A Framework to evaluate land take control policy efficiency in friuli Venezia Giulia, Italy

The development of effective policies against land take should be based on a deep knowledge of the specific land use dynamics and their determinants in a regional context. To this end, the traditional quantitative land use change analyses need to be integrated with a more accurate spatial and qualitative evaluation of the eects of the land use zoning of municipal land development plans and of the connected supplementary regulations (e.g., local building regulations). Land take limitation policies in Italy are largely based on the definition of quantitative thresholds for new development zones, while ignoring all those undeveloped zones that have been assigned building rights codes by plans of which the knowledge could largely impact policies. This paper attempted to define a conceptual framework of analysis which integrates a land use change assessment with an analysis in a Geographic Information System (GIS) environment of the spatial distribution of normative zones. The method was tested on the Friuli Venezia Giulia region (north-east Italy)\u2014a territory that has experienced rapid growth in recent decades\u2014by analyzing the spatial impact of the recently promulgated regional laws on land take control, the explicit and specific purpose of which was to limit commercial and industrial land use in the whole region. The soil sealing data were analyzed by performing a cross-comparison with the building rights permissions data, thus achieving a comprehensive evaluation of the past and predicted land take for commercial and industrial uses. Results demonstrated that the expected land take will exceed the past urbanization rate, highlighting a substantial inecacy of the promulgated regional laws in promoting local land take control. The main innovations of this study relate to the definition of a newer qualitative methodology for framing an efficient decision-making supporting system, while helping to achieve the long-term sustainability of policie

Dysferlinopathy course and sportive activity: clues for possible treatment

LGMD2B is a frequent proximo-distal myopathy with rapid evolution after age 20. Exacerbating factors may be physical exercise and inflammation. There is very little information about the effect of sportive activity in LGMD2B, since eccentric exercise frequently results in muscle damage. LGMD2B has often an onset with myalgia and MRI imaging (STIR-sequences) shows myoedema. In a prolonged observational study of a series of 18 MM/LGMD2B patients we have studied the pattern of clinical and radiological evolution. The disease has an abrupt onset in the second decade and most patients perform sports before definite disease onset. On the basis of Gardner-Medwin and Walton scale, grade 4 is reached two years faster in patients who performed sports (over 1000 hours). Other considerations regarding pathogenetic mechanism and response to treatment show a poor response to immunosuppressive treatment of muscle inflammation. Preventing a strenuous physical activity should be recommended in patients with high CK and diagnosed or suspected to have dysferlin deficiency

Weak and Strong Sustainability of Irrigation: A Framework for Irrigation Practices Under Limited Water Availability

Agriculture strongly relies on irrigation. While irrigated land accounts for roughly 20% of the global cultivated area, it contributes to about 40% of crop production. In the last few decades, the growing demand for agricultural commodities has translated into an increasing pressure on the global freshwater resources, often leading to their unsustainable use. Here we investigate the sustainability of irrigation, balancing farmers' profit generation objectives and the needs of ecological systems. We ask the question “sustainability of what?” to stress how the sustainability of irrigation is often evaluated with respect the opposing needs of humans and nature. While from the farmers' perspective irrigation is sustainable when it provides uninterrupted access to water resources at a price not exceeding the marginal revenue they generate (clearly without accounting for environmental externalities), from the standpoint of water resources, irrigation is sustainable if it does not deplete freshwater stocks or environmental flows. We invoke the notions of “weak” and “strong” sustainability to develop a novel framework for the evaluation of tradeoffs between human needs and the conservation of natural capital. Through the analysis of criteria of performance, we relate water deficit and irrigation overuse to the reliability and resilience of irrigation. This approach is applied to the case of Australia, a major agricultural country affected by water scarcity. The application of the framework to the case of Australia shows how this approach can be used to highlight areas in which irrigation contributes to a weakly sustainable use of water resources with impacts on environmental flows and groundwater stocks. Solutions, such as increasing efficiencies or reducing water applications through the adoption of deficit irrigation, can enhance water sustainability in some water scarce locations

The low-energy limit of AdS(3)/CFT2 and its TBA

We investigate low-energy string excitations in AdS3 × S3 × T4. When the worldsheet is decompactified, the theory has gapless modes whose spectrum at low energies is determined by massless relativistic integrable S matrices of the type introduced by Al. B. Zamolodchikov. The S matrices are non-trivial only for excitations with identical worldsheet chirality, indicating that the low-energy theory is a CFT2. We construct a Thermodynamic Bethe Ansatz (TBA) for these excitations and show how the massless modes’ wrapping effects may be incorporated into the AdS3 spectral problem. Using the TBA and its associated Y-system, we determine the central charge of the low-energy CFT2 to be c = 6 from calculating the vacuum energy for antiperiodic fermions — with the vacuum energy being zero for periodic fermions in agreement with a supersymmetric theory — and find the energies of some excited states

Transição Agroecológica na produção de hortícolas como desenvolvimento rural sustentável no Assentamento 72 de Ladário-MS.

Este relatório tem o objetivo de discutir o efeito de métodos participativos para a promoção da Transição Agroecológica na produção de hortaliças no Assentamento de Reforma Agrária 72, no município de Ladário - MS. Após 10 anos, os colonos estavam desesperançados e com pouca confiança nas instituições públicas, sem acesso às políticas públicas. O projecto, liderado pela Universidade Federal do Mato Grosso do Sul, Campus do Pantanal (UFMS), utilizando métodos participativos, centrou-se em duas hortas modelo instalados em duas propriedades escolhidas pelo grupo de assentados. Nestas unidades, ele equipe técnica da Embrapa e da UFMS realizou cursos, experimentos e oficinas buscando fazer o diálogo entre o conhecimento científico e o saber popular. As técnicas apresentadas e aprovadas nas hortas modelo foram adotadas pelos agricultores, que ao longo do tempo, aumentaram a sua produção e os seus rendimentos, bem como a sua autoconfiança.ref. 14851 Edição dos resumos do VIII Congresso Brasileiro de Agroecologia, Porto Alegre, nov. 2013

Ações de capacitação no Assentamento 72, Ladário-MS, com enfoque na transição agroecológica.

Este trabalho é parte integrante das experiências de desenvolvimento local do projeto ?Alternativas para o desenvolvimento territorial rural do Assentamento 72 em Ladário MS, no Pantanal sul-mato-grossense, tendo como princípios básicos a agroecologia. O objetivo foi relatar as experiências decorrentes do projeto, visando à capacitação dos assentados para uma produção agroecológica. A metodologia esteve baseada na pesquisa ação e nos trabalhos de campo. O projeto começou a produzir transformações na organização social dos camponeses. This work is part of the experiences of local development project "Alternatives for the development of rural territory settlement 72 in Ladario-MS", in the Pantanalsul-mato-grossense, with the basic principles of agroecology. The objective was to report experiences from the project, used to teach the settlers for ecological production.The methodology was based on action research and field work. The project began producing transformations in the social organization of the peasantry.Também em: SEMINÁRIO DE AGROECOLOGIA DE MATO GROSSO DO SUL, 4.; ENCONTRO DE PRODUTORES AGROECOLÓGICOS DE MS, 3., 2012, Glória de Dourados. O saber tradicional e o científico: a interação encurtando caminhos para o desenvolvimento sustentável: anais. Brasília, DF: Embrapa, 2012. 1 CD-ROM. Editado por: Leandro Fávio Carneiro, Milton Parron Padovan

A possibly inflated planet around the bright, young star DS Tuc A

The origin of the observed diversity of planetary system architectures is one of the main topic of the exoplanetary research. The detection of a statistically significant sample of planets around young stars allows us to study the early stages of planet formation and evolution, but only a handful of them is known so far. In this regard, a considerable contribution is expected from the NASA TESS satellite, which is now performing a survey of $\sim 85 \%$ of the sky to search for short-period transiting planets In its first month of operations, TESS found a planet candidate with an orbital period of 8.14 days around a member of the Tuc-Hor young association ($\sim$ 40 Myr), the G6V main component of the binary system DS\,Tuc. If confirmed, it would be the first transiting planet around a young star suitable for radial velocity and/or atmospheric characterization. We aim to validate the planetary nature of this companion and to measure its orbital and physical parameters. We obtain accurate planet parameters by coupling an independent reprocessing of the TESS light curve with improved stellar parameters and the dilution caused by the binary companion; we analyse high precision archival radial velocities to impose an upper limit of about 0.1 M$_{\rm Jup}$ on the planet mass; we finally rule out the presence of external companions beyond 40 au with adaptive optics images. We confirm the presence of a young, giant (${\rm R} = 0.50$ R$_{\rm Jup}$) planet having a not negligible possibility to be inflated (theoretical mass $\lesssim 20$ M$_{\oplus}$) around DS\,Tuc~A. We discuss the feasibility of mass determination, Rossiter-McLaughlin analysis and atmosphere characterization, allowed by the brightness of the star.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figures. Accepted for publication in A&

A PSF-based Approach to TESS High quality data Of Stellar clusters (PATHOS) -- II. Search for exoplanets in open clusters of the southern ecliptic hemisphere and their frequency

The scope of the project "A PSF-based Approach to TESS High Quality data Of Stellar clusters" (PATHOS) is the extraction and analysis of high-precision light curves of stars in stellar clusters and young associations for the identification of candidate exoplanets and variable stars. The cutting-edge tools used in this project allow us to measure the real flux of stars in dense fields, minimising the effects due to contamination by neighbour sources. We extracted about 200 000 light curves of stars in 645 open clusters located in the southern ecliptic hemisphere and observed by TESS during the first year of its mission. We searched for transiting signals and we found 33 objects of interest, 11 of them are strong candidate exoplanets. Because of the limited S/N, we did not find any Earth or super-Earth. We identified two Neptune-size planets orbiting stars with $R_{\star}<1.5\,R_{\odot}$, implying a frequency $f_{\star}=1.34 \pm 0.95\,\%$, consistent with the frequency around field stars. The 7 Jupiter candidates around stars with $R_{\star}<\,1.5R_{\odot}$ imply a frequency $f_{\star}=0.19\pm 0.07\,\%$, smaller than in the field. A more complete estimate of the survey completeness and false positive rate is needed to confirm these results. Light curves used in this work will be made available to the astronomical community on the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescope under the project PATHOS.Comment: 19 pages, 12 figures, 3 tables. Accepted for publication in MNRAS on May 20, 2020. PATHOS light curves are available at MAST as HLSP at https://archive.stsci.edu/hlsp/patho

Integrability and the conformal field theory of the Higgs branch

In the context of the AdS3/CFT2 correspondence, we investigate the Higgs branch CFT2. Witten showed that states localised near the small instanton singularity can be described in terms of vector multiplet variables. This theory has a planar, weak-coupling limit, in which anomalous dimensions of single-trace composite operators can be calculated. At one loop, the calculation reduces to finding the spectrum of a spin-chain with nearest-neighbour interactions. This CFT2 spin-chain matches precisely the one that was previously found as the weak-coupling limit of the integrable system describing the AdS3 side of the duality. We compute the one-loop dilatation operator in a non-trivial compact subsector and show that it corresponds to an integrable spin-chain Hamiltonian. This provides the first direct evidence of integrability on the CFT2 side of the correspondence