Seasonal variations of concentrations and optical properties of water soluble HULIS collected in urban environments

Major contributors to the organic aerosol include water-soluble macromolecular compounds (e.g. HULIS<sub>WS</sub>: Water Soluble Humic LIke Substances). The nature and sources of HULIS<sub>WS</sub> are still largely unknown. This work is based on a monitoring in six different French cities performed during summer and winter seasons. HULIS<sub>WS</sub> analysis was performed with a selective method of extraction complemented by carbon quantification. UV spectroscopy was also applied for their chemical characterisation. HULIS<sub>WS</sub> carbon represent an important contribution to the organic aerosol mass in summer and winter, as it accounts for 12–22% of Organic Carbon and 34–40% of Water Soluble Organic Carbon. We found strong differences in the optical properties (specific absorbance at 250, 272, 280 nm and E2/E3 ratio) and therefore in the chemical structure between HULIS<sub>WS</sub> from samples of summer- and wintertime. These differences highlight different processes responsible for emissions and formation of HULIS<sub>WS</sub> according to the season, namely biomass burning in winter, and secondary processes in summer. Specific absorbance can also be considered as a rapid and useful indicator of the origin of HULIS<sub>WS</sub> in urban environment

Le territoire d’État entre imposition et subversion : exemples saharo-sahéliens

Tandis que la crise du Moyen-Orient d’août 1990 à février 1991 montait inexorablement aux extrêmes, les leaders politiques occidentaux déclaraient l’avénement d’un “nouvel ordre mondial” ou d’un “nouvel ordre international” assurant la primauté du droit sur la force. 1989 avait ouvert la voie avec des changements politiques de taille : la chute du mur de Berlin et des régimes communistes de l’Europe de l’Est. 1990 connaitrait, parallèlement à l’explosion de la crise moyen-orientale, plus posi..

The "Polyploid Hop": shifting challenges and opportunities over the evolutionary lifespan of genome duplications

The duplication of an entire genome is no small affair. Whole genome duplication (WGD) is a dramatic mutation with long-lasting effects, yet it occurs repeatedly in all eukaryotic kingdoms. Plants are particularly rich in documented WGDs, with recent and ancient polyploidization events in all major extant lineages. However, challenges immediately following WGD, such as the maintenance of stable chromosome segregation or detrimental ecological interactions with diploid progenitors, commonly do not permit establishment of nascent polyploids. Despite these immediate issues some lineages nevertheless persist and thrive. In fact, ecological modelling supports patterns of adaptive niche differentiation in polyploids, with young polyploids often invading new niches and leaving their diploid progenitors behind. In line with these observations of polyploid evolutionary success, recent work documents instant physiological consequences of WGD associated with increased dehydration stress tolerance in first-generation autotetraploids. Furthermore, population genetic theory predicts both short-and long-term benefits of polyploidy and new empirical data suggests that established polyploids may act as 'sponges' accumulating adaptive allelic diversity. In addition to their increased genetic variability, introgression with other tetraploid lineages, diploid progenitors, or even other species, further increases the available pool of genetic variants to polyploids. Despite this, the evolutionary advantages of polyploidy are still questioned, and the debate over the idea of polyploidy as an evolutionary dead-end carries on. Here we broadly synthesise the newest empirical data moving this debate forward. Altogether, evidence suggests that if early barriers are overcome, WGD can offer instantaneous fitness advantages opening the way to a transformed fitness landscape by sampling a higher diversity of alleles, including some already preadapted to their local environment. This occurs in the context of intragenomic, population genomic, and physiological modifications that can, on occasion, offer an evolutionary edge. Yet in the long run, early advantages can turn into long-term hindrances, and without ecological drivers such as novel ecological niche availability or agricultural propagation, a restabilization of the genome via diploidization will begin the cycle anew

Reliable Self-Deployment of Cloud Applications

International audienceCloud applications consist of a set of interconnected software elements distributed over several virtual machines, themselves hosted on remote physical servers. Most existing solutions for deploying such applications require human intervention to configure parts of the system, do not respect functional dependencies among elements that must be respected when starting them, and do not handle virtual machine failures that can occur when deploying an application. This paper presents a self-deployment protocol that was designed to automatically configure a set of software elements to be deployed on different virtual machines. This protocol works in a decentralized way, i.e., there is no need for a centralized server. It also starts the software elements in a certain order, respecting important architectural invariants. This protocol supports virtual machine and network failures, and always succeeds in deploying an application when faced with a finite number of failures. Designing such highly parallel management protocols is difficult, therefore formal modeling techniques and verification tools were used for validation purposes. The protocol was implemented in Java and was used to deploy industrial applications