Mining and extractive urbanism: Postdevelopment in a Mozambican boomtown

Mozambique has attracted international attention in recent years following the discovery of huge reserves of coal and gas deposits. A major focus of Mozambique’s extractives boom is the province of Tete, once a remote outpost but now a hub of power generation for the southern African region and an emerging centre of global investment in coal extraction. Some of the world’s largest mining firms from both established and emerging economies have descended on Tete, investing billions of dollars in developing concessions to extract some of the world’s largest untapped coal reserves with wide-ranging implications for the region’s political economy and effecting significant shifts in relations between state, capital and territorial control. At the urban scale, Tete city and its expanding periphery are increasingly characterised by enclaves and spaces of enclosure, as some groups benefit from and are integrated into global circuits of production whilst others suffer displacement and dispossession. In seeking to trace the emergence of Tete’s resource economy, the paper contends that three distinctive spatialities have resulted from these developments, including the infrastructure networks being constructed around the extractive industries, the enclave spaces arising from the coal boom (and the particular labour geographies that shape them) and the new and distinctive urban geographies that are the product of Tete’s rapid urbanisation. The paper seeks to assess the impacts, stakes and challenges linked to investments in extractive activities and looks at how the costs and risks are being differentially distributed within and between the affected communities

Does virtual reality lower construal levels?

Although virtual reality (VR) is currently one of the fastest growing technologies, little research has compared its effect on cognitive state relative to computers. We examined VR through the lens of construal level theory (CLT), which describes mental representations as being either abstract (high-level construal) or concrete (low-level construal). Drawing on CLT, visual perception and interactivity, we hypothesised that the immersiveness of VR would induce lower construal levels compared to computers. We conducted two laboratory experiments which revealed that VR surprisingly does not produce different mental states compared to computers. We explain the insights and limitations of our experiments and derive design recommendations for VR applications and future VR research

Analysis of Indian monsoon daily rainfall on subseasonal to multidecadal time-scales using a hidden Markov model

A 70-year record of daily monsoon-season rainfall at a network of 13 stations in central western India is analyzed using a 4-state homogeneous hidden Markov model. The diagnosed states are seen to play distinct roles in the seasonal march of the monsoon, can be associated with 'active' and 'break' monsoon phases and capture the northward propagation of convective disturbances associated with the intraseasonal oscillation. Interannual variations in station rainfall are found to be associated with the alternation, from year to year, in the frequency of occurrence of wet and dry states; this mode of variability is well correlated with both all-India monsoon rainfall and an index characterizing the strength of the El Niño Southern Oscillation. Analysis of low-passed time series suggests that variations in state frequency are responsible for the modulation of monsoon rainfall on multidecadal time-scales as well

Inflaton field governed universe from NKK theory of gravity: stochastic approach

We study a nonperturbative single field (inflaton) governed cosmological model from a 5D Noncompact Kaluza-Klein (NKK) theory of gravity. The inflaton field fluctuations are estimated for different epochs of the evolution of the universe. We conclude that the inflaton field has been sliding down its (quadratic) potential hill along all the evolution of the universe and a mass of the order of the Hubble parameter. In the model here developed the only free parameter is the Hubble parameter, which could be reconstructed in future from Super Nova Acceleration Probe (SNAP) data.Comment: accepted in European Physical Journal

Characteristic velocities of stripped-envelope core-collapse supernova cores

The velocity of the inner ejecta of stripped-envelope core-collapse supernovae (CC-SNe) is studied by means of an analysis of their nebular spectra. Stripped-envelope CC-SNe are the result of the explosion of bare cores of massive stars ($\geq 8$ M$_{\odot}$), and their late-time spectra are typically dominated by a strong [O {\sc i}] $\lambda\lambda$6300, 6363 emission line produced by the innermost, slow-moving ejecta which are not visible at earlier times as they are located below the photosphere. A characteristic velocity of the inner ejecta is obtained for a sample of 56 stripped-envelope CC-SNe of different spectral types (IIb, Ib, Ic) using direct measurements of the line width as well as spectral fitting. For most SNe, this value shows a small scatter around 4500 km s$^{-1}$. Observations ($< 100$ days) of stripped-envelope CC-SNe have revealed a subclass of very energetic SNe, termed broad-lined SNe (BL-SNe) or hypernovae, which are characterised by broad absorption lines in the early-time spectra, indicative of outer ejecta moving at very high velocity ($v \geq 0.1 c$). SNe identified as BL in the early phase show large variations of core velocities at late phases, with some having much higher and some having similar velocities with respect to regular CC-SNe. This might indicate asphericity of the inner ejecta of BL-SNe, a possibility we investigate using synthetic three-dimensional nebular spectra.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figures, MNRAS accepte