Historical Space Steps of Turkey: It Is High Time to Establish the Turkish Space Agency

This paper discusses the importance of space in today’s space driven world, the current space activities of Turkey, its space organizations with legislation background information and calls for the necessity for the establishment of the Turkish Space Agency (TSA). Firstly, the importance of space is given which is followed by a brief background and current space activities in Turkey. Then, the answers to why Turkey needs a National Space Agency are outlined by stating its expected role and duties. Additionally, the framework for space policy for Turkey is proposed and the findings are compared with other developing regional space actors. Lastly, it is proposed and demonstrated that Turkey is on the right track with its space policy and it is suggested that the establishment of the TSA is critical both for a coherent space policy and progress as well as the successful development of its national space industry, security and international space relations.

Forward-in-Time, Spatially Explicit Modeling Software to Simulate Genetic Lineages Under Selection

SELECTOR is a software package for studying the evolution of multiallelic genes under balancing or positive selection while simulating complex evolutionary scenarios that integrate demographic growth and migration in a spatially explicit population framework. Parameters can be varied both in space and time to account for geographical, environmental, and cultural heterogeneity. SELECTOR can be used within an approximate Bayesian computation estimation framework. We first describe the principles of SELECTOR and validate the algorithms by comparing its outputs for simple models with theoretical expectations. Then, we show how it can be used to investigate genetic differentiation of loci under balancing selection in interconnected demes with spatially heterogeneous gene flow. We identify situations in which balancing selection reduces genetic differentiation between population groups compared with neutrality and explain conflicting outcomes observed for human leukocyte antigen loci. These results and three previously published applications demonstrate that SELECTOR is efficient and robust for building insight into human settlement history and evolution.