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 $l$ times, with the probability distribution $p(l)\propto 1/ l^{\mu}$. 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 $q$, 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 $\mu$.Comment: Published in the Brazilian Journal of Physic