I cambiamenti climatici: la sfida del XXI secolo

There is a large gap between the actions required to avoid a dangerous warming of the planet, and those already decided to contrast it. The more time passes, the more the pessimistic visions obtain valid motivations and reasons. In order to radically change in few decades an energetic system and a predatory attitude towards the planet’s resources, it is necessary to recognize the climate crisis as a systemic one, as a problem of justice and equity for the future generations. The climate science should help to understand the importance of this challenge, by emphasizing the consequences of today’s decisions for the future generations. To recover our reasons to deal with posterity, both as individuals and community, is a bigger endeavor. To understand the importance of the climate change requires not only more knowledge, but also the acceptance of the planetary limits, the redefinition of human expectations, and also a level of emotional understanding that is not sufficient today

Biospectroscopy of Nanodiamond-Induced Alterations in Conformation of Intra- and Extracellular Proteins: A Nanoscale IR Study

The toxicity of nanomaterials raises major concerns because of the impact that nanomaterials may have on health, which remains poorly understood. We need to explore the fate of individual nanoparticles in cells at nano and molecular levels to establish their safety. Conformational changes in secondary protein structures are one of the main indicators of impaired biological function and hence, the ability to identify these changes at a nanoscale level offers unique insights into the nanotoxicity of materials. Here, we used nanoscale infrared spectroscopy and demonstrated for the first time that nanodiamonds induced alterations in both extra- and intracellular secondary protein structures, leading to the formation of antiparallel β-sheet, β-turns, intermolecular β- sheet and aggregation of proteins. These conformational changes of the protein structure may result in the loss of functionality of proteins and in turn lead to adverse effects

Probate Law in Montana—Changes by the 1981 Legislature

1981 Probate Law Change

Asynchronous warming and δ18O evolution of deep Atlantic water masses during the last deglaciation

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2017. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here under a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license granted to WHOI. It is made available for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 114 (2017): 11075-11080, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1704512114.The large-scale reorganization of deep-ocean circulation in the Atlantic involving changes in North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW) and Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW) played a critical role in regulating hemispheric and global climate during the last deglaciation. However, changes in the relative contributions of NADW and AABW and their properties are poorly constrained by marine records, including δ18O of benthic foraminiferal calcite (δ18Oc). Here we use an isotope-enabled ocean general circulation model with realistic geometry and forcing conditions to simulate the deglacial water mass and δ18O evolution. Model results suggest that in response to North Atlantic freshwater forcing during the early phase of the last deglaciation, NADW nearly collapses while AABW mildly weakens. Rather than reflecting changes in NADW or AABW properties due to freshwater input as suggested previously, the observed phasing difference of deep δ18Oc likely reflects early warming of the deep northern North Atlantic by ~1.4°C while deep Southern Ocean temperature remains largely unchanged. We propose a thermodynamic mechanism to explain the early warming in the North Atlantic, featuring a strong mid-depth warming and enhanced downward heat flux via vertical mixing. Our results emphasize that the way ocean circulation affects heat, a dynamic tracer, is considerably different than how it affects passive tracers like δ18O, and call for caution when inferring water mass changes from δ18Oc records while assuming uniform changes in deep temperatures.This work is supported by the U.S. NSF P2C2 projects (1401778 and 1401802) and OCE projects (1600080 and 1566432), China NSFC 41630527, and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundatio

Partition Algebras and Kronecker Coefficients

Classical Schur-Weyl duality relates the representation theory of the general linear group to the representation theory of the symmetric group via their commuting actions on tensor space. With the goal of studying Kronecker products of symmetric group representations, the partition algebra is introduced as the commutator algebra of the diagonal action of the symmetric group on tensor space. An analysis of the representation theory of the partition offers results relating reduced Kronecker coefficients to Kronecker coefficients

Combinatorics of Grassmannian Decompositions

This thesis studies several combinatorially defined families of subsets of the Grassmannian. We introduce and study a family of subsets called “basis shape loci” associated to transversal matroids. Additionally, we study the Deodhar and positroid decompositions of the Grassmannian. A basis shape locus takes as input data a zero/nonzero pattern in a matrix, which is equivalent to a specific presentation of a transversal matroid. The locus is defined to be the set of points in the Grassmannian which are the row spaces of matrices with the prescribed zero/nonzero pattern. We show that this locus depends only on the transversal matroid, not on the specific presentation. When a transversal matroid is a positroid, the closure of its basis shape locus is exactly the positroid variety labelled by the matroid. We give a sufficient, and conjecturally necessary, condition for when a transversal matroid is a positroid. Components in the Deodhar decomposition are indexed by Go-diagrams, certain fillings of Ferrers shapes with white stones, black stones, and pluses. Le-diagrams are a common combinatorial object indexing positroids; all Le-diagrams are Go-diagrams. We give a system of local flips on fillings of Ferrers shapes which may be used to turn arbitrary diagrams into Go-diagrams. When a Go-diagram is a Le-diagram, these flips are exactly the previously studied Le-moves. Using these local flips, we conjecture a combinatorial condition describing when one Deodhar component is contained in the closure of another within a Schubert cell. We define a variety containing and conjecturally equal to the closure of a Deodhar component and prove that this combinatorial criterion implies a containment of these varieties. We further show that there is no reasonable description of Go-diagrams in terms of forbidden subdiagrams by providing an injection from the set of valid Go- diagrams into the set of minimal forbidden subdiagrams. In lieu of such a description, we give an algorithmic characterization of Go-diagrams. Finally, we use the above results to prove several corollaries about Wilson loop cells, which arise in the study of scattering amplitudes in N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory. Notably, it was previously known that the matroid represented by a generic point in a Wilson loop cell is a positroid. We show that the closure of the Wilson loop cell agrees with the positroid variety labelled by this positroid