The 2011–2014 controversies between the Ethiopian Government and Muslim communities on the role of Islam in Ethiopia have highlighted the precarious nature of religious relations in Ethiopia. Statements by public figures and religious leaders recently have drawn attention to the nature and scope of the Ethiopian secular state order. This paper describes the recent Muslim protest movement and th...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to investigate whether a secular trend in growth occurred during the last century in Pygmies from Cameroon (West Pygmies) and in Bantu rural farmers, the latter being studied to serve as controls. DESIGN The evolution in height of West Pygmies and Bantu farmers from 1911 to 2006 was evaluated using data from the literature as well as data gathered by our re...

This article argues that the emerging project of contemplative science will be best served if it is informed by two perspectives. First, attention should be paid not only to non-analytical and/or mindfulness-based practices, but to a fuller range of contemplative practices, including analytical styles of meditation. Second, the issue of ethics must be addressed as a framework within which to un...

Today we have numerous evidences that spirals evolve dynamically through various secular or episodic processes, such as bar formation and destruction, bulge growth and mergers, sometimes over much shorter periods than the standard galaxy age of 10− 15 Gyr. This, coupled to the known properties of the Hubble sequence, leads to a unique sense of evolution: from Sm to Sa. Linking this to the known...

Stellar evolution theory predicts that asymptotic giant branch stars undergo a series of short thermal pulses that significantly change their luminosity and mass on timescales of hundreds to thousands of years. These pulses are confirmed observationally by the existence of the short-lived radioisotope technetium in the spectra of some of these stars, but other observational consequences of ther...

The term ‘secular religion’ first appeared in the description of modern totalitarian ideologies but soon became a general category applied to other political, socio-economic and cultural phenomena. problem with this approach is inherent contradiction term, since ‘secular’ by all definitions means ‘non-religious’, making secular religion something like ‘nonreligious religion’. second wide range ...

Article history: Received 31 May 2009 Received in revised form 5 December 2009 Accepted 7 December 2009 Available online 6 January 2010 In this Editorial we correct the false claim that g loadings and inbreeding depression scores correlate with the secular gains in IQ. This claim has been used to render the logic of heritable g a “red herring” and an “absurdity” as an explanation of Black–White...

BACKGROUND Few studies on spatial patterns or secular trends in human leishmanias have been conducted in Morocco. This study aimed to examine spatial patterns and trends associated with the human leishmaniasis incidence rate (HLIR) at the province/prefecture level between 2003 and 2013 in Morocco. METHODS Only the available published country data on the HLIR between 2003 and 2013, from the op...