scholarly journals Self-organized rhythmic patterns in geochemical systems

Author(s):  
Ivan L'Heureux

Chemical oscillating patterns are ubiquitous in geochemical systems. Although many such patterns result from systematic variations in the external environmental conditions, it is recognized that some patterns are due to intrinsic self-organized processes in a non-equilibrium nonlinear system with positive feedback. In rocks and minerals, periodic precipitation (Liesegang bands) and oscillatory zoning constitute good examples of patterns that can be explained using concepts from nonlinear dynamics. Generally, as the system parameters exceed some threshold values, the steady (time-independent) state characterizing the system loses its stability. The system then evolves towards other time-dependent solutions (‘attractors’) that may have an oscillatory behaviour or a complex chaotic one. In this review, we describe many of these pattern types taken from a variety of geological environments: eruptive, sedimentary, hydrothermal or metamorphic. One particular example (periodic precipitation of pyrite bands in an evolving sapropel sediment) is presented here for the first time. This will help in convincing the reader that the tools of nonlinear dynamics may be useful to understand the history of our planet.

Patterns of mineralization may develop during diagenesis that are not a direct reflection of sedimentary features or stresses and fluids imposed on the boundaries of a basin. These patterns occur through the amplification of omnipresent non-uniformities of textural or compositional variables. Amplification occurs through feedback involving the coupling of diagenetic processes. The spatial scale of these patterns varies from microns to kilometres. Examples to be discussed include intracrystalline oscillatory zoning, millimetre- to metre-scale differentiated layering and stylolites, Liesegang bands, reaction front fingering, pulsatile fluid release from overpressurized zones in deep basins, and kilometre-scale basin compartmentation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-11
Author(s):  
E.A. Kuznetsov ◽  
S.I. Badulin ◽  
A.V. Slunyaev

The 27th Workshop of the Council of RAS on Nonlinear Dynamics was held at the Shirshov Institution of Oceanology of the Russian Academy of Sciences on December 17–18, 2018. The Workshop program is posted on the Institution website https://ocean.ru/index.php/konferentsii-i-shkoly/item/1142-xxvii-nauchnaya-sessiya-soveta-ran-po-nelinejnoj-dinamike. At the initiative and effort of Academician V.E. Zakharov, his students and colleagues, the Workshop was established in 1992 and was held regularly since then. It served as a place to discuss the research topics in the field of nonlinear dynamics in Russia and abroad, and to present new scientific results. Numerous studies are carried out with the support of the Program for Fundamental Research of the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences Nonlinear Dynamics: Fundamental Problems and Applications».The Organizing Committee of the 27th Workshop decided to publish short communications on the submitted talks in the first issue of the 47th volume of the Journal of Oceanological Research. Although some of the presented talks are formally far from the oceanic research, they convincingly demonstrate the unity of the physical picture of the world and of the modern approaches to its study. Such a publication is organized for the first time in the relatively long history of the workshops, including very difficult times for the Russian science. We believe that this publication will facilitate the long overdue task of expanding community of regular participants, attracting new scientists, especially young ones. The editors and organizers hope for the success of such publication and for the interest from the readers of the Journal of Oceanological Research.


2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 244-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holger Funk

In the history of botany, Adam Zalužanský (d. 1613), a Bohemian physician, apothecary, botanist and professor at the University of Prague, is a little-known personality. Linnaeus's first biographers, for example, only knew Zalužanský from hearsay and suspected he was a native of Poland. This ignorance still pervades botanical history. Zalužanský is mentioned only peripherally or not at all. As late as the nineteenth century, a researcher would be unaware that Zalužanský’s main work Methodi herbariae libri tres actually existed in two editions from two different publishers (1592, Prague; 1604, Frankfurt). This paper introduces the life and work of Zalužanský. Special attention is paid to the chapter “De sexu plantarum” of Zalužanský’s Methodus, in which, more than one hundred years before the well-known De sexu plantarum epistola of R. J. Camerarius, the sexuality of plants is suggested. Additionally, for the first time, an English translation of Zalužanský’s chapter on plant sexuality is provided.


2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
YAEL DARR

This article describes a crucial and fundamental stage in the transformation of Hebrew children's literature, during the late 1930s and 1940s, from a single channel of expression to a multi-layered polyphony of models and voices. It claims that for the first time in the history of Hebrew children's literature there took place a doctrinal confrontation between two groups of taste-makers. The article outlines the pedagogical and ideological designs of traditionalist Zionist educators, and suggests how these were challenged by a group of prominent writers of adult poetry, members of the Modernist movement. These writers, it is argued, advocated autonomous literary creation, and insisted on a high level of literary quality. Their intervention not only dramatically changed the repertoire of Hebrew children's literature, but also the rules of literary discourse. The article suggests that, through the Modernists’ polemical efforts, Hebrew children's literature was able to free itself from its position as an apparatus controlled by the political-educational system and to become a dynamic and multi-layered field.


2020 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomasz Dzieńkowski ◽  
Marcin Wołoszyn ◽  
Iwona Florkiewicz ◽  
Radosław Dobrowolski ◽  
Jan Rodzik ◽  
...  

The article discusses the results of the latest interdisciplinary research of Czermno stronghold and its immediate surroundings. The site is mentioned in chroniclers’ entries referring to the stronghold Cherven’ (Tale of Bygone Years, first mention under the year 981) and the so-called Cherven’ Towns. Given the scarcity of written records regarding the history of today’s Eastern Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus in the 10th and 11th centuries, recent archaeological research, supported by geoenvironmental analyses and absolute dating, brought a significant qualitative change. In 2014 and 2015, the remains of the oldest rampart of the stronghold were uncovered for the first time. A series of radiocarbon datings allows us to refer the erection of the stronghold to the second half/late 10th century. The results of several years’ interdisciplinary research (2012-2020) introduce qualitatively new data to the issue of the Cherven’ Towns, which both change current considerations and confirm the extraordinary research potential in the archeology of the discussed region.


Author(s):  
Michael D. Gordin

Dmitrii Mendeleev (1834–1907) is a name we recognize, but perhaps only as the creator of the periodic table of elements. Generally, little else has been known about him. This book is an authoritative biography of Mendeleev that draws a multifaceted portrait of his life for the first time. As the book reveals, Mendeleev was not only a luminary in the history of science, he was also an astonishingly wide-ranging political and cultural figure. From his attack on Spiritualism to his failed voyage to the Arctic and his near-mythical hot-air balloon trip, this is the story of an extraordinary maverick. The ideals that shaped his work outside science also led Mendeleev to order the elements and, eventually, to engineer one of the most fascinating scientific developments of the nineteenth century. This book is a classic work that tells the story of one of the world's most important minds.


Author(s):  
Rachel Ablow

The nineteenth century introduced developments in science and medicine that made the eradication of pain conceivable for the first time. This new understanding of pain brought with it a complex set of moral and philosophical dilemmas. If pain serves no obvious purpose, how do we reconcile its existence with a well-ordered universe? Examining how writers of the day engaged with such questions, this book offers a compelling new literary and philosophical history of modern pain. The book provides close readings of novelists Charlotte Brontë and Thomas Hardy and political and natural philosophers John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, and Charles Darwin, as well as a variety of medical, scientific, and popular writers of the Victorian age. The book explores how discussions of pain served as investigations into the status of persons and the nature and parameters of social life. No longer conceivable as divine trial or punishment, pain in the nineteenth century came to seem instead like a historical accident suggesting little or nothing about the individual who suffers. A landmark study of Victorian literature and the history of pain, the book shows how these writers came to see pain as a social as well as a personal problem. Rather than simply self-evident to the sufferer and unknowable to anyone else, pain was also understood to be produced between persons—and even, perhaps, by the fictions they read.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-86
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Heyne

AbstractAlthough visual culture of the 21th century increasingly focuses on representation of death and dying, contemporary discourses still lack a language of death adequate to the event shown by pictures and visual images from an outside point of view. Following this observation, this article suggests a re-reading of 20th century author Elias Canetti. His lifelong notes have been edited and published posthumously for the first time in 2014. Thanks to this edition Canetti's short texts and aphorisms can be focused as a textual laboratory in which he tries to model a language of death on experimental practices of natural sciences. The miniature series of experiments address the problem of death, not representable in discourses of cultural studies, system theory or history of knowledge, and in doing so, Canetti creates liminal texts at the margins of western concepts of (human) life, science and established textual form.


2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mbuzeni Mathenjwa

The history of local government in South Africa dates back to a time during the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910. With regard to the status of local government, the Union of South Africa Act placed local government under the jurisdiction of the provinces. The status of local government was not changed by the formation of the Republic of South Africa in 1961 because local government was placed under the further jurisdiction of the provinces. Local government was enshrined in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa arguably for the first time in 1993. Under the interim Constitution local government was rendered autonomous and empowered to regulate its affairs. Local government was further enshrined in the final Constitution of 1996, which commenced on 4 February 1997. The Constitution refers to local government together with the national and provincial governments as spheres of government which are distinctive, interdependent and interrelated. This article discusses the autonomy of local government under the 1996 Constitution. This it does by analysing case law on the evolution of the status of local government. The discussion on the powers and functions of local government explains the scheme by which government powers are allocated, where the 1996 Constitution distributes powers to the different spheres of government. Finally, a conclusion is drawn on the legal status of local government within the new constitutional dispensation.


Author(s):  
Amir A. Khisamutdinov

The article is devoted to the history of librarianship in Shanghai in the Russian emigration community. For the first time there is described the activities of public and private libraries, and paid attention to the individuals who contributed to forming of these funds.


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