in addition to the evolution of anticipatory effects. The results show that anticipatory effects evolve when the environmental cue provides reliable information about the environment and the environmental fluctuations span from a few to tens of generations, provided that fitness costs of anticipatory effects are rather low. Moreover, evolution of anticipatory effects is quite robust to different genetic architectures when reliability of the environmental cue is high. Anticipatory effects always give smaller fitness benefits than within generation plasticity, suggesting a possible reason for generally small observed anticipatory effects in empirical studies. The model suggests that empirical studies could focus on taxa that live in environments that have high environmental autocorrelations or environmental cues that reliably predict the environment to test model predictions.

Brain Glucose Metabolism and Dopamine Transporters Change in Addiction and Environmental Cue-Induced Memory

Purpose: Drug addiction is a chronic brain disease and abuse of morphine is compulsive. Serval brain regions were involved in drug stimulus learning and drug seeking behaviors. Dopaminergic signaling pathway plays a key role in drug seeking behaviors. In this study, we focus on the regions of brain metabolism and dopamine transporters alternation, and figure out their role in drug seeking behaviors, and environmental cue-induced craving and retrieval of drug withdrawal memory by morphine-induced conditioned place preference (CPP) rats.Methods: Rats with CPP training (n = 6) were established by intraperitoneal injection of morphine (6 mg/kg body weight) in male SD rats (250 - 300g) during three-day conditioning, and rats with only morphine injection were used as addictive group (n = 6). Micro-PET/CT scans were performed at 3 different time points by intravenous injection of 18F-FDG and 11C-CFT. Regions of interests were collected by PMOD, voxel-wise analysis were performed by SPM8 software (uncorrected, P < 0.001, k = 20) on MATLAB platform. Results: SUVr of FDG declined significantly in medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), cingulate in short term addiction compared with baseline. Glucose metabolism alternation in somatosensory cortex, hippocampus, cingulate were also found in addictive rats by voxel-wise analysis. Striatum, thalamus, medial prefrontal cortex, primary motor cortex and many regions in cortex also involved in CPP rats. Striatum, primary somatosensory cortex and some cortical regions play key roles in memory retrieval of addiction compared with addiction. DAT expression alternation were only observed in long term addiction compared with short term addiction.Conclusion: This study shows that the cerebral glucose metabolism in addiction and CPP is significantly different from control group mainly in mPFC, striatum and hippocampus. Hippocampal and neocortical circuits for episodic memories could also involve in memory retrieval of addiction, and primary somatosensory cortex, primary motor cortex could be the neocortical structure together with PFC.

Circadian clock mechanism driving mammalian photoperiodism

The annual photoperiod cycle provides the critical environmental cue synchronizing rhythms of life in seasonal habitats. In 1936, Bünning proposed a circadian-based coincidence timer for photoperiodic synchronization in plants. Formal studies support the universality of this so-called coincidence timer, but we lack understanding of the mechanisms involved. Here we show in mammals that long photoperiods induce the circadian transcription factor BMAL2, in the pars tuberalis of the pituitary, and triggers summer biology through the eyes absent / thyrotrophin (EYA3 / TSH) pathway. Conversely, long-duration melatonin signals on short photoperiods induce circadian repressors including DEC1, suppressing BMAL2 and the EYA3/TSH pathway, triggering winter biology. These actions are associated with progressive genome-wide changes in chromatin state, elaborating the effect of the circadian coincidence timer. Hence, circadian clock-pituitary epigenetic pathway interactions form the basis of the mammalian coincidence timer mechanism. Our results constitute a blueprint for circadian-based seasonal timekeeping in vertebrates.

An Integrative Framework for Understanding the Mechanisms and Multigenerational Consequences of Transgenerational Plasticity

Transgenerational plasticity (TGP) occurs when the environment experienced by a parent influences the development of their offspring. In this article, we develop a framework for understanding the mechanisms and multigenerational consequences of TGP. First, we conceptualize the mechanisms of TGP in the context of communication between parents (senders) and offspring (receivers) by dissecting the steps between an environmental cue received by a parent and its resulting effects on the phenotype of one or more future generations. Breaking down the problem in this way highlights the diversity of mechanisms likely to be involved in the process. Second, we review the literature on multigenerational effects and find that the documented patterns across generations are diverse. We categorize different multigenerational patterns and explore the proximate and ultimate mechanisms that can generate them. Throughout, we highlight opportunities for future work in this dynamic and integrative area of study.