פרסומים

O ensaio analisa criticamente o conceito de Am Haarets – tradicionalmente associado ao “ignorante” nas fontes rabínicas – e propõe uma reinterpretação inclusiva desse termo no contexto do ensino judaico contemporâneo. A partir de uma revisão histórica e textual das fontes bíblicas, farisaicas, mishnáicas e talmúdicas, o autor evidencia a evolução semântica de Am Haarets desde um termo polissêmico até sua cristalização como categoria de exclusão no judaísmo rabínico hegemônico. O trabalho questiona a centralidade do letramento e da leitura textual como marcadores de pertencimento religioso, destacando a primazia da oralidade na tradição judaica e a existência histórica de judeus fora dos circuitos institucionais de transmissão da Torá. Dialogando com autores como Oppenheimer, Halbertal, Ben-Zion e Hezser, o texto denuncia o viés elitista das narrativas tradicionais e propõe a valorização da diversidade interna do povo judeu – cultural, religiosa e epistemológica. Ao resgatar a figura do Am Haarets como símbolo de judeidades não normativas, o estudo reivindica uma pedagogia judaica pluralista, crítica e comprometida com as múltiplas formas de vivenciar e transmitir a tradição.

 

Was the catastrophic flooding in Derna, Libya—one of the deadliest hydrometeorological disasters on record—an inevitable outcome of rare weather conditions, or did the design of the infrastructure fail to account for probable risks? On 10 to 11 September 2023, Storm Daniel, a Mediterranean tropical-like cyclone, caused heavy rainfall that led to the collapse of two dams and more than 5000 casualties in Derna. Using a combination of atmospheric reanalysis, satellite data, and hydrologic modeling, we overcame key limitations typical of data-scarce, high-variability regions and revealed that despite the catastrophic impact, the return periods of the rainfall and flood were only a few decades. Hydraulic simulations revealed that the dam failures amplified the damage nearly 20-fold compared to a dam-free scenario. With extensive and timely implications, our findings underscore the importance of uncertainty-aware risk assessment and highlight the value of distributed flood prevention and early warning systems in mitigating risks in vulnerable regions.

 

The coexistence of multiple types of orders is a common thread in condensed matter physics and unconventional superconductors. The nature of superconducting orders may be unveiled by analyzing local perturbations such as vortices. For thin films, the vortex magnetic profile is characterized by the Pearl-length $Λ$ Λ , which is inversely proportional to the 2D superfluid density; hence, normally, also inversely proportional to the film thickness, $$d$$ d . Here we employ the scanning SQUID-on-tip microscopy to measure $Λ$ Λ in NbSe 2 flakes with thicknesses ranging from $$N=3$$ N = 3 to $$53$$ 53 layers. For $$N\, > \,10$$ N > 10 , we find the expected dependence $$Λ\propto 1/d$$ Λ ∝ 1 / d . However, six-layer films show a sharp increase of $Λ$ Λ deviating by a factor of three from the expected value. This value remains fixed for $$N=3$$ N = 3 to $$6$$ 6 . This unexpected behavior suggests the competition between two orders; one residing only on the first and last layers of the film while the other prevails in all layers.

Chickens serve as an excellent model organism for developmental biology, offering unique opportunities for precise spatiotemporal access to embryos within eggs. Optogenes are light-activated proteins that regulate gene expression, offering a non-invasive method to activate genes at specific locations and developmental stages, advancing developmental biology research. This study employed the Magnet-Cre optogenetic system to control gene expression in developing chicken embryos. Magnet-Cre consists of two light-sensitive protein domains that dimerize upon light activation, each attached to an inactive half of the Cre recombinase enzyme, which becomes active upon dimerization. We developed an all-in-one plasmid containing a green fluorescent protein marker, the Magnet-Cre system, and a light-activated red fluorescent protein gene. This plasmid was electroporated into the neural tube of Hamburger and Hamilton (H&H) stage 14 chicken embryos. Embryo samples were cleared using the CUBIC protocol and imaged with a light sheet microscope to analyze optogenetic activity via red-fluorescent cells. We established a pipeline for Magnet-Cre activation in chicken embryos, demonstrating that a single 3-min exposure to blue light following incubation at 28 °C was sufficient to trigger gene activity within the neural tube, with increased activity upon additional light exposure. Finally, we showed a spatiotemporal control of gene activity using a localized laser light induction. This research lays the groundwork for further advancements in avian developmental biology and poultry research, enabling spatiotemporal control of genes in both embryos and transgenic chickens.

A bicyclic PSP-pincer ligand featuring a sulfonium cation at the bridgehead position of its rigid triptycene-like scaffold was synthesized and metallated with a bis-cationic Pt(II) center. The resulting tris-cationic Pt(II) complex exhibits excellent photostability and improved catalytic performance compared to its analogue with the previously reported sulfonium pincer ligand.

In the new millennium, new media have made conscious self-performance an everyday and continuous activity. Memory has always been creative, but in the digital age it is becoming more commonplace to actively shape pictorial and verbal stories of oneself according to what one wishes to remember and show to the world. Many autofictional books explore the boundary and the overlap between memory, self-presentation, and self-invention, often through protagonists whose acts of writing appear to affect the lives they lead. This article argues that a new autofictional form turns the fluidity, mutability, and collaborative nature of self-presentation into a structural principle. It shows how Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be (2010/2012), Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013), and Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014) critically explore the potentials and dangers of new media ecologies, suggesting that self and world can be changed through acts of (self-)presentation. The article also addresses the question of how autofictional destabilizations of reality relate to concepts such as “alternative facts” and proclamations of a “post-factual” age, and reflects on political and ethical implications of how autofictional texts challenge the belief in uniform and universal truth.

 

December 2024: Alexandra Effe is Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oslo, where she is part of the interdisciplinary research and teaching initiative “Literature, Cognition, and Emotions,” and teaches Anglophone and comparative literature. She is the author of J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Narrative Transgression (Palgrave, 2017) and co-editor of The Autofictional (Palgrave, 2022) and Autofiction, Emotions, and Humour (Routledge, 2023). She has published articles and book chapters on narrative and cognitive theory, twenty-first-century literature, postcolonial literature, and testimonial writing. As Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, she co-convened the project “Autofiction in Global Perspective.”

Effectively shaping human and animal behavior is of great practical and theoretical importance. Here we ask whether quantitative models of choice can be used to achieve this goal more effectively than qualitative psychological principles. We term this approach, which is motivated by the effectiveness of engineering in the natural sciences, ‘choice engineering’. To address this question, we launched an academic competition, in which teams of academic competitors used either quantitative models or qualitative principles to design reward schedules that would maximally bias the choices of experimental participants in a repeated, two-alternative task. We found that a choice engineering approach is the most successful method for shaping behavior in our task. This is a proof of concept that quantitative models are ripe to be used in order to engineer behavior. Finally, we show that choice engineering can be effectively used to compare models in the cognitive sciences, thus providing an alternative to the standard statistical methods of model comparison that are based on likelihood or explained variance.

Effectively shaping human and animal behavior is of great practical and theoretical importance. Here we ask whether quantitative models of choice can be used to achieve this goal more effectively than qualitative psychological principles. We term this approach, which is motivated by the effectiveness of engineering in the natural sciences, ‘choice engineering’. To address this question, we launched an academic competition, in which teams of academic competitors used either quantitative models or qualitative principles to design reward schedules that would maximally bias the choices of experimental participants in a repeated, two-alternative task. We found that a choice engineering approach is the most successful method for shaping behavior in our task. This is a proof of concept that quantitative models are ripe to be used in order to engineer behavior. Finally, we show that choice engineering can be effectively used to compare models in the cognitive sciences, thus providing an alternative to the standard statistical methods of model comparison that are based on likelihood or explained variance.

The growing demand for dexterous and autonomous robotic manipulation highlights the need for advanced sensing and control strategies, particularly for slip prevention. Although soft grippers provide intrinsic compliance and adaptability, their effectiveness is often limited by the lack of real-time sensory feedback and the complexity of soft actuator dynamics. Inspired by human tactile perception, we developed a bioarchitectonics-inspired soft slip sensor with a three-dimensional structure that leverages crack and stress concentration to enhance sensitivity to incipient slip and shear force. Complementarily, a soft gripper with a linear pressure-to-force response was engineered to enable stable and predictable force modulation. The flexible slip sensors were conformally integrated onto the grippers, forming a fully perceptive soft robotic system capable of detecting early-stage slippage and investigating interfacial frictional properties. This integration establishes a closed-loop sensorimotor framework that notably improves the reliability and adaptability of soft robotic grasping across a wide range of real-world applications.