Gastric cancer represents a significant global health challenge due to its high mortality and incidence rates, particularly in Eastern Asia, Eastern Europe, and South America. This comprehensive review synthesizes the latest epidemiological data and explores both modifiable and non-modifiable risk factors associated with gastric cancer, aiming to delineate the multifactorial etiology of this disease. Modifiable risk factors include Helicobacter pylori infection, obesity, dietary habits, smoking and alcohol consumption, whereas nonmodifiable factors comprise genetic predispositions, age, family history and male gender. The interplay of these factors significantly impacts the risk and progression of gastric cancer, suggesting potential preventive strategies. The challenges in treating gastric cancer are considerable, largely because of the late-stage diagnosis and the heterogeneity of the disease, which complicate effective treatment regimens. Current treatment strategies involve a combination of surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and targeted therapies. The FLOT regimen (5-FU, Leucovorin, Oxaliplatin and Docetaxel) is now a standard for resectable cases in Europe and the US, showing superior survival and response rates over ECF and ECX regimens. For HER2-positive gastric cancer, trastuzumab combined with chemotherapy improves overall survival, as demonstrated by the ToGA trial. Additionally, immune checkpoint inhibitors like pembrolizumab and nivolumab offer promising results. However, the five-year survival rate remains low, underscoring the urgency for improved therapeutic approaches. Recent advancements in molecular biology and cancer genomics have begun to pave the way for personalized medicine in gastric cancer care, focusing on molecular targeted therapies and immunotherapy. This review also highlights the critical need for better screening methods that could facilitate early detection and treatment, potentially improving the prognosis. By integrating epidemiological insights with new therapeutic strategies, this article aims to thoroughly understand of gastric cancer's dynamics and outline a framework for future research and clinical management, advocating for a multidisciplinary approach to tackle this formidable disease.
James Price, Guillermo Valenzuela-Venegas, Oskar Vågerö
et al.
The large-scale deployment of wind power is central to Europe`s energy transition but faces challenges due to its social and environmental impacts on communities. Here we assess how the tolerance of local stakeholders to such impacts translates across spatial scales to shape the cost and design of the continent`s net-zero electricity system using a soft-linked modelling framework. We find that lower impact tolerance can reduce the role of onshore wind in Europe reaching net-zero by up to 84% relative to a future where wind enjoys higher acceptance, with other low carbon sources needing to be scaled up to compensate. This translates into total European electricity system costs increasing by between 2-14% while some countries see costs escalating by 20% or more. Our results show that the local acceptance of onshore wind is a key structural driver of the system and highlight the system value of policies to promote it.
One of the most public episodes of gatekeeping in modern science was the case of so-called 'cold fusion'. At a news conference in 1989 the electrochemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons announced that they had found evidence of nuclear fusion in palladium electrodes loaded with deuterium. There was worldwide interest. Many groups sought to reproduce the results, most unsuccessfully. Within months, the prevailing view became strongly negative. The claims of Fleischmann and Pons came to be regarded as disreputable, as well as false. As the Caltech physicist David Goldstein put it, cold fusion became 'a pariah field, cast out by the scientific establishment' (Goldstein 1994). The case would already be interesting for students of gatekeeping if the story had ended at that point. Even more interestingly, however, the field survived and persisted. It has been enjoying a modest renaissance, with recent government funding both in the US and the EU. This piece offers an opinionated introduction to cold fusion as a case study of scientific gatekeeping, discussing both its early and recent history
This paper examines whether a major U.S. regulatory clarification coincided with cross-border spillovers in crypto-asset entrepreneurial finance. We study the Securities and Exchange Commission's July 2017 DAO Report, which clarified the application of U.S. securities law to many initial coin offerings, and analyze how global issuance activity adjusted across regions. Using a comprehensive global dataset of ICOs from 2014 to 2021, we construct a region-month panel and evaluate issuance dynamics around the announcement. We document a substantial and persistent reallocation of ICO activity toward Europe following the DAO Report. In panel regressions with region and month fixed effects, Europe experiences an average post-2017 increase of approximately 14 additional ICOs per region-month relative to other regions, net of global market cycles. The results are consistent with cross-border regulatory spillovers in highly mobile digital-asset markets.
Мета статті – проаналізувати місце шкільної молоді в ідеологічному протистоянні між українським національно-визвольним рухом і радянською владою на теренах Рівненщини у післявоєнний період. Визначити особливості повсякденного життя юнацтва в умовах функціонування сталінського тоталітарного режиму.
Наукова новизна дослідження полягає у комплексному аналізі участі школярів Рівненської області в українському визвольному русі у 1944-1953 рр. На конкретних прикладах систематизовано основні форми та методи антирадянської діяльності учнів місцевих шкіл.
Висновки. Безкомпромісна боротьба між комуністичною владою та українським визвольним рухом мала значний вплив на освітній простір регіону. Ідеологічна складова займала важливе місце, адже безпосередньо впливала на формування майбутнього суспільства. Учнівський опір радянській владі у Рівненській області в післявоєнні роки був активним і частково продовжувався до середини 1950-х рр. Національні ідеали мали підтримку серед значної частини місцевої молоді, що безперечно ускладнювало утвердження комуністичних впливів.
Ключова роль у розправі над юними учасниками руху Опору відводилась судовій системі. Вона мала забезпечити швидкість розгляду справ і призначення потрібних владі покарань. Діяльність національно свідомої молоді на теренах Рівненського краю цілком співзвучна з функціонуванням подібних молодіжних організацій, що мали поширення у західних областях УРСР у післявоєнні роки.
Основними формами та методами опору були: усна антирадянська агітація у найрізноманітніших видах (обговорення, збори, дискусії); поширення забороненої літератури та листівок серед населення, іноді їх друк; самоосвіта й особистий розвиток; створення законспірованих юнацьких організацій; виконання завдань осередків ОУН щодо збору потрібної інформації та гуманітарної допомоги. Згодом частина молоді переходила у націоналістичне підпілля та долучалася до участі у збройній боротьбі.
Набор подношений в дипломатическом этикете народов кочевой степи нес определенный символический смысл и декларацию политических и экономических отношений. Обрядовое значение подобных демонстраций уходит корнями в традиционное восприятие и описание мира народов степного пространства Евразии. Прямых свидетельств о месте и роли данных подарков в ритуале посольских миссий в источниках не сохранилось (за исключением их экономического значения). Тем не менее, принципиальный вопрос требования «поминок» в русско-крымских отношениях и их яркие и разноцветные вещественные символические знаки власти, свидетельствуют о немаловажном политическом аспекте в ритуале посольского обмена в XIII—XVIIстолетиях. При этом косвенные известия позволяют составить представление о символическом смысле ряда атрибутов дипломатических подарков. Так охотничьи птицы — кречеты, соколы и ястребы — различной цветовой гаммы и, в особенности, белые представляли собой демонстрацию подчиненного положения младшего по отношению к старшему. Такое подчинение сопровождало признание поражения в войне и потери суверенитета одного народа по отношению к другому. Именно поэтому преподнесение белых птиц остро воспринималась при обмене посольских миссий на всем протяжении Евразийского пространства в рассматриваемое время. Компоненты атрибутов посольских подношений позволяют выявить тонкости дипломатической игры в момент обменами делегациями и развитие деклараций соподчинения или отказ от них в кризисные моменты отношений. Однако уяснение деталей такой игры задача дальнейших исследований.
While preparing the Operation Barbarossa the Nazi Germany did not originally consider participation of other countries apart from Romania and Finland that had territorial demands against Soviet Union. German military planners considered for some time the possibility to appoint two Slovak infantry divisions with security tasks in the rear, and in May 1941 there were voices calling for the utilization of two Slovak divisions to enforce the 17th Army of the Army Group South even despite open distrust of Adolf Hitler towards Slavs. Since the preparations were taking place on the Slovak territory as well, Slovak Minister of Defence Gen. Ferdinand Čatloš, in a conversation with German military attaché, Lt. Col. Heinrich Becker, stated that in case of Hungarian participation Slovakia would like to take part in the campaign as well. Germans, at first, pointed out an overall unreadiness of the Slovak Armed Forces but finally – only shortly before June 22nd, 1941 – Hitler declared his wish that the “Slovak Army attended some prospective action”. With the goal to show more loyalty than Hungarians, Slovak politicians and especially the Prime Minister Vojtech Tuka acted proactively without waiting for the Germans to specify their requirements. The paper analyses the circumstances of Slovak entry into the war against the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, and summarizes the latest findings of Slovak historiography.
The subject of this study is the estates of Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich, located in various provinces of the Russian Empire. Mikhail Alexandrovich was the brother of the last Emperor of Russia, Nicholas II. The personality of the Grand Duke, who is one of the key figures of the turning point of Russian history, is of interest not only from the point of view of its national significance, but also in the cultural and everyday aspect. In this regard, his private life as a landowner deserves attention. The possessions of the Grand Duke were an excellent example of an advanced estate economy of the late 19th – first quarter of the 20th centuries. Great merit in this belonged to the employees of his estates. In the future, some of them linked their lives with the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Being witnesses, and often participants in the events that took place in the cultural, socio-political life of Yugoslavia, they became one of the pages of the history of this country. The scientist forester V. T. Shatsky made a significant contribution to the development of forestry in the Kingdom of SCS. Julia and Yuri Rakitin became famous theater figures of Yugoslavia. N. A. Paganuzzi worked in the agricultural sector of the country. E. V. Pletneva (Daniel) made a significant contribution to the education and upbringing of the younger youth, her role in the formation of the First Russian-Serbian gymnasium is difficult to overestimate. Little-known documents in the Russian archives were used in writing this work.
A brief history of the development of surface detectors for the study of the high-energy cosmic rays is presented. The paper is based on an invited talk given at UHECR2022 held in LAquila, October 2022. In a complementary talk, P Sokolsky discussed the development of the fluorescence technique for air-shower detection.
In this work, I explore the concept of quantization as a mapping from classical phase space functions to quantum operators. I discuss the early history of this notion of quantization with emphasis on the works of Schrödinger and Dirac, and how quantization fit into their overall understanding of quantum theory in the 1920's. Dirac, in particular, proposed a quantization map which should satisfy certain properties, including the property that quantum commutators should be related to classical Poisson brackets in a particular way. However, in 1946, Groenewold proved that Dirac's mapping was inconsistent, making the problem of defining a rigorous quantization map more elusive than originally expected. This result, known as the Groenewold-Van Hove theorem, is not often discussed in physics texts, but here I will give an account of the theorem and what it means for potential "corrections" to Dirac's scheme. Other proposals for quantization have arisen over the years, the first major one being that of Weyl in 1927, which was later developed by many, including Groenewold, and which has since become known as Weyl Quantization in the mathematical literature. Another, known as Geometric Quantization, formulates quantization in differential-geometric terms by appealing to the character of classical phase spaces as symplectic manifolds; this approach began with the work of Souriau, Kostant, and Kirillov in the 1960's. I will describe these proposals for quantization and comment on their relation to Dirac's original program. Along the way, the problem of operator ordering and of quantizing in curvilinear coordinates will be described, since these are natural questions that immediately present themselves when thinking about quantization.
The ionization losses -- the losses of energy by fast charged particles traveling through a matter -- have been under study for more than 100 years. The theoretical explanation of this process spans similar period. About 75 years ago, Lev Landau published a theoretical paper on the ionization losses, which drastically leveled up the research and still remains amongst the most cited in the field. The present note digests the history of theoretical development and attempts to clarify Landau's method of research and the function named after him.
We present quantitative reconstructions of regional vegetation cover in north‐western Europe, western Europe north of the Alps, and eastern Europe for five time windows in the Holocene [around 6k, 3k, 0.5k, 0.2k, and 0.05k calendar years before present (bp)] at a 1° × 1° spatial scale with the objective of producing vegetation descriptions suitable for climate modelling. The REVEALS model was applied on 636 pollen records from lakes and bogs to reconstruct the past cover of 25 plant taxa grouped into 10 plant‐functional types and three land‐cover types [evergreen trees, summer‐green (deciduous) trees, and open land]. The model corrects for some of the biases in pollen percentages by using pollen productivity estimates and fall speeds of pollen, and by applying simple but robust models of pollen dispersal and deposition. The emerging patterns of tree migration and deforestation between 6k bp and modern time in the REVEALS estimates agree with our general understanding of the vegetation history of Europe based on pollen percentages. However, the degree of anthropogenic deforestation (i.e. cover of cultivated and grazing land) at 3k, 0.5k, and 0.2k bp is significantly higher than deduced from pollen percentages. This is also the case at 6k in some parts of Europe, in particular Britain and Ireland. Furthermore, the relationship between summer‐green and evergreen trees, and between individual tree taxa, differs significantly when expressed as pollen percentages or as REVEALS estimates of tree cover. For instance, when Pinus is dominant over Picea as pollen percentages, Picea is dominant over Pinus as REVEALS estimates. These differences play a major role in the reconstruction of European landscapes and for the study of land cover–climate interactions, biodiversity and human resources.
Стаття присвячена дослідженню феномену критики в автентичному марксистському доробку та відродженню принципів такої критики в філософії, що існувала на теренах УРСР у період із другої половини 1950-х до кінця 1980-х років. Актуальність дослідження визначається потребою критичного переосмислення досвіду вітчизняної філософії радянського періоду, зокрема у галузі критики західних немарксистських і неомарксистських філософських теорій та їхнього впливу на ідеологічні засади функціонування масової свідомості та філософію в УРСР.
Дослідженням вказаної проблематики займались В. Білодід, А. Бичко, П. Йолон, В. Кебуладзе, О. Погорілий, М. Попович, В. Скуратівський, В. Табачковський та інші. Автори цієї розвідки також приділили увагу питанню т. зв. «критики буржуазних теорій» у контексті дослідження феномену української філософії/філософії в Україні доби УРСР.
Метою розвідки є аналіз трансформації марксистської критики в УРСР та вплив західноєвропейських дискурсів на цей процес, особливо в епоху другої половини 1950-х – кінця 1980-х років, оскільки саме у цей період відбулося фактичне відродження української філософії/філософії в Україні після «напіврозпаду» сталінізму та наступний розвиток цієї філософії вже на власному підґрунті.
Одним із важливих напрямків аналізу є феномен критики, зокрема «буржуазних теорій», завдяки якому у гуманітарний вітчизняний дискурс проникали актуальні ідеї західної філософії та гуманітаристики загалом, що, у свою чергу, давало можливість дослідникам з України хоча б частково перебувати в контексті загальноєвропейських філософських досліджень, а також використовувати можливості критичної енергії автентичного марксизму для латентної критики радянської ідеології і всієї системи назагал.
Miroslav D. Filipović, Jeffrey L. Payne, Thomas Jarrett
et al.
We investigate possible reasons for the absence of historical records of the supernova of 1054 in Europe. At the same time, we search for the new evidences as well. We establish that the previously acclaimed 'Arabic' records from ibn Butlan originate from Europe. As one of the most prominent scientists of the era, he was in Constantinople at the time of the supernova and actively participated in the medieval Church feud known as the Great Schism. Next, we reconstruct the European sky at the time of the event and find that the 'new star' (SN 1054) was in the west while the planet Venus was on the opposite side of the sky (in the east) with the Sun sited directly between these two equally bright objects, as documented in East-Asian records.
In a previous paper, we showed that a class of time travel paradoxes which cannot be resolved using Novikov's self-consistency conjecture can be resolved by assuming the existence of multiple histories or parallel timelines. However, our proof was obtained using a simplistic toy model, which was formulated using contrived laws of physics. In the present paper we define and analyze a new model of time travel paradoxes, which is more compatible with known physics. This model consists of a traversable Morris-Thorne wormhole time machine in 3+1 spacetime dimensions. We define the spacetime topology and geometry of the model, calculate the geodesics of objects passing through the time machine, and prove that this model inevitably leads to paradoxes which cannot be resolved using Novikov's conjecture, but can be resolved using multiple histories. An open-source simulation of our new model using Mathematica is available for download on GitHub. We also provide additional arguments against the Novikov self-consistency conjecture by considering two new paradoxes, the switch paradox and the password paradox, for which assuming self-consistency inevitably leads to counter-intuitive consequences. Our new results provide more substantial support to our claim that if time travel is possible, then multiple histories or parallel timelines must also be possible.
The purpose of this dissertation is to present an overview of the operational and financial performance of airports in Europe. In benchmarking studies, airports are assessed and compared with other airports based on key indicators from a technical and an economic point of view. The interest lies primarily in the question, which key figures can best measure the perception of quality of service from the point of view of the passenger for the services at an airport.
This study explores the impact of high PV penetration on the inter-area oscillation modes of large-scale power grids. A series of dynamic models with various PV penetration levels are developed based on a detailed model representing the U.S. Eastern Interconnection (EI). Transient simulations are performed to investigate the change of inter-area oscillation modes with PV penetration. The impact of PV control strategies and parameter settings on inter-area oscillations is studied. This study finds that as PV increases, the damping of the dominant oscillation mode decreases monotonically. It is also observed that the mode shape varies with the PV control strategy and new oscillation modes may emerge under inappropriate parameter settings in PV plant controls.
Philippe Ciais, François-Marie Bréon, Stijn Dellaert
et al.
As the COVID-19 virus spread over the world, governments restricted mobility to slow transmission. Public health measures had different intensities across European countries but all had significant impact on peoples daily lives and economic activities, causing a drop of CO2 emissions of about 10% for the whole year 2020. Here, we analyze changes in natural gas use in the industry and built environment sectors during the first half of year 2020 with daily gas flows data from pipeline and storage facilities in Europe. We find that reductions of industrial gas use reflect decreases in industrial production across most countries. Surprisingly, natural gas use in buildings also decreased despite most people being confined at home and cold spells in March 2020. Those reductions that we attribute to the impacts of COVID-19 remain of comparable magnitude to previous variations induced by cold or warm climate anomalies in the cold season. We conclude that climate variations played a larger role than COVID-19 induced stay-home orders in natural gas consumption across Europe.