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This paper explores questions surrounding corporeality and heavenly ascent, in texts ranging from 1 Enoch to the Hekhalot literature, including Philo’s works. It examines both descriptions of the heavenly realms and accounts of the ascent process. Despite his Platonic apophaticism, Philo superimposes cosmological and spiritual heavens, and draws upon the biblical imagery of dazzling glory. Although they do not express themselves in philosophical language, the heavenly ascent texts make it clear that human beings cannot ascend to heaven in their earthly bodies, and that God cannot be seen with terrestrial eyes. In terms of ideas they are not so far from the philosopher Philo as might at first appear.
Turkish heritage students are underrepresented at university-track secondary schools in Germany, yet the institutional discrimination contributing to this ongoing disparity often remains unquestioned, situated within inequitable norms of belonging. Drawing on critical race theory and a risk and resilience framework, the current study investigated the interplay between institutional and interpersonal discrimination in relation to exclusionary norms enacted in university-track schools. Using thematic analysis, interviews with eight Turkish German young adults from multiple regions of Germany were analyzed, highlighting the need for culturally responsive teaching, more teacher reflexivity regarding bias, a greater focus on equity, and more direct discussions of racism and its impact.
My essay attends to a number of passages in Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative in which the Prussian explorer expresses anxiety about the apparent dangers posed by the overwhelmingly productive tropical landscapes he observes. In these passages, the excesses of an “exotic nature” threaten European identity and modes of civilization—and they trouble the accuracy of Humboldt’s own observational project. I also explore Humboldt’s related worry that South American vegetable (and visual) overload will exert a destabilizing effect on his aesthetic sensibility, disrupting his ability to represent the “New Continent” accurately in writing. Finally, I sketch the influence of Humboldt’s representations of tropical excess on nineteenth-century British cultural thought and literary practice. Studying the instabilities experienced by Personal Narrative’s expatriates and colonists promises to draw out important tensions latent in Humboldt’s treatment of tropical landscape and to illuminate broader epistemological and aesthetic shifts being worked out during the period.
“One video fit for all”
(2023)
Online learning in mathematics has always been challenging, especially for mathematics in STEM education. This paper presents how to make “one fit for all” lecture videos for mathematics in STEM education. In general, we do believe that there is no such thing as “one fit for all” video. The curriculum requires a high level of prior knowledge in mathematics from high school to get a good understanding, and the variation of prior knowledge levels among STEM education students is often high. This creates challenges for both online teaching and on-campus teaching. This article presents experimenting and researching on a video format where students can get a real-time feeling, and which fits their needs regarding their existing prior knowledge. They have the possibility to ask and receive answers during the video without having to feel that they must jump into different sources, which helps to reduce unnecessary distractions. The fundamental video format presented here is that of dynamic branching videos, which has to little degree been researched in education related studies. The reason might be that this field is quite new for higher education, and there is relatively high requirement on the video editing skills from the teachers’ side considering the platforms that are available so far. The videos are implemented for engineering students who take the Linear Algebra course at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in spring 2023. Feedback from the students gathered via anonymous surveys so far (N = 21) is very positive. With the high suitability for online teaching, this video format might lead the trend of online learning in the future. The design and implementation of dynamic videos in mathematics in higher education was presented for the first time at the EMOOCs conference 2023.
In 1810, Moses Lackenbacher, together with two of his children, Israel and Heinrich, and Moses Löwenstein created the company “Moses Lackenbacher & Compagnie” with headquarters in Nagykanizsa and a branch in Vienna. The main profile of the company was army purveyance. The business activity resulted in a high spatial mobility which led to socio-cultural acculturation and conversions to Christianity within the kinship. This paper explores the connection between kinship and the operation of the company on the basis of the prominent yet little-researched Lackenbachers in the early 19th-century Habsburg Monarchy. Central questions are how the relatives organized a company during the Napoleonic wars, as well as the impact of operating a business; how familial bonds and kinship links were affected, and, in this context, how relatives together evolved into a multi-religious network of kinship.
“Mason without apron”
(2019)
While the lack of religion in Alexander von Humboldt’s work and the criticism he received is well known, his relationship with Freemasonry is relatively unexplored. Humboldt appears on some lists of “illustrious Masons,” and several lodges carry his name, but was he really a member? If so, when and where did he join a lodge? Are there any comments by him about Freemasonry? Who were the renowned Masons he was surrounded by? This paper examines these questions, but more importantly it analyzes what a membership might have meant for Humboldt’s scholarly work. It looks particularly at the unprecedented success he enjoyed in the United States in the early 19th century and the factors behind it. What could he have gained from these connections and how was he viewed by Masonic leaders and lodges in the trans-Atlantic world?
“Israel am Meere”
(2023)
For Jews in Germany, the period following the Nazis’ rise to power in January 1933 was a period of decision-making on many levels: How should they respond to the persecution? If they decided to emigrate, many more decisions had to be made: How does one leave a country, and where should one go? A key moment in the process and in the cultural practice of emigration is the beginning of the sea voyage – when the need for departure and the hope for a new arrival jointly create a period of liminality. Looking at reports from sea voyages of exploration and emigration from the 1930s, this contribution discusses the question whether, and in what ways, such reflections can be read in the context of religious experiences and in the search for Jewish identities in times of turmoil.
“Ich Habe Nicht Geantwortet”
(2020)
The exchange between Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig on the status of halakha is a well known, but also frustrating fixture in scholarship. For rather than responding to Rosenzweig’s critique, Buber seems to retreat in silence, claiming to be “unable to speak” about his position on Jewish Law. Scholars have generally tried to explain Buber’s failure to respond on philosophical and biographical grounds. What I propose, by contrast, is to revisit the question of Buber’s silence and secrecy from a hermeneutical standpoint, arguing that Buber engaged in a deliberate strategy of concealment that constituted its own form of response. The hermeneutics of silence discloses a call for religious renewal that follows a state of Dialogvergessenheit, but which cannot be made audible. Neither dialogue nor its remembrance can be commanded. While Buber struggles with his Nichtredenkönnen, he also stands in a tradition of secretive hermeneutics – the Jewish hermeneutics of sod.
“I mean, no soy psicóloga”
(2019)
This paper is concerned with the qualitative analysis of the use of the English discourse marker I mean in Spanish and Portuguese online discourses (in online fora, blogs or user comments on websites). The examples are retrieved from the Corpus del Español (Web/ Dialects) as well as the Corpus do Português (Web/ Dialects).
A quote from Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk, 1996) may seem unusual for a Classicist. Nevertheless, this famous sentence summarises the contents of this special issue of thersites perfectly. As specialists in classical reception frequently witness, there is a sort of déjà-vu effect when it comes to the presence of Antiquity within popular culture. In 2019, to try to better understand the phenomenon, Antiquipop invited researchers to take an interest in the construction and semantic path of these “masterpieces” in contemporary popular culture, with a particular focus on the 21st century.
“Creating a Maritime Future”
(2023)
This article explores the importance of the port city of Hamburg in the evolving discourses on the creation of a maritime future, a vision which became influential in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. While some Jewish representatives in the city aimed at preserving and intertwining Hanseatic and Jewish traditions in order to secure a Jewish presence in the port city under the pressure of the Nazi regime and thereafter, others wanted to create new emigration opportunities, especially to Mandatory Palestine, and create a Jewish maritime future in Eretz Israel. Different Zionist organizations supported the newly evolving maritime ideas, such as the “conquest of the sea”, and promoted the image of a Jewish seafaring nation. Despite the difficulties in the 1940s, these concepts gained influence post-1945 and led to the foundation of the fishery kibbutz “Zerubavel” in Blankenese/Hamburg. However, the idea of a Hanseatic Jewish future also remained influential and illustrates how differently a “Jewish maritime future” was imagined and used to link past, present and future.
“Chunking” spoken language
(2021)
In this introductory paper to the special issue on “Weak cesuras in talk-in-interaction”, we aim to guide the reader into current work on the “chunking” of naturally occurring talk. It is conducted in the methodological frameworks of Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics – two approaches that consider the interactional aspect of humans talking with each other to be a crucial starting point for its analysis. In doing so, we will (1) lay out the background of this special issue (what is problematic about “chunking” talk-in-interaction, the characteristics of the methodological approach chosen by the contributors, the cesura model), (2) highlight what can be gained from such a revised understanding of “chunking” in talk-in-interaction by referring to previous work with this model as well as the findings of the contributions to this special issue, and (3) indicate further directions such work could take starting from papers in this special issue. We hope to induce a fruitful exchange on the phenomena discussed, across methodological divides.
“Broadcast your gender.”
(2022)
Social media platforms provide a large array of behavioral data relevant to social scientific research. However, key information such as sociodemographic characteristics of agents are often missing. This paper aims to compare four methods of classifying social attributes from text. Specifically, we are interested in estimating the gender of German social media creators. By using the example of a random sample of 200 YouTube channels, we compare several classification methods, namely (1) a survey among university staff, (2) a name dictionary method with the World Gender Name Dictionary as a reference list, (3) an algorithmic approach using the website gender-api.com, and (4) a Multinomial Naïve Bayes (MNB) machine learning technique. These different methods identify gender attributes based on YouTube channel names and descriptions in German but are adaptable to other languages. Our contribution will evaluate the share of identifiable channels, accuracy and meaningfulness of classification, as well as limits and benefits of each approach. We aim to address methodological challenges connected to classifying gender attributes for YouTube channels as well as related to reinforcing stereotypes and ethical implications.
The Sino-Japanese War of 1894/95 is usually only briefly mentioned in studies on diplomatic history. Especially the war's impact on Wilhelmine foreign and world policy (Weltpolitik) has been largely neglected. However, the events in East Asia had a profound influence on the political leadership in Berlin. The Wilhelmstrasse's attitude towards the conflict changed rapidly when the course of the war in Northeast Asia made a collapse of the Qing Empire increasingly likely. Afraid of the prospect of being left empty handed in an upcoming scramble for China, German diplomacy got active in early 1895. Driven by a hectic activism which soon should become a dominant feature of Weltpolitik, Berlin concluded an ad-hoc alliance with St. Petersburg and Paris. In April 1895, this unlikely coalition intervened against Tokyo. While the Triple Intervention served primarily Russia's interest to maintain the status quo on the Chinese mainland, Germany aimed at the acquisition of a military and commercial base in Northeast Asia. Driven by public opinion, the naval leadership and the Emperor Wilhelm II., the formerly neutral and reserved German diplomacy changed towards an aggressive and unstable imperialist policy, which ultimately resulted in the acquisition of Qingdao in November 1897.
It has been highlighted many times how difficult it is to draw a boundary between gift and bribe, and how the same transfer can be interpreted in different ways according to the position of the observer and the narrative frame into which it is inserted. This also applied of course to Ancient Rome; in both the Republic and Principate lawgivers tried to define the limits of acceptable transfers and thus also to identify what we might call ‘corruption’. Yet, such definitions remained to a large extent blurred, and what was constructed was mostly a ‘code of conduct’, allowing Roman politicians to perform their own ‘honesty’ in public duty – while being aware at all times that their involvement in different kinds of transfer might be used by their opponents against them and presented as a case of ‘corrupt’ behaviour.
‘Crazy Man-Killing Monsters’
(2023)
The Amazons have a long legacy in literature and the visual arts, extending from antiquity to the present day. Prior scholarship tends to treat the Amazons as hostile ‘Other’ figures, embodying the antithesis of Greco-Roman cultural norms. Recently, scholars have begun to examine positive portrayals of Amazons in contemporary media, as role models and heroic figures. However, there is a dearth of scholarship examining the Amazons’ inherently multifaceted nature, and their subsequent polarised reception in popular media.
This article builds upon the large body of scholarship on contemporary Amazon narratives, in which the figures of Wonder Woman and Xena, Warrior Princess dominate scholarly discourse. These ‘modern Amazon’ figures epitomise the dominant contemporary trend of portraying Amazons as strong female role models and feminist icons. To highlight the complexity of the Amazon image in contemporary media, this article examines the representation of the Amazons in the Supernatural episode ‘Slice Girls’ (S7 E13, 2012), where their portrayal as hostile, monstrous figures diverges greatly from the positive characterisation of Wonder Woman and Xena. I also consider the show’s engagement with ancient written sources, to examine how the writers draw upon the motifs of ancient Amazon narratives when crafting their unique Amazon characters. By contrasting the Amazons of ‘Slice Girls’ to contemporary figures and ancient narratives, this article examines how factors such as feminist ideology, narrative story arcs, characters’/audience’s perspectives and male bias shape the representation of Amazons post-antiquity.
After the mass immigration to Israel from 1948 to 1950, about 2000 Jews remained
in Yemen. These Jews lived in small communities and continued to maintain their
religious environment as it was. In the years that followed, many of them, however, moved from Yemen to Israel with the assistance of the Jewish Agency and the Joint
Distribution Committee (JDC). The community was of a small size and the fact that it
was dispersed throughout the predominantly Muslim areas, created a certain closeness
between the two groups. About ten percent of the Jews chose to convert to Islam, many
of them in groups. In about twenty cases, the husbands chose to convert to Islam while
their wives emigrated to preserve their Judaism. Some of the converts refused to grant
their wives a divorce, because, according to Muslim law, conversion is enough to sever
the marital relationship. This procedure is called ʿAgunot. Meaning, women bound in
marriage to a husband and they no longer lived together, but the husband didn’t formally
‘released’ her from marriage union. The article follows the efforts undertaken
to release the ʿAgunot, and shows that Jewish and Muslim scholars were able to find
solutions to the ʿAgunot problem and, at times, managed to bridge the gap between the
two religions.
This paper attempts to account for the syntactic distribution of the particle sey in Turkish, in particular its suffixed variant which is a placeholder for expressions that have to be inserted into the discourse later. The paper argues that the distribution of suffixed sey is determined by constituent structure, meaning that Bey can only substitute for syntactic constituents. Thus, sey acts as a pro-form, similar, for instance, to pronouns substituting for noun phrases. This has two implications: First, as sey is a quasi-universal pro-form with the ability to substitute for a wide range of constituents, sey-substitution can be used as a constituency test to peek into the constituent structure of virtually any major syntactic domain. Second, the overall sey-substitution pattern across different syntactic domains constitutes evidence for Kayne's binary branching hypothesis.
This article looks at Émile Zola’s novel cycle Les Rougon-Macquart and argues that it describes its subject, the Second Empire, as a warming climate tending toward climate catastrophe. Zola’s affinity to the notion of climate is shown to be linked to his poetic employment of the concept of ‘milieu’, inspired by Hippolyte Taine. Close readings of selected passages from the Rougon-Macquart are used to work out the climatic difference between ‘the old’ and ‘the new Paris’, and the process of warming that characterises the Second Empire. Octave Mouret’s department store holds a special place in the article, as it is analysed through what the article suggests calling a ‘meteorotopos’: a location of intensified climatic conditions that accounts for an increased interaction between human and non-human actors. The department store is also one of the many sites in the novel cycle that locally prefigure the ‘global’ climate catastrophe of Paris burning, in which the Second Empire perishes.
On 7 February 1861, John Tyndall, professor of natural philosophy, delivered a historical lecture: he could prove that different gases absorb heat to a very different degree, which implies that the temperate conditions provided for by the Earth's atmosphere are dependent on its particular composition of gases. The theoretical foundation of climate science was laid.
Ten years later, on the other side of the Channel, a young and ambitious author was working on a comprehensive literary analysis of the French era under the Second Empire. Émile Zola had probably not heard or read of Tyndall's discovery. However, the article makes the case for reading Zola's Rougon-Macquart as an extensive story of climate change. Zola's literary attempts to capture the defining characteristic of the Second Empire led him to the insight that its various milieus were all part of the same ‘climate’: that of an all-encompassing warming. Zola suggests that this climate is man-made: the economic success of the Second Empire is based on heating, in a literal and metaphorical sense, as well as on stoking the steam-engines and creating the hypertrophic atmosphere of the hothouse that enhances life and maximises turnover and profit. In contrast to Tyndall and his audience, Zola sensed the catastrophic consequences of this warming: the Second Empire was inevitably moving towards a final débâcle, i.e. it was doomed to perish in local and ‘global’ climate catastrophes.
The article foregrounds the supplementary status of Tyndall's physical and Zola's literary knowledge. As Zola's striking intuition demonstrates, literature appears to have a privileged approach to the phenomenon of man-induced climate change.
On 7 February 1861, John Tyndall, professor of natural philosophy, delivered a historical lecture: he could prove that different gases absorb heat to a very different degree, which implies that the temperate conditions provided for by the Earth's atmosphere are dependent on its particular composition of gases. The theoretical foundation of climate science was laid.
Ten years later, on the other side of the Channel, a young and ambitious author was working on a comprehensive literary analysis of the French era under the Second Empire. Émile Zola had probably not heard or read of Tyndall's discovery. However, the article makes the case for reading Zola's Rougon-Macquart as an extensive story of climate change. Zola's literary attempts to capture the defining characteristic of the Second Empire led him to the insight that its various milieus were all part of the same ‘climate’: that of an all-encompassing warming. Zola suggests that this climate is man-made: the economic success of the Second Empire is based on heating, in a literal and metaphorical sense, as well as on stoking the steam-engines and creating the hypertrophic atmosphere of the hothouse that enhances life and maximises turnover and profit. In contrast to Tyndall and his audience, Zola sensed the catastrophic consequences of this warming: the Second Empire was inevitably moving towards a final débâcle, i.e. it was doomed to perish in local and ‘global’ climate catastrophes.
The article foregrounds the supplementary status of Tyndall's physical and Zola's literary knowledge. As Zola's striking intuition demonstrates, literature appears to have a privileged approach to the phenomenon of man-induced climate change.
Precipitation and land use in terms of livestock grazing have been identified as two of the most important drivers structuring the vegetation composition of semi-arid and arid savannas. Savanna research on the impact of these drivers has widely applied the so-called plant functional type (PFT) approach, grouping the vegetation into two or three broad types (here called meta-PFTs): woody plants and grasses, which are sometimes divided into perennial and annual grasses. However, little is known about the response of functional traits within these coarse types towards water availability or livestock grazing. In this study, we extended an existing eco-hydrological savanna vegetation model to capture trait diversity within the three broad meta-PFTs to assess the effects of both grazing and mean annual precipitation (MAP) on trait composition along a gradient of both drivers. Our results show a complex pattern of trait responses to grazing and aridity. The response differs for the three meta-PFTs. From our findings, we derive that trait responses to grazing and aridity for perennial grasses are similar, as suggested by the convergence model for grazing and aridity. However, we also see that this only holds for simulations below a MAP of 500 mm. This combined with the finding that trait response differs between the three meta-PFTs leads to the conclusion that there is no single, universal trait or set of traits determining the response to grazing and aridity. We finally discuss how simulation models including trait variability within meta-PFTs are necessary to understand ecosystem responses to environmental drivers, both locally and globally and how this perspective will help to extend conceptual frameworks of other ecosystems to savanna research.
In many near-surface geophysical studies it is now common practice to collect co-located disparate geophysical data sets to explore subsurface structures. Reconstruction of physical parameter distributions underlying the available geophysical data sets usually requires the use of tomographic reconstruction techniques. To improve the quality of the obtained models, the information content of all data sets should be considered during the model generation process, e.g., by employing joint or cooperative inversion approaches. Here, we extend the zonal cooperative inversion methodology based on fuzzy c-means cluster analysis and conventional single-input data set inversion algorithms for the cooperative inversion of data sets with partially co-located model areas. This is done by considering recent developments in fuzzy c-means cluster analysis. Additionally, we show how supplementary a priori information can be incorporated in an automated fashion into the zonal cooperative inversion approach to further constrain the inversion. The only requirement is that this a priori information can be expressed numerically; e.g., by physical parameters or indicator variables. We demonstrate the applicability of the modified zonal cooperative inversion approach using synthetic and field data examples. In these examples, we cooperatively invert S- and P-wave traveltime data sets with partially co-located model areas using water saturation information expressed by indicator variables as additional a priori information. The approach results in a zoned multi-parameter model, which is consistent with all available information given to the zonal cooperative inversion and outlines the major subsurface units. In our field example, we further compare the obtained zonal model to sparsely available borehole and direct-push logs. This comparison provides further confidence in our zonal cooperative inversion model because the borehole and direct-push logs indicate a similar zonation.
While the underlying mechanisms of Parkinson’s disease (PD) are still insufficiently studied, a complex interaction between genetic and environmental factors is emphasized. Nevertheless, the role of the essential trace element zinc (Zn) in this regard remains controversial. In this study we altered Zn balance within PD models of the versatile model organism Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) in order to examine whether a genetic predisposition in selected genes with relevance for PD affects Zn homeostasis. Protein-bound and labile Zn species act in various areas, such as enzymatic catalysis, protein stabilization pathways and cell signaling. Therefore, total Zn and labile Zn were quantitatively determined in living nematodes as individual biomarkers of Zn uptake and bioavailability with inductively coupled plasma tandem mass spectrometry (ICP-MS/MS) or a multi-well method using the fluorescent probe ZinPyr-1. Young and middle-aged deletion mutants of catp-6 and pdr-1, which are orthologues of mammalian ATP13A2 (PARK9) and parkin (PARK2), showed altered Zn homeostasis following Zn exposure compared to wildtype worms. Furthermore, age-specific differences in Zn uptake were observed in wildtype worms for total as well as labile Zn species. These data emphasize the importance of differentiation between Zn species as meaningful biomarkers of Zn uptake as well as the need for further studies investigating the role of dysregulated Zn homeostasis in the etiology of PD.
Magmatic and metamorphic zircons have been dated from ductilely deformed gabbroic dykes defining a dyke swarm and signifying crustal extension in the northern part of the Hengshan Complex of the North China Craton, These dykes now occur as boudins and deformed sheets within migmatitic tonalitic, trondhjemitic, granodioritic and granitic gneisses and are conspicuous due to relics of high-pressure granulite or even former eclogite facies garnet + pyroxene-bearing assemblages. SHRIMP ages for magmatic zircons from two dykes reflect the time of dyke emplacement at similar to 1915 Ma, whereas metamorphic zircons dated by both SHRIMP and evaporation techniques are consistently in the range 1848-1888 Ma. The Youngest granitoid gneiss yet dated in the Hengshan has an emplacement age of 18 2 17 Ma. These results complement recent geochronological studies from the neighbouring Wutai and Fuping Complexes, to the SE of the Hengshan, showing that a crustal extension event Occurred in the late Palaeoproterozoic. This preceded a major high-pressure collision- type metamorphic event in the central part of the North China Craton that occurred in the Palaeoproterozoic and not in the late Archaean as previously thought. Our data support recent suggestions that the North China Craton experienced a major, craton-wide orogenic event in the late Palaeoproterozoic after which it became cratonized and acted as a stable block.
Precambrian microcontinents represent key tectonic units in the accretionary collages of the western Central Asian Orogenic Belt (CAOB), and their geological history is reasonably well established since the Mesoproterozoic but remains weakly constrained for older epochs due to a scarcity of exposed Palaeoproterozoic and Archaean rocks. Early Precambrian rocks were previously reported from several metamorphic complexes in the Kyrgyz Tianshan orogenic belt, mainly based on multigrain conventional zircon dating, but the present study only confirmed such rocks at one site, namely in the Kuilyu Complex of eastern Kyrgyzstan. New single grain SHRIMP II zircon ages, geochemical data, and whole-rock Nd isotopic compositions for granitoid gneisses of the Kuilyu Complex elucidate the age, origin and tectonic settings of this oldest continental fragment in the Tianshan. The Kuilyu Complex is part of the basement in the Ishim - Middle Tianshan microcontinent. It consist of a strongly deformed and metamorphosed supracrustal assemblage of paragneisses and schists which are tectonically interlayered with amphibolites, migmatites and granitoid gneisses. Our zircon dating indicates that the Kuilyu Complex contains two suites of Palaeoproterozoic granitoid gneisses with magmatic protolith ages of ca. 2.32-2.33 Ga and 1.85 Ga. Granitoid magmatism at 1.85 Ga was almost immediately followed by amphibolite-facies metamorphism at ca 1.83 Ga, evidenced by growth of metamorphic zircon rims. The older, ca 2.3 Ga granitoid gneisses chemically correspond to calc-alkaline, metaluminous, I-type magnesian quartz diorite and granodiorite. The protolith of the younger, ca. 1.85 Ga granite-gneiss is an alkalic-calcic, metaluminous to peraluminous, ferroan medium-grained porphyric granite with chemical features resembling A-type granites. The 2.3 Ga and 1.85 Ga granitoid gneisses have slightly to distinctly negative initial epsilon(Nd) values of -1.2 and -6.6, and similar depleted mantle Nd model ages of 2.7-2.6 Ga, which imply melting of Neoarchaean continental crust. The zircon age patterns of the Kuilyu Complex resemble those of exposed rocks in the Tarim Craton, where episodes of granitoid magmatism at ca. 2.3-2.4 and 1.85 Ga, followed by amphibolite-facies metamorphism at ca 1.85 Ga, are also recorded. Similarities in the early Precambrian magmatic and metamorphic episodes as well as similar histories during the Neoproterozoic and early Palaeozoic suggest that the Ishim-Middle Tianshan microcontinent was rifted off the Tarim Craton. Similar age patterns also suggest possible tectonic links of the Kuilyu and Tarim continental blocks with the Baidrag Block of central Mongolia. In contrast, substantial differences in age and Precambrian evolution between the Anrakhai block of southern Kazakhstan and the Kuilyu Complex argue against a previous connection and suggest the former to represent an independent continental terrane. Current data show that early Precambrian rocks in the western CAOB outside Tarim only occur at two sites, namely in the Anrakhai Complex of southern Kazakhstan and in the Kuilyu Complex of eastern Kyrgyzstan. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
We perform a quantitative analysis of extensive chess databases and show that the frequencies of opening moves are distributed according to a power law with an exponent that increases linearly with the game depth, whereas the pooled distribution of all opening weights follows Zipf's law with universal exponent. We propose a simple stochastic process that is able to capture the observed playing statistics and show that the Zipf law arises from the self-similar nature of the game tree of chess. Thus, in the case of hierarchical fragmentation the scaling is truly universal and independent of a particular generating mechanism. Our findings are of relevance in general processes with composite decisions.
In 1945, Zinovii Shenderovich Tolkatchev (1903–1977), a Soviet artist of Jewish origin, created a striking series of five images entitled “Jesus in Majdanek”. The series was the culmination of Tolkatchev‘s intensive preoccupation with the experience he, as a Red Army soldier, endured upon taking part in liberation of the concentration camps Majdanek and Auschwitz. Shocked by the actual sights he witnessed, he depicted Jesus as an actual camp inmate, wearing a striped uniform marked by every possible defamation sign – the Jewish yellow star, the red triangle of political prisoners, and the individual prison number, the numerical tattoo on his lower arm can also be seen. The different stages of camp life are portrayed as the traditional Passion of Christ. While showing the actual situations the artist based himself upon the well known European Renaissance paintings canonically depicting Jesus‘ suffering. The article places Tolkatchev‘s series in a broader cultural and visual context by exploring the development of the ‘historical Jesus’ in the 19th century European thought and Russian realist art, and by examining the impact of the German avant-garde. By doing so, a deeper understanding of the universal message Tolkatchev’s works entail is offered.
Background
Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has a severe impact on all aspects of patient care. Among the numerous biomarkers of potential validity for diagnostic and clinical management of COVID-19 are biomarkers at the interface of iron metabolism and inflammation.
Methods
The follow-up study included 54 hospitalized patients with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 with a moderate and severe/critical form of the disease. Iron deficiency specific biomarkers such as iron, ferritin, transferrin receptor, hepcidin, and zinc protoporphyrin (ZnPP) as well as relevant markers of inflammation were evaluated twice: in the first five days when the patient was admitted to the hospital and during five to 15 days; and their validity to diagnose iron deficiency was further assessed. The regression and Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) analyses were performed to evaluate the prognosis and determine the probability for predicting the severity of the disease in the first five days of COVID-19.
Results
Based on hemoglobin values, anemia was observed in 21 of 54 patients. Of all iron deficiency anemia-related markers, only ZnPP was significantly elevated (P<0.001) in the anemic group. When patients were grouped according to the severity of disease, slight differences in hemoglobin or other anemia-related parameters could be observed. However, the levels of ZnPP were significantly increased in the severely ill group of patients. The ratio of ZnPP to lymphocyte count (ZnPP/L) had a discrimination power stronger than the neutrophil to lymphocyte count ratio (N/L) to determine disease severity. Additionally, only two markers were independently associated with the severity of COVID-19 in logistic regression analysis; D-dimer (OR (5.606)(95% CI 1.019–30.867)) and ZnPP/L ratio (OR (74.313) (95% CI 1.081–5108.103)).
Conclusions
For the first time ZnPP in COVID-19 patients were reported in this study. Among all iron-related markers tested, ZnPP was the only one that was associated with anemia as based on hemoglobin. The increase in ZnPP might indicate that the underlying cause of anemia in COVID-19 patients is not only due to the inflammation but also of nutritional origin. Additionally, the ZnPP/L ratio might be a valid prognostic marker for the severity of COVID-19.
An approach is presented to modify the work function of solution-processed sol-gel derived zinc oxide (ZnO) over an exceptionally wide range of more than 2.3 eV. This approach relies on the formation of dense and homogeneous self-assembled monolayers based on phosphonic acids with different dipole moments. This allows us to apply ZnO as charge selective bottom electrodes in either regular or inverted solar cell structures, using poly(3-hexylthiophene): phenyl-C71-butyric acid methyl ester as the active layer. These devices compete with or even surpass the performance of the reference on indium tin oxide/poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) polystyrene sulfonate. Our findings highlight the potential of properly modified ZnO as electron or hole extracting electrodes in hybrid optoelectronic devices. (C) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC.
The zeta potential of the motile spores of the green alga (seaweed) Ulva linza was quantified by video microscopy in combination with optical tweezers and determined to be -19.3ñ1.1 mV. The electrostatic component involved in the settlement and adhesion of spores was studied using electret surfaces consisting of PTFE and bearing different net charges. As the surface chemistry remains the same for differently charged surfaces, the experimental results isolate the influence of surface charge and thus electrostatic interactions. Ulva spores were demonstrated to have a reduced tendency to settle on negatively charged surfaces and when they did settle the adhesion strength of settled spores was lower than with neutral or positively charged surfaces. These observations can be ascribed to electrostatic interactions.
We present fully polynomial time approximation schemes for a broad class of Holant problems with complex edge weights, which we call Holant polynomials. We transform these problems into partition functions of abstract combinatorial structures known as polymers in statistical physics. Our method involves establishing zero-free regions for the partition functions of polymer models and using the most significant terms of the cluster expansion to approximate them. Results of our technique include new approximation and sampling algorithms for a diverse class of Holant polynomials in the low-temperature regime (i.e. small external field) and approximation algorithms for general Holant problems with small signature weights. Additionally, we give randomised approximation and sampling algorithms with faster running times for more restrictive classes. Finally, we improve the known zero-free regions for a perfect matching polynomial.
Let M be a closed connected spin manifold of dimension 2 or 3 with a fixed orientation and a fixed spin structure. We prove that for a generic Riemannian metric on M the non-harmonic eigenspinors of the Dirac operator are nowhere zero. The proof is based on a transversality theorem and the unique continuation property of the Dirac operator.