Eton College

ABSTRACT Defined by Desmond Tutu as “a person is a person through other persons”, Ubuntu has contributed a great deal to our theological understanding of personhood. However, this article argues that it is time for a critical theology of Ubuntu. We need to be cognisant of the following dangers within Ubuntu as it has been traditionally been defined: (1) Ubuntu equates community with moral virtue, (2) Ubuntu is premised on idealised notions of community and consensus, and (3) the problem of personhood is unresolved in Ubuntu. In redefining Ubuntu as “becoming fully human in community”, we can develop a theology of Ubuntu which, while retaining the relationality at its core, gives full expression to human agency and freedom. Such a theology of Ubuntu expresses the truth that personhood is characterised by subjectivity, as well as a way of being that is developed and fulfilled in community.

In the long history of the study of the refraction of light, Willebrord Snell is credited with being the first to show that the ratio of the sines of the angles of incidence and reflection is constant for any given pair of media.

Abstract There is this view propounded by some theorists which claims that some conceptions of the nature of time are incompatible with the Christian position on the defeat of evil. The aim of this article is twofold. First, to clarify exactly which thesis about time’s nature is taken to be problematic for the defeat of evil. And second, to show that scriptural support for understanding the defeat of evil as requiring that evil not be in the range of the existential quantifier, something implicitly contended by those who put forward this problem, is weak and that these passages can be read in plausible ways which are affirmable by those who endorse the ‘problematic’ thesis.

Brian Leftow has argued in significant detail for a timeless conception of God. However, his work has been interacted with less than one might expect, especially given that some have contended that divine timelessness should be put to death and buried. Further, the work that has critically interacted with Leftow does a very poor job at discrediting it, or so I will contend. As we shall see, the main reason for this is either because what is central to Leftow’s view is not affected by the objection, or because Leftow provides another way of getting his theory off the ground. Why, then, do so many objections miss the mark? I suspect it’s because many struggle to understand Leftow’s view and what is central to it. As such, one of the main goals of this paper will be to make Leftow’s account more accessible and to elucidate the main elements of the theory, whilst also providing responses to the main objections raised against his view. The overall result of this, I hope, will be a more fruitful examination of Leftow’s view in the future.

In this paper, a multi-frequency shark-fin antenna has been developed using ANSYS HFSS, exhibiting operational capabilities at three discrete frequencies: 1.575GHz (GPS), 3.55GHz (n78), and 4GHz (n77). To enhance antenna performance, the incorporation of a superstrate has been executed effectively, enhancing gain. Employing a Microstrip patch architecture with inset feed mechanisms, the antenna configuration comprises two vertically positioned 4GHz antennas facing against each other, accompanied by two horizontally arranged antennas. The design is used to accommodate in a shark-fin casing for aerodynamic purposes.

There is an objection to divine timelessness which claims that timelessness shouldn’t be adopted since on this view evil is never “destroyed,” “vanquished,” “eradicated” or defeated. By contrast, some divine temporalists think that presentism is the key that allows evil to be destroyed/vanquished/eradicated/defeated. However, since presentism is often considered to be inconsistent with timelessness, it is thought that the presentist solution is not available for defenders of timelessness. In this paper I first show how divine timelessness is consistent with a presentist view of time and then how defenders of Presentist-Timelessness can adopt the presentist solution to the removal of evil. After this, I conclude the paper by showing that it’s far from clear that the presentist solution is successful and that unless one weakens what is meant by the destruction/vanquishing/eradication/defeat of evil, one can only make the presentist solution work by adopting a number of additional assumptions that many will find unattractive.

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Abstract The ER-α and β ligand bisphenol A (BPA) is used in the production of polycarbonate plastic and epoxy resins. BPA presents a potential environmental challenge to both human and wildlife immunity due to its widespread use and its resulting presence in surface water and wastewater runoff. We observed that BPA exposure downregulates the expression of a neutrophil-recruiting chemokine in both mice (cxcl1) and zebrafish (cxcl8) and that BPA exposure decreases neutrophil recruitment to a tail injury in zebrafish. Neutrophils are essential for the removal of damaged tissue and invading microbes, thus facilitating tissue regeneration of the tail fin. To investigate BPA’s effects on larval zebrafish tail regeneration, we induced a tail injury at day 3 post fertilization (dpf) and found that fish exposed to 100 ng/ml BPA regenerate a smaller tail fin area at 3 dpi (p-value < 0.01). We hypothesized that neutrophil recruitment could be tied to regeneration by altering the expression of inflammation- and regeneration-related genes. 3 dpf embryos exposed to BPA show modulated levels of background wnt10a and il-10 expression compared to controls. BPA exposure reduces the 3 hour post-injury inflammatory response by decreasing both il-1 and il-6 expression. By modifying the cytokine environment both prior to and following infection and injury, BPA impacts both the inflammatory response and tissue regeneration. Multiple cytokine and chemokine genes are regulated by the transcription factor NF-kB and Wnt plays a key role in tissue regeneration; these two proteins also cross regulate one another. The impact of BPA on wnt10a and nfkb expression following tissue injury and LPS exposure will be discussed. Supported by Carleton College.

In butterflies and moths, male‐killing endosymbionts are transmitted from infected females via their eggs, and the male progeny then perish. This means that successful transmission of the parasite relies on the successful mating of the host. Paradoxically, at the population level, parasite transmission also reduces the number of adult males present in the final population for infected females to mate with. Here we investigate if successful female mating when males are rare is indeed a likely rate‐limiting step in the transmission of male‐killing Spiroplasma in the African Monarch, Danaus chrysippus. In Lepidoptera, successful pairings are hallmarked by the transfer of a sperm‐containing spermatophore from the male to the female during copulation. Conveniently, this spermatophore remains detectable within the female upon dissection, and thus, spermatophore counts can be used to assess the frequency of successful mating in the field. We used such spermatophore counts to examine if altered sex ratios in the D. chrysippus do indeed affect female mating success. We examined two different field sites in East Africa where males were often rare. Surprisingly, mated females carried an average of 1.5 spermatophores each, regardless of male frequency, and importantly, only 10–20% remained unmated. This suggests that infected females will still be able to mate in the face of either Spiroplasma‐mediated male killing and/or fluctuations in adult sex ratio over the wet–dry season cycle. These observations may begin to explain how the male‐killing mollicute can still be successfully transmitted in a population where males are rare.