[Abridged] In the late nineteenth century, Mars emerged as one of the most intensively reported astronomical objects in the popular press, driven by favourable oppositions, improved telescopic capabilities and growing speculation regarding planetary habitability. I examine how Mars was interpreted in Australian newspapers between the 1870s and 1899, focusing on the ways in which astronomical knowledge was framed, contextualised and debated within a colonial media environment. Drawing on a large collection of digitised newspaper articles, I analyse how observational authority, instrumental credibility and individual expertise were harnessed in press reporting. The paper situates Australian Mars coverage within a global network of scientific communication dominated by metropolitan centres in Europe and North America, while highlighting the distinctive role played by southern-hemisphere visibility. Australian observatories and observers were frequently positioned as contributors of confirmatory observation rather than interpretive leadership, reinforcing a pattern of locally grounded but internationally oriented scientific engagement. The analysis traces a shift from early emphasis on disciplined observation and measurement to later periods characterised by contested interpretations, particularly surrounding the so-called Martian "canals" and the speculative claims advanced by personalities such as Percival Lowell in the USA. By examining how newspapers mediated between observational astronomy, engineering analogies and popular imagination, this study contributes to a broader understanding of how planetary science entered public discourse beyond metropolitan centres. In doing so, it underscores the active role of colonial newspapers in shaping scientific meaning and situates Australian Mars reporting within the wider history of nineteenth-century astronomical culture.
C. Kourouklas, P. Bonatis, E. Papadimitriou
et al.
The M6.0 earthquakes recurrence times, Tr, exhibit high variability from 40 to 1500 years, with the southern Corinth Rift fault segments reaching values up to 350 years and their antithetic ones ranging from 400 to 1500 years. The fault segments in the Corinth Rift can be divided into three groups, according to their recurrence behaviour, with some of them exhibiting significantly lower renewal model probabilities than the Poisson model, others showing nearly equal probabilities, and one segment where the renewal model probabilities are much higher than the Poisson one.
Marko S. Sabovljević, Gordana Tomović, Aneta D. Sabovljević
et al.
This paper presents new records and noteworthy data on the following taxa in SE Europe and adjacent regions: hemibiotrophic fungus Juglanconis juglandina, lichenised fungi Micarea lignaria var. lignaria, Pertusaria flavicans, and Placidiopsis custnani, parasitic fungi Entyloma gaillardianum and Stegocintractia luzulae, saprotrophic fungi Hericium coralloides, Hericium flagellum, and Rosellinia corticium, liverwort Sauteria alpina, mosses Acaulon triquetrum, Buxbaumia aphylla, and Dicranum viride, monocot Epipactis palustris and dicots Clinopodium vardarense, Helichrysum doerfleri and Opopanax chironium subsp. bulgaricum.
This article reviews in depth life, works and spirit of the eminent Greek agriculturist Ioannis Papadakis. Primarily, it shows the way Papadakis, working mainly as a plant breeder from 1923, tackled the major problem of Greek agricultural history, namely the accomplishment of Greece’s wheat self-sufficiency, by inventing new, high-yielding, varieties of great adaptability to the adverse soil and climatic conditions of the country. The solution to this problem is regarded as an outstanding achievement of agricultural research and policy in Greece. However, today, judging in the comfort of time-distance from the events of the Mid-war period and in an effort to interpret the outcome of this exercise and its implications on the development of Greece’s agricultural economy, one could say that the pursued single-cultivation of wheat with a simultaneous decrease in the area devoted to growing of certain crops destined for forage or other animal feed resources, this had a negative effect as regards the imbalanced evolution of the various branches of agricultural production in favor of wheat. Therefore, this partial approach brought about a dramatic delay in the development of the animal production sector, contributing to the huge exchange deficit for importing animal products in contemporary Greece. Nevertheless, Ioannis Papadakis had received the mandate by the Hellenic State for achieving the country’s wheat self-sufficiency and in this respect was successful and worked for it impeccably. Furthermore, in 1947, after having been invited by Argentina to construct its ecological map, he emigrated permanently to that country. Papadakis had published (1938) in French the first of its kind book worldwide “Agricultural Ecology”. He was also invited to write the entry “Soils” in Encyclopaedia Britannica. He worked for Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and studied agricultural questions in South America, West Africa, South-East Asia and elsewhere. He wrote research and review papers on several aspects of agriculture, including field crops, plant breeding, biometry, soil science, agricultural ecology as well as rural economy and policy. This article concludes with some of Papadakis’ thoughts, stemming from his own wisdom of experience, accumulated from his long service in Greece, Argentina and elsewhere in the world.
History (General) and history of Europe, Science (General)
Eleni Palamara, Stelios Kesidis, Laura Tormo Cifuentes
et al.
The combined application of Cathodoluminescence (CL) with Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) on paintings and painted surfaces has the potential to identify both organic and inorganic pigments on a micrometre or even nanometre scale. Additionally, the combination with Energy-Dispersive Spectrometry (EDS) allows for a more holistic, elemental, and mineralogical characterization of pigments. In addressing the need for the creation of a robust, open access database of characteristic CL spectra of pigments, a large project has been undertaken, focusing primarily on common organic and inorganic pigments. The present paper focuses on the CL characterization of 10 significant blue pigments in pure powder form: cerulean blue, Egyptian blue, Han blue, indigo, lapis lazuli, Maya blue, phthalo blue, vivianite, ultramarine blue, and zirconium blue. The CL spectra present characteristic bands for most of the pigments, allowing their secure identification, especially when combining the results with the EDS analyses. The effect of binding media and of the mixture of different pigments was also studied, via the analysis of mixtures of pigments with oil painted over canvas. Overall, both the binding medium and the mixture of pigments do not appear to create significant differences in the occurring spectra, thus allowing the identification of individual pigments. EDS and RAMAN spectra are included in order to facilitate comparison with other databases.
Hagit Attiya, Michael A. Bender, Martin Farach-Colton
et al.
A data structure is called history independent if its internal memory representation does not reveal the history of operations applied to it, only its current state. In this paper we study history independence for concurrent data structures, and establish foundational possibility and impossibility results. We show that a large class of concurrent objects cannot be implemented from smaller base objects in a manner that is both wait-free and history independent; but if we settle for either lock-freedom instead of wait-freedom or for a weak notion of history independence, then at least one object in the class, multi-valued single-reader single-writer registers, can be implemented from smaller base objects, binary registers. On the other hand, using large base objects, we give a strong possibility result in the form of a universal construction: an object with $s$ possible states can be implemented in a wait-free, history-independent manner from compare-and-swap base objects that each have $O(s + 2^n)$ possible memory states, where $n$ is the number of processes in the system.
I commence this review with six important works on mobility, diasporas, ethnicities, and intercultural relations in antiquity; after a decade of relative dearth of significant contributions, it is truly wonderful that the field is moving again. Jonathan Hall and James Osborne have edited an excellent volume on the interregional networks in the eastern Mediterranean between 900–600 bce. The volume aims to link the novel approaches to Mediterranean history espoused in the major syntheses by Nicholas Purcell – Peregrine Horden and Cyprian Broodbank respectively, with new approaches to the study of cross-cultural interaction and material culture. The editors explicitly and convincingly argue in favour of employing multiple models for explaining the Early Iron Age Mediterranean; the ten chapters exemplify both multiplicity and important common themes. Certain contributions accept the concept of globalization as a useful way of explaining the changes evident across the Mediterranean. While some contributions problematize the concept of style as a means of drawing clear ethnic lines among artists and artistic traditions, other scholars argue for the need to maintain traditional ethnic labels like that of the Phoenicians, which is facing a current deconstructive trend; equally interesting is the stress on the agency of specific groups, like mercenaries, as agents of connectivity. Particularly significant, finally, is the focus on areas that have usually remained at the margins of discussion of Iron Age interconnectivity, like the North Aegean and the Troad, the Black Sea, Anatolia and Egypt.
Greeks and Macedonians both assert that they, and they alone, have the right to identify themselves as Macedonians. The Greek government denies the existence of a Macedonian nation and insists that all Macedonians are Greeks, while Macedonians vehemently assert their existence as a unique people. This work examines the Macedonian conflict in the light of contemporary theoretical work on ethnic nationalism, the construction of national identities and cultures, the invenstion of tradition, and the role of the state in the process of building a nation. The conflict is set in the broader context of Balkan history and in the narrower context of the disintegration of Yugoslavia. The book focuses on the transnational dimension of the "global cultural war" taking place between Greeks and Macedonians both in the Balkans and throughout the rest of the world. It analyzes two issues in particular: the struggle for human rights of the Macedonian minority in northern Greece and the campaign for international recognition of the newly independent Republic of Macedonia. The book concludes with a detailed analysis of the construction of identity at an individual level among immigrants from nothern Greece who have settled in Australia, where multiculturalism is an official policy.
Tulisan ini menguraikan bagaimana bidang ilmu pengetahuan, khususnya kosmologi modern, berada dalam situasi yang kacau. Sepanjang sejarah, kosmologi tidak muncul melalui jalan yang tenang dan sepi, melainkan melalui serangkaian perdebatan yang penuh gejolak dan kontroversial yang masih berlangsung hingga saat ini. Artikel ini dimulai dari gambaran singkat tentang pesatnya perkembangan kosmologi, menelusuri asal-usulnya dari Yunani Klasik hingga zaman modern. Perlu dicatat bahwa, seperti halnya filsafat, kosmologi terkait erat dengan pendahulunya, pemikiran Yunani Klasik, yang menjadi landasan bagi teori-teori kosmologis berikutnya. Selanjutnya diulas perdebatan yang sedang berlangsung antara kaum realis dan antirealis mengenai definisi alam semesta, serta peran Einstein dalam perkembangan kosmologi. Secara khusus, artikel ini mengeksplorasi bagaimana Einstein berkontribusi pada wacana seputar alam semesta yang mengembang (big bang) dan alam semesta yang statis. Intinya, makalah ini bertujuan untuk menjelaskan sifat kosmologi yang kacau dan berbelit-belit, yang dibentuk oleh berbagai perspektif dan teori yang saling bersaing. Dengan mengkaji sejarah kosmologi, artikel ini menemukan bagaimana kosmologi sampai pada kondisi saat ini, dan bagaimana kosmologi dapat terus berkembang di masa depan.
In this paper, I aim to expound on how the field of science, particularly modern cosmology, finds itself in a chaotic situation. Throughout history, cosmology has not emerged through a calm and deserted road, but instead through a tumultuous and contentious series of debates that persist to this day. To begin, I will provide a brief overview of the rapid development of cosmology, tracing its origins from Classical Greece to modern times. It is worth noting that, like philosophy, cosmology is inextricably linked to its predecessor, Classical Greek thought, which served as the foundation for subsequent cosmological theories. Moving forward, I will delve into the ongoing debate between realists and antirealists regarding the definition of the universe, as well as the role of Einstein in the development of cosmology. Specifically, I will explore how Einstein contributed to the discourse surrounding the expanding universe (big bang) and the static universe. In essence, this paper aims to shed light on the chaotic and convoluted nature of cosmology, which has been shaped by a myriad of competing perspectives and theories. By examining the history of cosmology, we can better understand how it has arrived at its current state, and how it may continue to evolve in the future.
In this paper, we revisit Johanna Drucker's question, "Is there a digital art history?" -- posed exactly a decade ago -- in the light of the emergence of large-scale, transformer-based vision models. While more traditional types of neural networks have long been part of digital art history, and digital humanities projects have recently begun to use transformer models, their epistemic implications and methodological affordances have not yet been systematically analyzed. We focus our analysis on two main aspects that, together, seem to suggest a coming paradigm shift towards a "digital" art history in Drucker's sense. On the one hand, the visual-cultural repertoire newly encoded in large-scale vision models has an outsized effect on digital art history. The inclusion of significant numbers of non-photographic images allows for the extraction and automation of different forms of visual logics. Large-scale vision models have "seen" large parts of the Western visual canon mediated by Net visual culture, and they continuously solidify and concretize this canon through their already widespread application in all aspects of digital life. On the other hand, based on two technical case studies of utilizing a contemporary large-scale visual model to investigate basic questions from the fields of art history and urbanism, we suggest that such systems require a new critical methodology that takes into account the epistemic entanglement of a model and its applications. This new methodology reads its corpora through a neural model's training data, and vice versa: the visual ideologies of research datasets and training datasets become entangled.
I commence this review with a number of important works in Greek social history. As I commented in my last review for this journal, the study of labour is among the biggest holes in current research in Greek history. An important contribution towards filling this gap is the Cultural History of Work in Antiquity, edited by Ephraim Lytle. The volume gives an excellent overview of how work is represented and discussed in both literary and archaeological sources; at the same time, it situates work and workers within four important contexts: the structures of ancient economies and the level of trade and specialization determined demand in urban and rural labour; the changing form of workplaces determined the division of labour among workers; different forms of work developed highly divergent workplace cultures; finally, practices and organizations for the transmission of skills and knowledge were of critical importance. Work and workers are then placed within wider contexts: chapters explore the role of mobility in ancient labour markets, and how political communities and attitudes about different forms of work affected workers. Finally, work is profitably juxtaposed to leisure practices and ideas. Perhaps the strongest point of most chapters is their attention to regional diversity and historical change: the volume sets the groundwork for ultimately producing a dynamic narrative of the history of work in antiquity.
Complex agricultural problems concern many countries, as the economic motives are increasingly higher, and at the same time the consequences from the irrational resources use and emissions are becoming more evident. In this work we study three of the most common agricultural problems and model them through optimization techniques, showing ways to assess conflicting objectives together as a system and provide overall optimum solutions. The studied problems refer to: i) a water-scarce area with overexploited surface and groundwater resources due to over-pumping for irrigation (Central Greece), ii) a water-abundant area with issues of water quality deterioration caused by agriculture (Southern Ontario, Canada), iii) and a case of intensified agriculture based on animal farming that causes issues of water, soil quality degradation, and increased greenhouse gases emissions (Central Ireland). Linear, non-linear, and Goal Programming optimization techniques have been developed and applied for each case to maximize farmers welfare, make a less intensive use of environmental resources, and control the emission of pollutants. The proposed approaches and their solutions are novel applications for each case-study, compared to the existing literature and practice. Furthermore, they provide useful insights for most countries facing similar problems, they are easily applicable, and developed and solved in publicly available tools such as Python.
This paper is inspired by the PQ penny flip game. It employs group-theoretic concepts to study the original game and its possible extensions. In this paper, it is shown that the PQ penny flip game can be associated, in a precise way, with the dihedral group <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><msub><mi>D</mi><mn>8</mn></msub></semantics></math></inline-formula> and that within <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><msub><mi>D</mi><mn>8</mn></msub></semantics></math></inline-formula> there exist precisely two classes of equivalent winning strategies for Q. This is achieved by proving that there are exactly two different sequences of states that can guarantee Q’s win with probability <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mrow><mn>1.0</mn></mrow></semantics></math></inline-formula>. It is demonstrated that the game can be played in every dihedral group <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><msub><mi>D</mi><mrow><mn>8</mn><mi>n</mi></mrow></msub></semantics></math></inline-formula>, where <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mrow><mi>n</mi><mo>≥</mo><mn>1</mn></mrow></semantics></math></inline-formula>, without any significant change. A formal examination of what happens when Q can draw their moves from the entire <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mrow><mi>U</mi><mo>(</mo><mn>2</mn><mo>)</mo></mrow></semantics></math></inline-formula>, leads to the conclusion that, again, there are exactly two classes of winning strategies for Q, each class containing an infinite number of equivalent strategies, but all of them sending the coin through the same sequence of states as before. Finally, when general extensions of the game, with the quantum player having <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mrow><mi>U</mi><mo>(</mo><mn>2</mn><mo>)</mo></mrow></semantics></math></inline-formula> at their disposal, are considered, a necessary and sufficient condition for Q to surely win against Picard is established: Q must make both the first and the last move in the game.
School dropout is a global problem because economic and social development can be achieved only if it is sustained by people with a solid education. Lately, many young people aged between 18-24 years end up choosing a university specialization without knowing clearly what their professional expectations are for the future. At the European and national level, measures are constantly being taken to prevent university dropout. Although the average number of students dropping out between 18-24 years from 2005 to 2019 show a tendency to decrease, we can still see the lack of trust from young people in educational programs. In 27 of the studied countries, the number of men leaving the university programmes is higher than that of women. The increasing presence of women in university programs is possible due to the opportunities to combine successfully, family, professional and university life. Efforts to encourage lifelong learning are significant, in addition to national institutions and the European Council, organizations such as the European Association for Adult Education; the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO); International Education; the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) have joined forces with a well-defined agenda. The average number of adults participating in the learning process aged between 25-64 years in 28 European countries from 2005 to 2019 grow with 2.79%. The highest values are recorded in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and the United Kingdom because education for them is a landmark. Countries such as Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Slovakia and Croatia need to review their educational policies because the low values show a lack of trust in the system. The confidence of Austrian adults in the quality of university education is demonstrated by the high number of participants. With a rich educational history nowadays, Italy is struggling to engage adults in the educational process. Although 2019 has been beneficial for lifelong learning, we must not forget that it is an ongoing process. European countries want that in the XXI century adult education became an integral part of people’s lives.
Santanu Saha, Simone Di Cataldo, Maximilian Amsler
et al.
In this work we probe the possibility of high-temperature conventional superconductivity in the boron-carbon system, using ab-initio screening. A database of 320 metastable structures with fixed composition (50$\%$/50$\%$) is generated with the Minima-Hopping method, and characterized with electronic and vibrational descriptors. Full electron-phonon calculations on sixteen representative structures allow to identify general trends in $T_{\textrm{c}}$ across and within the four families in the energy landscape, and to construct an approximate $T_{\textrm{c}}$ predictor, based on transparently interpretable and easily computable electronic and vibrational descriptors. Based on these, we estimate that around 10$\%$ of all metallic structures should exhibit $T_{\textrm{c}}$'s above 30 $K$. This work is a first step towards ab-initio design of new high-$T_{\textrm{c}}$ superconductors.
Kimberley Miner, Laura Meyerson, . Climate Change Institute
et al.
Mediterranean ecosystems such as those found in California, Central Chile, Southern Europe, and Southwest Australia host numerous, diverse, fire-adapted micro-ecosystems. These micro-ecosystems are as diverse as mountainous conifer to desert-like chaparral communities. Over the last few centuries, human intervention, invasive species, and climate warming have drastically affected the composition and health of Mediterranean ecosystems on almost every continent. Increased fuel load from fire suppression policies and the continued range expansion of non-native insects and plants, some driven by long-term drought, produced the deadliest wildfire season on record in 2018. As a consequence of these fires, a large number of structures are destroyed, releasing household chemicals into the environment as uncontrolled toxins. The mobilization of these materials can lead to health risks and disruption in both human and natural systems. This article identifies drivers that led to a structural weakening of the mosaic of fire-adapted ecosystems in California, and subsequently increased the risk of destructive and explosive wildfires throughout the state. Under a new climate regime, managing the impacts on systems moving out-of-phase with natural processes may protect lives and ensure the stability of ecosystem services.
As the History of Science Society, which is based in America, holds its annual meeting in Utrecht, one of the key academic centers on the European continent, one may surmise that the field has returned home. Yet, this hardly reflects how today's world of scholarship is constituted: in the historiography of science, 'provincializing Europe' has become an important theme, while the field itself, as is the case across the world of academia, is centered around a predominantly American literature. At the same time, ever since historians of science have emancipated themselves from the sciences a long time ago, they often have appeared, in the public eye, to question rather than to seek to bolster the authority of the sciences. How has this situation come about, and what does it tell us about the world we live in today? What insight is sought and what public benefit is gained by the historical study of science? As we try to answer these questions, we will follow a number of key mid-twentieth century historians--Eduard Dijksterhuis, Thomas Kuhn and Martin Klein--in their Atlantic crossings. Their answers to debates on the constitution of the early modern scientific revolution or the novelty of the work of Max Planck will illustrate how notions of 'center' and 'periphery' have shifted--and what that may tell us about being 'in Europe' today.
Pride of place in this review goes undoubtedly to Sally Humphreys’ monumental study of kinship in ancient Athens. A work in progress for four decades, it is finally published in two volumes of almost 1,500 pages. The book's coverage is vast: the first volume focuses on interactions among kinsfolk (legal, social, economic, and ritual), while the second volume explores the various Athenian corporate groups which employed kinship as their organizing principle (phratries, gene, tribes, and trittyes) and provides an exhaustive discussion of kinship networks attested across all Athenian demes. As a result of its size and encyclopaedic coverage, I suspect that most readers will approach this work in a piecemeal fashion, looking for a particular phenomenon or searching for a particular kinship network; the lack of a detailed introduction or conclusions – features that would have been essential in a work of this size and ambition – does not help in this respect. But this work needs to be assessed as a whole, for three main reasons. The first is that households were the main organizing units of Athenian society, while most Athenian groups were organized on a kinship principle. Their roles were crucial, and they need to complement the social models of Athenian society we employ, alongside class and status. The second reason is that Humphreys makes a very good job of exploring the various contradictory tendencies at work in how Athenian kinship operated: the interests of male heads; of wives, children, and relatives; of wider kinship networks; and of the political community. The third is the combination of literary, epigraphic, and material evidence of Athenian kinship, which reveals in often impressive ways the contradictions and gaps of our various sources: not only will this work be essential reading for those working on Athenian oratory, archaeology, or economy, but its accumulated detail offers the basis for writing a novel history of Athenian society. Of course, a work gestated for forty years will also show the unavoidable flaws of its piecemeal construction; but these are largely of secondary importance, compared to the value of the end product.