Search

The effects of cold hardening of cereals on their cross-tolerance to treatments leading to oxidative stress were investigated. Long-term exposure to low non-freezing temperatures provided partial protection to wheat and barley plants from the damage caused by paraquat and hydrogen peroxide treatments. It also conferred resistance in two barley cultivars to the necrotic symptoms and growth of the fungal phytopathogen Pyrenophora teres f. teres. Pathogen-induced oxidative burst was also reduced in cold hardened plants. The possible roles of host-derived redox factors and other signaling components in the observed forms of cereal cross-tolerance are discussed.

In 1960 Stanley Milgram wondered if ordinary people would, as many Germans did during the Holocaust, obey higher orders to harm innocent people. Soon after, he ran the New Baseline experiment: at the behest of a scientific authority, 65 percent of subjects inflicted what appeared to be potentially lethal shocks on another person with a mild heart condition. Although, to date, there is no widely accepted explanation that can account for this finding, three theories continue to attract a disproportionate amount of attention: the Incredulity Hypothesis, Agentic State, and Engaged Followership. The aim of this paper is to present an overview of how Milgram invented his basic procedure and then use the insights gained from his journey of discovery as a foundation from which to critically review these three explanatory accounts. Succeeding this critical review, a lesser well-known theory will be presented; one that is supported by Milgram’s original results.

Our earlier research showed that an interspecific tobacco hybrid (Nicotiana edwardsonii ‘Columbia’ [NEC]) displays elevated levels of salicylic acid (SA) and enhanced resistance to localized necrotic symptoms (hypersensitive response [HR]) caused by tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) and tobacco necrosis virus (TNV), as compared with another interspecific hybrid (Nicotiana edwardsonii [NE]) derived from the same parents. In the present study, we investigated whether symptomatic resistance in NEC is indeed associated with the inhibition of TMV and TNV and whether SA plays a role in this process. We demonstrated that enhanced viral resistance in NEC is manifested as both milder local necrotic (HR) symptoms and reduced levels of TMV and TNV. The presence of an adequate amount of SA contributes to the enhanced defense response of NEC to TMV and TNV, as the absence of SA resulted in seriously impaired viral resistance. Elevated levels of subcellular tripeptide glutathione (GSH) in NEC plants in response to viral infection suggest that in addition to SA, GSH may also contribute to the elevated viral resistance of NEC. Furthermore, we found that NEC displays an enhanced resistance not only to viral pathogens but also to bacterial infections and abiotic oxidative stress induced by paraquat treatments. [Graphic: see text] Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.

The anti-metaphysical argument against scientific realism (AMA) is the following: (1) Knowledge of unobservable entities implies metaphysical knowledge; (2) There is no metaphysical knowledge. Therefore, there is no knowledge of unobservable entities. This argument has strangely received little attention in the profuse literature on scientific realism. This paper claims that the AMA is logically more fundamental than both the pessimistic meta-induction and the underdetermination argument. The second and main claim of this paper is that the instrumentalists' use of AMA is incoherent. The gist of my argument is that experimental knowledge requires minimally metaphysical knowledge, and that minimally metaphysical knowledge-when associated with empirical knowledge-suffices to yield a minimal knowledge of the unobservable. I then examine and reject two possible responses: minimally metaphysical instrumentalism and algebraic instrumentalism., Author(s): Raphaël Künstler [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.508721.9, Philosophy Department, Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès, , Toulouse, France Introduction Is it more legitimate to believe in quarks than in telepathic [...]