As a form of princely entertainment, opera flourished at court between Mazarin’s ministry and the Regency, and was destined to continue throughout the eighteenth century. Not subject to formal constraints or the logic of profitability, this genre was performed in different places within royal residences, depending on the circumstances and purpose of the production: the Palais-Royal in Paris, the Châteaux de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Versailles and Fontainebleau. In the absence of an actual theatre designed to meet the technical needs of opera, which would not be built in Versailles until 1770 for the wedding of the future Louis XVI, these spaces were arranged and used in different ways, hosting operas given in the sung version only, or semi-scenic with costumes, or with decors and machines. The discussion will also extend to the question of preferred genres and performers in order to gain a better understanding of the specific nature of the repertoire performed at court. Taken together, these elements provide a perspective on the curial practices of opera production and reception.
This article examines the three translations of Nikolai Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveler published in nineteenth-century France. Relying on Descriptive Translation Studies so as to challenge the traditional narrative about the political innocuousness of Karamzin’s travelogue, it reconstructs the historical contexts of the three publications in order to highlight the political agendas of their translators and/or translating patrons. Far from being the innocent product of the translators’ sheer curiosity, the three translations prove to be political objects, used at three key moments in the history of Franco-Russian relations in the nineteenth century, in order to call for political change, to try and restore Russia’s damaged reputation, or to attempt to forge new diplomatic alliances.
History of Russia. Soviet Union. Former Soviet Republics
Navigation by scent is a capability in robotic systems that is rising in demand. However, current methods often suffer from ambiguities, particularly when robots misattribute odours to incorrect objects due to limitations in olfactory datasets and sensor resolutions. To address challenges in olfactory navigation, we introduce a multimodal olfaction dataset along with a novel machine learning method using diffusion-based molecular generation that can be used by itself or with automated olfactory dataset construction pipelines. This generative process of our diffusion model expands the chemical space beyond the limitations of both current olfactory datasets and training methods, enabling the identification of potential odourant molecules not previously documented. The generated molecules can then be more accurately validated using advanced olfactory sensors, enabling them to detect more compounds and inform better hardware design. By integrating visual analysis, language processing, and molecular generation, our framework enhances the ability of olfaction-vision models on robots to accurately associate odours with their correct sources, thereby improving navigation and decision-making through better sensor selection for a target compound in critical applications such as explosives detection, narcotics screening, and search and rescue. Our methodology represents a foundational advancement in the field of artificial olfaction, offering a scalable solution to challenges posed by limited olfactory data and sensor ambiguities. Code, models, and data are made available to the community at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/kordelfrance/olfaction-vision-language-dataset.
Quentin Jossart, Quentin Jossart, Yann Lelièvre
et al.
Sub-Antarctic islands are expected to show a high degree of endemicity due to their remoteness. However, biogeographic affinities in the sub-Antarctic remain poorly understood, especially in the marine realm. Sub-Antarctic islands being at the crossroads between Antarctic and cold temperate regions, biodiversity characterization and biogeographic analyses are a priority for monitoring and rapidly assessing variations associated with environmental changes. One underexplored sub-Antarctic area is Crozet, a protected archipelago located halfway between Antarctica and South Africa. In this study, we investigated the shallow-water Crozet macrofaunal diversity, distribution patterns and biogeographic affinities based on the examination of fieldwork specimens via a thorough morphological identification and a genetic characterisation. The resulting dataset provides an important baseline for further studies and conservation strategies, compiling the first genetic and taxonomic database for the Crozet archipelago. In total, 100 morphotypes were found, belonging to nine different phyla, among which arthropods (32), molluscs (18) and echinoderms (17) were the richest. Forty-seven morphotypes were identified to the species level, among which 20 were reported in Crozet for the first time. This confirms that Crozet is a poorly known region, even compared to other sub-Antarctic areas. A large proportion of species (62%) had circum Southern Ocean or circum sub-Antarctic distributions. These species were mostly shared with Kerguelen (72%), the Magellan Province (64%), and Prince Edward Islands (64%), confirming the patterns found in macroalgae and specific macrofaunal groups. However, this large-distribution statement needs to be counterbalanced by the detection (genetic data) of more restricted distributions than expected in four study cases (the tanaid Apseudes spectabilis, the nudibranch Doris kerguelenensis, the polychaete Neanthes kerguelensis and the chiton Hemiarthrum setulosum). Considering that most morphotypes had no genetic data available from other regions, the proportion of morphotypes with restricted distribution is likely to increase alongside future investigations. In addition, we also found a few cases of unrecognized diversity that might lead to the descriptions of new species, some likely to be endemic to Crozet (e.g., within the polychaete genus Harmothoe and the bryozoan genus Antarctothoa). Altogether, this stresses the need to maintain conservation efforts in Crozet and pursue integrative investigations in order to highlight and protect its unusual diversity.
Bernard Lathuilière, Danwei Huang, The Corallosphere Group
The morphology of stony corals (Scleractinia) remains the only means to reconstruct the most inclusive evolutionary history of the clade comprising both extant and extinct species. The definitions of morphological characters and their associated trait states are critical for assembling a dataset that could be analysed for phylogenetic reconstruction. Here, we present coral morphological data that consist of more than a hundred characters reviewed by the Corallosphere working group. These characters would eventually form the basis of a data matrix used to reconstruct the phylogeny of all extinct and extant scleractinian families. The initial results obtained by the working group comprise poorly resolved trees, which are biased by the complexity of the multiple character states and the multiplicity of researchers involved in the coding process. When the analysis is restricted to matrices consisting of families from the Triassic and Jurassic periods and coded by a single person, resolution increased, allowing for further exploration of various ingroups and outgroups. The results presented here represent analyses of (i) a data matrix with all families represented by their type genus; (ii) a data matrix with selected families represented by their solitary or phaceloid genera; (iii) a data matrix with only Triassic corals; (iv) a data matrix with only Jurassic corals; (v) a data matrix with Triassic and Jurassic corals; and (vi) data matrices with several outgroups. Well-resolved trees have been obtained in several cases. Phylogenetic rela-tionships among basal, robust and complex groups established using molecular data are discussed in the context of the morphological phylogeny obtained here.
Kevin France, Jason Tumlinson, Brian Fleming
et al.
NASA's Great Observatories Maturation Program (GOMAP) will advance the science definition, technology, and workforce needed for the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) with the goal of a Phase A start by the end of the current decade. GOMAP offers long-term cost and schedule savings compared to the 'TRL 6 by Preliminary Design Review' paradigm historically adopted by large NASA missions. Many of the key technologies in the development queue for HWO require the combined activities of 1) facility and process development for validation of technologies at the scale required for HWO and 2) deployment in the 'real world' environment of mission Integration & Test prior to on-orbit operations. We present a concept for the Smallsat Technology Accelerated Maturation Platform (STAMP), an integrated facility, laboratory, and instrument prototype development program that could be supported through the GOMAP framework and applied to any of NASA's Future Great Observatories (FGOs). This brief describes the recommendation for the first entrant into this program, "STAMP-1", an ESPA Grande-class mission advancing key technologies to enable the ultraviolet capabilities of HWO. STAMP-1 would advance new broadband optical coatings, high-sensitivity ultraviolet detector systems, and multi-object target selection technology to TRL 6 with a flight demonstration. STAMP-1 advances HWO technology on an accelerated timescale, building on current ROSES SAT+APRA programs, reducing cost and schedule risk for HWO while conducting a compelling program of preparatory science and workforce development with direct benefits for HWO mission implementation in the 2030s.
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.
This article makes links between travel literature, history of art and museology in André Malraux’s autofiction, Miroir des limbes, written in 1965, a founding text bringing together travel, aesthetics and museology. As a creator of the “imaginary museum” notion in 1947, Malraux is the forerunner of the Museum of Primitive Arts. In France, the Quai Branly is an exemplary model of the art of others. Defined by the writer as “the largest field of images known to mankind”, the Imaginary Museum is both a dialogue of civilisation and a dialogue of works between themselves.
This work evaluates the severity of COVID-19 Omicron variant in terms of the case-fatality-rates (CFR) with respective uncertainty intervals via a simultaneous fitting of confirmed cases and deaths in the USA, India, Brazil, France, Germany and United Kingdom. The CFRs were calculated combining Monte Carlo simulations and analytical methods based on Gompertz functions under the framework of the Least Square Method and assuming that the deaths can be described by a convolution of the confirmed cases with a common gamma function to describe the case to death period. Linear backgrounds both for cases and deaths were included in the fitting to account for the contributions from other strains within the Omicron peaks. The fitting included 125 and 113 epidemiological weeks, for cases and deaths, respectively, and 64 parameters, resulting in a chi^2 of 176.5 for 174 degrees of freedom (p = 0.434). The CFRs with 95% confidence intervals for USA, India, Brazil, France, Germany and United Kingdom were 0.295 (0.154-0.436)%, 0.232 (0.134-0.331)%, 0.49 (0.27-0.71)%, 0.056 (0.028-0.084)%, 0.129 (0.074-0.184)% and 0.168 (0.107-0.229)%, respectively. The case to death period was satisfactorily described by a common gamma function with mean of 15.71 +/- 0.55 days and coefficient of variation of 0.354 +/- 0.070. The proposed calculations provided accurate and reliable information about the respective CFRs and the case to death period, the latter being consistent with previous estimates for the symptom onset to death made in the early stages of the pandemic. The CFRs thus obtained are considerably lower than previous measurements available in the literature, suggesting that the latter may have been overestimated, as the probability of deaths from other strains of the virus under the generally prominent Omicron peak, here accounted for in terms of linear backgrounds, was not considered.
Maria Luisa Barrigon, Antonio Artes, Mercedes Perez-Rodriguez
et al.
Introduction Suicide is one of the leading public health issues worldwide. Mobile health can help us to combat suicide through monitoring and treatment. The SmartCrisis V.2.0 randomised clinical trial aims to evaluate the effectiveness of a smartphone-based Ecological Momentary Intervention to prevent suicidal thoughts and behaviour.Methods and analysis The SmartCrisis V.2.0 study is a randomised clinical trial with two parallel groups, conducted among patients with a history of suicidal behaviour treated at five sites in France and Spain. The intervention group will be monitored using Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) and will receive an Ecological Momentary Intervention called ‘SmartSafe’ in addition to their treatment as usual (TAU). TAU will consist of mental health follow-up of the patient (scheduled appointments with a psychiatrist) in an outpatient Suicide Prevention programme, with predetermined clinical appointments according to the Brief Intervention Contact recommendations (1, 2, 4, 7 and 11 weeks and 4, 6, 9 and 12 months). The control group would receive TAU and be monitored using EMA.Ethics and dissemination This study has been approved by the Ethics Committee of the University Hospital Fundación Jiménez Díaz. It is expected that, in the near future, our mobile health intervention and monitoring system can be implemented in routine clinical practice. Results will be disseminated through peer-reviewed journals and psychiatric congresses. Reference number EC005-21_FJD. Participants gave informed consent to participate in the study before taking part.Trial registration number NCT04775160.
In October 1534 and January 1535, placards were posted in French cities attacking the Mass, prompting official backlash and altering the course of the Christian Reformations in France. This paper argues that the response to the posting of the placards expressed a specifically Gallic anxiety about the popularization of sacramentarian critiques of the Mass and the Eucharist. France's history of sacral kingship and Gallican independence from the papacy were the key contexts and causes of the official response to the posting of the placards, which affirmed the importance of Eucharistic devotion in the political theology of early modern France and transferred heresy prosecutions to secular courts. Focusing on three key responses – the royal processional in January 1535, the empowering of secular courts to prosecute "seditious" heresy, and the defense of the Mass by the Sorbonne theologian Jérôme de Hangest, I argue that the responses to the posting of the placards reflected an understanding and fear of popular receptions of sacramentarian arguments and the threat they posed to the political, social, and institutional cohesion of the early modern French nation-state. The placards both reflected and mobilized a nationalist identification of a sacred and secular nation with the state headed by the monarch charged with protecting the nation.
Symeon Lechareas, Kaji Sritharan, R. G. Mc Williams
Abstract Background Chronic limb-threatening ischaemia (CLTI) in cases where there are no further standard treatment options for limb salvage represents the most advanced stage of peripheral arterial disease. For these “no-option” CLTI patients, an experimental treatment of foot vein arterialisation (FVA) was first described in 1912, however, it was never widely adopted as outcomes varied significantly most likely due to the complexity of the surgical intervention and lack of standardisation. In recent years there have been significant developments in performing FVA fully percutaneously and standardising the procedure with the introduction of specific indications for patient selection, a dedicated set of devices and structured follow up. This case represents the first UK use of the dedicated LimFlow System as a standardised procedure to perform percutaneous deep vein arterialisation (pDVA) in a “no option” CLTI patient according to the latest treatment recommendations in the literature, with outcomes out to 18 months post-procedure. Case presentation We present the case of a 78 year old male diabetic patient with a history of contralateral below knee amputation who presented with ischaemic rest pain and dry gangrene involving his left heel and first and second toes. Following review by the lower limb multi-disciplinary team at our institution, the patient was deemed to have no surgical or endovascular treatment options, apart from major amputation, as there was no suitable target for either angioplasty or bypass. He was therefore referred as a candidate for percutaneous deep vein arterialisation (pDVA) with the LimFlow System (LimFlow SA, France). After screening of the patient according to the indications for use, the pDVA procedure was successfully performed resulting in complete resolution of ischaemic rest pain immediately following the procedure, and adequate revascularisation of the foot. Following the index procedure, the subject went on to have minor amputation of the first, second and third toes 2 months post initial procedure with further secondary angioplasty procedures to optimise the flow throughout the arterialised circuit up to 4 months after the initial procedure. He underwent elective completion transmetatarsal amputation at 13 months post index procedure. The surgical wounds post minor amputation and the heel wound showed continued healing, especially after secondary optimisation of the pDVA outflow, with tissue epithelialisation by 6 months and complete healing by 18 months after the index procedure. Conclusions This case report demonstrates the clinical outcomes of a technically-successful standardised pDVA procedure with the LimFlow system including both limb salvage and wound healing at 18 months. It also highlights the importance of close clinical and radiological surveillance post-index procedure and the requirement for re-interventions to optimise wound healing.
Diseases of the circulatory (Cardiovascular) system
The aim of the work is to review the results of the search, study, systematization as well as prospects of publishing the collection of letters between Ahatanhel Krymskyi and Volodymyr Minorskyi. The research methodology is based on the combination of such methods of historical research, as comparative, chronological, bibliographic, archival, as well as source study. The scientific novelty of the work is that such archival documents as letters are analyzed and put into scientific circulation for the first time, because the life and academic legacy of the outstanding representatives of the classical Oriental studies - Ahatanhel Krymskyi (1871-1942), and his student, Volodymyr Minorskyi (1877-1966), reflect not only the personal events in their biographies but also landmarks in the history of the research of the Islamic East from all over the world. During the time, when they visited Russia, Ukraine, Iran, France and Britain, the two researchers held correspondence with each other. The letters, written by Volodymyr Minorskyi during his diplomatic work in Persia, require specific attention. The Institute of Manuscript of the V. I. Vernadskyi National Library of Ukraine contains a collection of letters from Volodymyr Minorskyi to Ahatanhel Krymskyi (fond XXXVI). It includes 23 letters, which were written during the period from 1904 to 1911. Fond I also contains 16 postcards and photos, which Minorskyi sent to Krymskyi from the East (Persepolis, Tabriz, Agra, Makkah). It is not known, how these photos were taken. It is likely, that Volodymyr Minorskyi sent them to his brother Mykola, who later became a marine officer and famous scholar. Several letters, addressed to Koka (Mykola), can also be found in Fond I. These letters from Maku and Tabriz (1905) were typewritten. Volodymyr Minorskyi discribed his visits to Kurdistan in details on 28 pages. Later Krymskyi got the letters and photos and they were preserved in his archive. In his letters from Persia Volodymyr Minorskyi describes various aspects of the diplomatic work, his trips to Iran and Kurdistan, his colleagues at the mission and people, he met. Conclusions. The correspondence carried out between a teacher and a student, keeps the warmth of their relationship. Studying and publishing the collection of letters between them will open new horizons in the Oriental studies.
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.
Gilles Desplanque, Nicolas Garmond, Valentin Schneider
et al.
The unexpected discoveries of German prisoner of war camps from the Second World War at Bétheny (Marne) and Coyolles (Aisne) les raise many new questions concerning the care of German prisoners in France by the Allies starting in June 1944. Though similar discoveries have been made in France, these finds contribute to an emerging research domain.Analysis of the uncovered remains and the study of the equipment of the American army, and especially of the residual artifacts discarded by the prisoners, provide new information on a material cultural, certainly ephemeral, but nonetheless belonging to thousands of individuals, often young, touched by these poorly known episodes in the history of the Second World War.
Conversational question answering (ConvQA) is a simplified but concrete setting of conversational search. One of its major challenges is to leverage the conversation history to understand and answer the current question. In this work, we propose a novel solution for ConvQA that involves three aspects. First, we propose a positional history answer embedding method to encode conversation history with position information using BERT in a natural way. BERT is a powerful technique for text representation. Second, we design a history attention mechanism (HAM) to conduct a "soft selection" for conversation histories. This method attends to history turns with different weights based on how helpful they are on answering the current question. Third, in addition to handling conversation history, we take advantage of multi-task learning (MTL) to do answer prediction along with another essential conversation task (dialog act prediction) using a uniform model architecture. MTL is able to learn more expressive and generic representations to improve the performance of ConvQA. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model with extensive experimental evaluations on QuAC, a large-scale ConvQA dataset. We show that position information plays an important role in conversation history modeling. We also visualize the history attention and provide new insights into conversation history understanding.
All Hamiltonian complexity results to date have been proven by constructing a local Hamiltonian whose ground state -- or at least some low-energy state -- is a "computational history state", encoding a quantum computation as a superposition over the history of the computation. We prove that all history-state Hamiltonians must be critical. More precisely, for any circuit-to-Hamiltonian mapping that maps quantum circuits to local Hamiltonians with low-energy history states, there is an increasing sequence of circuits that maps to a growing sequence of Hamiltonians with spectral gap closing at least as fast as O(1/n) with the number of qudits n in the circuit. This result holds for very general notions of history state, and also extends to quasi-local Hamiltonians with exponentially-decaying interactions. This suggests that QMA-hardness for gapped Hamiltonians (and also BQP-completeness of adiabatic quantum computation with constant gap) either require techniques beyond history state constructions. Or gapped Hamiltonians cannot be QMA-hard (respectively, BQP-complete).