Pascal Meurer, Sebastian Buschow, Svenja Szemkus
et al.
The increasing occurrence of extreme weather events since the beginning of the 21st century has led to the development of new methods to attribute extreme events to anthropogenic climate change. How the extreme event is defined has a major influence on the attribution result. A frequently disregarded or evaded aspect concerns the temporal dependence and the clustering of extremes. This study presents an approach for attributing complete time series during extreme events to anthropogenic forcing. The approach is based on a non-stationary Markov process using bivariate extreme value theory to model the temporal dependence of the time series. We calculate the likelihood ratio of an observational time series from ERA5 given the distributions as estimated from CMIP6 simulations with historical natural-only and natural and anthropogenic forcing scenarios. The spatial fields are condensed by the extremal pattern index as a compact description of spatial extremes. In addition, the study examines the extent to which attribution statements about the occurrence of extreme heat events change when the effect of the mean warming is eliminated. The resulting attribution statement provides very strong evidence for the scenario with anthropogenic drivers over Europe, especially since the beginning of the 21st century. For central and southern Europe, the influence of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions on heatwaves could already have been proven in the 1970s using today's methods. There is no reliable signal apart from a general increase in temperature, neither in terms of the temporal dependence of extreme heat days nor in terms of the shape of the extreme value distribution.
Melanie Wasmuth, Tero Alstola , Rotem Avneri Meir
et al.
Empires and kingship are long-standing topics of research in ancient Near Eastern studies; the study of queenship has gradually received more attention over recent decades. However, discussions of the social implications of kingship and queenship, comparisons of the gender roles, and their study across several empires remain rare. The paper at hand takes the unprecedented step of such a comparative analysis by tracing a specific detail of royal ideology, namely the presentation of the king and queen to the public as builders, across seven major Near Eastern empires following and/or interacting with each other throughout the first millennium BCE: the Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, Teispid-Achaemenid, Seleucid, Ptolemaic, Parthian, and Roman empires. Drawing on the available textual, material, and visual sources from the ancient contemporary contexts of each empire and from Classical reception history, we showcase the potential of a longue-durée comparison for the social institutions of kingship and of queenship, giving full attention and space also to the lesser known empires and the queens’ roles. To achieve this, we present first a synopsis of the key findings per empire and role, followed by a diachronic study of three aspects of gender comparison: concerning the empire-internal portfolios of king and queen, the joint presentation as a couple, and the question of how far the roles of king and queen mirror or complement each other. We conclude with some pertinent (albeit tentative) results on the features shared by some or all of the empires as well as their outstanding idiosyncracies.
This paper describes a cascading multimodal pipeline for high-resolution biodiversity mapping across Europe, integrating species distribution modeling, biodiversity indicators, and habitat classification. The proposed pipeline first predicts species compositions using a deep-SDM, a multimodal model trained on remote sensing, climate time series, and species occurrence data at 50x50m resolution. These predictions are then used to generate biodiversity indicator maps and classify habitats with Pl@ntBERT, a transformer-based LLM designed for species-to-habitat mapping. With this approach, continental-scale species distribution maps, biodiversity indicator maps, and habitat maps are produced, providing fine-grained ecological insights. Unlike traditional methods, this framework enables joint modeling of interspecies dependencies, bias-aware training with heterogeneous presence-absence data, and large-scale inference from multi-source remote sensing inputs.
Emile Esmaili, Michael J. Puma, Francis Ludlow
et al.
Economic historians have long studied market integration and contagion dynamics during periods of warfare and global stress, but there is a lack of model-based evidence on these phenomena. This paper uses an econometric contagion model, the Diebold-Yilmaz framework, to examine the dynamics of economic shocks across European markets in the early modern period. Our findings suggest that key periods of violent conflicts significantly increased food price spillover across cities, causing widespread disruptions across Europe. We also demonstrate the ability of this framework to capture relevant historical dynamics between the main trade centers of the period.
This paper proposes a two blocks and three regions economic geography model that can account for the most salient stylized facts experienced by Eastern European transition economies during the period 1990 2005. In contrast to the existing literature, which has favored technological explanations, trade liberalization is the only driving force. The model correctly predicts that in the first half of the period, trade liberalization led to divergence in GDP per capita, both between the West and the East and within the East. Consistent with the data, in the second half of the period, this process was reversed and convergence became the dominant force.
In traditional medical practices, music therapy has proven effective in treating various psychological and physiological ailments. Particularly in Eastern traditions, the Five Elements Music Therapy (FEMT), rooted in traditional Chinese medicine, possesses profound cultural significance and unique therapeutic philosophies. With the rapid advancement of Information Technology and Artificial Intelligence, applying these modern technologies to FEMT could enhance the personalization and cultural relevance of the therapy and potentially improve therapeutic outcomes. In this article, we developed a music therapy system for the first time by applying the theory of the five elements in music therapy to practice. This innovative approach integrates advanced Information Technology and Artificial Intelligence with Five-Element Music Therapy (FEMT) to enhance personalized music therapy practices. As traditional music therapy predominantly follows Western methodologies, the unique aspects of Eastern practices, specifically the Five-Element theory from traditional Chinese medicine, should be considered. This system aims to bridge this gap by utilizing computational technologies to provide a more personalized, culturally relevant, and therapeutically effective music therapy experience.
Ekaterina V. Doronicheva, Liubov V. Golovanova, Vladimir B. Doronichev
et al.
Neanderthals were widespread during the Middle Palaeolithic (MP) across Europe and Asia, including the Caucasus Mountains. Occupying the border between eastern Europe and West Asia, the Caucasus is important region regarding the Neanderthal occupation of Eurasia. On current radiometric estimates, the MP is represented in the Caucasus between about 260–210 ka and about 40 ka. Archaeological record indicates that several culture diverse MP hominin populations inhabited the Caucasus, but the region complex population history during this period remains poorly understood. In this paper, we identify for the first time the archaeological evidence indicating contacts between two culture diverse MP Neanderthal populations in the North Caucasus and discuss the nature of these contacts. Basing on the lithic assemblages that we excavated at Mezmaiskaya cave in the north-western Caucasus (Kuban River basin) and Saradj-Chuko grotto in the north-central Caucasus (Terek River basin), dating from MIS 5 to MIS 3, and comparative data from other MP sites in the Caucasus, we identify two large cultural regions that existed during the late MP in the North Caucasus. The distinctive toolkits and stone knapping technologies indicate that the MP assemblages from Mezmaiskaya cave and other sites in the west of North Caucasus represent a Caucasian variant of the Eastern Micoquian industry that was wide spread in central and eastern Europe, while the assemblages from Saradj-Chuko Grotto and other sites in the east of North Caucasus closely resemble the Zagros Mousterian industry that was wide spread in the Armenian Highlands, Lesser Caucasus and Zagros Mountains. The archaeological evidence implies that two culture diverse populations of Neanderthals settled the North Caucasus during the Late Pleistocene from two various source regions: from the Armenian Highlands and Lesser Caucasus along the Caspian Sea coast, and from Russian plain along the Sea of Azov coast.
This article deals with the interpretation of toponyms and archaeological materials from early medieval Lesser Poland that may be associated with the Hungarians or the Khazar Kabars. So far, they have most often been interpreted as traces of invasions by Hungarians – nomads (single monuments) or the operations of watchtowers they established to control the passes through the Carpathians and subjugated the local Slavic population (the so-called Old Magyar cemetery in Przemyśl) in the late 9th and
1st half of the 10th century. It could have been related to their participation in the armed squads of the Piasts or the Rurikiviks, the activities of Hungarian merchants or prisoner-of-war settlements. The dating and interpreting the so-called Old Magyar cemetery in Przemyśl remains an open issue until it is fully developed and the results published.
History of Eastern Europe, History of Central Europe
On 26 April 1986, the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Soviet Ukraine led to a massive disaster, the consequences of which affected millions of people in northern and eastern Europe. Today, 35 years later, we recall it not only as one of the greatest catastrophes in the history of nuclear power but also as one of the main political preconditions or factors that led to the end of the USSR. This paper presents the initial stage of a comparative study on the memories of this disastrous event among Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians, and Bulgarians living on the periphery of the affected zone. The aim is to trace diverse aspects of public reflection in connection with people’s awareness and the degree to which they were affected, the reactions to the disaster, its effects and consequences, the preparedness of the population, and the latter’s assessment of post-disaster management.
History (General) and history of Europe, Political science
Max Brauer, Rafael J. Vicente, Jaime S. Buruaga
et al.
Quantum-key-distribution (QKD) networks are gaining importance and it has become necessary to analyze the most appropriate methods for their long-distance interconnection. In this paper, four different methods of interconnecting remote QKD networks are proposed. The methods are used to link three different QKD testbeds in Europe, located in Berlin, Madrid, and Poznan. Although long-distance QKD links are only emulated, the used methods can serve as a blueprint for a secure interconnection of distant QKD networks in the future. Specifically, the presented approaches combine, in a transparent way, different fiber and satellite physical media, as well as common standards of key-delivery interfaces. The testbed interconnections are designed to increase the security by utilizing multipath techniques and multiple hybridizations of QKD and post quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms.
The war in Ukraine seems to have positively changed the attitude toward the critical societal topic of migration in Europe -- at least towards refugees from Ukraine. We investigate whether this impression is substantiated by how the topic is reflected in online news and social media, thus linking the representation of the issue on the Web to its perception in society. For this purpose, we combine and adapt leading-edge automatic text processing for a novel multilingual stance detection approach. Starting from 5.5M Twitter posts published by 565 European news outlets in one year, beginning September 2021, plus replies, we perform a multilingual analysis of migration-related media coverage and associated social media interaction for Europe and selected European countries. The results of our analysis show that there is actually a reframing of the discussion illustrated by the terminology change, e.g., from "migrant" to "refugee", often even accentuated with phrases such as "real refugees". However, concerning a stance shift in public perception, the picture is more diverse than expected. All analyzed cases show a noticeable temporal stance shift around the start of the war in Ukraine. Still, there are apparent national differences in the size and stability of this shift.
The Chronicle “Tarikh-i Mehmed Geray” (1682–1703) by the Crimean Tatar historiographer Dervish Mehmed bin Mubarek Geray Genghisi is the narrative source reflecting the history of the Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman state in 1682–1703. The date of the work is 1703 (completed in the month of Rejeb 1115). A copy of the chronicle has been preserved in the funds of the Austrian National Library (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek) under the cipher (inventory number) No. 1080, Cod. H.O.86 HAN MAG. Volume (folio) – 125 sheets in taalik script, sheets are small. There are verses on 125 sheets. The manuscript is not marked with the title, but has an appraisal prescript: “Tarih-i Mehmed Geray Qara Mustafa Paşa cenklerin söyler üçünci Sultan Mehmed Han vaqtlarından Sultan Ahmed Han biñ yüz on beş tarihınacek söyler bir maqbul tarihdır” / “Mehmed Tarikh-i Mehmed Geray narrating about the wars of Kara Mustafa Pasha, the acceptable story telling from the time of Sultan Mehmed Khan III to the period of Sultan Ahmed Khan, up to the year one thousand one hundred and fifteen”.
The Chronicle’s translation into Russian (the author of the translation is R.R. Abduzhemilev) was made from the text’s transliteration of the manuscript into Latin, presented in the Turkish edition of Ugur Demir’s master thesis “Tarikh-i Mehmed Giray” (assessment – text’s transcription) ”(consultant: Prof. Dr. Nejdet Öztürk, Istanbul, 2006, 163 pages).
The aim of the present work is analysing and understanding the dynamics of the prices of companies, depending on whether they are included or excluded from the STOXX Europe 600 Index. For this reason, data regarding the companies of the Index in question was collected and analysed also through the use of logit models and neural networks in order to find the independent variables that affect the changes in prices and thus determine the dynamics over time.
Alain Aspect's three experiments on Bell's theorem, published in the early 1980s, were a turning point in the history of the research on the foundations of quantum mechanics not only because they corroborated entanglement as the distinctive quantum signature but also because these experiments brought wider recognition to this field of research and Aspect himself. These experiments may be considered the most direct precursors of the research on quantum information, which would blossom a decade later.
Projected changes in summer precipitation deficits partly depend on alterations in synoptic circulations. Here, the automated Jenkinson-Collison (JC) classification is used to assess the ability of twenty-one Global Climate Models (GCMs) to capture the frequency of recurring circulation types (CTs) and their implications for European daily precipitation intensities in summer (JJA). The ability of the GCMs to reproduce the observed present-day climate features is first evaluated. Most GCMs capture the observed links between mean directional flow characteristics of the CTs, and the occurrence of dry days and related dry months. The most robust relationships are found for anticyclonic and easterly CTs which are generally associated with higher than average occurrences of dry conditions. Future changes in summer frequencies of the CTs are estimated in the high-emissions SSP5-8.5 scenario for the sake of a high signal-to-noise ratio. Our results reveal consistent changes, mainly in the zonal CTs. A robust decrease in frequency of the westerlies and increase in the frequency of easterly CTs favour more continental, dry and warm air masses over Central Europe. These dynamical changes are shown to enhance the projected summer drying over central and southern Europe.
Стаття присвячена розгляду низки питань соціальної структури Ольвійського полісу.
Першим із них є ступінь соціального розшарування в Ольвії, починаючи з кінця VI – початку V ст. до н.е.
Другим питанням є проблема економічної бази, на якій будувала свій вплив ольвійська аристократія. Аналізується її торгівельна діяльність і землеволодіння.
Окремим аспектом соціальної історії Ольвії є поширення рабовласницьких відносин. Епіграфічні пам’ятки демонструють залучення рабської праці у різні сфери життя полісу. Фіксується також вивіз рабів на зовнішні ринки.
Strelko, Oleh, Berdnychenko, Yuliia , Pylypchuk, Oleh
This study aims to review the socio-political and economic preconditions of
creation and beginning of operation of main railways in Bukovina. The analysis of scientific and memoir literature, recollections, review of archival sources allowed establishing the fact that the problem of formation and beginning of operation of the network of railways in Bukovina of the Austro-Hungarian period was not a subject of systematic and integral investigation. It was shown that the idea of building railways in Bukovina was also in the political and socio-economic interests of Austria in the south-eastern region of Europe because by laying railways, the imperial government provided itself with a favourable strategic position in the region. Based on the results of the study, it was established that with the construction of the Lviv-Chernivtsi-Iași railway, railway communications came to first place in the Austrian-Hungarian Empire in terms of material, technical, defense and economic potential.
Invasive organisms represent great threats to ecosystems and great challenges to forest management. In Europe, the black timber bark beetle (Xylosandrus germanus) is an invasive secondary pest that mostly attacks the logs of felled trees. We showed the invasion history for Europe and using many local surveys, we summarize the current distribution and other available information on X. germanus in the Czech Republic. We report that this species is distributed from the lowlands to the mountains in the Czech Republic; it is widespread in the eastern half of the country, where it is more abundant in the warmer south and southeast areas than in the cooler areas. Most (78%) of the known localities are at elevation below 400 m a.s.l. Although an ice storm greatly increased X. germanus abundance near the border with Austria, its high abundance did not result in damage to standing trees. Presence of X. germanus in the Czech Republic for over 10 years has not led to heavy tree infestation.