Un entomologo in India: l’orientalismo consapevole di Guido Gozzano

This article analyzes Guido Gozzano’s collection of Indian letters, Verso la cuna del mondo (Towards the Cradle of Mankind, 1917). After taking a position in the recent debate concerning the authorial standing of the book, the essay demonstrates the exceptionality of Gozzano’s case within the genre of Orientalism writing. Thanks to his ironic mode, the poet is able to develop an early awareness of Orientalist tópoi, and succeeds in manipulating them according to his own expressive needs

One-loop conformal anomaly in an implicit momentum space regularization framework

In this paper we consider matter fields in a gravitational background in order to compute the breaking of the conformal current at one-loop order. Standard perturbative calculations of conformal symmetry breaking expressed by the non-zero trace of the energy-momentum tensor have shown that some violating terms are regularization dependent, which may suggest the existence of spurious breaking terms in the anomaly. Therefore, we perform the calculation in a momentum space regularization framework in which regularization dependent terms are judiciously parametrized. We compare our results with those obtained in the literature and conclude that there is an unavoidable arbitrariness in the anomalous term $\Box R$.Comment: in European Physical Journal C, 201

On a quasilinear elliptic differential equation in unbounded domains

Existence and multiplicity results for a variational quasilinear elliptic equation on unbounded domains are proved; the solutions are obtained as critical points of a nonsmooth functional. We consider the case where the functional is coercive or has a saddle-point geometry

Conductivity of Coulomb interacting massless Dirac particles in graphene: Regularization-dependent parameters and symmetry constraints

We compute the Coulomb correction $\mathcal{C}$ to the a. c. conductivity of interacting massless Dirac particles in graphene in the collisionless limit using the polarization tensor approach in a regularization independent framework. Arbitrary parameters stemming from differences between logarithmically divergent integrals are fixed on physical grounds exploiting only spatial $O(2)$ rotational invariance of the model which amounts to transversality of the polarization tensor. Consequently $\mathcal{C}$ is unequivocally determined to be $(19- 6\pi)/12$ within this effective model. We compare our result with explicit regularizations and discuss the origin of others results for $\mathcal{C}$ found in the literature

Pathways of L-glutamic acid transport in cultured human fibroblasts.

The transport of L-glutamic acid has been studied in skin-derived diploid human fibroblasts. Competition analysis in the presence and absence of Na+ and mathematical discrimination by nonlinear regression indicated that L-glutamic acid enters the cell by at least three transport systems: 1) a high affinity Na+-dependent system which has been found to be identical to the previously described system for anionic amino acids (Gazzola, G. C., Dall'Asta, V., Bussolati, O., Makowske, M., and Christensen, H. N. (1981) J. Biol. Chem. 256, 6054-6059) and which is provisionally designated as System X-AG; this route was shared by L-aspartic acid; 2) a low affinity Na+-dependent system resembling the ASC System for neutral amino acids (Franchi-Gazzola, R., Gazzola, G. C., Dall'Asta, V., and Guidotti, G. G. (1982) J. Biol. Chem. 257, 9582-9587); its reactivity toward L-glutamic acid was strongly inhibited by L-serine, but not by 2-(methyl-amino)isobutyric acid; and 3) a Na+-independent system similar to System XC- described in fetal human lung fibroblasts (Bannai, S., and Kitamura, E. (1980) J. Biol. Chem. 255, 2372-2376). The XC- system served for L-glutamic acid and L-cystine, the latter amino acid behaving as a potent inhibitor of L-glutamic acid uptake. Amino acid starvation did not change the uptake of L-glutamic acid by the two Na+-dependent systems, but enhanced the activity of System XC- by increasing its Vmax. L-Glutamic acid transport was also affected by the density of the culture. An increased cell density lowered the uptake of the amino acid by Systems ASC and XC- and promoted the uptake by System X-AG. All these variations were dependent upon changes in Vmax

Brazil nut almonds: nutritional and market aspects.

The aim of this study was to estimate the annual growth rate in production and exportation of Brazil nut almonds. Presents information related to the composition of different fatty acids from brazil nut almonds and the human daily intake needs, as well as an analysis of its production, its growth rate during the last 20 years and its export. and the human daily intake needs

On the Casimir energy for a massive quantum scalar field and the Cosmological constant

We present a rigorous, regularization independent local quantum field theoretic treatment of the Casimir effect for a quantum scalar field of mass $\mu\ne0$ which yields closed form expressions for the energy density and pressure. As an application we show that there exist special states of the quantum field at fixed cosmic time, in which the expectation value of the renormalized energy-momentum tensor is independent of the space coordinate and is of the perfect fluid form $g_{\mu,\nu}\rho_{vac}$ with $\rho_{vac}>0$, thus providing a quantum field theoretic foundation of the Cosmological constant. Using some values of $\mu$ suggested in the literature for the hypothetical axion particle, there results a model for dark energy which is consistent with past and future evolution and is also in good agreement with experimental data.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figures, conceptually improved version, to appear in Ann. Phy