In the nineteenth century, the Dutch established time signals in their Atlantic colonies to synchronise maritime navigation with European standards. In Paramaribo (Suriname), a sophisticated sequence of apparatus -- including time balls, noon guns, discs and flags -- operated from 1851 until World War I. Naval officers aboard guard ships used sextants equipped with artificial horizons to determine local noon, thus integrating the colony into the global Greenwich-based cartographic system. This infrastructure was not merely technical; it became a civic ritual, with the daily noon gun structuring urban life and becoming a point of political negotiation between naval commanders and the colonial governor. In contrast, the Dutch Caribbean islands employed simpler, pragmatic systems. Curaçao used a daily time flag, a cost-effective solution suited to its climate and harbour scale, while smaller islands like Aruba and St. Eustatius relied on occasional noon guns. This diversity reflected a decentralised colonial administration that adapted technologies to local conditions and budgets. The history of these time signals reveals a process of hybrid adaptation, not simply replication of European models. They were shaped by environmental challenges, fiscal constraints and local politics, functioning simultaneously as navigational aids and civic landmarks. Their eventual decline, owing to budgetary pressures and new technologies like wireless telegraphy, underscores the fragile and negotiated nature of colonial scientific infrastructures.
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.
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.
Understanding how cooperation emerges in public goods games is crucial for addressing societal challenges. While optional participation can establish cooperation without identifying cooperators, it relies on specific assumptions -- that individuals abstain and receive a non-negative payoff, or that non-participants cause damage to public goods -- which limits our understanding of its broader role. We generalize this mechanism by considering non-participants' payoffs and their potential direct influence on public goods, allowing us to examine how various strategic motives for non-participation affect cooperation. Using replicator dynamics, we find that cooperation thrives only when non-participants are motivated by individualistic or prosocial values, with individualistic motivations yielding optimal cooperation. These findings are robust to mutation, which slightly enlarges the region where cooperation can be maintained through cyclic dominance among strategies. Our results suggest that while optional participation can benefit cooperation, its effectiveness is limited and highlights the limitations of bottom-up schemes in supporting public goods.
A search for the decay of the Higgs boson to a Z boson and a light, pseudoscalar particle, a, decaying respectively to two leptons and to two photons is reported. The search uses the full LHC Run 2 proton–proton collision data at s=13 TeV, corresponding to 139 fb−1 collected by the ATLAS detector. This is one of the first searches for this specific decay mode of the Higgs boson, and it probes unexplored parameter space in models with axion-like particles (ALPs) and extended scalar sectors. The mass of the a particle is assumed to be in the range 0.1–33 GeV. The data are analysed in two categories: a merged category where the photons from the a decay are reconstructed in the ATLAS calorimeter as a single cluster, and a resolved category in which two separate photons are detected. The main background processes are from Standard Model Z boson production in association with photons or jets. The data are in agreement with the background predictions, and upper limits on the branching ratio of the Higgs boson decay to Za times the branching ratio a→γγ are derived at the 95% confidence level and they range from 0.08% to 2% depending on the mass of the a particle. The results are also interpreted in the context of ALP models.
Contrary to the contested use of depleted uranium (DU) weapons following the Iraq war in 2003, which led some nations to seek a ban on DU use and even eliminate their existing arsenals, there is now a growing tendency both toward the use and production of DU weapons, rendering such weapons as “normal” and “acceptable.” There is a risk of a DU renaissance as a consequence of the war in Ukraine. We argue that more attention is needed to the strategies to deal with the DU renaissance, including further research on the health and environmental effects and the associated clean-up efforts, particularly concerning chemical toxicity and exposure to DU-linked radiation, to the alternative military strategies, as well as alternative munitions, such as tungsten.
No II Congresso do Partido Socialista, em 1976, a única lista de oposição à direção de Mário Soares obteve 25% dos votos dos delegados. À cabeça do grupo estavam Carmelinda Pereira e António Aires Rodrigues – deputados constituintes e da I legislatura – que, acusados de se organizarem como uma fração trotskista, seriam expulsos nos meses seguintes. Este artigo pretende explicar a ação deste grupo no período aberto pelo 25 de Abril de 1974, contextualizando o seu percurso nos anos imediatamente anteriores. Entre as fontes analisadas contam-se entrevistas realizadas aos protagonistas, jornais nacionais e internacionais da época e a documentação proveniente do Centro de Documentação 25 de Abril, da Fundação Mário Soares e do Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo.
Este trabalho tem por objetivo estudar a demografia da cidade do Porto na década de 1520. A fonte utilizada é primordialmente “O Livro da Abertura da Rua das Flores” (de 1521-1527), que divide os habitantes em diversas categorias fiscais e por circunscrições; iremos assim quantificar os habitantes de acordo com essas categorizações, detetando disparidades de riqueza nas diferentes partes da cidade, o peso da finta para o orçamento doméstico e finalmente calcular o crescimento da população desde 1438.
PALAVRAS-CHAVE: PORTO, IDADE MODERNA, DEMOGRAFIA
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.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, a continuous evolution and perfection of what we today call the standard cosmological model has been produced, although some authors like to distinguish separate periods within this evolution. A possible historical division of the development of cosmology into six periods is: (1) the initial period (1917-1927); (2) the period of development (1927-1945); (3) the period of consolidation (1945-1965); (4) the period of acceptance (1965-1980); (5) the period of enlargement (1980-1998); and (6) the period of high-precision experimental cosmology (1998-now). The last period started with a epistemological optimism that has declined with time, and the expression "crisis in cosmology" is now stubbornly reverberating in the media. The initial expectation of removing the pending minor problems arising from the increased accuracy of measurements has backfired: the higher the precision with which the standard model tries to fit the data, the greater the number of tensions that arise, the problems proliferating rather than diminishing.
A partir do arquivo fotográfico do Brasil Imperial, a artista Rosana Paulino resgata imagens de mulheres negras, marcadas pela exploração racista. Com foco nas representações de amas de leite, este artigo analisa as práticas imagéticas de Paulino com as quais transforma regimes visuais baseados na violência escravocrata em uma convivialidade afetiva, particularmente no ritual fotográfico do vídeo Das avós. Traçando os contextos e características das fotografias reconfiguradas, inclusive o discurso sobre certas imagens, o artigo mostra como Rosana Paulino revela as feridas do trauma transgeracional e, ao mesmo tempo, recria simbolicamente uma genealogia interrompida pela necropolítica em vigor no Brasil desde a época da escravidão.
Sergi Taboada, Sergi Taboada, Sergi Taboada
et al.
Little is known about dispersal in deep-sea ecosystems, especially for sponges, which are abundant ecosystem engineers. Understanding patterns of gene flow in deep-sea sponges is essential, especially in areas where rising pressure from anthropogenic activities makes difficult to combine management and conservation. Here, we combined population genomics and oceanographic modelling to understand how Northeast Atlantic populations (Cantabrian Sea to Norway) of the deep-sea sponge Phakellia ventilabrum are connected. The analysis comprised ddRADseq derived SNP datasets of 166 individuals collected from 57 sampling stations from 17 different areas, including two Marine Protected Areas, one Special Area of Conservation and other areas with different levels of protection. The 4,017 neutral SNPs used indicated high connectivity and panmixis amongst the majority of areas (Ireland to Norway), spanning ca. 2,500-km at depths of 99–900 m. This was likely due to the presence of strong ocean currents allowing long-distance larval transport, as supported by our migration analysis and by 3D particle tracking modelling. On the contrary, the Cantabrian Sea and Roscoff (France) samples, the southernmost areas in our study, appeared disconnected from the remaining areas, probably due to prevailing current circulation patterns and topographic features, which might be acting as barriers for gene flow. Despite this major genetic break, our results suggest that all protected areas studied are well-connected with each other. Interestingly, analysis of SNPs under selection replicated results obtained for neutral SNPs. The relatively low genetic diversity observed along the study area, though, highlights the potential fragility of this species to changing climates, which might compromise resilience to future threats.
Science, General. Including nature conservation, geographical distribution
Arnaud Carrier, Cécile Desjobert, Loic Ponger
et al.
Aberrant DNA methylation is a well-known feature of tumours and has been associated with metastatic melanoma. However, since melanoma cells are highly heterogeneous, it has been challenging to use affected genes to predict tumour aggressiveness, metastatic evolution, and patients’ outcomes. We hypothesized that common aggressive hypermethylation signatures should emerge early in tumorigenesis and should be shared in aggressive cells, independent of the physiological context under which this trait arises. We compared paired melanoma cell lines with the following properties: (i) each pair comprises one aggressive counterpart and its parental cell line and (ii) the aggressive cell lines were each obtained from different host and their environment (human, rat, and mouse), though starting from the same parent cell line. Next, we developed a multi-step genomic pipeline that combines the DNA methylome profile with a chromosome cluster-oriented analysis. A total of 229 differentially hypermethylated genes was commonly found in the aggressive cell lines. Genome localization analysis revealed hypermethylation peaks and clusters, identifying eight hypermethylated gene promoters for validation in tissues from melanoma patients. Five Cytosine-phosphate-Guanine (CpGs) identified in primary melanoma tissues were transformed into a DNA methylation score that can predict survival (log-rank test, p=0.0008). This strategy is potentially universally applicable to other diseases involving DNA methylation alterations.
A existência da Fábrica de Cerâmica Lusitânia encontra-se intrinsecamente associada ao desenvolvimento da construção civil nacional. A sua dinâmica empresarial, assente no desenvolvimento tecnológico, permitiu produzir materiais inovadores, mas essenciais para a construção civil, fator fundamental para os projetos- previstos para a expansão da cidade de Lisboa na primeira metade do século XX.
Igualmente na área da azulejaria, a Fábrica de Cerâmica Lusitânia teve um papel importante através da introdução de métodos inovadores, da realização de projetos em diversos locais de Portugal, e da contratação de um dos principais artistas nacionais: Jorge Colaço.
É um percurso de inovação técnica de instalações e infraestruturas, de apoio social aos seus colaboradores, de expansão nacional, mas, fundamentalmente, da adaptação aos “novos tempos” (inclusive na decisão de deslocalização para a zona do Arco do Cego, Campo Pequeno) enquadrando-se tecnologicamente nos desenvolvimentos dos métodos produtivos que surgiam na Europa.
F. López-Núñez, E. Marchante, Ruben H. Heleno
et al.
Classical biocontrol is key for the successful management of invasive alien plants; yet, it is still relatively new in Europe. Although post-release monitoring is essential to evaluate the effectiveness of a biocontrol agent, it is often neglected. This study reports the detailed post-release monitoring of the first biocontrol agent intentionally introduced against an invasive plant in continental Europe. The Australian bud-galling wasp Trichilogaster acaciaelongifoliae (Frogatt) is used to control the invasive Acacia longifolia (Andr.) Willd., with a long history of success in South Africa. This biocontrol agent was first released in Europe in 2015 at several sites along the Portuguese coast. We monitored the establishment, spread and early impacts of T. acaciaelongifoliae on target-plants in Portugal, across 61 sites, from 2015 to 2020. Initial release of adults emerging from galls imported from South Africa and the subsequent releases from galls established in Portugal (2018 onwards) was compared, assessing the implications of the hemisphere shift. The impacts on the reproductive output and vegetative growth of A. longifolia were evaluated in more detail at three sites. From 2015 to 2019, 3567 T. acaciaelongifoliae were released at 61 sites, with establishment confirmed at 36 sites by 2020. The transfer of the wasp from the southern hemisphere limited its initial establishment, but increased rates of establishment followed with synchronization of its life cycle with northern hemisphere conditions. Therefore, after an initial moderate establishment, T. acaciaelongifoliae adapted to the northern hemisphere conditions and experienced an exponential growth (from 66 galls by 2016, to 24000 galls by 2018). Galled A. longifolia branches produced significantly fewer pods (-84.1%), seeds (-95.2%) and secondary branches (-33.3%) and had fewer phyllodes but increased growth of the main branch compared to ungalled branches. Trichilogaster acaciaelongifoliae successfully established in the northern hemisphere, despite the initial phenological mismatch and adverse weather conditions. To achieve this, it had to establish and synchronize its life cycle with the phenology of its host-plant, after which it developed exponentially and began to show significant impacts on the reproductive output of A. longifolia.