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Muitos de nós cultivamos habilidades aparentemente desconexas – advogados que tocam piano, médicos amantes de culinária, designers fascinados por tecnologia. Essa multiplicidade não é apenas uma peculiaridade pessoal, mas uma característica compartilhada por muitos. Leonardo Da Vinci é um exemplo famoso, mas poucos sabem que Einstein tocava violino, Shakespeare era fascinado pela ciência e Samuel Morse, o engenheiro que inventou o aparelho precursor do telefone, também era pintor e professor de belas artes. A conexão entre diferentes campos vai além do interesse pessoal; é vital para a criatividade e a busca por soluções para questões contemporâneas. Das catástrofes climáticas às epidemias, da desigualdade social aos conflitos armados, os desafios globais exigem uma abordagem transdisciplinar e criativa. Neste livro, João Silveira mergulha nessa intersecção, traçando um panorama histórico e destacando projetos inovadores. Ao visitar universidades, laboratórios e centros de arte ao redor do mundo, o autor explora a essência de conectar habilidades técnicas e criativas. Leitura para inspirar artistas, cientistas, educadores, empreendedores e todos aqueles que possuem múltiplas aptidões, demonstrando como a fusão entre arte e ciência impulsiona a inovação e a criação de grandes ideias.

In recent years, rapid technological progress has led to a wholesale destruction of middle-level jobs and a substantial rise in income inequality. It could also bring an era of high structural unemployment. These impacts constitute a major challenge that cannot be ignored by policymakers. They affect the fundamentals of our labor market – and might severely shake the social structure and stability of our society. This new report examines the impacts of technology on the European labor market. The report documents that technological innovation brings not only immense benefits but also significant dislocations in the labor market by making many jobs redundant. HCSS calls upon policymakers to take the risks of job polarization, increased inequality and potentially high technological unemployment quite seriously and suggests some policy measures that could mitigate these risks.The study was conducted in the context of the TNO Strategy & Change program. To download the report, please click on the button on the right.

Providing analysis of what is happening in other countries remains an important task for our Ministries of Foreign Affairs. Much of this analysis currently continues to be done in the way in which it has been done for a very long time. Yet it is clear that the sources that can be used for this type of analysis are changing extremely rapidly. The same holds for the tools that can be used to analyze those sources.

This study points to worrying trends in how far two great power contenders, Russia and China, have been willing to go to assert themselves in the international arena. It concludes that increased willingness to resort to brinkmanship has heightened the danger of a ‘Cuban Missile Crisis’-type event that could spiral into uncontrollable escalation.

The construction industry is one of the key economic sectors in Europe, but it was hit hard by the financial crisis. In the euro zone, employment in construction declined by a quarter since 2008. These difficult times raise important questions about the future path of the construction industry. The Briefing describes the various aspects of renovation and maintenance activities in the EU, and explores their potential to become the main growth driver for the European construction market.

Circadian and photoperiodic phenomena serve to organize the temporal pattern of various biological processes. While the former generates endogenous daily rhythms, the latter is related to seasonality. In Drosophila melanogaster, the gene timeless (tim) encodes a cardinal component of the circadian clock and also contributes to photoperiodism, which is observed as an adult reproductive diapause. In this work, natural tim variants were examined for diapause across different temperatures and photoperiods. The newly derived allele, ls-tim, exhibited consistently higher diapause levels than the ancestral one, s-tim, implicating a putative adaptive advantage in the seasonal European environment and providing a perfect substrate for the recently proposed scenario of directional selection. To investigate further genetic links between circadian and photoperiodic mechanisms, classical clock mutations and transgenes were placed on a natural congenic background and assayed for locomotor activity behaviour and diapause response. Surprisingly, the results not only highlighted the importance of tim, and its natural alleles, but also revealed the participation of other clock components in diapause, suggesting that both daily and seasonal timers might have molecularly coevolved. The phenotypic effects promoted by ls-tim arise from the protein isoform LTIM, which expresses an additional N-terminal fragment. To study the adaptive significance of the N-terminal residues, including putative phosphorylation sites, a number of mutagenized TIM constructs were generated and functionally analysed. At the molecular level, it was demonstrated that both the N-terminus length and the order of its residues are important variables modulating the interaction dynamics between TIM and CRYPTOCHROME (CRY). At the behaviour level, the overall amino acid composition, rather than a particular order, appeared to be more critical for the phaseshift responses. Interestingly, despite the functional importance of the N-terminus, a deletion mapping analysis revealed that CRY directly binds to a protein sequence located at TIM C-terminus.