Impact of CoronaVac on Covid-19 outcomes of elderly adults in a large and socially unequal Brazilian city: A target trial emulation study.

Background: Although CoronaVac was the only Covid-19 vaccine adopted in the first months of the Brazilian vaccination campaign, randomized clinical trials to evaluate its efficacy in elderly adults were limited. In this study, we use routinely collected surveillance and SARS-CoV-2 vaccination and testing data comprising the population of the fifth largest city of Brazil to evaluate the effectiveness of CoronaVac in adults 60+ years old against severe outcomes.

Methods: Using large observational databases on vaccination and surveillance data from the city of Fortaleza, Brazil, we defined a retrospective cohort including 324,302 eligible adults aged ≥60 years to evaluate the effectiveness of the CoronaVac vaccine.

Tracing contacts to evaluate the transmission of COVID-19 from highly exposed individuals in public transportation.

We investigate, through a data-driven contact tracing model, the transmission of COVID-19 inside buses during distinct phases of the pandemic in a large Brazilian city. From this microscopic approach, we recover the networks of close contacts within consecutive time windows. A longitudinal comparison is then performed by upscaling the traced contacts with the transmission computed from a mean-field compartmental model for the entire city.

Eye-tracking as a proxy for coherence and complexity of texts.

Reading is a complex cognitive process that involves primary oculomotor function and high-level activities like attention focus and language processing. When we read, our eyes move by primary physiological functions while responding to language-processing demands. In fact, the eyes perform discontinuous twofold movements, namely, successive long jumps (saccades) interposed by small steps (fixations) in which the gaze "scans" confined locations.

Morphological Transition between Patterns Formed by Threads of Magnetic Beads.

Magnetic beads attract each other, forming chains. We push such chains into an inclined Hele-Shaw cell and discover that they spontaneously form self-similar patterns. Depending on the angle of inclination of the cell, two completely different situations emerge; namely, above the static friction angle the patterns resemble the stacking of a rope and below they look similar to a fortress from above.

Time evolution of the behaviour of Brazilian legislative Representatives using a complex network approach.

The follow up of Representative behavior after elections is imperative for a democratic Representative system, at the very least to punish betrayal with no re-election. Our goal was to show how to follow Representatives' and how to show behavior in real situations and observe trends in political crises including the onset of game changing political instabilities. We used correlation and correlation distance matrices of Brazilian Representative votes during four presidential terms.

General continuum approach for dissipative systems of repulsive particles.

We propose a general coarse-graining method to derive a continuity equation that describes any dissipative system of repulsive particles interacting through short-ranged potentials. In our approach, the effect of particle-particle correlations is incorporated to the overall balance of energy, and a nonlinear diffusion equation is obtained to represent the overdamped dynamics. In particular, when the repulsive interaction potential is a short-ranged power law, our approach reveals a distinctive correspondence between particle-particle energy and the generalized thermostatistics of Tsallis for any nonpositive value of the entropic index q.