Two Years of the COVID-19 Crisis: Anxiety, Creativity and the Everyday

Doubtless, the COVID-19 pandemic has been extremely challenging in all aspects. However, rather than looking at COVID-19 exclusively as a catastrophic event, which has generated insecurity, anxiety, panic and helplessness, I suggest investigating this insecurity and anxiety through the prism of existential philosophy. Drawing, in particular, on the work of Soren Kierkegaard and the literature on the existentialist anxiety of international relations, this study suggested looking at anxiety not in terms of insecurity but as "freedom's actuality". In other words, the attention was focused not so much on the many restrictions and bans imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic, but on the many quotidian and minuscule creative interventions through which people attempted to counterbalance, respond and react to them by creating new possibilities of freedom. Special attention was devoted to the distinction between normal and neurotic anxiety. This distinction is especially important, as it connects to two different and opposing subjectivities. While normal anxiety encourages a proactive approach to life-inspiring individuals to change the present through new daily strategies-neurotic anxiety prevents it, as it tends to replicate the ordinary, the known and the familiar

Reading the COVID-19 emergency with and beyond Foucault: The liberal subject and everyday practices of mobility

Since the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020, most analyses have used a Foucauldian perspective to investigate the disciplinary and surveillance mechanisms that (il/liberal) states introduced to contain the spread of the virus. Focussing on the Italian context, I suggest that, despite the mobility restrictions, the government retained overall its liberal rationality. Italian institutions did not aim to create a state of police nor to transform subjects into docile bodies. By reading the COVID-19 emergency with Foucault, I suggest approaching COVID-19 restrictions through the concept of governmentality, and propose that Italian institutions, at different levels, structured people's fields of action by persuading, encouraging, and incentivising certain behaviours during the pandemic. However, I also suggest reading the COVID-19 emergency beyond Foucault by engaging with the work of Michel de Certeau and investigating the many 'antidisciplinary practices' through which people 'metaphorized' dominant (disciplinary) norms

The social and economic message of Benedict XVI's Caritas in Veritate in the perspective of the Roman Catholic social doctrine

This study analyses the encyclical Caritas in veritate as a new encyclical in the ongoing development of the __social doctrine__ of the Roman Catholic Church. In this regard, the research questions are: to what extent is Caritas in veritate continuous with earlier pronouncements? To what extent is it new? In as far as there are new elements, can these be understood in relation to the theological thought of Joseph Ratzinger, who became pope Benedict XVI? To what extent can the specific points of view present in Caritas in veritate be seen as responses to contemporary social and economic developments such as globalization, or to new insights in the human sciences and contemporary secular thought?Modernity (Religion and Modernity

Exchange interactions and magnetic phases of transition metal oxides: benchmarking advanced ab initio methods

The magnetic properties of the transition metal monoxides MnO and NiO are investigated at equilibrium and under pressure via several advanced first-principles methods coupled with Heisenberg Hamiltonian MonteCarlo. The comparative first-principles analysis involves two promising beyond-local density functionals approaches, namely the hybrid density functional theory and the recently developed variational pseudo-self-interaction correction method, implemented with both plane-wave and atomic-orbital basis sets. The advanced functionals deliver a very satisfying rendition, curing the main drawbacks of the local functionals and improving over many other previous theoretical predictions. Furthermore, and most importantly, they convincingly demonstrate a degree of internal consistency, despite differences emerging due to methodological details (e.g. plane waves vs. atomic orbitals

Diazotroph Activity in Surface Narragansett Bay Sediments in Summer is Stimulated by Hypoxia and Organic Matter Delivery

Bacteria that carry out many processes of the nitrogen cycle inhabit estuarine sediments. Denitrification is known to be a dominant process causing estuarine sediments to behave as net nitrogen sinks. However, measurements of nitrogen fluxes in the sediments of Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, USA, have at times revealed high rates of net nitrogen (N2) fixation. Whereas changes in primary production, in magnitude and phenology, within Narragansett Bay have been identified as possible causes for these changes in nitrogen cycling within the benthos, a factor that has not been examined thus far is seasonal hypoxia. Since anaerobic diazotrophs figure so prominently within the sediments of Narragansett Bay, we hypothesized that dissolved oxygen concentrations in the bottom waters affect their activity. In order to explore this relationship, we measured the activity of diazotrophs in the surface sediments of 3 study areas during the summers of 2013 and 2014 using the acetylene reduction assay. We explored the effects of several water quality parameters on nitrogenase activity including, among others, dissolved oxygen and chlorophyll concentrations. Our measurements of nitrogenase activity were generally low, ranging between 2 and 5 nmol ethylene g-1 d-1 but spiked to 16 nmol ethylene g-1 d-1 at an area experiencing severe hypoxia in July 2013. Our data suggest that diazotrophy in estuarine sediments is enhanced when the benthos experiences very low dissolved oxygen in conjunction with recent influxes of autochthonous organic matter. Experiments with sediment core incubations conducted in the laboratory support our hypothesis that low dissolved oxygen and organic matter additions promote N2 fixation

Preparation and benchmarking of highly hydrophilic polyaniline poly(2-acrylamido-2-methyl-1-propanesulfonic acid) PANI PAMPSA membranes in the separation of sterols and proteins from fruit juice

A straightforward approach is presented to prepare highly hydrophilic ultrafiltration polyaniline poly(2-acrylamido-2-methyl-1-propanesulfonic acid (PANI PAMPSA) membranes. Their application in the fractionation of phytosterols and proteins from fruit juice is described. Poly(2-acrylamido-2-methyl-1-propanesulfonic (PAMPSA) is added to aniline during the polymer synthesis and the membrane is prepared via phase inversion forming a highly hydrophilic and mechanically stable ultrafiltration membrane of 200 µm thickness and pure water flux of 126 LMH at 1 bar. The membrane so produced is benchmarked against a hydrophilic commercial regenerated cellulose acetate membrane (RCA) for the separation of phytosterols and proteins from orange juice. Cross-flow filtration experiments show comparable protein separation efficiency of the membranes, but better rejection of phytosterols for the commercial RCA membrane. Both commercial and lab prepared membranes are subject to fouling, with the PANI PAMPSA membrane showing higher irreversible fouling. Nevertheless, the PANI PAMPSA membrane showed a good cleaning efficiency of 74% after three fouling-cleaning cycles. Overall, this work has demonstrated the possibility of use PANI PAMPSA for ultrafiltration application and provided a better understanding of its fouling ability when compared to a commercial membrane in a multicomponent system.</p

Caudal approach and Mini TightRope system (mTR) application for the treatment of craniodorsal hip luxation in a cat: a case report

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Extraction of synaptic input properties in vivo

Knowledge of synaptic input is crucial for understanding synaptic integration and ultimately neural function. However, in vivo, the rates at which synaptic inputs arrive are high, so that it is typically impossible to detect single events. We show here that it is nevertheless possible to extract the properties of the events and, in particular, to extract the event rate, the synaptic time constants, and the properties of the event size distribution from in vivo voltage-clamp recordings. Applied to cerebellar interneurons, our method reveals that the synaptic input rate increases from 600 Hz during rest to 1000 Hz during locomotion, while the amplitude and shape of the synaptic events are unaffected by this state change. This method thus complements existing methods to measure neural function in vivo