La peur du noir et la lumière défaillante du Nord dans les sagas et les contes islandais

La Saga de Grettir met en scène un personnage censé être l’homme le plus fort d’Islande à son époque. Ce héros a pourtant une grande faiblesse: la peur du noir. C’est la rencontre violente avec un revenant dans une ferme isolée à l’arrivée de l’hiver qui a déclenché chez Grettir cette frayeur épouvantable. Les revenants font partie des créatures imaginaires qui peuplent l’obscurité dans les contes islandais. Dans cet article, nous nous interrogerons sur le rôle de la lumière défaillante de la saison sombre dans les croyances folkloriques en Islande, notamment telles qu’elles apparaissent dans les contes populaires et les sagas

Quatre sagas légendaires d'Islande

L'activité littéraire en Islande médiévale fut extraordinaire. En témoignent notamment les célèbres sagas des Islandais, mais aussi d'autres catégories de sagas moins connues à l'étranger comme par exemple les sagas de chevaliers, en partie traduites ou adaptées du français, et les sagas légendaires qui mettent en scène des héros du Nord dont les aventures se déroulent dans un passé lointain et un univers plus fictif que réel. Puisant dans les mythes et dans le folklore, les quatre textes ici présentés et traduits appartiennent à cette dernière catégorie : le Dit de Thorstein le Colosse-de-Ia Ferme, le Dit de Helgi Fils de Thorir, la Saga de Sturlaug l'Industrieux, et la Saga d'Egille Manchot et d'Asmund Tueur-de-Guerriers-Fauves. Rédigés à la fin du xiiie siècle et au xive siècle et destinés au divertissement, ces textes s'adressent aujourd'hui non seulement aux spécialistes mais aussi à tout amateur de merveilleux curieux de découvrir le monde imaginaire des Islandais de cette époque. L'ouvrage comporte une sélection bibliographique des sagas islandaises

Coherent electronic transport in a multimode quantum channel with Gaussian-type scatterers

Coherent electron transport through a quantum channel in the presence of a general extended scattering potential is investigated using a T-matrix Lippmann-Schwinger approach. The formalism is applied to a quantum wire with Gaussian type scattering potentials, which can be used to model a single impurity, a quantum dot or more complicated structures in the wire. The well known dips in the conductance in the presence of attractive impurities is reproduced. A resonant transmission peak in the conductance is seen as the energy of the incident electron coincides with an energy level in the quantum dot. The conductance through a quantum wire in the presence of an asymmetric potential are also shown. In the case of a narrow potential parallel to the wire we find that two dips appear in the same subband which we ascribe to two quasi bound states originating from the next evanescent mode.Comment: RevTeX with 14 postscript figures include

As a Matter of Factions: The Budgetary Implications of Shifting Factional Control in Japan’s LDP

For 38 years, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) maintained single-party control over the Japanese government. This lack of partisan turnover in government has frustrated attempts to explain Japanese government policy changes using political variables. In this paper, we look for intraparty changes that may have led to changes in Japanese budgetary policy. Using a simple model of agenda-setting, we hypothesize that changes in which intraparty factions “control” the LDP affect the party’s decisions over spending priorities systematically. This runs contrary to the received wisdom in the voluminous literature on LDP factions, which asserts that factions, whatever their raison d’être, do not exhibit different policy preferences. We find that strong correlations do exist between which factions comprise the agenda-setting party “mainstream” and how the government allocates spending across pork-barrel and public goods items

Unbound states in quantum heterostructures

We report in this review on the electronic continuum states of semiconductor Quantum Wells and Quantum Dots and highlight the decisive part played by the virtual bound states in the optical properties of these structures. The two particles continuum states of Quantum Dots control the decoherence of the excited electron – hole states. The part played by Auger scattering in Quantum Dots is also discussed

Globally Gridded Satellite (GridSat) Observations for Climate Studies

Geostationary satellites have provided routine, high temporal resolution Earth observations since the 1970s. Despite the long period of record, use of these data in climate studies has been limited for numerous reasons, among them: there is no central archive of geostationary data for all international satellites, full temporal and spatial resolution data are voluminous, and diverse calibration and navigation formats encumber the uniform processing needed for multi-satellite climate studies. The International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project set the stage for overcoming these issues by archiving a subset of the full resolution geostationary data at approx.10 km resolution at 3 hourly intervals since 1983. Recent efforts at NOAA s National Climatic Data Center to provide convenient access to these data include remapping the data to a standard map projection, recalibrating the data to optimize temporal homogeneity, extending the record of observations back to 1980, and reformatting the data for broad public distribution. The Gridded Satellite (GridSat) dataset includes observations from the visible, infrared window, and infrared water vapor channels. Data are stored in the netCDF format using standards that permit a wide variety of tools and libraries to quickly and easily process the data. A novel data layering approach, together with appropriate satellite and file metadata, allows users to access GridSat data at varying levels of complexity based on their needs. The result is a climate data record already in use by the meteorological community. Examples include reanalysis of tropical cyclones, studies of global precipitation, and detection and tracking of the intertropical convergence zone

Genome-wide methylation analysis identifies genes silenced in non-seminoma cell lines

Silencing of genes by DNA methylation is a common phenomenon in many types of cancer. However, the genome wide effect of DNA methylation on gene expression has been analysed in relatively few cancers. Germ cell tumours (GCTs) are a complex group of malignancies. They are unique in developing from a pluripotent progenitor cell. Previous analyses have suggested that non-seminomas exhibit much higher levels of DNA methylation than seminomas. The genomic targets that are methylated, the extent to which this results in gene silencing and the identity of the silenced genes most likely to play a role in the tumours’ biology have not yet been established. In this study, genome-wide methylation and expression analysis of GCT cell lines was combined with gene expression data from primary tumours to address this question. Genome methylation was analysed using the Illumina infinium HumanMethylome450 bead chip system and gene expression was analysed using Affymetrix GeneChip Human Genome U133 Plus 2.0 arrays. Regulation by methylation was confirmed by demethylation using 5-aza-2-deoxycytidine and reverse transcription–quantitative PCR. Large differences in the level of methylation of the CpG islands of individual genes between tumour cell lines correlated well with differential gene expression. Treatment of non-seminoma cells with 5-aza-2-deoxycytidine verified that methylation of all genes tested played a role in their silencing in yolk sac tumour cells and many of these genes were also differentially expressed in primary tumours. Genes silenced by methylation in the various GCT cell lines were identified. Several pluripotency-associated genes were identified as a major functional group of silenced genes