9,097 research outputs found
Extensive Characterization of Seismic Laws in Acoustic Emissions of Crumpled Plastic Sheets
Statistical similarities between earthquakes and other systems that emit
cracking noises have been explored in diverse contexts, ranging from materials
science to financial and social systems. Such analogies give promise of a
unified and universal theory for describing the complex responses of those
systems. There are, however, very few attempts to simultaneously characterize
the most fundamental seismic laws in such systems. Here we present a complete
description of the Gutenberg-Richter law, the recurrence times, Omori's law,
the productivity law, and Bath's law for the acoustic emissions that happen in
the relaxation process of uncrumpling thin plastic sheets. Our results show
that these laws also appear in this phenomenon, but (for most cases) with
different parameters from those reported for earthquakes and fracture
experiments. This study thus contributes to elucidate the parallel between
seismic laws and cracking noises in uncrumpling processes, revealing striking
qualitative similarities but also showing that these processes display unique
features.Comment: Accepted for publication in EP
Distance to the scaling law: a useful approach for unveiling relationships between crime and urban metrics
We report on a quantitative analysis of relationships between the number of
homicides, population size and other ten urban metrics. By using data from
Brazilian cities, we show that well defined average scaling laws with the
population size emerge when investigating the relations between population and
number of homicides as well as population and urban metrics. We also show that
the fluctuations around the scaling laws are log-normally distributed, which
enabled us to model these scaling laws by a stochastic-like equation driven by
a multiplicative and log-normally distributed noise. Because of the scaling
laws, we argue that it is better to employ logarithms in order to describe the
number of homicides in function of the urban metrics via regression analysis.
In addition to the regression analysis, we propose an approach to correlate
crime and urban metrics via the evaluation of the distance between the actual
value of the number of homicides (as well as the value of the urban metrics)
and the value that is expected by the scaling law with the population size.
This approach have proved to be robust and useful for unveiling
relationships/behaviors that were not properly carried out by the regression
analysis, such as i) the non-explanatory potential of the elderly population
when the number of homicides is much above or much below the scaling law, ii)
the fact that unemployment has explanatory potential only when the number of
homicides is considerably larger than the expected by the power law, and iii) a
gender difference in number of homicides, where cities with female population
below the scaling law are characterized by a number of homicides above the
power law.Comment: Accepted for publication in PLoS ON
Scale-adjusted metrics for predicting the evolution of urban indicators and quantifying the performance of cities
More than a half of world population is now living in cities and this number
is expected to be two-thirds by 2050. Fostered by the relevancy of a scientific
characterization of cities and for the availability of an unprecedented amount
of data, academics have recently immersed in this topic and one of the most
striking and universal finding was the discovery of robust allometric scaling
laws between several urban indicators and the population size. Despite that,
most governmental reports and several academic works still ignore these
nonlinearities by often analyzing the raw or the per capita value of urban
indicators, a practice that actually makes the urban metrics biased towards
small or large cities depending on whether we have super or sublinear
allometries. By following the ideas of Bettencourt et al., we account for this
bias by evaluating the difference between the actual value of an urban
indicator and the value expected by the allometry with the population size. We
show that this scale-adjusted metric provides a more appropriate/informative
summary of the evolution of urban indicators and reveals patterns that do not
appear in the evolution of per capita values of indicators obtained from
Brazilian cities. We also show that these scale-adjusted metrics are strongly
correlated with their past values by a linear correspondence and that they also
display crosscorrelations among themselves. Simple linear models account for
31%-97% of the observed variance in data and correctly reproduce the average of
the scale-adjusted metric when grouping the cities in above and below the
allometric laws. We further employ these models to forecast future values of
urban indicators and, by visualizing the predicted changes, we verify the
emergence of spatial clusters characterized by regions of the Brazilian
territory where we expect an increase or a decrease in the values of urban
indicators.Comment: Accepted for publication in PLoS ON
On the dynamics of bubbles in boiling water
We investigate the dynamics of many interacting bubbles in boiling water by
using a laser scattering experiment. Specifically, we analyze the temporal
variations of a laser intensity signal which passed through a sample of boiling
water. Our empirical results indicate that the return interval distribution of
the laser signal does not follow an exponential distribution; contrariwise, a
heavy-tailed distribution has been found. Additionally, we compare the
experimental results with those obtained from a minimalist phenomenological
model, finding a good agreement.Comment: Accepted for publication in Chaos, Solitons & Fractal
Tadalafil modulates aromatase activity and androgen receptor expression in a human osteoblastic cell in vitro model
Purpose Phosphodiesterase type-5 inhibitor (PDE5i)
tadalafil administration in men with erectile dysfunction is
associated with increased testosterone/estradiol ratio, leading
to hypothesize a potential increased effect of androgen
action on target tissues. We aimed to characterize, in a cellular
model system in vitro, the potential modulation of
aromatase and sex steroid hormone receptors upon exposure
to tadalafil (TAD).
Methods Human osteoblast-like cells SAOS-2 were chosen
as an in vitro model system since osteoblasts are target
of steroid hormones. Cells were tested for viability upon
TAD exposure, which increased cell proliferation. Then,
cells were treated with/without TAD for several times to
evaluate potential modulation in PDE5, aromatase (ARO),
androgen (AR) and estrogen (ER) receptor expression.
Results Osteoblasts express significant levels of both PDE5
mRNA and protein. Exposure of cells to increasing concentrations
of TAD (10−8–10−7 M) decreased PDE5 mRNA and
protein expression. Also, TAD inhibited ARO mRNA and
protein expression leading to an increase in testosterone levels
in the supernatants. Interestingly, TAD increased total AR mRNA and protein expression and decreased ERα, with an
increased ratio of AR/ER, suggesting preferential androgenic
vs estrogenic pathway activation.
Conclusions Our results demonstrate for the first time
that TAD decreases ARO expression and increases AR
protein expression in human SAOS-2, strongly suggesting
a new control of steroid hormones pathway by PDE5i.
These findings might represent the first evidence of translational
actions of PDE5i on AR, which leads to hypothesize
a growing relevance of this molecule in men with
prostate cancer long-term treated with TAD for sexual
rehabilitation.
Keywords Tadalafil · Osteoblasts · Aromatase · Androgen
receptor · Estrogen recepto
Symbolic Sequences and Tsallis Entropy
We address this work to investigate symbolic sequences with long-range
correlations by using computational simulation. We analyze sequences with two,
three and four symbols that could be repeated times, with the probability
distribution . For these sequences, we verified that
the usual entropy increases more slowly when the symbols are correlated and the
Tsallis entropy exhibits, for a suitable choice of , a linear behavior. We
also study the chain as a random walk-like process and observe a nonusual
diffusive behavior depending on the values of the parameter .Comment: Published in the Brazilian Journal of Physic
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