The link between the ecology of the prokaryotic rare biosphere and its biotechnological potential

Current research on the prokaryotic low abundance taxa, the prokaryotic rare biosphere, is growing, leading to a greater understanding of the mechanisms underlying organismal rarity and its relevance in ecology. From this emerging knowledge it is possible to envision innovative approaches in biotechnology applicable to several sectors. Bioremediation and bioprospecting are two of the most promising areas where such approaches could find feasible implementation, involving possible new solutions to the decontamination of polluted sites and to the discovery of novel gene variants and pathways based on the attributes of rare microbial communities. Bioremediation can be improved through the realization that diverse rare species can grow abundant and degrade different pollutants or possibly transfer useful genes. Further, most of the prokaryotic diversity found in virtually all environments belongs in the rare biosphere and remains uncultivatable, suggesting great bioprospecting potential within this vast and understudied genetic pool. This Mini Review argues that knowledge of the ecophysiology of rare prokaryotes can aid the development of future, efficient biotechnology-based processes, products and services. However, this promise may only be fulfilled through improvements in (and optimal blending of) advanced microbial culturing and physiology, metagenomics, genome annotation and editing, and synthetic biology, to name a few areas of relevance. In the future, it will be important to understand how activity profiles relate with abundance, as some rare taxa can remain rare and increase activity, whereas other taxa can grow abundant. The metabolic mechanisms behind those patterns can be useful in designing biotechnological processes.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Stability of a two-sublattice spin-glass model

We study the stability of the replica-symmetric solution of a two-sublattice infinite-range spin-glass model, which can describe the transition from antiferromagnetic to spin glass state. The eigenvalues associated with replica-symmetric perturbations are in general complex. The natural generalization of the usual stability condition is to require the real part of these eigenvalues to be positive. The necessary and sufficient conditions for all the roots of the secular equation to have positive real parts is given by the Hurwitz criterion. The generalized stability condition allows a consistent analysis of the phase diagram within the replica-symmetric approximation.Comment: 21 pages, 5 figure

Catherine A. Davies, Whitman's Queer Children: America's Homosexual Epics.

Redressing a dearth of book-length work on queer American epic poetry, Catherine Davies’s Whitman’s Queer Children: America’s Homosexual Epicsexaminesmodernist and postmodern confessional and epic poetry through a queer approach, drawing from Foucault’s and his queer intellectual descendants’ – Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Leo Bersani, Jonathan Dollimore, Lee Edelman, Alan Sinfield, to name a few – readings of sex, power and knowledge. In the study, Davies aims to demonstrate the essentiality of br..

Essays in applied economics: evidence from Brazil

This thesis contains three essays. In the first essay, I examine whether a temporary policy can affect long-run house hold behavior. I look at evidence from a nine-month compulsory rationing imposed on Brazilian households’ electricity use in 2001, exploiting differences in the policy’s implementation across regions as a quasi-experiment to test its short-and long-run impacts on households’ electricity consumption patterns. I find that the rationing program led to a persistent reduction in electricity use of 14% even ten years later. Unique household level microdata on appliance ownership and consumption habits suggest that the main source of persistence is changes in the utilization of electricity services, rather than technology adoption. In the second essay, we examine the effects of China’s recent emergence into the world economy in local labour markets in Brazil. Much of the literature have viewed China as a competitor. However, China is also an increasingly large consumer of goods produced abroad, and an increasing share of its import demand is for primary goods. Using census data, we compare trends in migration, unemployment, employment structure (primary/manufacturing/services), informality and participation on Bolsa Família program in areas affected by the ‘China competition shock’ and the ‘China demand shock’. We find significant and heterogeneous effects from these two ‘shocks’. In the third essay, we employ an unified theoretical framework to structurally estimate the effect of changes within China on the production in Brazil and in the rest of the world. Based on the Ricardian model of trade of Costinot et al. (2012), we perform counterfactuals exercises to analyze how countries and industries in Brazil would have performed in the absence of the recent Chinese ascension. Results suggest that changes in China’s comparative advantage hampered manufacturing sector abroad. We find no support for the idea of China demand (taste) shock towards raw materials

‘I used to be subversive, but now I’m gay’: representations of queer identities on the American stage from the postwar to the 1990s

The central aim of this study is to examine ‘non-normative’ masculinities constructed and represented in American drama, theatre and performance throughout the second half of the twentieth century, thus assessing the ‘queer’ challenges these masculinities present to hegemonic ‘heteronormativity.’ To identify the historical, social and cultural constraints that shaped the manifestations of ‘gay’ male identities on the American stage from the postwar to the 1990s, I will offer extended analysis and close reading of selected texts. I will examine Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Suddenly, Last Summer (1958), Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band (1968), Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart (1985), Tony Kushner’s two Angels in America (1992) plays, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion! (1994), and David Drake’s The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me (1994). My analysis of the selected texts will demonstrate that some of these particular plays represent ‘gay’ male individuals who challenge, and others, who identify themselves with ideological principals of a hegemonic ‘heteronormativity.’ Consequently, in this study I partially outline a history of ‘queer’ drama, theatre and performance in America throughout the second half of the twentieth century, and examine how ‘gay’ male identities were represented particularly by ‘gay’ male authors during this period. I will also analyse to what extent these representations were subversive, assimilative, or had a hidden agenda, and most importantly, I seek to deconstruct established conceptions of the works here analysed, considered to be the most assimilative, which through a ‘queer’-inflected close reading can be in fact read as the most subversive

A internet como meio de difusão do radicalismo islâmico

O presente trabalho investiga o papel desempe‑ nhado pela Internet como meio de difusão do ra‑ dicalismo islâmico, destacando o aparecimento de utilizadores (v.g. Younis Tsouli, Aabid Khan), que não se limitam a participar em fora radicais, mas que disseminam informação radical e incentivam a prática de actos terroristas jihadistas. Para além disso, analisa as vantagens que a Internet oferece ao radicalismo islâmico, quer em termos de segurança dos utilizadores (aprovei‑ tando o anonimato), quer como meio de trans‑ missão de informação e a sua relevância no processo de radicalização, com o objectivo de apontar algumas soluções para o combate deste fenómeno

Strong consumer data protection can be a disruptive innovation

Apparent consumer disinterest in privacy may result precisely from a lack of options, writes Francisco Costa-Cabra