The reaction of the Orthodox Church to the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) arguably set a pattern that would persist until the end of Byzantium. While members of the hierarchy were mostly opposed to accepting invitations to attend the council, the Emperor Theodore i Laskaris saw it as an opportunity to open up a dialogue with the papacy in the hope of deriving some political advantage. This episode reveals that negotiations over the Union of Churches divided Byzantine society in a way that had not happened before 1204.

I am guessing, but I suspect that Bryer's first introduction to Nicholas Mesarites was like mine through a very short article by A. A. Vasiliev, entitled ‘Mesarites as a source’,1 which was a footnote to his much more substantial ‘The foundation of the Empire of Trebizond’,2 which dominated the field for years. Vasiliev was responding to a criticism by Franz Dölger, who suggested that Vasiliev might have benefited from a perusal of the works of Nicholas Mesarites, which had been edited by his old master August Heisenberg.3 Vasiliev was adamant Nicholas Mesarites had little to contribute to the early history of the Empire of Trebizond. In his opinion, the Seljuq inscription from the walls of Sinope, which Heisenberg included in his commentary, was far more valuable than anything that could be gleaned from Mesarites’ writings. This rather explains why they remained a neglected source.

The public health burden of alcohol is unevenly distributed across the life course, with levels of use, abuse, and dependence increasing across adolescence and peaking in early adulthood. Here, we leverage this temporal patterning to search for common genetic variants predicting developmental trajectories of alcohol consumption. Comparable psychiatric evaluations measuring alcohol consumption were collected in three longitudinal community samples (N = 2,126, obs = 12,166). Consumption-repeated measurements spanning adolescence and early adulthood were analyzed using linear mixed models, estimating individual consumption trajectories, which were then tested for association with Illumina 660W-Quad genotype data (866,099 SNPs after imputation and QC). Association results were combined across samples using standard meta-analysis methods. Four meta-analysis associations satisfied our pre-determined genome-wide significance criterion (FDR < 0.1) and six others met our ‘suggestive’ criterion (FDR <0.2). Genome-wide significant associations were highly biological plausible, including associations within GABA transporter 1, SLC6A1 (solute carrier family 6, member 1), and exonic hits in LOC100129340 (mitofusin-1-like). Pathway analyses elaborated single marker results, indicating significant enriched associations to intuitive biological mechanisms, including neurotransmission, xenobiotic pharmacodynamics, and nuclear hormone receptors (NHR). These findings underscore the value of combining longitudinal behavioral data and genome-wide genotype information in order to study developmental patterns and improve statistical power in genomic studies.

The importance of including developmental and environmental measures in genetic studies of human pathology is widely acknowledged, but few empirical studies have been published. Barriers include the need for longitudinal studies that cover relevant developmental stages and for samples large enough to deal with the challenge of testing gene–environment–development interaction. A solution to some of these problems is to bring together existing data sets that have the necessary characteristics. As part of the National Institute on Drug Abuse-funded Gene-Environment-Development Initiative, our goal is to identify exactly which genes, which environments, and which developmental transitions together predict the development of drug use and misuse. Four data sets were used of which common characteristics include (1) general population samples, including males and females; (2) repeated measures across adolescence and young adulthood; (3) assessment of nicotine, alcohol, and cannabis use and addiction; (4) measures of family and environmental risk; and (5) consent for genotyping DNA from blood or saliva. After quality controls, 2,962 individuals provided over 15,000 total observations. In the first gene–environment analyses, of alcohol misuse and stressful life events, some significant gene–environment and gene–development effects were identified. We conclude that in some circumstances, already collected data sets can be combined for gene–environment and gene–development analyses. This greatly reduces the cost and time needed for this type of research. However, care must be taken to ensure careful matching across studies and variables.

Two issues are addressed here: the status of Byzantine autobiography and the state of Byzantine literary culture in its last years. Autobiographical information was mostly a device used at all levels of Byzantine literature for immediacy, emphasis and to suggest personal involvement. It continued to function in this way in the last years of Byzantium, but there was also a degree of experimentation, as it extended its range into satire and comedy and, in the hands of Theodore Agallianos evolved from the rhetoric of apologia into fully-fledged autobiography.

Amulticategory item-response theory model was developed to characterize developmental changes in three items relating to the assessment of puberty in adolescent twin girls and boys. The model allowed for the fixed effects of age on probability of endorsing the responses and for the random effects of individual differences on the timing of pubertal changes relative to chronological age. In girls, the model was applied three-wave data on twin pairs (N = 414 female monozygotic [MZ] and 197 female dizygotic [DZ] pairs) and female twins from boy–girl pairs (N = 300 twins) from the Virginia Twin Study of Adolescent Behavioral Development. In boys, the data comprised 318 MZ and 185 DZ pairs and 297 male twins from boy–girl pairs. A total of 3172 and 2790 individual twin assessments were available in girls and boys, respectively, spanning ages 8–17 years. The availability of twin data allows the contributions of genes, the shared environment and individual unique environmental experiences to be resolved in the relative timing of pubertal changes. Parameters of the mixed model including fixed effects of age and random effects of genes and environment were estimated by Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulations using the BUGS algorithm for Gibbs sampling. The estimated standard deviation of random differences in the timing of puberty relative to age was 0.96 years in girls and 1.01 years in boys. The estimated intraclass correlations for the relative timing of pubertal changes were 0.99 +/−0.01 in MZ girls, 0.52 +/−0.02 in DZ girls, 0.88 +/−0.04 in MZ boys and 0.44+/−0.02 in DZ boys, indicating a very large contribution of genetic factors to the relative timing of pubertal change in both sexes. Additive genetic factors account for an estimated 96.3+/−3.3% of the total variance in random effects in girls and 88.0+/−3.6% in boys. Shared environmental influences account for 3.6+/−3.4% in girls and 0% in boys. In girls, nonshared environmental effects explain 0.1+/−0.1% of the total residual variance. The comparable figure in boys is 12.0+/−;3.6%.