Selective Games on Binary Relations

We present a unified approach, based on dominating families in binary relations, for the study of topological properties defined in terms of selection principles and the games associated to them.Comment: 28 page

Indestructibility of compact spaces

In this article we investigate which compact spaces remain compact under countably closed forcing. We prove that, assuming the Continuum Hypothesis, the natural generalizations to $\omega_1$-sequences of the selection principle and topological game versions of the Rothberger property are not equivalent, even for compact spaces. We also show that Tall and Usuba's "$\aleph_1$-Borel Conjecture" is equiconsistent with the existence of an inaccessible cardinal.Comment: 18 page

Both cetaceans in the Brazilian Amazon show sustained, profound population declines over two decades

<div><p>Obligate river dolphins occur only in the rivers of Asia and South America, where they are increasingly subject to damaging pressures such as habitat degradation, food competition and entanglement in fishing gear as human populations expand. The Amazon basin hosts two, very different, dolphins—the boto or Amazon river dolphin (<i>Inia geoffrensis</i>) and the smaller tucuxi (<i>Sotalia fluviatilis</i>). Both species have wide geographical ranges and were once considered to be relatively abundant. Their IUCN Red List conservation status of Data Deficient (DD), due to limited information on threats, ecology, population numbers and trends, did not initially cause alarm. However, the development of dolphin hunting to provide fish bait at around the beginning of this millennium broadly coincided with the onset of a widespread perception that numbers of both species were in decline. Consequently, the need for population trend data to inform conservation advice and measures became urgent. This paper presents a 22-year time series of standardised surveys for both dolphins within the Mamirauá Reserve, Amazonas State, Brazil. Analysis of these data show that both species are in steep decline, with their populations halving every 10 years (botos) and 9 years (tucuxis) at current rates. These results are consistent with published, independent information on survival rates of botos in this area, which demonstrated a substantial drop in annual survival, commencing at around the year 2000. Mamirauá is a protected area, and is subject to fewer environmental pressures than elsewhere in the region, so there is no reason to suspect that the decline in dolphins within the Reserve is more pronounced than outside it. If South America's freshwater cetaceans are to avoid following their Asian counterparts on the path to a perilous conservation status, effective conservation measures are required immediately. Enforcement of existing fishery laws would greatly assist in achieving this.</p></div

Chaotic itinerancy, temporal segmentation and spatio-temporal combinatorial codes

We study a deterministic dynamics with two time scales in a continuous state attractor network. To the usual (fast) relaxation dynamics towards point attractors (``patterns'') we add a slow coupling dynamics that makes the visited patterns to loose stability leading to an itinerant behavior in the form of punctuated equilibria. One finds that the transition frequency matrix between patterns shows non-trivial statistical properties in the chaotic itinerant regime. We show that mixture input patterns can be temporally segmented by the itinerant dynamics. The viability of a combinatorial spatio-temporal neural code is also demonstrated

Some interesting features of new massive gravity

A proof that new massive gravity - the massive 3D gravity model proposed by Bergshoeff, Hohm and Townsend (BHT) - is the only unitary system at the tree level that can be constructed by augmenting planar gravity through the curvature-squared terms, is presented. Two interesting gravitational properties of the BHT model, namely, time dilation and time delay, which have no counterpart in the usual Einstein 3D gravity, are analyzed as well.Comment: Submitted to Classical and Quantum Gravit

Biodegradable polyesters from agro&industrial by-products

Poster presented at the 11th annual World Congress on Industrial Biotechnology. Studies on GRP were financed by the EU Integrated Project BIOPRODUCTION (contract nº 026515-2) and those on cellulosic hydrolysates are funded by the EU Collaborative Project BUGWORKERS (contract nº 246449). C. Almeida, J. Cavalheiro, T. Cesário and F. Ferreira were supported by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, Portugal (SFRH/BPD/26678/2006, SFRH/BD/45266/2008 and SFRH/BPD/68587/2010, IF/00442/2012). Waste glycerol was kindly provided by Torrejana, Fábrica de Biocombustíveis (Torres Vedras). Lignocellulosic hydrolysates were produced by biorefinery.de GmbH, Germany, in the framework of BUGWORKERS project.Institute for Biotechnology and Bioengineering, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal / Biotrend S.A., Cantanhede, Portugal / Ecole Europeènne de Chimie, Polymères et Matériaux, Université de Strasbourg, Franc