Research gaps in understanding flood changes at the catchment scale caused by changes in forest management, agricultural practices, artificial drainage, and terracing are identified. Potential strategies in addressing these gaps are proposed, such as complex systems approaches to link processes across time scales, long‐term experiments on physical‐chemical‐biological process interactions, and a focus on connectivity and patterns across spatial scales. It is suggested that these strategies will stimulate new research that coherently addresses the issues across hydrology, soil and agricultural sciences, forest engineering, forest ecology, and geomorphology.
Background/objectives:The emptying of the gall bladder in response to feeding is pivotal for the digestion of fat, but the role of various food ingredients in contracting the gall bladder postprandially is not well understood. We hypothesized that different food ingredients, when consumed, will have a different effect on stimulating gall bladder emptying. To investigate this we designed two randomized, investigator-blind, cross-over studies in healthy subjects using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to measure gall bladder volumes serially and non-invasively.Subjects/methods:Study 1: exploratory study evaluating the effects of 10 different food ingredients on gall bladder emptying in eight healthy subjects. The choice of ingredients varied from common items like coffee, tea and milk to actives like curcumin and potato protease inhibitor. Study 2: mechanistic study investigating the cholecystokinin (CCK) dose response to the best performer ingredient from Study 1 in 21 healthy subjects four ways.Results:The largest gall bladder volume change in Study 1 was observed with fat, which therefore became the dose-response ingredient in Study 2, where the maximum % gall bladder volume change correlated well with CCK.Conclusions:These serial test-retest studies showed that the fasted gall bladder volume varied remarkably between individuals and that individual day-to-day variability had wide coefficients of variation. Improved knowledge of how to stimulate bile release using food ingredients will be useful to improve in vitro–in vivo correlation of bioavailability testing of hydrophobic drugs. It could improve performance of cholesterol-lowering plant stanol and sterol products and possibly aid understanding of some cholesterol gallstone disease.
More than 600 million young people today live in economically and environmentally fragile contexts. Scholarly literature on the interconnections between these young people and religion has often portrayed them as prone to radicalization and drawn to violent extremism. Such framings, however, render invisible their potential as agents for positive change. In this article, we take a step back to consider more basic questions about the socio‐political significance of youth leadership in (inter)religious contexts for the cultivation of peace. In particular, we focus on youth, religion, and religious representations of insider and outsider “others.” In this article, we report on the youth‐focused programme Enemy, Stranger, Neighbor, Friend, aiming to contribute to understanding the complexities that youth working in conflict prevention, informal peace education, and interreligious work face and the contributions they can make.
The article examines the disparity in use of digital humanities tools and resources among the theological disciplines, highlighting the question of why systematic theology has struggled to follow the digital turn. The author argues that issues of fairness in access and use of digital resources in knowledge production constitute an important set of concerns for systematic theologians in considering appropriate uses of the digital in their research. The article suggests that there are indeed reasons for methodological innovation in systematic theology in reaction to the digital revolution in humanities research – not, however, toward more plugged-in methods but toward methods embedded in life with the poor, underrepresented, and excluded. Three principles for a methodological “reboot” in systematic theology are given, which offer directions for further research as well as material for debate.
What are we talking about when we talk about the postsecular? This article looks at the ways articulations of the secular often presuppose the presence – not the absence – of religion and religious plurality. This can be observed even in the work of early theorists of secularism as well as of the first sociologists who observed secularizing tendencies in society and sought to conduct social‐scientific inquiry in a way that aimed to be analytically agnostic. At the same time, the return or renewed visibility of religion does not imply a decrease in individualization of religious expression, the disappearance of secularist attitudes, or that challenges of negotiating religious pluralism have been overcome. This more complicated orientation toward relating secularity and religious pluralism shifts the focus away from debates over the truth or rationality of religious beliefs and practices to the need for mutual, voluntary, open, and ongoing communication among them. On the one hand, a commitment is necessary to the creation and maintenance of meaningful participation opportunities in the self‐presentation of religious self‐understandings in relation to issues of common concern (the mutuality requirement); on the other hand, a steadfast commitment is needed from religious persons and groups themselves to persistent participation in presentation of one's own views or those of one's constituencies in ways that are clear and accessible to all other participants (the voluntariness requirement).
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