[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.
Peter A. Jałowiczor, Thomas P. Bickle, J. Davy Kirkpatrick
et al.
We present new spectroscopic data for Gaia DR3 2309499817384726016 (WD 0008-350A) and its two wide, comoving, low-mass companions. We confirm the white dwarf is a hydrogen rich DA, with T _eff = 6200 ± 90 K and a mass of 0.63 ± 0.03 M _⊙ , close to that of the average white dwarf. Near-infrared spectra of the two stellar companions to WD 0008-350A reveal that the inner companion is an M dwarf, exhibiting a spectral type of M8. Furthermore, the outer companion is identified as a possible M6 + M9 binary. This paper examines the evidence which suggests the system may be quadruple.
Mirko Schäfer, Tiernan Buckley, Frank Boerman
et al.
In 2023, Germany's electricity trade balance shifted from net exports to net imports for the first time since 2002, resulting in an increasing discussion of these imports in the public debate. This study discusses different data driven approaches for the analysis of Germany's cross-border trade, with a focus on the methodological challenges to determine the origin of imported electricity within the framework of European electricity market coupling. While scheduled commercial flows from ENTSO-E are often used as indicators, generally these do not correspond to bilateral exchanges between different market actors. In particular, for day-ahead market coupling only net positions have an economically reasonable interpretation, and scheduled commercial exchanges are defined through ex-post algorithmic calculations. Any measure of the origin of electricity imports thus depends on some underlying interpretation and corresponding method, ranging from local flow patterns to correlations in net positions. To illustrate this dependence on methodological choices, we compare different approaches to determine the origin of electricity imports for hourly European power system data for 2024.
Language models have led to a leap forward in web automation. The current web automation approaches take the current web state, history actions, and language instruction as inputs to predict the next action, overlooking the importance of history states. However, the highly verbose nature of web page states can result in long input sequences and sparse information, hampering the effective utilization of history states. In this paper, we propose a novel web history compressor approach to turbocharge web automation using history states. Our approach employs a history compressor module that distills the most task-relevant information from each history state into a fixed-length short representation, mitigating the challenges posed by the highly verbose history states. Experiments are conducted on the Mind2Web and WebLINX datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach. Results show that our approach obtains 1.2-5.4% absolute accuracy improvements compared to the baseline approach without history inputs.
Extensive research demonstrates that many households eligible for means-tested benefits do not claim them, a phenomenon known as non-take-up. Empirical studies frequently conceptualise non-take-up as a rational decision, occurring when the perceived net utility of claiming is negative. Theoretically, long-term factors can substantially impact this decision. Despite the potential relevance of longitudinal aspects, evidence on their influence remains limited. This study addresses this gap by incorporating long-term factors in the analysis of non-take-up behaviour relating to Unemployment Benefit II (UB II), Germany's basic means-tested welfare programme. Using data from the German Panel Study Labour Market and Social Security (PASS) from 2008 to 2020, linked with administrative data from Germany's Federal Employment Agency (PASS-ADIAB), this study reconstructs households' benefit receipt and income histories, even during non-survey periods. This allows modelling benefit non-take-up for eligible households using the duration and frequency of past benefit receipt. In addition, the use of administrative data mitigates bias from self-reported benefit receipt. Household eligibility for UB II is simulated using GETTSIM, an open-source microsimulation model, applied to the PASS dataset for the first time. Findings indicate that long-term factors significantly influence the probability of claiming UB II. Specifically, a longer history of benefit receipt increases this probability, whereas higher income potential and positive income shocks reduce it. Including long-term factors substantially affects the estimated impact of traditionally used determinants of non-take-up, indicating a potential misspecification in existing models that neglect them.
Patrick Wincker, Didier Aurelle, Denys Malengros
et al.
The Eunicella cavolini reference genome provides an important resource to study the adaptation of this species to different environments and anthropic pressures. This species is impacted by human activities, including climate change, and this reference genome will be useful to study the genomic evolution of this species. The entirety of the genome sequence was assembled into 17 contiguous chromosomal pseudomolecules. This chromosome-level assembly encompasses 0.49 Gb, composed of 159 contigs and 46 scaffolds, with contig and scaffold N50 values of 7.7 Mb and 51.1 Mb, respectively.
The essay emphasises the importance of a short-lived Wrocław picture gallery that came into existence in the wake of the 1810 dissolution of Silesian monasteries. Created by Johann Gustav Gottlieb Büsching on behalf of the Prussian state, it was the country’s first truly public art museum, predating Berlin’s famous Königliches Museum by 15 years and offering an alternative to display strategies in existing local collections while taking inspiration from recent similar tendencies abroad. The dissolution of Silesian monasteries was at its roots. When Frederick William III secularised eighty religious establishments, Büsching was commissioned to secure their cultural treasures but transformed this preservation mission into an opportunity to create comprehensive public collections including a central library, archive, and art museum. He developed a pioneering three-part gallery structure that arranged medieval to 16th-century Silesian paintings as a tribute to chronology although without sequencing them rigorously, dedicated an entire room to Michael Willmann as Silesia’s most important baroque painter, and displayed works from other schools to contextualised local traditions within broader art history. The author identifies the exact location of the first gallery project in a now-lost building, and he points out that a crucial theoretical innovation was implied in the way Büsching articulated the paradigm shift from religious to art-historical appreciation of medieval works, arguing as he was that secularised altarpieces retained their artistic power despite losing their sacred function and required proper institutional contexts for full appreciation as historical documents and aesthetic objects. Opening in 1815 in the former Augustinian quarters, the museum faced significant challenges including limited funding, modest artistic quality of the artworks available to the founding director, and Wrocław’s peripheral location on European art routes. Contemporary visitors found the collection underwhelming compared to major galleries in Vienna, Munich, or Dresden. However, Büsching’s emphasis on art-historical narrative, regional cultural identity, and scientific methodology pioneered approaches that became fundamental to modern museum practice, making his curatorial work a crucial but underrecognised contribution to the institutionalization of German museum culture.
Estela Suarez, Hendryk Bockelmann, Norbert Eicker
et al.
High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems are among the most energy-intensive scientific facilities, with electric power consumption reaching and often exceeding 20 megawatts per installation. Unlike other major scientific infrastructures such as particle accelerators or high-intensity light sources, which are few around the world, the number and size of supercomputers are continuously increasing. Even if every new system generation is more energy efficient than the previous one, the overall growth in size of the HPC infrastructure, driven by a rising demand for computational capacity across all scientific disciplines, and especially by artificial intelligence workloads (AI), rapidly drives up the energy demand. This challenge is particularly significant for HPC centers in Germany, where high electricity costs, stringent national energy policies, and a strong commitment to environmental sustainability are key factors. This paper describes various state-of-the-art strategies and innovations employed to enhance the energy efficiency of HPC systems within the national context. Case studies from leading German HPC facilities illustrate the implementation of novel heterogeneous hardware architectures, advanced monitoring infrastructures, high-temperature cooling solutions, energy-aware scheduling, and dynamic power management, among other optimizations. By reviewing best practices and ongoing research, this paper aims to share valuable insight with the global HPC community, motivating the pursuit of more sustainable and energy-efficient HPC operations.
Germany is tasked with ensuring the safe and final storage of high-level radioactive waste in a deep geological repository. Since 2022, the ambitious target year of 2031 to identify a suitable location for such a site has been deferred by most public actors. The target year was pushed back by several decades to 2046 or even 2068, consequently delaying the completion of all waste management activities well into the 22nd century. Most radioactive waste management activities in Germany are funded via the external fund KENFO that was initiated with an initial endowment of EUR24.1 bn. in 2017. KENFO hopes to achieve average returns on invest (ROI) of 3.7% over the coming decades to ensure that sufficient funds remain. However, the delays in the current process will likely result in overall cost increases. Thus, in this analysis, we conduct a stochastic analysis of the potential delays in the site selection procedure and their corresponding cost effects to assess whether KENFO's target ROI will suffice for the long-term funding requirements. We find that even under optimistic assumptions, KENFO's ROI would have to be increased to at least 5.91%, up to 6.63%. Alternatively, lump sum injections of up to EUR31.07 bn. as of 2024 could reduce funding shortfall risks. We conclude that in order to minimize the financial burden on future generations, German policymakers must address this issue of potential funding shortfalls proactively, either by reducing costs, via, e.g., delay minimization, or by increasing revenues, via, e.g., capital injections.
This paper explores the potential of contextualized word embeddings (CWEs) as a new tool in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science (HPSS) for studying contextual and evolving meanings of scientific concepts. Using the term "Planck" as a test case, I evaluate five BERT-based models with varying degrees of domain-specific pretraining, including my custom model Astro-HEP-BERT, trained on the Astro-HEP Corpus, a dataset containing 21.84 million paragraphs from 600,000 articles in astrophysics and high-energy physics. For this analysis, I compiled two labeled datasets: (1) the Astro-HEP-Planck Corpus, consisting of 2,900 labeled occurrences of "Planck" sampled from 1,500 paragraphs in the Astro-HEP Corpus, and (2) a physics-related Wikipedia dataset comprising 1,186 labeled occurrences of "Planck" across 885 paragraphs. Results demonstrate that the domain-adapted models outperform the general-purpose ones in disambiguating the target term, predicting its known meanings, and generating high-quality sense clusters, as measured by a novel purity indicator I developed. Additionally, this approach reveals semantic shifts in the target term over three decades in the unlabeled Astro-HEP Corpus, highlighting the emergence of the Planck space mission as a dominant sense. The study underscores the importance of domain-specific pretraining for analyzing scientific language and demonstrates the cost-effectiveness of adapting pretrained models for HPSS research. By offering a scalable and transferable method for modeling the meanings of scientific concepts, CWEs open up new avenues for investigating the socio-historical dynamics of scientific discourses.
Women are underrepresented in many areas of journalistic newsrooms. In this paper, we examine if this established effect continues in the new forms of journalistic communication, Social Media Networks. We used mentions, retweets, and hashtags as journalistic amplification and legitimation measures. Furthermore, we compared two groups of journalists in different stages of development: political and data journalists in Germany in 2021. Our results show that journalists regarded as women tend to favor their other women in mentions and retweets on Twitter, compared to men. While both professions are dominated by many men and a high share of men-authored tweets, women are mentioning and retweeting other women to a more extensive degree than their male colleagues. Women data journalists also leveraged different sources than men. In addition, we have found data journalists to be more inclusive towards non-member sources in their network compared to political journalists.
Eberhard Fischer, Dorothee Killmann, Johanna Gerlach
et al.
Freshwater red algae from Hunsrück-Hochwald National Park previously identified as <i>Virescentia vogesiaca</i> are described as <i>Hoefkenia hunsrueckensis</i> gen. et sp. nov. They cluster in the phylogenetic tree together with <i>Kumanoa</i> and form its sister clade. <i>Virescentia</i> is rendered monophyletic by exclusion of these samples. The taxonomic history of <i>Virescentia vogesiaca</i> is described. The species was named by Skuja referring to the description of <i>Batrachospermum vagum</i> var. <i>flagelliforme</i> Sirodot and the specimens all come from Western France and Spain. The name <i>Batrachospermum vogesiacum</i> was erroneously applied referring to a specimen from the North Vosges close to Germany collected and annotated by F.W. Schultz and representing the new <i>Hoefkenia hunsrueckensis</i>. However, this specimen was never cited in the protologue of <i>Virescentia vogesiaca</i>. We provide evidence that the real <i>Virescentia vogesiaca</i> is endemic to Western France and Spain, and that <i>Hoefkenia hunsrueckensis</i> is restricted to Eastern Belgium, Eastern France and SW Germany, differing in morphological and molecular characters.
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.
Neural Language Models (LMs) offer an exciting solution for general-purpose embodied control. However, a key technical issue arises when using an LM-based controller: environment observations must be converted to text, which coupled with history, results in long and verbose textual prompts. As a result, prior work in LM agents is limited to restricted domains with small observation size as well as minimal needs for interaction history or instruction tuning. In this paper, we introduce diff history, a simple and highly effective solution to these issues. By applying the Unix diff command on consecutive text observations in the interaction histories used to prompt LM policies, we can both abstract away redundant information and focus the content of textual inputs on the salient changes in the environment. On NetHack, an unsolved video game that requires long-horizon reasoning for decision-making, LMs tuned with diff history match state-of-the-art performance for neural agents while needing 1800x fewer training examples compared to prior work. Even on the simpler BabyAI-Text environment with concise text observations, we find that although diff history increases the length of prompts, the representation it provides offers a 25% improvement in the efficiency of low-sample instruction tuning. Further, we show that diff history scales favorably across different tuning dataset sizes. We open-source our code and data to https://diffhistory.github.io.
Actor training in Western culture evolved as an oral tradition. Formal education appeared in the late-nineteenth century with the work of Konstantin Stanislavski. Despite its relatively brief history, the family tree of theatre pedagogy now consists of many contrasting branches. Several branches contain the creative and educational DNA of an approach to Western music education known as Dalcroze Eurhythmics. Emile Jaques-Dalcroze was a Swiss pianist and composer whose work at the Hellerau Institute near Dresden in Germany had a significant impact on the Modernist movements in theatre and dance, 1911–1914. Historical records show that this embodied method of music learning was disseminated by Hellerau graduates in drama schools and theatre companies around the world. This essay traces four branches on the family tree of theatre pedagogy that are directly influenced by Dalcroze Eurhythmics. These branches include the legacies of Stanislavski in Russia; Jacques Copeau and Suzanne Bing in France; Rudolph Laban and Yat Malmgren in Germany and England; and Sanford Meisner and Anne Bogart in the United States of America. This essay is written from the author’s perspective as an actor trainer and music educator in a higher education conservatoire. It offers historical contexts for contemporary pedagogies in actor training.
To date, knowledge of the textual history of the Qur'an has relied primarily on the Arabo-Islamic tradition. The study of material evidence, which should contribute to understanding the historical development of the canonization of the text, form the first part of the Coranica project. The Coranica project gives priority to an empirical approach, contributing to the history of the Qur'anic text based primarily on material evidence, distributed chronologically, and less on the data of the Arabo-Islamic tradition. As part of its empirical approach, Coranica aims to take into account current developments and the latest discoveries. These include continuing and amplifying the research on older written witnesses of the Qur'an, a field of study that lay dormant until the 1980s and was revived by the discoveries of Sanaa, and other well known collections, such as those of St. Petersburg or Istanbul. Coranica provides a platform for cooperation between those in the fields of antiquity and Islamic studies. The project brings together researchers from various disciplines from Germany, France, England, Austria and Italy. Coranica began in 2011, and is directed by Christian Robin and François Deroche (AIBL, Paris) and Michael Marx and Angelika Neuwirth (BBAW, Berlin). In this paper, the introduction and the details of the project are given for the urdu-natives with critical analysis of the project components theoretically.
Michael Tessler, Michael Tessler, Michael Tessler
et al.
Many known evolutionary lineages have yet to be described formally due to a lack of traditional morphological characters. This is true for genetically distinctive groups within the amoeboid Placozoa animals, the protists in ponds, and the bacteria that cover nearly everything. These taxonomic tabula rasae, or blank slates, are problematic; without names, communication is hampered and other scientific progress is slowed. We suggest that the morphology of molecules be used to help alleviate this issue. Molecules, such as proteins, have structure. Proteins are even visualizable with X-ray crystallography, albeit more easily detected by and easier to work with using genomic sequencing. Given their structured nature, we believe they should not be considered as anything less than traditional morphology. Protein-coding gene content (presence/absence) can also be used easily with genomic sequences, and is a convenient binary character set. With molecular morphology, we believe that each taxonomic tabula rasa can be solved.