Adolescents’ Faith Commitments as Correlates of Their Involvement in Christian Service

This study sought to determine the relationship between adolescents’ involvement in service to others and their commitment to religious values and Seventh-day Adventist beliefs. Canonical correlation indicated that adolescents’ involvement in service to others is significantly related to their commitment to religious values and beliefs. Results indicated that greater commitment to religious values and Seventh-day Adventist beliefs among adolescents attending Seventh-day Adventist schools is correlated with greater involvement in service to others.     

On Merely Modal Epistemic Peers: Challenging the Equal-Weight View

There is a controversy, within social epistemology, over how to handle disagreement among epistemic peers. Call this the problem of peer disagreement. There is a solution, i.e. the equal-weight view, which says that disagreement among epistemic peers is a reason for each peer to lower the credence they place in their respective positions. However, this solution is susceptible to a serious challenge. Call it the merely modal peers challenge. Throughout parts of modal space, which resemble the actual world almost completely, there are hordes of epistemic peers, who disagree with almost any arbitrarily chosen belief had by residents of the actual world. Further, the mere modality of these peers is not itself an epistemic difference-maker. Thus, on the equal-weight view, we should significantly lower the credence we place in most of our beliefs. Surely, this is seriously mistaken. Thus, there are serious considerations that cut against the equal-weight view.     

How do slender mineral crystals resist buckling in biological materials?

Mineral crystals in biological materials such as bone, tooth, and sea shell are susceptible to buckling under compressive loading due to their slender geometry with large aspect ratios. How does nature deal with this problem? This question is especially interesting in view of the three orders of magnitude difference in elastic modulus between protein and mineral. As a first analysis of this question, we study the stability of a single mineral platelet confined in an otherwise perfect protein–mineral nanostructure. We find that there exists a transition of buckling strength from an aspect ratio-dependent regime to a lower threshold value, independent of the crystal geometry. Typical values of the aspect ratio of mineral crystals of bone and nacre fall in this transition region. The existence of a buckling strength independent of the detailed geometrical parameters of mineral may be critically important from the point of view of structure robustness as the composite behaviour of biomaterials should not depend sensitively on small variations in crystal size and shape.