Naturalness

About: Naturalness is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1305 publications have been published within this topic receiving 31737 citations.

The consequences of the concept of naturalness for organic plant breeding and propagation

Abstract: Organic agriculture is enhancing specific plant breeding activities to meet its requirements for varieties better adapted to the specific organic environment. In the past five years, therefore, attempts have been made to translate the principles of organic farming into rules, regulations and guidelines for organic plant breeding and propagation. These principles are based on the concept of naturalness, which includes three complementary approaches: the non-chemical approach, the agro-ecological approach and the integrity approach. Departing from the concept of naturalness, criteria have been developed to evaluate existing plant breeding and propagation techniques for their compliance to the principles of organic agriculture. Each of the three approaches of the concept of naturalness has major consequences. If these consequences are taken seriously, plant breeding and propagation strategies and techniques for organic farming will greatly differ from breeding and propagation for conventional farming. To better understand the choices to be made and to make them acceptable to the mainstream seed industry, it is necessary to further clarify the underlying framework. This paper provides this clarification by analysing the cognitive, emotive, and normative dimensions of the three approaches. Distinguishing the three different approaches of naturalness in organic agriculture, as well as their three dimensions, and analysing the consequences for the breeding and propagation strategies and techniques can also help to identify and prioritize short-term and long-term steps for the practical development of organic seed production and plant breeding.

Naturalness in biological conservation

Abstract: Conservation scientists are arguing whether naturalness provides a reasonable “imperative” for conservation. To clarify this debate and the interpretation of the term “natural,” I analyze three management strategies – ecosystem preservation, ecosystem restoration, and ecosystem engineering – with respect to the naturalness of their outcomes. This analysis consists in two parts. First, the ambiguous term “natural” is defined in a variety of ways, including (1) naturalness as that which is part of nature, (2) naturalness as a contrast to artifactuality, (3) naturalness as an historical independence from human actions, and (4) naturalness as possession of certain properties. After that, I analyze the different conceptions with respect to their implications for the three management strategies. The main conclusion is that there exists no single conception of naturalness that could distinguish between the outcomes of the three management methods. Therefore, as long as the outcomes of the different methods are regarded as being of a different value in conservation, we should either abandon the idea of naturalness as the guiding concept in conservation or use the term “natural” only in the ways that take both its historical and feature dependent meanings into consideration.

The state of the art of food ingredients’ naturalness evaluation: A review of proposed approaches and their relation with consumer trends

Abstract: Background: Food naturalness has been the subject of several recent studies and is a key trend in the food industry. There is currently no comprehensive legal definition of food naturalness, which is a multi-faceted and complex principle composed of many aspects. Naturalness-influencing aspects constituting naturalness of food ingredients are similar to those already investigated for finished food products. Scope and approach: Two research questions are posed in this review: • To what extent are the naturalness criteria for food ingredients set by ISO technical specification 19,657 “Definitions and technical criteria for food ingredients to be considered as natural” in line with the latest trends in consumer studies, reviews and reports on the topic? • What aspects contributing to naturalness of food ingredients are the most present across food ingredients’ categories? The first question is answered through a review of governmental sources and scientific literature related to food naturalness and its evaluation. The second question is addressed through four case studies. Key findings and conclusions: ISO TS 19657 evaluates food ingredients' naturalness and only partially fulfils consumers’ requests. To build up a more comprehensive evaluation system, other aspects e.g. farming practices should be taken into consideration. The case studies presented in this review paper highlighted this need for a more extended basis for naturalness evaluation of food ingredients. A gap between technical and safety need for processing and consumer perception of processing in relation to naturalness emerged.

A First Top Partner's Hunter Guide

Abstract: We provide a systematic effective lagrangian description of the phenomenology of the lightest top-partners in composite Higgs models. Our construction is based on symmetry, on selection rules and on plausible dynamical assumptions. The structure of the resulting simplified models depends on the quantum numbers of the lightest top partner and of the operators involved in the generation of the top Yukawa. In all cases the phenomenology is conveniently described by a small number of parameters, and the results of experimental searches are readily interpreted as a test of naturalness. We recast presently available experimental bounds on heavy fermions into bounds on top partners: LHC has already stepped well inside the natural region of parameter space.

"L=R" -- $U(1)_R$ Lepton Number at the LHC

Abstract: We perform a detailed study of a variety of LHC signals in supersymmetric models where lepton number is promoted to an (approximate) U(1)_R symmetry. Such a symmetry has interesting implications for naturalness, as well as flavor- and CP-violation, among others. Interestingly, it makes large sneutrino vacuum expectation values phenomenologically viable, so that a slepton doublet can play the role of the down-type Higgs. As a result, (some of) the leptons and neutrinos are incorporated into the chargino and neutralino sectors. This leads to characteristic decay patterns that can be experimentally tested at the LHC. The corresponding collider phenomenology is largely determined by the new approximately conserved quantum number, which is itself closely tied to the presence of "leptonic R-parity violation". We find rather loose bounds on the first and second generation squarks, arising from a combination of suppressed production rates together with relatively small signal efficiencies of the current searches. Naturalness would indicate that such a framework should be discovered in the near future, perhaps through spectacular signals exhibiting the lepto-quark nature of the third generation squarks. The presence of fully visible decays, in addition to decay chains involving large missing energy (in the form of neutrinos) could give handles to access the details of the spectrum of new particles, if excesses over SM background were to be observed. The scale of neutrino masses is intimately tied to the source of U(1)_R breaking, thus opening a window into the R-breaking sector through neutrino physics. Further theoretical aspects of the model have been presented in a recent companion paper.