SARS-CoV-2, alcohol consumption, poor social behaviour, and the COVID-19 pandemic

Studies dealing with the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the COVID-19 disease have concentrated on the study of the virus and the disease themselves, but a knowledge of the causes responsible for the pandemic is still lacking. Crucial for effective decision making and control of the pandemic is a thorough and critical analysis of data regarding COVID-19, which shows an intimate relation between the number of cases/deaths and the consumption of alcohol. Ranked top 30 countries in COVID-19 cases/deaths and alcohol consumption coincide, with only a few exceptions. This coincidence is not fortuitous nor surprising, because excessive alcohol consumption is known to have pernicious effects on social behaviour, i.e. lead to deviant and irresponsible behaviour, which greatly promotes transmission

No syllabus, no problem

The intimate relation people have with food provides unique opportunities for teaching. In this field report, I will describe and reflect upon the method of student-centred learning I use in a first-year university course entitled Food, Agriculture & Society. The aim of the course is to provide students with a broad understanding of how food and agriculture have shaped society and can contribute to a more sustainable future. Consistent with food pedagogy, a premise of the course design is that the intimate relation students have with the food they eat reflects their personal values and responsibility for their choices. An innovative element of my approach is that I co-create the syllabus. The course starts by writing the word “Food” on the blackboard. I then facilitate a multi-step process with students to co-create the syllabus. For most of the course, students lead the preparation and delivery of lectures on their selected topics. In this report, after describing the course design, I reflect upon my approach in relation to the tenets of food pedagogy, as well as discuss student feedback and my experience of teaching the course.

Direct visualization of a static incommensurate antiferromagnetic order in Fe-doped Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+δ

In cuprate superconductors, due to strong electronic correlations, there are multiple intertwined orders which either coexist or compete with superconductivity. Among them, the antiferromagnetic (AF) order is the most prominent one. In the region where superconductivity sets in, the long-range AF order is destroyed. Yet the residual short-range AF spin fluctuations are present up to a much higher doping, and their role in the emergence of the superconducting phase is still highly debated. Here, by using a spin-polarized scanning tunneling microscope, we directly visualize an emergent incommensurate AF order in the nearby region of Fe impurities embedded in the optimally doped Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+δ (Bi2212). Remarkably, the Fe impurities suppress the superconducting coherence peaks with the gapped feature intact, but pin down the ubiquitous short-range incommensurate AF order. Our work shows an intimate relation between antiferromagnetism and superconductivity.

Martial politics, MOVE and the racial violence of policing

Recent scholarship on war and policing has begun to theorize the two in more intimate relation with each other, especially through connections to racialized violence and governance. Drawing on this body of work, and the concept of martial politics specifically, I examine how logics of war operate within domestic spaces and reproduce racialized conceptualizations of threat. I focus on a confrontation between the MOVE organization and the city of Philadelphia in 1985, which led to police firing 10,000 rounds of ammunition into a house where MOVE members and their children were living, and to the extensive use of military-grade explosives, culminating in the police dropping a bomb from a helicopter onto the house. The bomb ignited a fire that killed six adult MOVE members and five children, and destroyed 61 houses. I examine the decision of the city to bomb MOVE and consider the role that conceptions of war and threat played in shaping the event. This case shows not just the migration of military techniques into domestic spheres (and a long history of this in the United States), but more significantly, it reveals how violence and war-making have always been a foundation of liberal governance.

Ionic Conductors: Effect of Temperature on Conductivity and Mechanical Properties and Their Interrelations

The ionic transport and the mechanical properties in solids are intimately related. However, few studies have been done to elucidate the background of that relation. With the objective to fill this gap and gain further understanding on the fundamental properties of ion conducting materials, we are studying systematically the mechanical properties of different materials. In the present study, after showing briefly our previous results obtained in crystalline materials, results regarding the relation between ionic conduction and mechanical properties in superionic glasses is presented. All these results indicate the intimate relation between the mechanical and ionic conduction. The results also indicate that the Grüneisen parameter and the Anderson–Grüneisen parameter of ionic conductors exhibit large temperature dependence and increase with temperature.

Introduction

No philosophical dictum is better known than Descartes’s assertion about the intimate relation between thinking and existing. What remains unknown is how we are to understand the “I” who thinks and exists. This book is about the ways that the concept of an “I” or a “self” has been developed and deployed at different times in the history of western philosophy. It also offers a striking contrast case, the “interconnected” self, who appears in some expressions of African philosophy. Appealing to philosophy to illuminate the concept of a “self” may seem unnecessary. Anyone who can read this book is a self, so why ...

Passion's Fictions from Shakespeare to Richardson

Passion’s Fictions traces the intimate links between literature and the sciences of soul and mind from the age of Shakespeare to the rise of the novel. It chronicles the emergence of new sciences of the passions between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries out of and in some ways against a received “science of the soul,” and it argues that this history was shaped by rhetoric, which contained the most extensively particularized discourse on the passions, offering principles for moving and affecting the passions of others in concrete social scenes. This rhetoric of the passions centered on narrative as the instrument of a non-theoretical knowledge of the passions in their particularity, predicated on an account of passion as an intimate relation between an empassioned mind and an empassioning world: rhetoric offers a kind of externalist psychology, formalized in the relation of passion to action and underwriting an account of narrative as a means of both moving passion and knowing it. This book describes the psychology of the passions before the discipline of psychology, tracing the influence of rhetoric on theories of the passions from Francis Bacon to Adam Smith and using that history to read literary works by Shakespeare, Milton, Haywood, Richardson, and others. Narrative offers a means of knowing and moving the passions by tracing them to the events and objects that generate them; the history of narrative practices is thus a key part of the history of the psychology of the passions at a critical moment in its development.

Portrait of My Father: Frida Kahlo’s Intimate Relation to Epilepsy

The painting <i>Portrait of My Father</i> (1951) by the Mexican painter, Frida Kahlo, is discussed by the author within the context of epilepsy and biographical events in the lives of both Frida and her father, the German Mexican photographer Guillermo Kahlo. The biographical accounts of the photographer’s seizures are suggestive of juvenile absence epilepsy but cannot discount the possibility of posttraumatic epilepsy of mesial frontal origin.

Edge channels of broken-symmetry quantum Hall states in graphene visualized by atomic force microscopy

The quantum Hall (QH) effect, a topologically non-trivial quantum phase, expanded the concept of topological order in physics bringing into focus the intimate relation between the “bulk” topology and the edge states. The QH effect in graphene is distinguished by its four-fold degenerate zero energy Landau level (zLL), where the symmetry is broken by electron interactions on top of lattice-scale potentials. However, the broken-symmetry edge states have eluded spatial measurements. In this article, we spatially map the quantum Hall broken-symmetry edge states comprising the graphene zLL at integer filling factors of $${{\nu }}={{0}},\pm {{1}}$$ ν = 0 , ± 1 across the quantum Hall edge boundary using high-resolution atomic force microscopy (AFM) and show a gapped ground state proceeding from the bulk through to the QH edge boundary. Measurements of the chemical potential resolve the energies of the four-fold degenerate zLL as a function of magnetic field and show the interplay of the moiré superlattice potential of the graphene/boron nitride system and spin/valley symmetry-breaking effects in large magnetic fields.

Extended endoscopic frontal nasal sinus surgery in management of chronic and recurrent frontal sinus diseases

Background The anatomical variation of the frontal sinus and its intimate relation to the skull base and orbit makes its surgery demanding. The extended endoscopic frontal sinus surgery allows wide better drainage and preventing the recurrence of the disease. Fourteen patients underwent EEFSS from May 2017 to May 2019. These patients are nine patients presented by chronic recurrent frontal sinusitis, three patients presented by chronic recurrent fronto ethmoidal mucocele and two patients with chronic recurrent external frontal fistula. Draff III done for ten patients of them and Draff IIB done for four patients of them. This study is designed for evaluating the efficacy of the extended endoscopic frontal sinus surgery (E E F S S) in management of chronic and recurrent frontal sinus diseases. Results The neo opening of the restored frontal sinus was remained opened with Draff III with high success rate; two patients from four patients with Draff IIb were with closed nasofrontal duct. The main follow-up was 12 months; the patients were followed up post-operatively for many office visits without any other manifestations. Conclusion The chronic recurrent frontal sinus diseases can be treated successfully with extended endoscopic frontal sinus surgery (E E F S S). The extended endoscopic frontal sinus surgery (Draff III) provides good results with low morbidity and less post-operative care.