Ricardo Fernandes, Alberto Alamia, Sina Kalweit
et al.
The electrification of energy demand across sectors, powered by solar and wind generation, is the best strategy for achieving carbon neutrality. Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) strategies are also expected to play a crucial role by providing net-negative emissions that can offset residual CO2 emissions, including those from cement manufacturing. While previous studies have assessed the role of CDRs in Europe's decarbonisation, most either focus solely on combinations of biogenic point-source capture and direct air capture (DAC) coupled with underground sequestration, or consider multiple CDR strategies at low spatial and temporal resolution, thereby limiting the representation of linkages amongst technologies. In this study, the sector-coupled European energy system model PyPSA-Eur is extended to include afforestation, perennialisation, biochar, and enhanced rock weathering (ERW) as additional CDR strategies. Using this model with a 3-hourly resolution and a network comprising 90 nodes, results show that a climate-neutral energy system equipped with these CDR strategies is 9% less expensive. Afforestation, perennialisation, and ERW potentials are fully utilised across regions, whereas biochar is not selected due to limited solid biomass feedstock being allocated to other higher-value processes. Furthermore, when these CDR strategies are combined with underground sequestration and a continental CO2 transport network, DAC is no longer required to achieve climate neutrality in Europe.
In recent decades, European forests have faced an increased incidence of fire disturbances. This phenomenon is likely to persist, given the rising frequency of extreme events expected in the future. Estimating canopy recovery time after disturbance serves as a critical assessment for understanding forest resilience, which can ultimately help determine the ability of forests to regain their capacity to provide essential ecosystem services. This study estimated fire severity and post-disturbance recovery in European forests using a remote sensing--based time series approach. MODIS Leaf Area Index (LAI) time series data were used to track the evolution of vegetation cover over burned areas from 2001 to 2024. Fire severity was defined relative to pre-disturbance conditions by comparing vegetation status before and after fire events. Recovery intervals were determined from temporal evolution of vegetation greening as the duration required to reach the pre-disturbance LAI baseline. Furthermore, this study analyzed the severity and recovery indicators in relation to forest species diversity and landscape heterogeneity metrics across Europe, offering valuable insights into the spatial variability of forest response dynamics across diverse forest ecosystems across Europe. Results revealed a consistent pattern across vegetation cover types: higher forest species diversity and greater landscape shape complexity were associated with lower fire severity and, notably, shorter recovery times following fire disturbance.
Mostafa Barani, Konstantin Löffler, Pedro Crespo del Granado
et al.
Europe is warming at the fastest rate of all continents, experiencing a temperature increase of about 1°C higher than the corresponding global increase. Aiming to be the first climate-neutral continent by 2050 under the European Green Deal, Europe requires an in-depth understanding of the potential energy transition pathways. In this paper, we develop four qualitative long-term scenarios covering the European energy landscape, considering key uncertainty pillars -- categorized under social, technological, economic, political, and geopolitical aspects. First, we place the scenarios in a three-dimensional space defined by Social dynamics, Innovation, and Geopolitical instabilities. These scenarios are brought to life by defining their narratives and focus areas according to their location in this three-dimensional space. The scenarios envision diverse futures and include distinct features. The EU Trinity scenario pictures how internal divisions among EU member states, in the context of global geopolitical instability, affect the EU climate targets. The REPowerEU++ scenario outlines the steps needed for a self-sufficient, independent European energy system by 2050. The Go RES scenario examines the feasibility of achieving carbon neutrality earlier than 2050 given favourable uncertain factors. The NECP Essentials scenario extends current national energy and climate plans until 2060 to assess their role in realizing climate neutrality. The scenarios are extended by incorporating policies and economic factors and detailed in a Qualitative to Quantitative (Q2Q) matrix, linking narratives to quantification. Finally, two scenarios are quantified to illustrate the quantification process. All the scenarios are in the process of being quantified and will be openly available and reusable.
Sara Si-Moussi, Stephan Hennekens, Sander Mücher
et al.
The EUNIS habitat classification is crucial for categorising European habitats, supporting European policy on nature conservation and implementing the Nature Restoration Law. To meet the growing demand for detailed and accurate habitat information, we provide spatial predictions for 260 EUNIS habitat types at hierarchical level 3, together with independent validation and uncertainty analyses. Using ensemble machine learning models, together with high-resolution satellite imagery and ecologically meaningful climatic, topographic and edaphic variables, we produced a European habitat map indicating the most probable EUNIS habitat at 100-m resolution across Europe. Additionally, we provide information on prediction uncertainty and the most probable habitats at level 3 within each EUNIS level 1 formation. This product is particularly useful for both conservation and restoration purposes. Predictions were cross-validated at European scale using a spatial block cross-validation and evaluated against independent data from France (forests only), the Netherlands and Austria. The habitat maps obtained strong predictive performances on the validation datasets with distinct trade-offs in terms of recall and precision across habitat formations.
Stanislas Rigal, Maxime Lenormand, Léa Tardieu
et al.
In response to increasing threats to biodiversity, conservation objectives have been set at national and international level, with the aim of halting biodiversity decline by reducing direct anthropogenic pressures on species. However, the potential effects of conservation policies derived from these objectives on common species remain rarely studied. Common species are often not the primary species targeted by conservation measures and can be distributed across a wide range of habitats that may be affected differently by these measures. We analyse the effect of a range of pressures related to climate, land use and land use intensity, on 263 common bird and 144 common butterfly species from more than 20,000 sites between 2000 and 2021 across 26 European countries. We use land-use and land-use-intensity change scenarios produced previously using the IPBES Nature Futures Framework to support the achievement of conservation objectives, as well as climate change scenarios in order to project the future of biodiversity pressures in Europe up to 2050. To project the future of common biodiversity in these scenarios, we translate these pressure changes into expected variations of abundances for all common bird and butterfly species, as well as for the multi-species indicators used to monitor common biodiversity status in Europe. The projected trends are improved, while still declining, for birds in particular farmland species under the scenarios that meet the conservation objectives, with few effects on butterflies. No scenario shows a stop or a reversal in the decline in abundance of bird and butterfly species that are currently common, on the time scale considered. Our results therefore call into question the fate of common biodiversity under the current conservation policies and the need for other anticipatory frameworks that do not implicitly require a growing need for natural resources.
Energy Efficiency Contracting (EEC) enables structural improvements in buildings by financing upgrades through the savings generated, eliminating the need for upfront investment by property owners. Although the model supports the energy transition and the reduction in GHG emissions, its adoption in the private sector faces relevant barriers such as the lack of information from the Energy Service Companies (ESCOs), distrust from clients in benefits with no upfront costs, and legal and behavioral barriers. To overcome these challenges, the FinSESCo platform, funded by Era-Net 2020 joint call, aims to channel private investments into building renovations and renewable energy installations via a crowdfunding portal. The platform allows individuals and organizations to finance small-scale renewable energy installations and energy efficiency measures for homeowners, tenants, and apartment owners. The new platform is likely to change the way EE investments are made and reach out to new audiences. A survey of 2585 German households sought to understand the drivers of EE investments, factors affecting the decisions, and their relationships with several demographic variables. Using a stepwise backward regression model, the study found significant differences between traditional investors in EE and those who would use the FinSESCo platform. Low- and medium-income households were more likely to take up the platform, and previous renewable energy ownership, experience with EEC models, and knowledge of crowdfunding further raised willingness to participate. The results point to the potential of the FinSESCo platform to expand EEC to new audiences, underlining its role of democratization and diversification of investments in building energy efficiency.
Matthew A. Bershady, Kyle B. Westfall, Shravan Shetty
et al.
We measure the age-velocity relationship from the lag between ionized gas and stellar tangential speeds in ~500 nearby disk galaxies from MaNGA in SDSS-IV. Selected galaxies are kinematically axisymmetric. Velocity lags are asymmetric drift, seen in the Milky Way's (MW) solar neighborhood and other Local Group galaxies; their amplitude correlates with stellar population age. The trend is qualitatively consistent in rate (d(sigma)/dt) with a simple power-law model where sigma is proportional to t^b that explains the dynamical phase-space stratification in the solar neighborhood. The model is generalized based on disk dynamical times to other radii and other galaxies. We find in-plane radial stratification parameters sigma_(0,r} (dispersion of the youngest populations) in the range of 10-40 km/s and 0.2<b_r<0.5 for MaNGA galaxies. Overall b_r increases with galaxy mass, decreases with radius for galaxies above 10.4 dex (M_solar) in stellar mass, but is ~constant with radius at lower mass. The measurement scatter indicates the stratification model is too simple to capture the complexity seen in the data, unsurprising given the many possible astrophysical processes that may lead to stellar population dynamical stratification. Nonetheless, the data show dynamical stratification is broadly present in the galaxy population, with systematic trends in mass and density. The amplitude of the asymmetric drift signal is larger for the MaNGA sample than the MW, and better represented in the mean by what is observed in the disks of M31 and M33. Either typical disks have higher surface-density or, more likely, are dynamically hotter (hence thicker) than the MW.
The onset and the development of the concept of exchange force in quantum physics are historically reconstructed, starting from Heisenberg's seminal contributions in 1926 and going through the great developments in nuclear physics, which allowed the emergence of the idea of force mediating virtual quanta. Although most of such work was performed in Europe, the last and decisive effort in this long path was carried out by Japanese scientists in the 1930s. This is the main focus of the present work, which retraces the achievements of Yukawa and Tomonaga, whose results and mutual interactions are carefully analyzed and related to those of European physicists.
Sabyasachi Chattopadhyay, Matthew A. Bershady, David R. Law
et al.
We have re-observed $\rm\sim$40 low-inclination, star-forming galaxies from the MaNGA survey ($\upsigma\sim65$~\kms) at $\sim$6.5 times higher spectral resolution ($\upsigma\sim10$~\kms) using the HexPak integral field unit on the WIYN 3.5m telescope. The aim of these observations is to calibrate MaNGA's instrumental resolution and to characterize turbulence in the warm interstellar medium and ionized galactic outflows. Here we report the results for the H$\rm\upalpha$ region observations as they pertain to the calibration of MaNGA's spectral resolution. Remarkably, we find that the previously-reported MaNGA line-spread-function (LSF) Gaussian width is systematically underestimated by only 1\%. The LSF increase modestly reduces the characteristic dispersion of HII regions-dominated spectra sampled at 1-2 kpc spatial scales from 23 to 20 km s$^{-1}$ in our sample, or a 25\% decrease in the random-motion kinetic energy. This commensurately lowers the dispersion zeropoint in the relation between line-width and star-formation rate surface-density in galaxies sampled on the same spatial scale. This modest zero-point shift does not appear to alter the power-law slope in the relation between line-width and star-formation rate surface-density. We also show that adopting a scheme whereby corrected line-widths are computed as the square root of the median of the difference in the squared measured line width and the squared LSF Gaussian avoids biases and allows for lower SNR data to be used reliably.
This paper addresses critical questions surrounding the security of government-issued identity documents and their potential misuse, with an emphasis on understanding the perspectives of ordinary citizens across Europe and the United States of America. Drawing upon research on technology acceptance and diffusion, the research focuses on understanding the factors that influence users' adoption of novel identity management solutions. Our methodology includes a comprehensive, census-representative survey spanning citizens from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the USA. The paper's findings underscore a robust confidence in government-issued identity documents, contrasted by a lower trust in private sector services, including social media platforms and email accounts. The adoption of artificial intelligence for identity verification remains contested, with a significant percentage of respondents undecided, indicating a need for explicit explanation and transparency about its implementation and related risks. Public sentiment leans towards acceptance of government data collection for identification purposes; however, the sharing of this data with private entities elicits more apprehension.
The article called Marking the 140th anniversary of prof. Dr. J. A. Schumpeter’s birth. The author describes Schumpeter’s scientific works his opinion on Marx’s theories of capitalism, as well as the deep humanism of this extraordinary man, reflected in his attitude towards the people of lower status in general. The article talks about Schumpeter’s theories on the role law in the case with the interplay between law and economy, the interrelationship between law and politics. In the context of democratic society, law appears as one of the most central mechanism to ensure that the participation of the populace in a state’s governance, as well as the outcome of government in the form of legislative decisions, abide by standards of democracy.
History (General) and history of Europe, History of Law
Open access to scientific publications has progressively become a key issue for European policy makers, resulting in concrete measures by the different country members to promote its development. The aim of paper is, after providing a quick overview of OA policies in Europe, to carry out a comparative study of OA practices within European countries, using data from the Web of Science (WoS) database. This analysis is based on two indicators: the OA share that illustrates the evolution over time, and the normalized OA indicator (NOAI) that allows spatial comparisons, taking into account disciplinary structures of countries. Results show a general trend towards the development of OA over time as expected, but with large disparities between countries, depending on how early they begin taking measures in favor of OA. While it is possible to stress the importance of policy and its influence on open access at country level, this does not appear to be the case at the regional level. There is not much variability between regions, within the same country, in terms of open access indicators.
Magnetic topological states refer to a class of exotic phases in magnetic materials with their non-trivial topological property determined by magnetic spin configurations. An example of such states is the quantum anomalous Hall (QAH) state, which is a zero magnetic field manifestation of the quantum Hall effect. Current research in this direction focuses on QAH insulators with a thickness of less than 10nm. The thick QAH insulators in the three-dimensional(3D) regime are limited, largely due to inevitable bulk carriers being introduced in thick magnetic TI samples. Here, we employ molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) to synthesize magnetic TI trilayers with a thickness of up to ~106 nm. We find these samples exhibit well-quantized Hall resistance and vanishing longitudinal resistance at zero magnetic field. By varying magnetic dopants, gate voltages, temperature, and external magnetic fields, we examine the properties of these thick QAH insulators and demonstrate the robustness of the 3D QAH effect. The realization of the well-quantized 3D QAH effect indicates that the nonchiral side surface states of our thick magnetic TI trilayers are gapped and thus do not affect the QAH quantization. The 3D QAH insulators of hundred-nanometer thickness provide a promising platform for the exploration of fundamental physics, including axion physics and image magnetic monopole, and the advancement of electronic and spintronic devices to circumvent Moore's law.
This work presents an analysis of the measures adopted by leading democratic countries in response to the COVID-19 emergency, and the compatibility issues that arose between these measures and the guarantees of the rule of law. The global and simultaneous scope of this serious emergency facilitates comparative analysis and reveals their advantages and their shortcomings. The aim of the article is to evaluate the various extra-constitutional methods employed in response to the exception as well as the state of exception model, based on the regulation of extraordinary situations and the measures to be adopted. Lastly, the analysis focuses on the contradictions that have arisen as a consequence of the use and non-use of the state of exception model in the response to COVID-19 in Europe.
Law, Law in general. Comparative and uniform law. Jurisprudence
The paper follows the development of the notary profession in Venice in the production of private deeds (instrumenta) and public acts (acta). In the Middle Ages, both activities were performed by the clergy. With the advent of the Commune, a Chancery was instituted to archive separately the acta, as well as the instrumenta. A lay Great Chancellor organised clerks who were members of the clergy, and they also wrote private deeds. As the requirements of the notarial activity became stricter, a policy of careful selection was implemented. The two fields of the notarial activity began to differentiate. In 1433, a papal bull forbade priests to work as clerks in secular institutions. It marked the beginning of a turnover in the Chancery staff, the new clerks being chosen among laymen. Close control was kept on Venetian citizenship as the main requisite to access Chancery posts. Similar criteria were applied to private notaries: after some successful tests, in 1514 a procedure for admission to the profession, and a College of Notaries, were finally instituted.
Sumario: I. Introducción.—II. Primera parte. Los desarrollos jurisprudenciales del derecho de la Unión Europea. 1. El poder judicial en la Unión Europea: independencia y diálogo con el Tribunal de Justicia: a) La independencia de los jueces nacionales: las deficiencias en Rumanía y en Polonia b) La suspensión parcial del litigio principal y la cuestión prejudicial. 2. Los desarrollos de la Carta de los derechos fundamentales: a) La protección de los datos personales en el ámbito penal. b) La motivación de la autorización de escuchas telefónicas: sentencia HYA. c) La protección de los profesores por videoconferencia: sentencia Comité del Personal Docente de Hesse. d) La protección de datos personales en el proceso civil: sentencia Norra Stockholm Bygg. e) La independencia del delegado de protección de datos: sentencia X-FAB Dresden. 3. El espacio de libertad, seguridad y justicia. 4. La realización del mercado único europeo y las políticas europeas: a) El dieselgate y la sentencia Mercedes-Benz Group AG. b) Lucha contra la morosidad en las operaciones comerciales y efecto directo de las directivas: sentencia ALD Automotive. c) La armonización fiscal: el IVA. d) La protección de los consumidores en los viajes combinados durante la pandemia. e) La protección del medio ambiente y los efectos en el ámbito judicial.—III. Segunda parte. La jurisprudencia europea provocada por los jueces españoles y sus efectos en el derecho interno. 1. La confianza mutua en el espacio judicial europeo: sentencia Puig Gordi y otros. 2. La realización del mercado interior europeo: medicamentos, transporte urbano y contratación pública: a) Licencias de transporte urbano, taxis y VTC. b) La regulación administrativa de los medicamentos. c) La contratación y las Administraciones. 3. La aplicación en España del Derecho europeo de la competencia: a) La Directiva de daños por infracción del Derecho de la competencia: auto Deutsche Bank. b) La indemnización de los daños producidos: sentencia Repsol. c) El cártel de los camiones: sentencia Tráficos Manuel Ferrer y auto Dalarjo. 4. Las cláusulas abusivas: sentencia Caixabank y la comisión de apertura de un préstamo con garantía hipotecaria. 5. La interpretación de las directivas de armonización fiscal.—IV. Relación de las sentencias comentadas.
Background: Nowadays, a lot of food products are produced in large quantities in factories. Milk and its derivatives are among the most important and well-known things that may be mentioned. Due to the industrialization of many nations, heavy metals are regarded as the most significant contaminants and have an impact on the presence of these substances in milk and dairy products. The toxicity of different heavy metals on human health, as well as their sources in milk and other dairy products are all represented in the current review paper, which focuses on methodologies and regulatory constraints for heavy metals in milk. The study also examines the frequency of heavy metals detected in milk samples from Iraq, a few other nations in Asia, South America, the United States, and Africa, as well as a few instances from Europe. strategies to lessen the number of heavy metals in milk and its products or stop them from contaminating such foods.
Conclusion: Heavy metals have several health risks. Heavy metal exposure is especially prevalent in young age and the elderly due to milk drinking. Due to rapid industrialization and urbanization, law enforcement, and less restrictions, developing countries have high heavy metal levels in milk. Wealthy countries have less heavy metal pollution. Milk samples had significant lead and cadmium levels, requiring strict environmental and health protections.
Chromatic dispersion is a common problem to degrade the system resolution in optical coherence tomography (OCT). This study is to develop a deep learning network for automated dispersion compensation (ADC-Net) in OCT. The ADC-Net is based on a redesigned UNet architecture which employs an encoder-decoder pipeline. The input section encompasses partially compensated OCT B-scans with individual retinal layers optimized. Corresponding output is a fully compensated OCT B-scans with all retinal layers optimized. Two numeric parameters, i.e., peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index metric computed at multiple scales (MS-SSIM), were used for objective assessment of the ADC-Net performance. Comparative analysis of training models, including single, three, five, seven and nine input channels were implemented. The five-input channels implementation was observed as the optimal mode for ADC-Net training to achieve robust dispersion compensation in OCT