Jogos digitais educacionais nas aulas de Educação Física: Olympia, um videogame sobre os jogos olímpicos

Pós-graduação em Desenvolvimento Humano e Tecnologias - IBRC

Ancient Dispersal of the Human Fungal Pathogen Cryptococcus gattii from the Amazon Rainforest

Over the past two decades, several fungal outbreaks have occurred, including the high-profile 'Vancouver Island' and 'Pacific Northwest' outbreaks, caused by Cryptococcus gattii, which has affected hundreds of otherwise healthy humans and animals. Over the same time period, C. gattii was the cause of several additional case clusters at localities outside of the tropical and subtropical climate zones where the species normally occurs. In every case, the causative agent belongs to a previously rare genotype of C. gattii called AFLP6/VGII, but the origin of the outbreak clades remains enigmatic. Here we used phylogenetic and recombination analyses, based on AFLP and multiple MLST datasets, and coalescence gene genealogy to demonstrate that these outbreaks have arisen from a highly-recombining C. gattii population in the native rainforest of Northern Brazil. Thus the modern virulent C. gattii AFLP6/VGII outbreak lineages derived from mating events in South America and then dispersed to temperate regions where they cause serious infections in humans and animals.

Transmissable Dog Cancer Genome Reveals the Origin and History of an Ancient Cell Lineage

Canine transmissible venereal tumor (CTVT) is the oldest known somatic cell lineage. It is a transmissible cancer that propagates naturally in dogs. We sequenced the genomes of two CTVT tumors and found that CTVT has acquired 1.9 million somatic substitution mutations and bears evidence of exposure to ultraviolet light. CTVT is remarkably stable and lacks subclonal heterogeneity despite thousands of rearrangements, copy-number changes, and retrotransposon insertions. More than 10,000 genes carry nonsynonymous variants, and 646 genes have been lost. CTVT first arose in a dog with low genomic heterozygosity that may have lived about 11,000 years ago. The cancer spawned by this individual dispersed across continents about 500 years ago. Our results provide a genetic identikit of an ancient dog and demonstrate the robustness of mammalian somatic cells to survive for millennia despite a massive mutation burden.

O mar e as viagens: épico e romance antigo em Galáxias, de Haroldo de Campos

The aim of this paper is to discuss the presence of epic and ancient romance as construction’s mechanism of the poem Galáxias by Haroldo de Campos, whose work was, all of the time, dedicated to both: innovation in poetry forms and rescue of tradition. It is quite important to investigate how epic and ancient narrative elements contribute to the meaning construction of poem Galaxias, written by Campos during thirteen years. This investigation appears to be very challenging because seems to be an opportunity to think about post-modern and post-antique, at the same time, making both instances dialogue. Galáxias seems to be exemplary to show this dialogue between present and past: it is a sea voyage book and a book as sea voyage, not only because the epic and ancient narrative have strong presence in the poem, but also because the poem central theme is the sea voyages – and the book.

A região do Médio Tietê e os primeiros acordes paulistas: o Cururu

Pós-graduação em Geografia - IGCE

Book Review of Stone by Stone: Exploring Ancient Sites on the Canadian Plains by Liz Bryan

Liz Bryan begins her book with a description of the Canadian Plains:" . .. a voluptuous landscape of hills and valleys and plains, of lakes and tiny twinkling potholes, of flower-filled coulees and vast sand dunes." Her emphasis throughout on the landscape of southern Saskatchewan and Alberta is necessary since the ancient monuments she describes only truly resonate within this setting. Indeed, almost every page of this attractive book is adorned with at least two color images-of scenery, stone features, artifacts, and aboriginal events. She then proceeds to an eclectic overview of the archaeological record of the Plains of Saskatchewan and Alberta, including the earliest human evidence, such as the Clovis points from the Wally's Beach site, Alberta, where the trackways of mammoths, camels, and muskoxen were miraculously and briefly exposed in the late 1990s. There is one perplexing error, however-the attribution of the extinction of the ice age bestiary, about 12,000 years ago, to the meteorite that felled the dinosaurs!

Hunting in Ancient and Modern Amazonia: Rethinking Sustainability

We use a recently developed computerized modeling technique to explore the long-term impacts of indigenous Amazonian hunting in the past, present, and future. The model redefines sustainability in spatial and temporal terms, a major advance over the static "sustainability indices" currently used to study hunting in tropical forests. We validate the model's projections against actual field data from two sites in contemporary Amazonia and use the model to assess various management scenarios for the future of Manu National Park in Peru. We then apply the model to two archaeological contexts, show how its results may resolve long-standing enigmas regarding native food taboos and primate biogeography, and reflect on the ancient history and future of indigenous people in the Amazon.

An ancient founder mutation in PROKR2 impairs human reproduction

Congenital gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) deficiency manifests as absent or incomplete sexual maturation and infertility. Although the disease exhibits marked locus and allelic heterogeneity, with the causal mutations being both rare and private, one causal mutation in the prokineticin receptor, PROKR2 L173R, appears unusually prevalent among GnRH-deficient patients of diverse geographic and ethnic origins. To track the genetic ancestry of PROKR2 L173R, haplotype mapping was performed in 22 unrelated patients with GnRH deficiency carrying L173R and their 30 first-degree relatives. The mutations age was estimated using a haplotype-decay model. Thirteen subjects were informative and in all of them the mutation was present on the same approximate to 123 kb haplotype whose population frequency is 10. Thus, PROKR2 L173R represents a founder mutation whose age is estimated at approximately 9000 years. Inheritance of PROKR2 L173R-associated GnRH deficiency was complex with highly variable penetrance among carriers, influenced by additional mutations in the other PROKR2 allele (recessive inheritance) or another gene (digenicity). The paradoxical identification of an ancient founder mutation that impairs reproduction has intriguing implications for the inheritance mechanisms of PROKR2 L173R-associated GnRH deficiency and for the relevant processes of evolutionary selection, including potential selective advantages of mutation carriers in genes affecting reproduction.

ANCIENT LAW – UM CLÁSSICO REVISITADO 150 ANOS DEPOIS

Este artigo pretende realçar a importância desempenhada pela obra de Henry James Sumner Maine na formação da antropologia jurídica e da sociologia do direito. Mediante a recuperação da tese central de sua obra Ancient Law, procura ressaltar o papel por ela desempenhado no delineamento de uma nova forma de abordagem da relação entre direito e sociedade. Para tanto, recupera traços gerais das análises de Norbert Rouland e de Niklas Luhmann acerca da importância das ideias do autor.

Tradition, Change and Variation : Past and Present Trends in Public Old-age Care

The general aim of this dissertation is to describe and analyse how public old-age care in Sweden has developed and changed during the last century. The study applies a provider perspective on how care has been planned and professionally carried out. A broader social policy perspective, studying old-age care at central/national as well as local/municipal level, is also developed. A special focus is directed at the large local variation in care and services for the elderly. The empirical base is comprised of official documents and other public sources, survey data from interviews with elderly recipients of public old-age care, and official statistics on publicly financed and controlled old-age care and services. Study I addresses the development of old-age care in Sweden during the twentieth century by studying an important occupation in this field – the supervisors and their professional roles, tasks and working conditions. Throughout, the roles of supervisors have followed the prevailing official policy on the proper way to provide care for elderly people in Sweden; from poor relief at the beginning of the 1900s, via a generous level of services in the 1960s and 1970s, to today’s restricted and economy-controlled mode of operation. Study II describes and compares two main forms of public old-age care in Sweden today, home help services and institutional care. The care-load found in home-based care was comparable to and sometimes even larger than in service-homes and other institutions, indicating that large care needs among elderly people in Sweden today can be met in their homes as well as in institutional settings. Studies III and IV analyse the local variation in public old-age care in Sweden. During the last decades there has been an overall decline in home help services. The coverage of home help for elderly people shows large differences between municipalities throughout this period, and the relative variation has increased. The local disparity seems to depend more on historical factors, e.g., previous coverage rates, than on the present municipal situation in levels of need or local economy and politics. In an introductory part the four papers are linked together by an outline of the demographic situation and the social policy model for old-age care in Sweden. Trends that have been apparent over time, e.g. professionalisation and market orientation, are traced and discussed. Conflicts between prevailing ideologies are analysed, in regards to for instance home-based and institution-based care, social and medical culture, and local and central levels of decision-making. ’Welfare municipality’, ‘path dependency’, and ‘decentralisation’ are suggested as a conceptual framework for describing the large and increasing local variations in old-age care. Finally, implications of the four studies with regard to old-age care policy and further research are discussed.

Aldo Rossi, autobiografia scientifica: scrittura come progetto. Indagine critica tra scrittura e progetto di architettura

«In altri termini mi sfuggiva e ancora oggi mi sfugge gran parte del significato dell’evoluzione del tempo; come se il tempo fosse una materia che osservo dall’esterno. Questa mancanza di evoluzione è fonte di alcune mie sventure ma anche mi appartiene con gioia.» Aldo Rossi, Autobiografia scientifica. The temporal dimension underpinning the draft of Autobiografia scientifica by Aldo Rossi may be referred to what Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, the well-known French anthropologist, defines as “primitive mentality” and “prelogical” conscience : the book of life has lost its page numbers, even punctuation. For Lévy-Bruhl, but certainly for Rossi, life or its summing up becomes a continuous account of ellipses, gaps, repetitions that may be read from left to right or viceversa, from head to foot or viceversa without distinction. Rossi’s autobiographical writing seems to accept and support the confusion with which memories have been collected, recording them after the order memory gives them in the mental distillation or simply according to the chronological order in which they have happened. For Rossi, the confusion reflects the melting of memory elements into a composite image which is the result of a fusion. He is aware that the same sap pervades all memories he is going to put in order: each of them has got a common denominator. Differences have diminished, almost faded; the quick glance is prevalent over the distinction of each episode. Rossi’s writing is beyond the categories dependent on time: past and present, before and now. For Rossi, the only repetition – the repetition the text will make possible for an indefinite number of times – gives peculiarity to the event. As Gilles Deleuze knows, “things” may only last as “singleness”: more frequent the repetition is, more singular is the memory phenomenon that recurs, because only what is singular magnifies itself and happens endlessly forever. Rossi understands that “to raise the first time to nth forever”, repetition becomes glorification . It may be an autobiography that, celebrating the originality, enhances the memory event in the repetition; in fact it greatly differs from the biographical reproduction, in which each repetition is but a weaker echo, a duller copy, provided with a smaller an smaller power in comparison with the original. Paradoxically, for Deleuze the repetition asserts the originality and singularity of what is repeated. Rossi seems to share the thought expressed by Kierkegaard in the essay Repetition: «The hope is a graceful maiden slipping through your fingers; the memory of an elderly woman, indeed pretty, but never satisfactory if necessary; the repetition is a loved friend you are never tired of, as it is only the new to make you bored. The old never bores you and its presence makes you happy [...] life is but a repetition [...] here is the beauty of life» . Rossi knows well that repetition hints at the lasting stability of cosmic time. Kierkegaard goes on: «The world exists, and it exists as a repetition» . Rossi devotes himself, on purpose and in all conscience, to collect, to inventory and «to review life», his own life, according to a recovery not from the past but of the past: a search work, the «recherche du temps perdu», as Proust entitled his masterpiece on memory. If you want the past time to be not wasted, you must give it presence. «Memoria e specifico come caratteristiche per riconoscere se stesso e ciò che è estraneo mi sembravano le più chiare condizioni e spiegazioni della realtà. Non esiste uno specifico senza memoria, e una memoria che non provenga da un momento specifico; e solo questa unione permette la conoscenza della propria individualità e del contrario (self e non-self)» . Rossi wants to understand himself, his own character; it is really his own character that requires to be understood, to increase its own introspective ability and intelligence. «Può sembrare strano che Planck e Dante associno la loro ricerca scientifica e autobiografica con la morte; una morte che è in qualche modo continuazione di energia. In realtà, in ogni artista o tecnico, il principio della continuazione dell’energia si mescola con la ricerca della felicità e della morte» . The eschatological incipit of Rossi’s autobiography refers to Freud’s thought in the exact circularity of Dante’s framework and in as much exact circularity of the statement of the principle of the conservation of energy: in fact it was Freud to connect repetition to death. For Freud, the desire of repetition is an instinct rooted in biology. The primary aim of such an instinct would be to restore a previous condition, so that the repeated history represents a part of the past (even if concealed) and, relieving the removal, reduces anguish and tension. So, Freud ask himself, what is the most remote state to which the instinct, through the repetition, wants to go back? It is a pre-vital condition, inorganic of the pure entropy, a not-to-be condition in which doesn’t exist any tension; in other words, Death. Rossi, with the theme of death, introduces the theme of circularity which further on refers to the sense of continuity in transformation or, in the opposite way, the transformation in continuity. «[...] la descrizione e il rilievo delle forme antiche permettevano una continuità altrimenti irripetibile, permettevano anche una trasformazione, una volta che la vita fosse fermata in forme precise» . Rossi’s attitude seems to hint at the reflection on time and – in a broad sense – at the thought on life and things expressed by T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets: «Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future is contained in time past. / I all time is eternally present / All time is unredeemable. / What might have been is an abstraction / Remaining perpetual possibility / Only in a word of speculation. / What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present. [...]» . Aldo Rossi’s autobiographical story coincides with the description of “things” and the description of himself through the things in the exact parallel with craft or art. He seems to get all things made by man to coincide with the personal or artistic story, with the consequent immediate necessity of formulating a new interpretation: the flow of things has never met a total stop; all that exists nowadays is but a repetition or a variant of something existing some time ago and so on, without any interruption until the early dawnings of human life. Nevertheless, Rossi must operate specific subdivisions inside the continuous connection in time – of his time – even if limited by a present beginning and end of his own existence. This artist, as an “historian” of himself and his own life – as an auto-biographer – enjoys the privilege to be able to decide if and how to operate the cutting in a certain point rather than in another one, without being compelled to justify his choice. In this sense, his story is a matter very ductile and flexible: a good story-teller can choose any moment to start a certain sequence of events. Yet, Rossi is aware that, beyond the mere narration, there is the problem to identify in history - his own personal story – those flakings where a clean cut enables the separation of events of different nature. In order to do it, he has to make not only an inventory of his own “things”, but also to appeal to authority of the Divina Commedia started by Dante when he was 30. «A trent’anni si deve compiere o iniziare qualcosa di definitivo e fare i conti con la propria formazione» . For Rossi, the poet performs his authority not only in the text, but also in his will of setting out on a mystical journey and handing it down through an exact descriptive will. Rossi turns not only to the authority of poetry, but also evokes the authority of science with Max Plank and his Scientific Autobiography, published, in Italian translation, by Einaudi, 1956. Concerning Planck, Rossi resumes an element seemingly secondary in hit account where the German physicist «[...] risale alle scoperte della fisica moderna ritrovando l’impressione che gli fece l’enunciazione del principio di conservazione dell’energia; [...]» . It is again the act of describing that links Rossi to Planck, it is the description of a circularity, the one of conservation of energy, which endorses Rossi’s autobiographical speech looking for both happiness and death. Rossi seems to agree perfectly to the thought of Planck at the opening of his own autobiography: «The decision to devote myself to science was a direct consequence of a discovery which was never ceased to arouse my enthusiasm since my early youth: the laws of human thought coincide with the ones governing the sequences of the impressions we receive from the world surrounding us, so that the mere logic can enable us to penetrate into the latter one’s mechanism. It is essential that the outer world is something independent of man, something absolute. The search of the laws dealing with this absolute seems to me the highest scientific aim in life» . For Rossi the survey of his own life represents a way to change the events into experiences, to concentrate the emotion and group them in meaningful plots: «It seems, as one becomes older. / That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence [...]» Eliot wrote in Four Quartet, which are a meditation on time, old age and memory . And he goes on: «We had the experience but missed the meaning, / And approach to the meaning restores the experience / In a different form, beyond any meaning [...]» . Rossi restores in his autobiography – but not only in it – the most ancient sense of memory, aware that for at least 15 centuries the Latin word memoria was used to show the activity of bringing back images to mind: the psychology of memory, which starts with Aristotele (De Anima), used to consider such a faculty totally essential to mind. Keith Basso writes: «The thought materializes in the form of “images”» . Rossi knows well – as Aristotele said – that if you do not have a collection of mental images to remember – imagination – there is no thought at all. According to this psychological tradition, what today we conventionally call “memory” is but a way of imagining created by time. Rossi, entering consciously this stream of thought, passing through the Renaissance ars memoriae to reach us gives a great importance to the word and assumes it as a real place, much more than a recollection, even more than a production and an emotional elaboration of images.

I sensi spirituali nel Liber di Angela da Foligno. La metafora del "gusto" nel Liber di Angela da Foligno e nella mistica femminile francescana tra XIII e XIV secolo.

Angela da Foligno’s Liber is a fundamental text for the scholar of Women Mystics between the XIIIth and the XIVth century in Italy and all over Europe, and it has been chosen in my research because of its originality, with refer of its feminine and franciscan essence. Angela teaches to the italian hagiographic tradition the internal point of view of the holy woman, who becomes the teller of her both ordinary and extraordinary experiences. After giving references about the religious and social historical universe in evolution during the XIIth century, my research proceeds with a linguistic and rhetorical analysis based upon the Liber. I have been searching in Angela’s text and in contemporary italian feminine hagiography the sensory metaphor of “tasting”. That kind of metaphor has an ancient memory and, thanks to the Origene’s studies - the Christian Father of the IIIrd century - we can easily recognize it already in the Bible; Origene identifies the sensory metaphor as a rhetoric system, able to exemplify the God learning process of soul. Theory of “spiritual senses”, theory of vision and rhetoric, evolving from the IIIrd to the XIIIth century, are the theological and linguistic heritage of our feminine and franciscan literature. Inside of that, the metaphor of “tasting” moves and changes, therefore becoming the favourite way of mystics to represent the contact of their souls with God.

Study of materials and technology of ancient floor mosaics' substrate

Ancient pavements are composed of a variety of preparatory or foundation layers constituting the substrate, and of a layer of tesserae, pebbles or marble slabs forming the surface of the floor. In other cases, the surface consists of a mortar layer beaten and polished. The term mosaic is associated with the presence of tesserae or pebbles, while the more general term pavement is used in all the cases. As past and modern excavations of ancient pavements demonstrated, all pavements do not necessarily display the stratigraphy of the substrate described in the ancient literary sources. In fact, the number and thickness of the preparatory layers, as well as the nature and the properties of their constituent materials, are often varying in pavements which are placed either in different sites or in different buildings within a same site or even in a same building. For such a reason, an investigation that takes account of the whole structure of the pavement is important when studying the archaeological context of the site where it is placed, when designing materials to be used for its maintenance and restoration, when documenting it and when presenting it to public. Five case studies represented by archaeological sites containing floor mosaics and other kind of pavements, dated to the Hellenistic and the Roman period, have been investigated by means of in situ and laboratory analyses. The results indicated that the characteristics of the studied pavements, namely the number and the thickness of the preparatory layers, and the properties of the mortars constituting them, vary according to the ancient use of the room where the pavements are placed and to the type of surface upon which they were built. The study contributed to the understanding of the function and the technology of the pavements’ substrate and to the characterization of its constituent materials. Furthermore, the research underlined the importance of the investigation of the whole structure of the pavement, included the foundation surface, in the interpretation of the archaeological context where it is located. A series of practical applications of the results of the research, in the designing of repair mortars for pavements, in the documentation of ancient pavements in the conservation practice, and in the presentation to public in situ and in museums of ancient pavements, have been suggested.

A molecular phylogeny of bivalve mollusks: ancient radiations and divergences as revealed by mitochondrial genes

The main scope of my PhD is the reconstruction of the large-scale bivalve phylogeny on the basis of four mitochondrial genes, with samples taken from all major groups of the class. To my knowledge, it is the first attempt of such a breadth in Bivalvia. I decided to focus on both ribosomal and protein coding DNA sequences (two ribosomal encoding genes -12s and 16s -, and two protein coding ones - cytochrome c oxidase I and cytochrome b), since either bibliography and my preliminary results confirmed the importance of combined gene signals in improving evolutionary pathways of the group. Moreover, I wanted to propose a methodological pipeline that proved to be useful to obtain robust results in bivalves phylogeny. Actually, best-performing taxon sampling and alignment strategies were tested, and several data partitioning and molecular evolution models were analyzed, thus demonstrating the importance of molding and implementing non-trivial evolutionary models. In the line of a more rigorous approach to data analysis, I also proposed a new method to assess taxon sampling, by developing Clarke and Warwick statistics: taxon sampling is a major concern in phylogenetic studies, and incomplete, biased, or improper taxon assemblies can lead to misleading results in reconstructing evolutionary trees. Theoretical methods are already available to optimize taxon choice in phylogenetic analyses, but most involve some knowledge about genetic relationships of the group of interest, or even a well-established phylogeny itself; these data are not always available in general phylogenetic applications. The method I proposed measures the "phylogenetic representativeness" of a given sample or set of samples and it is based entirely on the pre-existing available taxonomy of the ingroup, which is commonly known to investigators. Moreover, it also accounts for instability and discordance in taxonomies. A Python-based script suite, called PhyRe, has been developed to implement all analyses.