Deborah Mawer, editor. Historical Interplay in French Music and Culture, 1860-1960. Routledge, 2018.

Review of Deborah Mawer, editor. Historical Interplay in French Music and Culture, 1860-1960

Reversible phase transformation and doubly-charged anions at the surface of simple cubic RbC60

The simple cubic phase of a RbC60 thin film has been studied using photoelectron spectroscopy. The simple cubic-to-dimer transition is found to be reversible at the film surface. A sharp Fermi edge is observed and a lower limit of 0.5 eV is found for the surface Hubbard U, pointing to a strongly-correlated metallic character of thin-film simple cubic RbC60. A molecular charge state is identified in the valence band and core level photoemission spectra which arises from C602- anions and contributes to the spectral intensity at the Fermi level.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figure

Yehuda Jean-Bernard Moraly. L’Œuvre impossible: Claudel, Genet, Fellini. Paris: Éditions le Manuscrit, 2013. 207 pp.

Review of Yehuda Jean-Bernard Moraly. L’Œuvre impossible: Claudel, Genet, Fellini. Paris: Éditions le Manuscrit, 2013. 207 pp

Genetic aetiology of glycaemic traits: approaches and insights.

Glycaemic traits such as fasting and post-challenge glucose and insulin measures, as well as glycated haemoglobin (HbA1c), are used to diagnose and monitor diabetes. These traits are risk factors for cardiovascular disease even below the diabetic threshold, and their study can additionally yield insights into the pathophysiology of type 2 diabetes. To date, a diverse set of genetic approaches have led to the discovery of over 97 loci influencing glycaemic traits. In this review, we will focus on recent advances in the genetic aetiology of glycaemic traits, and the resulting biological insights. We will provide a brief overview of results ranging from common, to low- and rare-frequency variant-trait association studies, studies leveraging the diversity across populations, and studies harnessing the power of genetic and genomic approaches to gain insights into the biological underpinnings of these traits

The internal courtyard of mixed use buildings, a device of thermal and luminous comfort

International audienceThe historical patio-courtyard is an outdoor area largely or entirely surrounded by buildings or walls. Generally, the courtyards are useful to sunlighting because their open spaces preserve the solar access of the adjoining buildings. They allow sunlight to reach the facades so that side-lighting strategies can be used. In urban fabric of the Mediterranean countries, we observe a new generation of big patios with mixed-use buildings (housing, trade, offices). This may be a return to the traditional form of the patio, which allows a passive regulation of built environment, multi-use activities, and security of the inhabitants. This new interpretation of a traditional passive device suggests more problems of illumination on lower levels. It becomes necessary to assess the performances of different courtyard shapes that behave as shafts. This paper presents the influence of the courtyard shape and orientation, on sunlighting duration and illumination levels of ground and facades. The results enable to propose changes of the distribution of the uses through the facades, vertically or horizontally, according to the orientation preferred and the illumination for each use

Unsteady shear flows of colloidal hard-sphere suspensions by dynamic simulation

The rheology during the start-up and cessation of simple shear flow has been investigated for near hard-sphere colloidal suspensions. Simulations augmented by theoretical analysis are used to determine how the non-Newtonian stress development and relaxation depend on the microstructure. Accelerated Stokesian dynamics (ASD) and Brownian dynamics (BD) simulations are used for 0.05 ≤ Pe ≤ 500 in concentrated freely flowing suspensions; the Péclet number defining the ratio of shear to thermal motion is Pe=3πηγ ̇a^3/kT with η the suspending fluid viscosity, γ ̇ the shear rate, and kT the thermal energy. Theoretical predictions based on the Smoluchowski equation for dilute suspensions are made, and these are primarily used for comparison with results from BD simulations in which hydrodynamic interactions are neglected. For suspensions with hydrodynamics, simulations by ASD are used to probe start-up and flow cessation over a large range of Pe; these studies focus on solid volume fraction ϕ=0.4, with more limited examinations at other ϕ. The use of both BD and ASD simulations allows us to discriminate hydrodynamic interaction effects on the suspension rheology. The Brownian stresses computed by either method exhibit overshoots of their steady state value during the start-up of shear flow. The overshoots occur at strain amplitudes which depend on Pe, and the overshoot is described by a model based on extension of the concept of cage-breaking from glass dynamics. Results from the relaxation of a sheared suspension show that the distortion of the pair distribution function from its equilibrium form has a fast radial relaxation and a slow angular relaxation. The various rheometric functions (relative viscosity; first and second normal stress differences) are found to respond on different timescales, reflecting their different dependences on the flow-induced structure. A re-examination of steady shear flow allows us to find normal stress differences which tend properly toward zero at small Pe, unlike prior work; the discrepancy is found to be due to finite size scaling, as small simulations used in prior work resulted in excessively large normal stress responses at small Pe