the 56th pugwash conference on science and world affairs opened with a key note address by the italian minister of foreign affairs, massimo d’alema, and the un secretary-general ban ki-moon’s message in bari, italy, on 21 october 2008. in the week-long meeting, the participants discussed a wide array of topics related to regional security issues such as the status of nuclear arms control, the r...

Food for humans is one of the most important of all global issues. It is a critical determinant of planetary and individual health, of economic development, of how sustainable energy and water supplies are, and its security a powerful determinant of peace or conflict. Those who assume leadership for the integrity of food and health systems have great responsibility. The IUNS (International Unio...

Time-varying topological simplifications of the space of votes in the US House of Representatives (US HoR) display several interesting features unavailable with classical methods of machine learning. In this paper we demonstrate how a recently developed topological simplification method, MAPPER, can detect changes in collaboration structures within the US HoR over time.

pierre teilhard de chardin, as he is more commonly known, was a jesuit priest who died in 1955, having worked for some twenty years as a paleontologist in china. while being a renowned scientist, who assisted in the finding of the peking man fossil, teilhard’s main desire and scholastic efforts were to reshape modern christian theology in the light of contemporary science, especially in his own...

New momentum for civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) is building, driven by the confluence of growing demands for accountability and results in health, improved equity, and rights-based approaches to development challenges, and by the immense potential of innovation and new technologies to accelerate CRVS improvement. Examples of country successes in strengthening of hitherto weak sy...