Two new Lejeuneaceae records for the Colombian liverwort flora

Two epiphyllous Lejeuneaceae, Cololejeunea surinamensis and Drepanolejeunea polyrhiza, previously known from Amazonian Brazil, are recorded for the first time in Colombia. They were found as epiphylls on understory shrubs in the middle Caquetá area in Colombian Amazonia. Cololejeunea surinamensis was found in the Tierra Firme forests and D. polyrhiza was found in the floodplains of the Caquetá River.Dos especies de Lejeuneaceae epífilas, Cololejeunea surinamensis y Drepanolejeunea polyrhiza, previamente conocidas de los bosques amazónicos de Brasil son reportadas por primera vez para Colombia. Las especies fueron encontradas como epífilas sobre hojas de arbustos del sotobosque en el área del medio Caquetá en la amazonía Colombiana. Cololejeunea surinamensis fue encontrada en los bosques de tierra firme, mientras que D. polyrhiza fue encontrada en los planos inundables del Río Caquetá

Regular and chaotic motion in elliptical galaxies

Here I review recent work, by other authors and by myself, on some particular topics related to the regular and chaotic motion in elliptical galaxies. I show that it is quite possible to build highly stable triaxial stellar systems that include large fractions of chaotic orbits and that partially and fully chaotic orbits fill different regions of space, so that it is important not to group them together under the single denomination of chaotic orbits. Partially chaotic orbits should not be confused with weakly fully chaotic orbits either, and their spatial distributions are also different. Slow figure rotation (i.e., rotation in systems with zero angular momentum) seems to be always present in highly flattened models that result from cold collapses, with the rotational velocity diminishing or becoming negligibly small for less flattened models. Finally, I comment on the usefulness and limitation of the classification of regular orbits via frequency analysis.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures (both are mosaics of 6 and 4 individual figures, respectively, in eps format). It is an invited talk delivered at the workshop "Chaos in Astronomy 2007", in memory of N. Voglis, held in Athens (Greece), 17 - 20 September 2008, and accepted for publication in the Proccedings of that worksho

The inflationary origin of the Cold Spot anomaly

Single-field inflation, arguably the simplest and most compelling paradigm for the origin of our Universe, is strongly supported by the recent results of the Planck satellite and the BICEP2 experiment. The results from Planck, however, also confirm the presence of a number of anomalies in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), whose origin becomes problematic in single-field inflation. Among the most prominent and well-tested of these anomalies is the Cold Spot, which constitutes the only significant deviation from gaussianity in the CMB. Planck's non-detection of primordial non-gaussianity on smaller scales thus suggests the existence of a physical mechanism whereby significant non-gaussianity is generated on large angular scales only. In this letter, we address this question by developing a localized version of the inhomogeneous reheating scenario, which postulates the existence of a scalar field able to modify the decay of the inflaton on localized spatial regions only. We demonstrate that if the Cold Spot is due to an overdensity in the last scattering surface, the localization mechanism offers a feasible explanation for it, thus providing a physical mechanism for the generation of localized non-gaussianity in the CMB. If, on the contrary, the Cold Spot is caused by a newly discovered supervoid (as recently claimed), we argue that the localization mechanism, while managing to enhance underdensities, may well shed light on the rarity of the discovered supervoid.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures. v3 Comments and references added. It matches published versio