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A play installation about neoliberal fascism. It looks at the friendship and falling out of two adults that sometimes resemble the famous people that bear their names, or what happens when neoliberal capitalism and consumerist fascism meet. This piece is loosely inspired by real life.

'Head Lice and My Worst Boyfriend' -- by Lynda Barry, cartoonist, creator of the syndicated strip Ernie Pook's Comeek -- Lynda, my idol, is able to make life seem simultaneously poetic and comic -- here she takes the humiliation of getting head lice and giving it to her boyfriend -- and realizes 'head lice are much easier to get rid of than bad love.

A bstract We study dissipation in holographic superfluids at finite temperature and zero chemical potential. The zero overlap with the heat current allows us to isolate the physics of the conserved current corresponding to the broken global U(1). By using analytic techniques we write constitutive relations including the first non-trivial dissipative terms. The corresponding transport coefficients are determined in terms of thermodynamic quantities and the black hole horizon data. By analysing their behaviour close to the phase transition we show explicitly the breakdown of the hydrodynamic expansion. Finally, we study the pseudo-Goldstone mode that emerges upon introducing a perturbative symmetry breaking source and we determine its resonant frequency and decay rate.

Tissue regeneration is a process that recapitulates and restores organ structure and function. Although previous studies have demonstrated wound-induced hair neogenesis (WIHN) in laboratory mice ( Mus ), the regeneration is limited to the center of the wound unlike those observed in African spiny ( Acomys ) mice. Tissue mechanics have been implicated as an integral part of tissue morphogenesis. Here, we use the WIHN model to investigate the mechanical and molecular responses of laboratory and African spiny mice, and report these models demonstrate opposing trends in spatiotemporal morphogenetic field formation with association to wound stiffness landscapes. Transcriptome analysis and K14-Cre-Twist1 transgenic mice show the Twist1 pathway acts as a mediator for both epidermal-dermal interactions and a competence factor for periodic patterning, differing from those used in development. We propose a Turing model based on tissue stiffness that supports a two-scale tissue mechanics process: (1) establishing a morphogenetic field within the wound bed (mm scale) and (2) symmetry breaking of the epidermis and forming periodically arranged hair primordia within the morphogenetic field (μm scale). Thus, we delineate distinct chemo-mechanical events in building a Turing morphogenesis-competent field during WIHN of laboratory and African spiny mice and identify its evo-devo advantages with perspectives for regenerative medicine. How hair follicle regeneration arises readily in some species ie. spiny rather than laboratory mice, is unclear. Here, authors compare them, showing an optimal stiffness is needed for placode formation and the difference in hair follicle regenerative behaviour after wounding is linked to Twist1.

Marine micro-organisms must cope with complex flow patterns and even turbulence as they navigate the ocean. To survive they must avoid predation and find efficient energy sources. A major difficulty in analysing possible survival strategies is that the time series of environmental cues in nonlinear flow is complex and that it depends on the decisions taken by the organism. One way of determining and evaluating optimal strategies is reinforcement learning. In a proof-of-principle study, Colabrese et al. (Phys. Rev. Lett., vol. 118, 2017, 158004) used this method to find out how a micro-swimmer in a vortex flow can navigate towards the surface as quickly as possible, given a fixed swimming speed. The swimmer measured its instantaneous swimming direction and the local flow vorticity in the laboratory frame, and reacted to these cues by swimming either left, right, up or down. However, usually a motile micro-organism measures the local flow rather than global information, and it can only react in relation to the local flow because, in general, it cannot access global information (such as up or down in the laboratory frame). Here we analyse optimal strategies with local signals and actions that do not refer to the laboratory frame. We demonstrate that symmetry breaking is required to find such strategies. Using reinforcement learning, we analyse the emerging strategies for different sets of environmental cues that micro-organisms are known to measure.

Macroscopic oscillations of different brain regions show multiple phase relationships that are persistent across time and have been implicated in routing information. While multiple cellular mechanisms influence the network oscillatory dynamics and structure the macroscopic firing motifs, one of the key questions is to identify the biophysical neuronal and synaptic properties that permit such motifs to arise. A second important issue is how the different neural activity coherence states determine the communication between the neural circuits. Here we analyse the emergence of phase-locking within bidirectionally delayed-coupled spiking circuits in which global gamma band oscillations arise from synaptic coupling among largely excitable neurons. We consider both the interneuronal (ING) and the pyramidal-interneuronal (PING) population gamma rhythms and the inter coupling targeting the pyramidal or the inhibitory neurons. Using a mean-field approach together with an exact reduction method, we reduce each spiking network to a low dimensional nonlinear system and derive the macroscopic phase resetting-curves (mPRCs) that determine how the phase of the global oscillation responds to incoming perturbations. This is made possible by the use of the quadratic integrate-and-fire model together with a Lorentzian distribution of the bias current. Depending on the type of gamma (PING vs. ING), we show that incoming excitatory inputs can either speed up the macroscopic oscillation (phase advance; type I PRC) or induce both a phase advance and a delay (type II PRC). From there we determine the structure of macroscopic coherence states (phase-locking) of two weakly synaptically-coupled networks. To do so we derive a phase equation for the coupled system which links the synaptic mechanisms to the coherence states of the system. We show that a synaptic transmission delay is a necessary condition for symmetry breaking, i.e. a non-symmetric phase lag between the macroscopic oscillations. This potentially provides an explanation to the experimentally observed variety of gamma phase-locking modes. Our analysis further shows that symmetry-broken coherence states can lead to a preferred direction of signal transfer between the oscillatory networks where this directionality also depends on the timing of the signal. Hence we suggest a causal theory for oscillatory modulation of functional connectivity between cortical circuits.

Chiral superconductors, a unique class of unconventional superconductors in which the complex superconducting order parameter winds clockwise or anticlockwise in the momentum space 1 , represent a topologically non-trivial system with intrinsic time-reversal symmetry breaking (TRSB) and direct implications for topological quantum computing 2 , 3 . Intrinsic chiral superconductors are extremely rare, with only a few arguable examples, including UTe 2 , UPt 3 and Sr 2 RuO 4 (refs.  4 – 7 ). It has been suggested that chiral superconductivity may exist in non-centrosymmetric superconductors 8 , 9 , although such non-centrosymmetry is uncommon in typical solid-state superconductors. Alternatively, chiral molecules with neither mirror nor inversion symmetry have been widely investigated. We suggest that an incorporation of chiral molecules into conventional superconductor lattices could introduce non-centrosymmetry and help realize chiral superconductivity 10 . Here we explore unconventional superconductivity in chiral molecule intercalated TaS 2 hybrid superlattices. Our studies reveal an exceptionally large in-plane upper critical field B c2,|| well beyond the Pauli paramagnetic limit, a robust π-phase shift in Little–Parks measurements and a field-free superconducting diode effect (SDE). These experimental signatures of unconventional superconductivity suggest that the intriguing interplay between crystalline atomic layers and the self-assembled chiral molecular layers may lead to exotic topological materials. Our study highlights that the hybrid superlattices could lay a versatile path to artificial quantum materials by combining a vast library of layered crystals of rich physical properties with the nearly infinite variations of molecules of designable structural motifs and functional groups 11 . By incorporating chiral molecules into conventional superconductor lattices such as TaS 2 to form a hybrid superlattice, non-centrosymmetry could be introduced and can be shown to help lead to unconventional superconductivity.