Automation creates the space for entirely new jobs: the UK must adopt, adapt and improve

Fears about robots taking people’s jobs are overplayed, say Rui Costa and Yuanhang Yu. Their research shows the real fear to overcome should be Britain’s lack of productivity-enhancing robots, software, artificial intelligence and other technologies

O USO DA GESTÃO DE PROJETOS PARA A IMPLANTAÇÃO DE UMA GESTÃO DA INFORMAÇÃO INTEGRADA E PARTICIPATIVA: A EXPERIÂNCIA DA COORDENADORIA DE EDUCAÇÃO ABERTA E A DISTÂNCIA DA UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE VIÇOSA-MG

A gerência da Educação a Distância exige de seus gestores executarem tarefas de planejamento, sistematização, organização, direção e controle de processos e projetos e por isso não pode prescindir de um gerenciamento da informação que atenda aos requisitos de integração, de responsabilidade coletiva e de participação. Sendo assim, este trabalho teve como objetivo a implementação da gestão da informação na Coordenadoria de Educação Aberta e a Distância da Universidade Federal de Viçosa (CEAD-UFV), seguindo a metodologia de gerenciamento de projetos com base numa modificação do dotProject, um software livre de código aberto. Para tanto, foi desenvolvido e implementado um sistema de gerenciamento da informação no órgão, com base na metodologia da gestão de projetos para organizações de tecnologia da informação e comunicação. Constatou-se, de modo geral, que o modelo implantado ofereceu à CEAD-UFV uma visão sistêmica de seus projetos e dinamizou o fluxo de informações, a experiência mostrou ainda que esse modo de gestão baseado na gerência de projetos permite enfatizar a sinergia entre grupos necessária no contexto de EaD

I\u27m Saving Up the Means to Get to New Orleans / music by Harry de costa; words by Howard Johnson

Cover: drawing of three scenes of African Americans, one of picking cotton, another of a duo singing and playing banjo, and the last of dock workers; photo inset of singer Emma Carus; Publisher: Leo Feist Inc. (New York)https://egrove.olemiss.edu/sharris_c/1103/thumbnail.jp

Associations of reproductive factors with postmenopausal follicle stimulating hormone

Recent studies have suggested that higher postmenopausal follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) may be associated with lower risk of diabetes. However, relatively little is known about postmenopausal FSH levels, including the level of variation between women and whether reproductive factors are associated with this variation.Peer reviewe

The Oceanic Biological Pump: Rapid carbon transfer to depth at Continental Margins during Winter

The oceanic biological pump is responsible for the important transfer of CO2-C as POC “Particulate Organic Carbon” to the deep sea. It plays a decisive role in the Earth’s carbon cycle and significant effort is spent to quantify its strength. In this study we used synchronized daily time-series data of surface chlorophyll-a concentrations from the NASA’s MODIS satellite in combination with hourly to daily observations from sea surface buoys and from an Internet Operated Vehicle (IOV) on the seafloor within Barkley Canyon (Northeast Pacific) to investigate the importance of winter processes in the export of fresh phytodetritus. The results indicate that phytoplankton pulses during winter can be as important in POC transfer to depth as the pulses associated with spring and summer blooms. Short winter phytoplankton pulses were observed to disappear from surface waters after low-pressure systems affected the area. Pulses of chlorophyll reached the IOV, at 870 m depth on the canyon seafloor, 12–72 hours later. These observed short pulses of biological carbon production regularly observed in the region from December to March have not been considered a significant component of the biological pump when compared with the denser summer productivity blooms

Spatiotemporal control of cell cycle acceleration during axolotl spinal cord regeneration

Axolotls are uniquely able to resolve spinal cord injuries, but little is known about the mechanisms underlying spinal cord regeneration. We previously found that tail amputation leads to reactivation of a developmental-like program in spinal cord ependymal cells (Rodrigo Albors et al., 2015), characterized by a high-proliferation zone emerging 4 days post-amputation (Rost et al., 2016). What underlies this spatiotemporal pattern of cell proliferation, however, remained unknown. Here, we use modeling, tightly linked to experimental data, to demonstrate that this regenerative response is consistent with a signal that recruits ependymal cells during ~85 hours after amputation within ~830 μm of the injury. We adapted Fluorescent Ubiquitination-based Cell Cycle Indicator (FUCCI) technology to axolotls (AxFUCCI) to visualize cell cycles in vivo. AxFUCCI axolotls confirmed the predicted appearance time and size of the injury-induced recruitment zone and revealed cell cycle synchrony between ependymal cells. Our modeling and imaging move us closer to understanding bona fide spinal cord regeneration

On the photometric signature of fast rotators

Rapidly rotating stars have been recently recognized as having amajor role in the interpretation of colour-magnitude diagrams of young and intermediate-age star clusters in the Magellanic Clouds and in the Milky Way. In this work, we evaluate the distinctive spectra and distributions in colour-colour space that follow from the presence of a substantial range in effective temperatures across the surface of fast rotators. The calculations are inserted in a formalism similar to the one usually adopted for non-rotating stars, which allows us to derive tables of bolometric corrections as a function not only of a reference effective temperature, surface gravity and metallicity, but also of the rotational speed with respect to the break-up value, omega, and the inclination angle, i. We find that only very fast rotators (omega > 0.95) observed nearly equator-on (i>45 degrees) present sizable deviations from the colour-colour relations of non-rotating stars. In light of these results, we discuss the photometry of the similar to 200-Myr-old cluster NGC 1866 and its split main sequence, which has been attributed to the simultaneous presence of slow and fast rotators. The small dispersion of its stars in colour-colour diagrams allows us to conclude that fast rotators in this cluster either have rotational velocities omega<0.95, or are all observed nearly pole-on. Such geometric colour-colour effects, although small, might be potentially detectable in the huge, high-quality photometric samples in the post-Gaia era, in addition to the evolutionary effects caused by rotation-induced mixing

A hydroxypyrone-based inhibitor of metalloproteinase-12 displays neuroprotective properties in both status epilepticus and optic nerve crush animal models

Recently, we showed that matrix metalloproteinase-12 (MMP-12) is highly expressed in microglia and myeloid infiltrates, which are presumably involved in blood\u2013brain barrier (BBB) leakage and subsequent neuronal cell death that follows status epilepticus (SE). Here, we assessed the effects of a hydroxypyrone-based inhibitor selective for MMP-12 in the pilocarpine-induced SE rat model to determine hippocampal cell survival. In the hippocampus of rats treated with pilocarpine, intra-hippocampal injections of the MMP-12 inhibitor protected Cornu Ammonis 3 (CA3) and hilus of dentate gyrus neurons against cell death and limited the development of the ischemic-like lesion that typically develops in the CA3 stratum lacunosum-moleculare of the hippocampus. Furthermore, we showed that MMP-12 inhibition limited immunoglobulin G and albumin extravasation after SE, suggesting a reduction in BBB leakage. Finally, to rule out any possible involvement of seizure modulation in the neuroprotective effects of MMP-12 inhibition, neuroprotection was also observed in the retina of treated animals after optic nerve crush. Overall, these results support the hypothesis that MMP-12 inhibition can directly counteract neuronal cell death and that the specific hydroxypyrone-based inhibitor used in this study could be a potential therapeutic agent against neurological diseases/disorders characterized by an important inflammatory response and/or neuronal cell loss

Progressive Seizure Aggravation in the Repeated 6-Hz Corneal Stimulation Model Is Accompanied by Marked Increase in Hippocampal p-ERK1/2 Immunoreactivity in Neurons

The 6-Hz corneal stimulation test is used to screen novel antiepileptic molecules to overcome the problem of drug refractoriness. Although recognized as a standard test, it has been evaluated only recently in the attempt to characterize the putative neuronal networks involved in seizures caused by corneal stimulation. In particular, by recording from the CA1 region we previously established that the hippocampus participates to propagation of seizure activity. However, these findings were not corroborated by using markers of neuronal activation such as FosB/ΔFosB antigens. In view of this discrepancy, we performed new experiments to characterize the changes in levels of phosphorylated extracellular signal-regulated kinases1/2 (p-ERK1/2), which are also used as markers of neuronal activation. To this aim, mice underwent corneal stimulation up to three different times, in three sessions separated by an interval of 3 days. To characterize a group in which seizures could be prevented by pharmacological treatment, we also considered pretreatment with the ghrelin receptor antagonist EP-80317 (330 μg/kg). Control mice were sham-treated. Video electrocorticographic (ECoG) recordings were obtained from mice belonging to each group of treatment. Animals were finally used to characterize the immunoreactivity for FosB/ΔFosB and p-ERK1/2 in the hippocampus. As previously shown, FosB/ΔFosB levels were highly increased throughout the hippocampus by the first induced seizure but, in spite of the progressively increased seizure severity, they were restored to control levels after the third stimulation. At variance, corneal stimulation caused a progressive increase in p-ERK1/2 immunoreactivity all over the hippocampus, especially in CA1, peaking in the third session. Predictably, EP-80317 administration reduced both duration and severity of seizures, prevented the increase in FosB/ΔFosB levels in the first session, and partially counteracted the increase in p-ERK1/2 levels in the third session. The vast majority of p-ERK1/2 immunopositive cells were co-labeled with FosB/ΔFosB antibodies, suggesting the existence of a relationship between the investigated markers in a subpopulation of neurons activated by seizures. These findings suggest that p-ERK1/2 are useful markers to define the aggravation of seizures and the response to anticonvulsant treatments. In particular, p-ERK1/2 expression clearly identified the involvement of hippocampal regions during seizure aggravation in the 6-Hz model

YBC: a stellar bolometric corrections database with variable extinction coefficients: application to PARSEC isochrones

We present the YBC database of stellar bolometric corrections, in which we homogenise widely used theoretical stellar spectral libraries and provide BCs for many popular photometric systems, including Gaia filters. The database can easily be extended to additional photometric systems and stellar spectral libraries. The web interface allows users to transform their catalogue of theoretical stellar parameters into magnitudes and colours of selected filter sets. The BC tables can be downloaded or implemented into large simulation projects using the interpolation code provided with the database. We computed extinction coefficients on a star-by-star basis, hence taking into account the effects of spectral type and non-linearity dependency on the total extinction. We illustrate the use of these BCs in PARSEC isochrones. We show that using spectral-type dependent extinction coefficients is necessary for Gaia filters whenever A(V)greater than or similar to 0.5 mag. Bolometric correction tables for rotating stars and tables of limb-darkening coefficients are also provided