Instituto de Estudos Avançados da Universidade de São Paulo

Griggs, D., M. Stafford Smith, J. Rockström, M. C. Öhman, O. Gaffney, G. Glaser, N. Kanie, I. Noble, W. Steffen, and P. Shyamsundar. 2014. An integrated framework for sustainable development goals. Ecology and Society 19(4): 49. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-07082-190449

The epigenetic modification of nucleic acids represents one of the most significant areas of study in the field of nucleic acids because it makes gene regulation more complex and heredity more complicated, thus indicating its profound impact on aspects of heredity, growth, and diseases. The recent characterization of epigenetic modifications of DNA and RNA using chemical labelling strategies has promoted the discovery of these modifications, and the newly developed single-base or single-cell resolution mapping strategies have enabled large-scale epigenetic studies in eukaryotes. Due to these technological breakthroughs, several new epigenetic marks have been discovered that have greatly extended the scope and impact of epigenetic modifications in nucleic acids over the past few years. Because epigenetics is reversible and susceptible to environmental factors, it could potentially be a promising direction for clinical medicine research. In this review, we have comprehensively discussed how these epigenetic marks are involved in disease, including the pathogenesis, prevention, diagnosis and treatment of disease. These findings have revealed that the epigenetic modification of nucleic acids has considerable significance in various areas from methodology to clinical medicine and even in biomedical applications.

This paper analyzes the impact of public investment on the dynamics of private capital formation in an intertemporal optimizing market-clearing framework. The key feature characterizing the analysis is that the public good is treated as a durable capital good subject to congestion. The authors show how, in the presence of congestion, the effect of government investment on private capital formation involves a trade-off between the degree of substitution between private and public capital in production and the degree of congestion. Both lump-sum and distortionary tax financing are considered, with this trade-off being tightened in the latter case.

At the Heart of the State argues against the idea of government institutions as the tools of politics and politicians and explores the inherent morality—or immorality—of such institutions supposedly designed for the public good. The result of a five-year investigation, conducted by ten scholars, At the Heart of the State describes and analyses the police, court systems, prisons, social services, and mental health facilities of France, analyzing the supposed neutrality of these government institutions. Combining genealogy and ethnography, the authors argue that government institutions are not simply concerned with the implementation of laws, rules, and procedures but also with the imposition of values, affects, and judgments.

In this work, reduced graphene oxide (rGO) based electrode materials were developed to achieve a hybrid supercapacitor (SC) function. Therefore, several synthesis methods were developed to prepare a cost effective and environmentally friendly rGO. Additionally, to maintain the high surface area, spinel lithium titanate (sLTO) nanoparticles (NPs) were synthesized and deposited on the rGO surface to inhibit the restacking of the rGO layers on graphite. Furthermore, the adequate Fe-doping of sLTO increased the ionic conductivity and the intercalation capacity, which is necessary for a SC performance. The sLTO/rGO-composites were electrochemically analysed by chronopotentiometry and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) to determine the stability during charge/discharge cycling and the capacity, respectively. To overcome the drawback of LTO's low conductivity values, its value has been drastically increased by Fe-doping. The results demonstrated the remarkable cycling performance of the Fe:LTO/rGO composite as well as a higher capacity compared to LTO/rGO and pure rGO-electrodes. The thermal stability, degradation and weight loss of the sLTO/rGO in the temperature range between 20 °C and 800 °C were investigated by thermogravimetry (TG)/DTA. As a conclusion, it can be stated that, increasing the ionic conductivity by Fe-doping drastically increases the hybrid capacity of the SC electrodes.

We report spectroscopic observation of Rydberg polarons in an atomic Bose gas. Polarons are created by excitation of Rydberg atoms as impurities in a strontium Bose-Einstein condensate. They are distinguished from previously studied polarons by macroscopic occupation of bound molecular states that arise from scattering of the weakly bound Rydberg electron from ground-state atoms. The absence of a p-wave resonance in the low-energy electron-atom scattering in Sr introduces a universal behavior in the Rydberg spectral line shape and in scaling of the spectral width (narrowing) with the Rydberg principal quantum number, n. Spectral features are described with a functional determinant approach (FDA) that solves an extended Fröhlich Hamiltonian for a mobile impurity in a Bose gas. Excited states of polyatomic Rydberg molecules (trimers, tetrameters, and pentamers) are experimentally resolved and accurately reproduced with a FDA.

Geiger-Nuttall plots of the accurate modern data on partial half-lives for \ensuremath{\alpha} decay yield very striking linear correlations. The plots for isotopic sequences which cross the neutron magic number N=126 show clearly the presence of different linear relations for N126 and N>126. We indicate that this observation and all other data on ground-state to ground-state \ensuremath{\alpha} decays for even-even nuclei with 76\ensuremath{\le}Z\ensuremath{\le}100 may be accounted for very well by a simple model with fixed parameters. An important ingredient in the model is the proposal that preformed \ensuremath{\alpha} particles in the parent nuclei move in orbits with large values of a global quantum number.

Abstract Land use change and deforestation can influence local temperature and climate. Here we use a coupled ocean-atmosphere model to assess the impact of savannization of the Amazon Basin on the wet-bulb globe temperature heat stress index under two climate change scenarios (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5). We find that heat stress exposure due to deforestation was comparable to the effect of climate change under RCP8.5. Our findings suggest that heat stress index could exceed the human adaptation limit by 2100 under the combined effects of Amazon savannization and climate change. Moreover, we find that risk of heat stress exposure was highest in Northern Brazil and among the most socially vulnerable. We suggest that by 2100, savannization of the Amazon will lead to more than 11 million people will be exposed heat stress that poses an extreme risk to human health under a high emission scenario.

A simple method is demonstrated for obtaining the thermal diffusivity of solids, by measuring the phase lag between a front and rear illumination, at a single chopping frequency. The method is tested using some semiconductor and glass samples.

Bipolar disorder (BD) is a severe, chronic, and recurrent psychiatric illness. It has been associated with high prevalence of medical comorbidities and cognitive impairment. Its neurobiology is not completely understood, but recent evidence has shown a wide range of immune changes. Cytokines are proteins involved in the regulation and the orchestration of the immune response. We performed a review on the involvement of cytokines in BD. We also discuss the cytokines involvement in the neuroprogression of BD. It has been demonstrated that increased expression of cytokines in the central nervous system in postmortem studies is in line with the elevated circulating levels of proinflammatory cytokines in BD patients. The proinflammatory profile and the immune imbalance in BD might be regarded as potential targets to the development of new therapeutic strategies.

Highly flexible and stretchable electrodes and all-solid-state supercapacitors have been developed by using graphene-based films with a compact structure.

The proposed sensing device relies on the self-imaging effect that occurs in a pure silica multimode fiber (coreless MMF) section of a single-mode-multimode-single-mode (SMS)-based fiber structure. The influence of the coreless-MMF diameter on the external refractive index (RI) variation permitted the sensing head with the lowest MMF diameter (i.e., 55 μm) to exhibit the maximum sensitivity (2800 nm/RIU). This approach also implied an ultrahigh sensitivity of this fiber device to temperature variations in the liquid RI of 1.43: a maximum sensitivity of -1880 pm/°C was indeed attained. Therefore, the results produced were over 100-fold those of the typical value of approximately 13 pm/°C achieved in air using a similar device. Numerical analysis of an evanescent wave absorption sensor was performed, in order to extend the range of liquids with a detectable RI to above 1.43. The suggested model is an SMS fiber device where a polymer coating, with an RI as low as 1.3, is deposited over the coreless MMF; numerical results are presented pertaining to several polymer thicknesses in terms of external RI variation.

A highly flexible and stretchable all-solid-state supercapacitor that can bear a tensile strain as high as 480% is developed by using composite electrodes of aligned carbon nanotube and silver-doped poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene)–poly(styrenesulfonate).

http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/A/bo20701891.htmlAnthropology, Culture and Society

Ionic liquids present huge potential in the fabrication of biopolymer-based pharmaceutical materials for accurately controlled drug/gene delivery.

This paper reviews the subject of 3D printed hollow-core fibers for the propagation of terahertz (THz) waves. Several hollow and microstructured core fibers have been proposed in the literature as candidates for low-loss terahertz guidance. In this review, we focus on 3D printed hollow-core fibers with designs that cannot be easily created by conventional fiber fabrication techniques. We first review the fibers according to their guiding mechanism: photonic bandgap, antiresonant effect, and Bragg effect. We then present the modeling, fabrication, and characterization of a 3D printed Bragg and two antiresonant fibers, highlighting the advantages of using 3D printers as a path to make the fabrication of complex 3D fiber structures fast and cost-effective.

The presence of a large population of some 730,000 displaced amacrines is confirmed in the ganglion cell layer of the cat retina. These cells correspond to the microneurons of Hughes and Wieniawa-Narkiewicz (Nature 284:468-470, '80) and the bar-cells of Hughes (J. Comp. Neurol. 197:303-339, '81): a population of profiles of which the majority had previously been presumed to be glia (Stone: J. Comp. Neurol. 12:337-352, '65; J. Comp. Neurol 180:753-772, '78; Hughes: J. Comp. Neurol. 163: 107-128, '75). A sample of such nonganglion cells was identified by Nissl criteria in an area of retina subsequently subjected to serial sectioning and electron microscopy. Such cells form synapses with other processes in the inner plexiform layer. Members of each morphological subclass were found to bear synapses. In some instances, synapses occurred both onto and from the soma and processes of a cell, which is strong evidence for their being displaced amacrines, or preferably, "amacrines of the ganglion cell layer." In confirmation of their amacrine nature, it was established that the microneurons and bar-cells survive optic nerve section for up to 2.5 years. Ganglion cells underwent retrograde degeneration and completely disappeared in a much shorter time. Injection of kainic acid, a neurotoxin, into an eye whose optic nerve had been cut over 2 years previously resulted in the pyknosis of all morphologically classified microneurons and bar-cells without influence on conventional glial cells. These results further support the conclusion that microneurons and bar-cells are neurons and that they collectively form the displaced amacrine population of the cat ganglion cell layer. The topographic distribution of the displaced amacrines resembles that of the ganglion cells in form; their density peaks at 4,500-5,000 cells mm-2 in the area centralis and falls to less than 1,000 mm-2 in peripheral retina. A ganglion cell distribution map based on the latest morphological criteria derived from this study confirms that there are 170,000 ganglion cells in the cat retina. Displaced amacrines form some 80% of the total neuron population of the cat ganglion cell layer. The large population magnitude of these confirmed displaced amacrines implies their nonectopic origin and now provides a fresh insight into the ontogeny of the cat retinal ganglion cell layer.

This article provides an overview of recent developments in the fabrication of core–shell nanoparticles by one-step/pot methodologies as well as providing a summary and outlook of this emerging area.

This research explores how a new relation of production—the shift from human managers to algorithmic managers on digital platforms—manufactures workplace consent. While most research has argued that the task standardization and surveillance that accompany algorithmic management will give rise to the quintessential “bad job” (Kalleberg, Reskin, and Hudson, 2000; Kalleberg, 2011), I find that, surprisingly, many workers report liking and finding choice while working under algorithmic management. Drawing on a seven-year qualitative study of the largest sector in the gig economy, the ride-hailing industry, I describe how workers navigate being managed by an algorithm. I begin by showing how algorithms segment the work at multiple sites of human–algorithm interactions and how this configuration of the work process allows for more-frequent and narrow choice. I find that workers use two sets of tactics. In engagement tactics, individuals generally follow the algorithmic nudges and do not try to get around the system; in deviance tactics, individuals manipulate their input into the algorithmic management system. While the behaviors associated with these tactics are practical opposites, they both elicit consent, or active, enthusiastic participation by workers to align their efforts with managerial interests, and both contribute to workers seeing themselves as skillful agents. However, this choice-based consent can mask the more-structurally problematic elements of the work, contributing to the growing popularity of what I call the “good bad” job.

As in quantum field theory, for some singular two-body potentials, the momentum-space perturbative treatment of the three-dimensional quantum $N$-body problem is shown to exhibit ultraviolet divergences. Renormalization of these models leads to a scale and finite observables. For a Dirac delta potential we carry on this renormalization for two- and three-body systems. A new divergence, and hence a new scale, emerges for each added particle. For $N\ensuremath{\ge}3$ there are no divergences in one and two dimensions. The physical implications of these results are discussed.