Rethinking Border Studies: Participation and Social Innovation in Border Zone Development

The study of emerging forms of public engagement and collective action is crucial for understanding the ongoing democratic dynamics, citizenship, and the constitution of the city's public problems. To recognize how the field of frontier studies is inseparable from the processes of experience of actors, this study focuses on the importance of the social innovation ecosystem (SIE) for the development of frontier zones. Specifically, this study revisits the main instruments of public management and border development policies to emphasize figures of civil society and their collective mobilizations on the Brazil-Bolivia border, recognizing social innovation initiatives and the main challenges they seek to solve. This path of public investigation allowed us to understand the territorial dimension of borders and expand their meaning as a living space by giving light to the actors' practices, identifying how they mobilize to repair socio-environmental inequalities.

Repensando os Estudos Fronteiriços: Participação e Inovação Social no Desenvolvimento das Zonas de Fronteiras

The study of emerging forms of public engagement and collective action is crucial for understanding the ongoing democratic dynamics, citizenship, and the constitution of the city's public problems. To recognize how the field of frontier studies is inseparable from the processes of experience of actors, this study focuses on the importance of the social innovation ecosystem (SIE) for the development of frontier zones. Specifically, this study revisits the main instruments of public management and border development policies to emphasize figures of civil society and their collective mobilizations on the Brazil-Bolivia border, recognizing social innovation initiatives and the main challenges they seek to solve. This path of public investigation allowed us to understand the territorial dimension of borders and expand their meaning as a living space by giving light to the actors' practices, identifying how they mobilize to repair socio-environmental inequalities.

MicroRNAs as Biomarkers and Therapeutic Targets in Doxorubicin-Induced Cardiomyopathy: A Review

Doxorubicin is a broad-spectrum chemotherapy drug applied in antitumor therapy. However, its clinical utility is limited by its fatal cardiotoxicity. Doxorubicin (DOX)-induced cardiomyopathy (DIC) begins with the first DOX dose and is characterized by being cumulative dose-dependent, and its early diagnosis using common detection methods is very difficult. Therefore, it is urgent to determine the underlying mechanism of DIC to construct treatment strategies for the early intervention before irreversible damage to the myocardium occurs. Growing evidence suggests that microRNAs (miRNAs) play regulatory roles in the cardiovascular system. miRNAs may be involved in DIC by acting through multiple pathways to induce cardiomyocyte injury. Recent studies have shown that the dysregulation of miRNA expression can aggravate the pathological process of DIC, including the induction of oxidative stress, apoptosis, ion channel dysfunction and microvascular dysfunction. Current findings on the roles of miRNAs in DIC have led to a wide range of studies exploring candidate miRNAs to be utilized as diagnostic biomarkers and potential therapeutic targets for DIC. In this review, we discuss frontier studies on the roles of miRNAs in DIC to better understand their functions, develop relevant applications in DIC, discuss possible reasons for the limitations of their use and speculate on innovative treatment strategies.

Do It by Yourself: An Instructional Derivation of the Laplacian Operator in Spherical Polar Coordinates

For scientists and engineers, the Laplacian operator is a fundamental tool that has made it possible to carry out important frontier studies involving wave propagation, potential theory, heat conduction, the distribution of stresses in a deformable solid and quantum mechanics. Knowing, understanding, and manipulating the Laplacian operator allows us to tackle complex and exciting physics, chemistry, and engineering problems. In this paper, contained in the Special Issue “Mathematics as the M in STEM Education”, we present an instructional derivation of the Laplacian operator in spherical coordinates. Our derivation is self-contained and employs well-known mathematical concepts used in all science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Our lengthy but straightforward procedure shows that this fundamental tool in mathematics is not intractable but accessible to anyone who studies any of the STEM disciplines. We consider that this work may be helpful for students and teachers who wish to discuss the derivation of this vital tool from an elementary approach in their courses.

It depends on you, culturologist

In the article, the author addresses young people seeking to devote their lives to cultural studies and shows that for more than twenty years, as a pedagogue, he has been working very closely with culturologists studying at the Moscow University for the Humanities. That is not just communication between representatives of different specialties - pedagogy and cultural studies, which are called frontier studies in science, but a very close connection among the researchers themselves. The author speaks about joint research, including the monograph "Interaction between pedagogical science and the system of national education as a controlled process", and notes a detail that is very important for science. Only the union and close creative connection of living people develop science. Science itself does not exist as a subject of self-development. Without specific researchers, their talent and creativity, no science can develop in modern conditions. The author refers to the concept of "cultural studies", reveals its history as an independent science since the middle of the 20th century, speaks about the difficulty of defending one's "self" for any science, and shows how any science is formed - from the creation of certain justifications, analytics of certain facts, requiring comprehension and proving the need for independent consideration of this area of knowledge as a separate object of scientific knowledge. The author demonstrates that this is exactly what happened with cultural studies, when the scientific name itself arose in the 20th century, while many scientists had been directly involved in its development for many years. The article discusses scientific schools within the framework of cultural studies and the directions of its development.

HAYAO MIYAZAKI IN SEARCH OF THE WORLD

Рецензируется перевод монографии американского теоретика культуры Сюзан Нейпир «Волшебные миры Хаяо Миядзаки». Книга Сюзан Нейпир представляет собой наиболее фундаментальное исследование визуальных форм в творчестве японского анимационного режиссёра Хаяо Миядзаки. Сквозь призму анимационной визуальности автор раскрывает те философские смыслы, которые режиссёр закладывал в свои фильмы. С позиций культурной теории и философии культуры монография представляет особенный интерес, поскольку позволяет погрузиться в интерпретации ключевых для культуры XX века сюжетов в японской анимации. Помимо прочего работа Нейпир может представлять академический интерес для всех, кто интересуется теорией культурного фронтира и такими философскими сюжетами, как экологическое мышление, феминизм, новый материализм или апокалиптическое видение. Настоящая рецензия построена на исследовательских инициативах визуальной семиотики. Анализ интеллектуальных способов работы Сюзан Нейпир с визуальностью аниме Хаяо Миядзаки может быть полезен не только тем, кто интересуется непосредственными смыслами работ японского аниматора, но и претендует на раскрытие внутренних механизмов визуальных репрезентаций культурных феноменов. Иными словами, книга Нейпир, помимо раскрытия скрытых и неочевидных смыслов художественных произведений, вносит вклад в общую теорию работы с визуальным. Рецензия также акцентирует внимание на ряде непоследовательных ходов в мышлении Нейпир и предлагает свою интерпретацию спорных аспектов в книге. The Russian translation of Susan Napier’s monograph Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art is being reviewed. The book should be considered as the most fundamental research on the visual semiotics in the works of the Japanese animation director Hayao Miyazaki. Through the prism of visuality, the author analyses philosophical meanings that the director put in his films. From the perspectives of cultural theory and philosophy of culture, the monograph is particularly interesting because it allows going deeper into the interpretations of topics, key in the 20th-century culture, in Japanese animation. Among other things, Napiers’s book could be of interest for all academics interested in frontier studies and such philosophical topics as ecological thinking, feminism, new materialism, and apocalyptic thinking. This review is based on the research initiatives of visual semiotics. The analysis of Susan Napier’s intellectual ways of working with the visual nature of Hayao Miyazaki’s anime can be useful not only for those interested in the understanding of the direct meanings of the Japanese animator’s works, it also claims to reveal the internal mechanisms of visual representations of cultural phenomena. In other words, Napier’s book, in addition to revealing the hidden and non-obvious meanings of works of art, contributes to the general theory of working with the visual reality. The review also focuses on a number of inconsistent moves in Napier’s thinking and offers its own interpretation of the controversial aspects in the book.

Molecular Mechanisms of Autophagy Regulation in Plants and Their Applications in Agriculture

Autophagy is a highly conserved cellular process for the degradation and recycling of unnecessary cytoplasmic components in eukaryotes. Various studies have shown that autophagy plays a crucial role in plant growth, productivity, and survival. The extensive functions of plant autophagy have been revealed in numerous frontier studies, particularly those regarding growth adjustment, stress tolerance, the identification of related genes, and the involvement of metabolic pathways. However, elucidation of the molecular regulation of plant autophagy, particularly the upstream signaling elements, is still lagging. In this review, we summarize recent progress in research on the molecular mechanisms of autophagy regulation, including the roles of protein kinases, phytohormones, second messengers, and transcriptional and epigenetic control, as well as the relationship between autophagy and the 26S proteasome in model plants and crop species. We also discuss future research directions for the potential application of autophagy in agriculture.

Mathematical immunology: from phenomenological to multiphysics modelling

Mathematical immunology is the branch of mathematics dealing with the application of mathematical methods and computational algorithms to explore the structure, dynamics, organization and regulation of the immune system in health and disease. We review the conceptual and mathematical foundation of modelling in immunology formulated by Guri I. Marchuk. The current frontier studies concerning the development of multiscale multiphysics integrative models of the immune system are presented.

Constructing the archaeology of the Roman conquest of Hispania: new evidence, perspectives and challenges

The first meeting of specialists from different fields relating to research on the Roman army in Hispania took place in Segovia in 1998 under the title “Roman Military Archaeology in Hispania”. Its aim was to gather within one forum different experts working in this field.1 The term “military archaeology” was provocative in the Spanish academic world of the late 1990s, as military studies were viewed with slight suspicion in some quarters, both by those researching indigenous contexts and by those who remained anchored in a classical concept of Romanisation which rather neglected the contribution of the army to the process of assimilating Hispania into the Roman world. In Anglo-Saxon scholarship other terms with more historiographic tradition (e.g., “Roman army studies” or “Roman frontier studies”) were preferred. The goal in choosing the title of the 1998 congress was to create debate around a topic on which research efforts were becoming increasingly focused. Despite its limitations,2 the term “military archaeology” since then has become for many Spanish scholars the methodological basis for material-based and topographic studies of the military world and of war in its widest sense. As archaeology in the Iberian peninsula becomes increasingly open to new methodologies and practices being adopted elsewhere (especially in the Anglo-Saxon world), similar terms such as “conflict archaeology” or “battlefield archaeology” are appearing, which all form part of the conceptual frame of reference of military archaeology. In the last 15-20 years, research in this field has increased exponentially in the Iberian peninsula, particularly in the north and northwest where the Roman army had a much longer-lasting presence. This has allowed scholars, for example, to begin interpreting episodes such as the Cantabrian Wars, practically unknown from an archaeological perspective until very recently. In the last few years, progress has extended to earlier periods, affecting other regions such as the peninsula‘s northeast, southeast and E coast, where military topics are starting to be differentiated into Republican and indigenous contexts. A new generation of congresses and their resulting proceedings have generated some of the most significant contributions. The Segovia congress of 1998, its follow-up at León in 2004,3 the Roman Frontier Congress held at León in 2006,4 thematic French-Spanish congresses such as the meetings of the project “La guerre et ses traces dans la péninsule Ibérique” (2007, 2009 and 2010),5 and recent colloquia on the Republican period6 and on the Cantabrian Wars,7 have all become reference works. Coinciding with the first occasion upon which the Roman Frontier Congress was held in Spain, the first monograph — still an essential reference work — on the archaeological evidence for the Roman army in the peninsula was published.8