The impact of climate change on Brazil's agriculture

Brazilian agricultural production provides a significant fraction of the food consumed globally, with the country among the top exporters of soybeans, sugar, and beef. However, current advances in Brazilian agriculture can be directly impacted by climate change and resulting biophysical effects. Here, we quantify these impacts until 2050 using GLOBIOM-Brazil, a global partial equilibrium model of the competition for land use between agriculture, forestry, and bioenergy that includes various refinements reflecting Brazil's specificities. For the first time, projections of future agricultural areas and production are based on future crop yields provided by two Global Gridded Crop Models (EPIC and LPJmL). The climate change forcing is included through changes in climatic variables projected by five Global Climate Models in two emission pathways (RCP2.6 and RCP8.5) participating in the ISIMIP initiative. This ensemble of twenty scenarios permits accessing the robustness of the results. When compared to the baseline scenario, GLOBIOM-Brazil scenarios suggest a decrease in soybeans and corn production, mainly in the Matopiba region in the Northern Cerrado, and southward displacement of agricultural production to near-subtropical and subtropical regions of the Cerrado and the Atlantic Forest biomes

Cartilage Reshaping

In this chapter, we introduce the working theory of cartilage reshaping and highlight landmark papers in the development and refinement of this technique. We discuss the tissue and mechanical properties of cartilage and define how optical techniques may be utilized to manipulate these properties. The goal of cartilage reshaping is to ultimately reduce the need for more invasive traditional approaches with scalpel and suture, in favor of much less invasive techniques. Therefore, we discuss the challenges associated with its development and delineate its translation toward clinical applications