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Water resources and related issues are of great significance in 21st century politics. In Africa, for example, hydropolitics affect politics and policymaking at the local, national, and international levels. To investigate water politics, this unique work focuses on the issue transboundary water governance in Southern and Eastern Africa. Based on extensive field research, it offers a comparative study of the Orange Senqu and Nile basins in Africa, arguing that both causal and behavioral factors (such as localization and trust building) drive the multi-leveled development of cooperative management norms and foster the creation of regional communities of interest. The book combines theory, analysis, and fieldwork within the framework of Constructivism as well as a wide range of examples to identify and analyze the nature of norms in hydropolitics. By doing so, it will help shape the debate on how water conflict and cooperative governance should evolve and will interest anyone studying African politics, hydropolitics, and issues of development-- Source other than Library of Congress.

A long tradition of research including classical rhetoric, esthetics and poetics theory, formalism and structuralism, as well as current perspectives in (neuro)cognitive poetics has investigated structural and functional aspects of literature reception. Despite a wealth of literature published in specialized journals like Poetics, however, still little is known about how the brain processes and creates literary and poetic texts. Still, such stimulus material might be suited better than other genres for demonstrating the complexities with which our brain constructs the world in and around us, because it unifies thought and language, music and imagery in a clear, manageable way, most often with play, pleasure, and emotion (Schrott and Jacobs, 2011). In this paper, I discuss methods and models for investigating the neuronal and cognitive-affective bases of literary reading together with pertinent results from studies on poetics, text processing, emotion, or neuroaesthetics, and outline current challenges and future perspectives.

\"This book examines how democratic governments manage long-term policy challenges, asking how elected politicians choose between providing policy benefits in the present and investing in the future\"-- Provided by publisher.

This book introduces a new thrilling field- neuro computational poetics, the scientific 'marriage' between cognitive poetics, data science and neuroscience - that aims at uncovering the secrets of verbal art reception.

The Rosetta software for macromolecular modeling, docking and design is extensively used in laboratories worldwide. During two decades of development by a community of laboratories at more than 60 institutions, Rosetta has been continuously refactored and extended. Its advantages are its performance and interoperability between broad modeling capabilities. Here we review tools developed in the last 5 years, including over 80 methods. We discuss improvements to the score function, user interfaces and usability. Rosetta is available at http://www.rosettacommons.org . This Perspective reviews tools developed over the past five years in the macromolecular modeling, docking and design software Rosetta.

The field of complex self-assembly is moving toward the design of multiparticle structures consisting of thousands of distinct building blocks. To exploit the potential benefits of structures with such “addressable complexity,” we need to understand the factors that optimize the yield and the kinetics of self-assembly. Here we use a simple theoretical method to explain the key features responsible for the unexpected success of DNA-brick experiments, which are currently the only demonstration of reliable self-assembly with such a large number of components. Simulations confirm that our theory accurately predicts the narrow temperature window in which error-free assembly can occur. Even more strikingly, our theory predicts that correct assembly of the complete structure may require a time-dependent experimental protocol. Furthermore, we predict that low coordination numbers result in nonclassical nucleation behavior, which we find to be essential for achieving optimal nucleation kinetics under mild growth conditions. We also show that, rather surprisingly, the use of heterogeneous bond energies improves the nucleation kinetics and in fact appears to be necessary for assembling certain intricate 3D structures. This observation makes it possible to sculpt nucleation pathways by tuning the distribution of interaction strengths. These insights not only suggest how to improve the design of structures based on DNA bricks, but also point the way toward the creation of a much wider class of chemical or colloidal structures with addressable complexity.

Recent experiments and simulations have demonstrated that proteins can fold on the ribosome. However, the extent and generality of fitness effects resulting from cotranslational folding remain open questions. Here we report a genome-wide analysis that uncovers evidence of evolutionary selection for cotranslational folding. We describe a robust statistical approach to identify loci within genes that are both significantly enriched in slowly translated codons and evolutionarily conserved. Surprisingly, we find that domain boundaries can explain only a small fraction of these conserved loci. Instead, we propose that regions enriched in slowly translated codons are associated with cotranslational folding intermediates, which may be smaller than a single domain. We show that the intermediates predicted by a native-centric model of cotranslational folding account for the majority of these loci across more than 500 Escherichia coli proteins. By making a direct connection to protein folding, this analysis provides strong evidence that many synonymous substitutions have been selected to optimize translation rates at specific locations within genes. More generally, our results indicate that kinetics, and not just thermodynamics, can significantly alter the efficiency of self-assembly in a biological context.

The authors show that two primate-specific genes encoding KRAB domain containing zinc finger proteins, ZNF91 and ZNF93, have evolved during the last 25 million years to repress retrotransposon families that emerged during this time period; according to the new data KZNF gene expansion limits the activity of newly emerged retrotransposons, which subsequently mutate to evade repression. The battle to repel DNA insertions Primate genomes have endured waves of retrotransposon insertions despite the host's attempts to prevent them and to block their transcription. KRAB domain containing zinc-finger proteins (KZNFs) plays a role in this transcriptional silencing in mouse embryonic stem cells. KZNFs are one of the fastest growing gene families in primates; this expansion has been hypothesized to enable primates to respond to newly emerged transposable elements. Here the authors provide evidence in support of this theory. They show that two primate-specific KZNF genes, ZNF91 and ZNF93 , have evolved during the past 25 million years to repress distinct retrotransposon families that emerged during this time period. According to the new data, KZNF gene expansion limits the activity of newly emerged retrotransposons, which subsequently mutate to evade repression. Throughout evolution primate genomes have been modified by waves of retrotransposon insertions 1 , 2 , 3 . For each wave, the host eventually finds a way to repress retrotransposon transcription and prevent further insertions. In mouse embryonic stem cells, transcriptional silencing of retrotransposons requires KAP1 (also known as TRIM28) and its repressive complex, which can be recruited to target sites by KRAB zinc-finger (KZNF) proteins such as murine-specific ZFP809 which binds to integrated murine leukaemia virus DNA elements and recruits KAP1 to repress them 4 , 5 . KZNF genes are one of the fastest growing gene families in primates and this expansion is hypothesized to enable primates to respond to newly emerged retrotransposons 6 , 7 . However, the identity of KZNF genes battling retrotransposons currently active in the human genome, such as SINE-VNTR-Alu (SVA) 8 and long interspersed nuclear element 1 (L1) 9 , is unknown. Here we show that two primate-specific KZNF genes rapidly evolved to repress these two distinct retrotransposon families shortly after they began to spread in our ancestral genome. ZNF91 underwent a series of structural changes 8–12 million years ago that enabled it to repress SVA elements. ZNF93 evolved earlier to repress the primate L1 lineage until ∼12.5 million years ago when the L1PA3-subfamily of retrotransposons escaped ZNF93’s restriction through the removal of the ZNF93-binding site. Our data support a model where KZNF gene expansion limits the activity of newly emerged retrotransposon classes, and this is followed by mutations in these retrotransposons to evade repression, a cycle of events that could explain the rapid expansion of lineage-specific KZNF genes.

Isoprene, the most abundant non-methane volatile organic compound (VOC) emitted into the atmosphere, is known to undergo gas phase oxidation to form eight different hydroxynitrate isomers in \"high-NOx\" environments. These hydroxynitrates are known to affect the global and regional formation of ozone and secondary organic aerosol (SOA), as well as affect the distribution of nitrogen. In the present study, we have synthesized three of the eight possible hydroxynitrates: 4-hydroxy-3-nitroxy isoprene (4,3-HNI) and E / Z-1-hydroxy-4-nitroxy isoprene (1,4-HNI). Oxidation of the 4,3-HNI isomer by the OH radical was monitored using a flow tube chemical ionization mass spectrometer (FT-CIMS), and its OH rate constant was determined to be (3.64 ± 0.41) × 10−11 cm3 molecule−1 s−1. The products of 4,3-HNI oxidation were monitored, and a mechanism to explain the products was developed. An isoprene epoxide (IEPOX) – a species important in SOA chemistry and thought to originate only from \"low-NOx\" isoprene oxidation – was found as a minor, but significant, product. Additionally, hydrolysis kinetics of the three synthesized isomers were monitored with nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). The bulk, neutral solution hydrolysis rate constants for 4,3-HNI and the 1,4-HNI isomers were (1.59 ± 0.03) × 10−5 s−1 and (6.76 ± 0.09) × 10−3 s−1, respectively. The hydrolysis reactions of each isomer were found to be general acid-catalyzed. The reaction pathways, product yields and atmospheric implications for both the gas phase and aerosol phase reactions are discussed.

In this paper I would like to pave the ground for future studies in Computational Stylistics and (Neuro-)Cognitive Poetics by describing procedures for predicting the subjective beauty of words. A set of eight tentative word features is computed via Quantitative Narrative Analysis (QNA) and a novel metric for quantifying word beauty, the is proposed. Application of machine learning algorithms fed with this QNA data shows that a classifier of the decision tree family excellently learns to split words into beautiful vs. ugly ones. The results shed light on surface and semantic features theoretically relevant for affective-aesthetic processes in literary reading and generate quantitative predictions for neuroaesthetic studies of verbal materials.