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The article discusses the ethnic religious politics in Israel in reference to the Shas Party, an ultra-orthodox religious political party in Israel. It informs that the party was founded by ultra-Orthodox rabbis, second generation Jewish immigrants from the Arab countries. It mentions the reasons for the success of the political party and mentions that the Shas Movement began in Jerusalem in 1983. It informs that the strength of Shah Movements lies with the citizens who are culturally, religiously and economically inferior. It reflects the reasons for the political organization of second-generation immigrants from Arab countries.

The article discusses the impact of mysticism, charismatic and religious leadership. It informs that the non-establishment religious leaders do not exhibit any special qualities before their revelation as demonstrated by the case of miracle worker Yaakov Ifargan. It states that there is a tension within Judaism between orthodoxy and the revitalization of ritual. As the case of Ifargan is considered, he succeeded in establishing his leadership through the non-innovative image as do other non-establishment charismatic leaders. It is believed that the creation of a community of believers is a second element of nonestablishment religious leadership.

Infectious pancreatic necrosis virus (IPNV), an aquatic birnavirus that infects salmonid fish, encodes a large polyprotein (NH2-pVP2-VP4-VP3-COOH) that is processed through the proteolytic activity of its own protease, VP4, to release the proteins pVP2 and VP3. pVP2 is further processed to give rise to the capsid protein VP2 and three peptides that are incorporated into the virion. Reported here are two crystal structures of the IPNV VP4 protease solved from two different crystal symmetries. The electron density at the active site in the triclinic crystal form, refined to 2.2-Å resolution, reveals the acyl-enzyme complex formed with an internal VP4 cleavage site. The complex was generated using a truncated enzyme in which the general base lysine was substituted. Inside the complex, the nucleophilic Ser633Oγ forms an ester bond with the main-chain carbonyl of the C-terminal residue, Ala716, of a neighboring VP4. The structure of this substrate-VP4 complex allows us to identify the S1, S3, S5, and S6 substrate binding pockets as well as other substrate-VP4 interactions and therefore provides structural insights into the substrate specificity of this enzyme. The structure from the hexagonal crystal form, refined to 2.3-Å resolution, reveals the free-binding site of the protease. Three-dimensional alignment with the VP4 of blotched snakehead virus, another birnavirus, shows that the overall structure of VP4 is conserved despite a low level of sequence identity (∼19%). The structure determinations of IPNV VP4, the first of an acyl-enzyme complex for a Ser/Lys dyad protease, provide insights into the catalytic mechanism and substrate recognition of this type of protease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern conservation operates at the nexus of biological and social influences. While the importance of social and cultural factors is often mentioned, defining, measuring and comparing these factors remains a significant challenge. Here, we explore a novel method to quantify cultural interest in all extant reptile species using Wikipedia — a large, open-access online encyclopaedia. We analysed all page views of reptile species viewed during 2014 in all of Wikipedia's language editions. We compared species' page view numbers across languages and in relationship to their spatial distribution, phylogeny, threat status and various other biological attributes. We found that the three species with most page views are shared across major language editions, beyond these, page view ranks of species tend to be specific to particular language editions. Interest within a language is mostly focused on reptiles found in the regions where the language is spoken. Overall, interest is greater for reptiles that are venomous, endangered, widely distributed, larger and that have been described earlier. However, within individual reptile families not all the above factors predict page views. Most families contain at least one species in the top 5% of page views, but 29 families (with 1,450 species) have no ‘high interest species’ in them. Overall, our analyses elucidate novel patterns of human interests in nature over large geographical, cultural and taxonomic spectra using big-data techniques. Such approaches hold much promise for incorporating social perceptions in future conservation practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]