Design and construction of a new Drosophila species, D.synthetica, by synthetic regulatory evolution

Here, I merge the principles of synthetic biology^1,2^ and regulatory evolution^3-11^ to create a new species^12-15^ with a minimal set of known elements. Using preexisting transgenes and recessive mutations of Drosophila melanogaster, a transgenic population arises with small eyes and a different venation pattern that fulfills the criteria of a new species according to Mayr's "Biological Species Concept"^7,10^. The genetic circuit entails the loss of a non-essential transcription factor and the introduction of cryptic enhancers. Subsequent activation of those enhancers causes hybrid lethality. The transition from "transgenic organisms" towards "synthetic species", such as Drosophila synthetica, constitutes a safety mechanism to avoid hybridization with wild type populations and preserve natural biodiversity^16-18^. Drosophila synthetica is the first transgenic organism that cannot hybridize with the original wild type population but remains fertile when crossed with other transgenic animals

A war-prone tribe migrated out of Africa to populate the world.

Of the tribal hunter gatherers still in existence today, some lead lives of great violence, whereas other groups live in societies with no warfare and very little murder^1,2,3,4,5^. Here I find that hunter gatherers that belong to mitochondrial haplotypes L0, L1 and L2 do not have a culture of ritualized fights. In contrast to this, almost all L3 derived hunter gatherers have a more belligerent culture that includes ritualized fights such as wrestling, stick fights or headhunting expeditions. This appears to be independent of their environment, because ritualized fights occur in all climates, from the tropics to the arctic. There is also a correlation between mitochondrial haplotypes and warfare propensity or the use of murder and suicide to resolve conflicts. This, in the light of the “recent out of Africa” hypothesis”^6,7^, suggests that the tribe that left Africa 80.000 years ago performed ritualized fights. In contrast to the more pacific tradition of non-L3 foragers, it may also have had a tendency towards combat. The data implicate that the entire human population outside Africa is descended from only two closely related sub-branches of L3 that practiced ritual fighting and probably had a higher propensity towards warfare and the use of murder for conflict resolution. This may have crucially influenced the subsequent history of the world

On Some Unifications Arising from the MIMO Rician Shadowed Model

This paper shows that the proposed Rician shadowed model for multi-antenna communications allows for the unification of a wide set of models, both for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and single- input single-output (SISO) communications. The MIMO Rayleigh and MIMO Rician can be deduced from the MIMO Rician shadowed, and so their SISO counterparts. Other more general SISO models, besides the Rician shadowed, are included in the model, such as the κ-μ, and its recent generalization, the κ-μ shadowed model. Moreover, the SISO η-μ and Nakagami-q models are also included in the MIMO Rician shadowed model. The literature already presents the probability density function (pdf) of the Rician shadowed Gram channel matrix in terms of the well-known gamma- Wishart distribution. We here derive its moment generating function in a tractable form. Closed- form expressions for the cumulative distribution function and the pdf of the maximum eigenvalue are also carried out.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Bosonization of fermions coupled to topologically massive gravity

We establish a duality between massive fermions coupled to topologically massive gravity (TGM) in $d=3$ space-time dimensions and a purely gravity theory which also will turn out to be a TGM theory but with different parameters: the original graviton mass in the TGM theory coupled to fermions picks-up a contribution from fermion bosonization. We obtain explicit bosonization rules for the fermionic currents and for the energy-momentum-tensor showing that the identifications do not depend explicitly on the parameters of the theory. These results are the gravitational analog of the results for $2+1$ Abelian and non-Abelian bosonization in flat space-time.Comment: 8 page

STRUGGLING TOWARD AN AMERICAN NATIONAL THEATRE

The United States is conspicuously lacking in a large-scale government subsidy program for the arts and has never established a National Theatre. This makes us unique among most developed nations in the world as well as among many developing countries that established national theatres early in their burgeoning histories, and it begs the question: why has government support of the cultural life of the nation never been a priority in the U.S.? One notable exception to this can be found in considering the work accomplished by the Federal Arts Projects created under the auspices of the Work Progress Administration (WPA) during the 1930s. The policies enacted by the Roosevelt administration to address the crippling social and economic issues of the day signaled a profound shift in the ways in which the government responded to the needs of the people and resulted in the development of a new and sweeping form of federally funded welfare relief that extended to white collar workers and artists. Contested on political and economic grounds, the social welfare programs of the New Deal were the source of much debate, but none more so than the Federal Theatre Project (FTP). Using a cultural studies approach and the theory of articulation I consider the complexity of the FTP from a perspective that appreciates its transitory nature while also considering the multi-dimensionality of the project, thus providing a much richer way to analyze what articulations between social practices can teach us about larger questions of power and resistance. My intention is to challenge the perception of the FTP as either a failed attempt at a government supported theatre project or a model to be replicated but rather to consider how engagement in the process of struggle led to FTP innovations that can inform the future development of a National Theatre in the United State

Releyendo la campaña de Aníbal en el Duero (220 a. C.): la apertura de la Meseta Occidental a los intereses de las potencias mediterráneas

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Towards Emotion Recognition: A Persistent Entropy Application

Emotion recognition and classification is a very active area of research. In this paper, we present a first approach to emotion classification using persistent entropy and support vector machines. A topology-based model is applied to obtain a single real number from each raw signal. These data are used as input of a support vector machine to classify signals into 8 different emotions (calm, happy, sad, angry, fearful, disgust and surprised)