Is the Brazilian fauna well represented on children's books?

This paper examine children books about Brazilian fauna, especially those whose content reveals a potential for science communication. The research was conducted in Brazilian publishers, bookstores and in the Google search engine for books, using the keywords “animals”, “Brazilian animals” and “national fauna”. The content and descriptive analysis was performed in 24 books that presentedwild animals in their natural habitat and portrayed realistically to verify the strategies used in the dissemination of animal biology, focusing on language, content and images.There is a significant number of books about Brazilian animals for children (199), but few are available for purchase (61). Only seven were considered adequate to disseminate animal science, indicating that few books associate scientific knowledge with quality text, bringing together information and aesthetics of the word, as well as beautiful and attractive illustrations. However, all titles play an important role in the popularization of native species

Upper Extremity Prosthetics: Designing A Life Without Limits

When you’re a kid you don’t think very much about how your body grows, it just does. Sometimes you may get a little taller or stronger but you never think very far beyond that point - unless you have to wear a prosthetic. The question of how children that wear prosthetic limbs keep up with their ever-changing bodies as they grow into adulthood is what sparked our curiosity and led us to research the multifaceted prosthetics industry for this thesis project. We wanted to see if there was a socially, fiscally, and environmentally responsible solution to this problem and if not, what we could do to help

Frequency-dependent hydrodynamic finite size correction in molecular simulations reveals the long-time hydrodynamic tail

Finite-size effects are challenging in molecular dynamics simulations because they have significant effects on computed static and dynamic properties, in particular diffusion constants, friction coefficients, and time- or frequency-dependent response functions. We investigate the influence of periodic boundary conditions on the velocity autocorrelation function and the frequency-dependent friction of a particle in a fluid, and show that the long-time behavior (starting at the picosecond timescale) is significantly affected. We develop an analytical correction allowing us to subtract the periodic boundary condition effects. By this, we unmask the power-law long-time tails of the memory kernel and the velocity autocorrelation function in liquid water and a Lennard-Jones fluid from simulations with rather small box sizes

Confronting surface hopping molecular dynamics with Marcus theory for a molecular donor-acceptor system

We investigate the performance of fewest switches surface hopping (SH) in describing electron transfer (ET) for a molecular donor–acceptor system. Computer simulations are carried out for a wide range of reorganisation energy (λ), electronic coupling strength (Hab) and driving force using our recently developed fragment orbital-based SH approach augmented with a simple decoherence correction. This methodology allows us to compute SH ET rates over more than four orders of magnitude, from the sub-picosecond to the nanosecond time regime. We find good agreement with semi-classical ET theory in the non-adiabatic ET regime. The correct scaling of the SH ET rate with electronic coupling strength is obtained and the Marcus inverted regime is reproduced, in line with previously reported results for a spin-boson model. Yet, we find that the SH ET rate falls below the semi-classical ET rate in the adiabatic regime, where the free energy barrier is in the order of kBT in our simulations. We explain this by first signatures of non-exponential population decay of the initial charge state. For even larger electronic couplings (Hab = λ/2), the free energy barrier vanishes and ET rates are no longer defined. At this point we observe a crossover from ET on the vibronic time scale to charge relaxation on the femtosecond time scale that is well described by thermally averaged Rabi oscillations. The extension of the analysis from the non-adiabatic limit to large electronic couplings and small or even vanishing activation barriers is relevant for our understanding of charge transport in organic semiconductors

Structure and Dynamics of Water Confined in Imogolite Nanotubes

International audienceWe have studied the properties of water adsorbed inside nanotubes of hydrophilic imogolite, an aluminum silicate clay mineral, by means of molecular simulations. We used a classical force field to describe the water and the flexible imogolite nanotube and validated it against the data obtained from first-principles molecular dynamics. With it, we observe a strong structuration of the water confined in the nanotube, with specific adsorption sites and a distribution of hydrogen bond patterns. The combination of number of adsorption sites, their geometry, and the preferential tetrahedral hydrogen bonding pattern of water leads to frustration and disorder. We further characterize the dynamics of the water, as well as the hydrogen bonds formed between water molecules and the nanotube, which is found to be more than 1 order of magnitude longer than water–water hydrogen bonds

A systematic evaluation of bioelectrical impedance measurement after hemodialysis session

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