Quantum illumination represents one of the most interesting examples of quantum technologies. On the one hand, it can find significant applications; on the other hand, it is one of the few quantum protocols robust against noise and losses. Here we present a short summary of the history of this quantum protocol.
With the occupation of Poland by German troops in the fall of 1939, Nazi German authorities began to seize Polish cultural assets on a large scale, with academic institutions participating in this process. In this context, the article at hand focuses on the confiscation of Polish forestry science collections in 1939/40. The focus lies on the holdings of the Warsaw Szkoła Główna Gospodarstwa Wiejskiego (SGGW), the General Directorate of State Forests, and the Faculty of Forestry at the University of Poznań. With the cooperation of German forestry colleges – in particular those in Tharandt and Eberswalde – these holdings were systematically cataloged and transferred to Germany. Based on previously little-known files from the Tharandt University of Forestry, the case study reconstructs the sequence of events, the actors, and the ideological background of these measures. Particular emphasis is placed on the roles of Professor Kurt Mantel and his colleague Heinz Hoinkes, who were involved in the cataloging and relocation of Polish holdings in Warsaw on behalf of the German authorities. At the same time, contemporary Polish reports documenting the extent of looting and destruction are consulted. After the end of WWII, a systematic return of the stolen objects began in Tharandt, which was largely completed by the early 1950s. Nevertheless, provenance research has revealed that the holdings of the SLUB Dresden still contain volumes that arrived from Poland in 1940. Both concretely and symbolically, these volumes stand for the long-suppressed history of the systematic takeover of scientific and technical equipment. In the spirit of Walter Benjamin, this text is intended as a memorial that reveals the hidden traces of history and gives voice to the forgotten.
Um e Hani, Shiekh Marifatul Haq, Rabia Shabbir
et al.
Reliable estimates of how human activities may affect wildlife populations are critical for making scientifically sound resource management decisions. A significant issue in estimating the consequences of management, development, or conservation measures is the need to account for a variety of biotic and abiotic factors, such as land use and climate change, that interact over time altering wildlife habitats and populations. The snow leopard Panthera uncia (Schreber, 1775), as a vulnerable species, is extremely sensitive to indirect impacts of climate change. Given that it is highly difficult undertaking conservation measures on the entire range of snow leopards, identifying hotspots for conservation is necessary. This study was conducted in Bagrot and Haramosh valleys, in the Trans-Himalayan region, to evaluate the impacts of climate and human pressure on snow leopard habitat. Hybrid classification of Landsat satellite data for 2010 and 2020 was performed to elucidate land use changes that suggested a decrease in permanent snow by 10 % and 3 % in Haramosh and Bagrot while an increase in settlements cover by 16 % and 23 %, respectively. Life zone comparison for 2010 and 2020 using the Holdridge life zone (HLZ) classification system disclosed a change from three life zones to five life zones in Haramosh, and four life zones to five life zones in Bagrot, caused by a temperature increase of 2°C to 3°C, indicating that the area is becoming more and more suitable for settlements and less favorable for snow leopards. This study underlines again that mountainous regions are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Warming weather is making survival more difficult for snow leopards. Although they are resilient to the direct effects of climate change, indirect impacts like avalanches, flash floods, urbanization, and human-wildlife conflict make them more vulnerable and threaten their survival. Thus, we recommend establishing further protected areas, better controlling illegal wildlife trade, and conducting genetic studies to understand impacts on snow leopards and rangeland management, livelihood improvement, and human-wildlife conflict reductions.
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
Jan Moritz Fischer, Farid I. Kandil, Ekaterina Katsarova
et al.
IntroductionSince cannabinoids were partially legalized as prescription medicines in Germany in 2017, they are mostly used when conventional therapies do not suffice. Ambiguities remain regarding use, benefits and risks. This web-based survey explored the perspectives of patients whose experiences are not well enough known to date.MethodsIn an anonymous, exploratory, cross-sectional, one-time web-based observational study, participants receiving cannabinoid therapy on prescription documented aspects of their medical history, diagnoses, attitudes toward cannabinoids, physical symptoms, and emotional states. Participants completed the questionnaires twice here: first regarding the time of the survey and then, retrospectively, for the time before their cannabinoid therapy. Participants were recruited in a stratified manner in three German federal states.ResultsN = 216 participants (48.1% female, aged 51.8 ± 14.0) completed the survey, most of which (72%, n = 155) reported pain as their main reason for cannabinoid therapy. When comparing the current state with the retrospectively assessed state, participants reported greater satisfaction with their overall medical therapy (TSQM II: +47.9 ± 36.5, p < 0.001); improved well-being (WHO-5: +7.8 ± 5.9, p < 0.001) and fewer problems in PROMIS subscales (all p < 0.001). Patients suffering primarily from pain (72%, n = 155) reported a reduction of daily pain (NRS: −3.2 ± 2.0, p < 0.001), while participants suffering mainly from spasticity (8%, n = 17) stated decreased muscle spasticity (MSSS: −1.5 ± 0.6, p < 0.001) and better physical mobility (−0.8 ± 0.8, p < 0.001). Data suggests clinically relevant effects for most scores. Participants’ attitudes toward cannabinoids (on a 5-point scale) improved (+1.1 ± 1.1, p < 0.001). Most patients (n = 146, 69%) did not report major difficulties with the cannabinoid prescription process, while (n = 27; 19%) had their cannabinoid therapy changed due to side effects.DiscussionMost participants experienced their therapy with cannabinoids as more effective than their previous therapy. There are extensive limitations to this cross-sectional study: the originally intended representativeness of the dataset was not reached, partly due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic; the sample has a larger proportion of privately insured and self-paying patients. Results does not suggest that cannabinoid patients belong to a particular clientele. Effect sizes observed for pain reduction, quality of life, social participation, and other outcomes suggest a therapeutic potential, particularly in the treatment of chronic pain.
The extensive measures taken to destroy a people are facilitated by a complex matrix of interrelated actors and practices, yet there remains an underdeveloped implication of accounting in the wider moral and political imperatives. The purpose of this article is to introduce a thanatopolitical visualisation of accounting history adapted from the work of Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault. The theoretical triptych implicates business and accounting in the State-sanctioned financial, political and actual deaths of people. Through reference to Nazi Germany (1933–1945) and the companies Deutsche Bank and Ford Werke, the utility of the theoretical device is illustrated, and silences in accounting are given exposure through alternative accounts. Adopting a close-reading method, the peripheral yet integral role of accounting helped conceal the human cost of thanatopolitical ideology. Beyond the Holocaust example, this triptych is relevant for the exploration of other instances of thanatopolitics, such as war, natural disasters and pandemics.
Online action detection is the task of predicting the action as soon as it happens in a streaming video. A major challenge is that the model does not have access to the future and has to solely rely on the history, i.e., the frames observed so far, to make predictions. It is therefore important to accentuate parts of the history that are more informative to the prediction of the current frame. We present GateHUB, Gated History Unit with Background Suppression, that comprises a novel position-guided gated cross-attention mechanism to enhance or suppress parts of the history as per how informative they are for current frame prediction. GateHUB further proposes Future-augmented History (FaH) to make history features more informative by using subsequently observed frames when available. In a single unified framework, GateHUB integrates the transformer's ability of long-range temporal modeling and the recurrent model's capacity to selectively encode relevant information. GateHUB also introduces a background suppression objective to further mitigate false positive background frames that closely resemble the action frames. Extensive validation on three benchmark datasets, THUMOS, TVSeries, and HDD, demonstrates that GateHUB significantly outperforms all existing methods and is also more efficient than the existing best work. Furthermore, a flow-free version of GateHUB is able to achieve higher or close accuracy at 2.8x higher frame rate compared to all existing methods that require both RGB and optical flow information for prediction.
Iben Stokholm, Nicole Fischer, Christine Baechlein
et al.
Pestiviruses are widespread pathogens causing severe acute and chronic diseases among terrestrial mammals. Recently, Phocoena pestivirus (PhoPeV) was described in harbour porpoises (<i>Phocoena phocoena</i>) of the North Sea, expanding the host range to marine mammals. While the role of the virus is unknown, intrauterine infections with the most closely related pestiviruses— Bungowannah pestivirus (BuPV) and Linda virus (LindaV)—can cause increased rates of abortions and deaths in young piglets. Such diseases could severely impact already vulnerable harbour porpoise populations. Here, we investigated the presence of PhoPeV in 77 harbour porpoises, 277 harbour seals (<i>Phoca vitulina</i>), grey seals (<i>Halichoerus grypus</i>) and ringed seals (<i>Pusa hispida</i>) collected in the Baltic Sea region between 2002 and 2019. The full genome sequence of a pestivirus was obtained from a juvenile female porpoise collected along the coast of Zealand in Denmark in 2011. The comparative Bayesian phylogenetic analyses revealed a close relationship between the new PhoPeV sequence and previously published North Sea sequences with a recent divergence from genotype 1 sequences between 2005 and 2009. Our findings provide further insight into the circulation of PhoPeV and expand the distribution from the North Sea to the Baltic Sea region with possible implications for the vulnerable Belt Sea and endangered Baltic Proper harbour porpoise populations.
We reconstruct the history of reionization using Gaussian process regression. Using the UV luminosity data compilation from Hubble Frontiers Fields we reconstruct the redshift evolution of UV luminosity density and thereby the evolution of the source term in the ionization equation. This model-independent reconstruction rules out single power-law evolution of the luminosity density but supports the logarithmic double power-law parametrization. We obtain reionization history by integrating ionization equations with the reconstructed source term. Using optical depth constraint from Planck Cosmic Microwave Background observation, measurement of UV luminosity function integrated till truncation magnitude of -17 and -15, and derived ionization fraction from high redshift quasar, galaxies and gamma-ray burst observations, we constrain the history of reionization. In the conservative case we find the constraint on the optical depth as $τ=0.052\pm0.001\pm0.002$ at 68% and 95% confidence intervals. We find the redshift duration between 10% and 90% ionization to be $2.05_{-0.21-0.30}^{+0.11+0.37}$. Longer duration of reionization is supported if UV luminosity density data with truncation magnitude of -15 is used in the joint analysis. Our results point out that even in a conservative reconstruction, a combination of cosmological and astrophysical observations can provide stringent constraints on the epoch of reionization.
Shizhe Chen, Pierre-Louis Guhur, Cordelia Schmid
et al.
Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) aims to build autonomous visual agents that follow instructions and navigate in real scenes. To remember previously visited locations and actions taken, most approaches to VLN implement memory using recurrent states. Instead, we introduce a History Aware Multimodal Transformer (HAMT) to incorporate a long-horizon history into multimodal decision making. HAMT efficiently encodes all the past panoramic observations via a hierarchical vision transformer (ViT), which first encodes individual images with ViT, then models spatial relation between images in a panoramic observation and finally takes into account temporal relation between panoramas in the history. It, then, jointly combines text, history and current observation to predict the next action. We first train HAMT end-to-end using several proxy tasks including single step action prediction and spatial relation prediction, and then use reinforcement learning to further improve the navigation policy. HAMT achieves new state of the art on a broad range of VLN tasks, including VLN with fine-grained instructions (R2R, RxR), high-level instructions (R2R-Last, REVERIE), dialogs (CVDN) as well as long-horizon VLN (R4R, R2R-Back). We demonstrate HAMT to be particularly effective for navigation tasks with longer trajectories.
The European language world is characterized by an ideology of monolingualism and national languages. This language-related world view interacts with social debates and definitions about linguistic autonomy, diversity, and variation. For the description of border minorities and their sociolinguistic situation, however, this view reaches its limits. In this article, the conceptual difficulties with a language area that crosses national borders are examined. It deals with the minority in East Lorraine (France) in particular. On the language-historical level, this minority is closely related to the language of its (big) neighbor Germany. At the same time, it looks back on a conflictive history with this country, has never filled a (subordinated) political–administrative unit, and has experienced very little public support. We want to address the questions of how speakers themselves reflect on their linguistic situation and what concepts and argumentative figures they bring up in relation to what (Germanic) variety. To this end, we look at statements from guideline-based interviews. In the paper, we present first observations gained through qualitative content analysis.
Neda Bogdanović, Anne G. Hertel, Andreas Zedrosser
et al.
Abstract Most animals concentrate their movement into certain hours of the day depending on drivers such as photoperiod, ambient temperature, inter‐ or intraspecific competition, and predation risk. The main activity periods of many mammal species, especially in human‐dominated landscapes, are commonly set at dusk, dawn, and during nighttime hours. Large carnivores, such as brown bears, often display great flexibility in diel movement patterns throughout their range, and even within populations, striking between individual differences in movement have been demonstrated. Here, we evaluated how seasonality and reproductive class affected diel movement patterns of brown bears of the Dinaric‐Pindos and Carpathian bear populations in Serbia. We analyzed the movement distances and general probability of movement of 13 brown bears (8 males and 5 females) equipped with GPS collars and monitored over 1–3 years. Our analyses revealed that movement distances and probability of bear movement differed between seasons (mating versus hyperphagia) and reproductive classes. Adult males, solitary females, and subadult males showed a crepuscular movement pattern. Compared with other reproductive classes, females with offspring were moving significantly less during crepuscular hours and during the night, particularly during the mating season, suggesting temporal niche partitioning among different reproductive classes. Adult males, solitary females, and in particular subadult males traveled greater hourly distances during the mating season in May‐June than the hyperphagia in July–October. Subadult males significantly decreased their movement from the mating season to hyperphagia, whereas females with offspring exhibited an opposite pattern with almost doubling their movement from the mating to hyperphagia season. Our results provide insights into how seasonality and reproductive class drive intrapopulation differences in movement distances and probability of movement in a recovering, to date little studied, brown bear population in southeastern Europe.
Sándor Csősz, Bernhard Seifert, István Mikó
et al.
Abstract Morphometric research is being applied to a growing number and variety of organisms. Discoveries achieved via morphometric approaches are often considered highly transferable, in contrast to the tacit and idiosyncratic interpretation of discrete character states. The reliability of morphometric workflows in insect systematics has never been a subject of focused research, but such studies are sorely needed. In this paper, we assess the reproducibility of morphometric studies of ants where the mode of data collection is a shared routine. We compared datasets generated by eleven independent gaugers, that is, collaborators, who measured 21 continuous morphometric traits on the same pool of individuals according to the same protocol. The gaugers possessed a wide range of morphometric skills, had varying expertise among insect groups, and differed in their facility with measuring equipment. We used intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) to calculate repeatability and reproducibility values (i.e., intra‐ and intergauger agreements), and we performed a multivariate permutational multivariate analysis of variance (PERMANOVA) using the Morosita index of dissimilarity with 9,999 iterations. The calculated average measure of intraclass correlation coefficients of different gaugers ranged from R = 0.784 to R = 0.9897 and a significant correlation was found between the repeatability and the morphometric skills of gaugers (p = 0.016). There was no significant association with the magnification of the equipment in the case of these rather small ants. The intergauger agreement, that is the reproducibility, varied between R = 0.872 and R = 0.471 (mean R = 0.690), but all gaugers arrived at the same two‐species conclusion. A PERMANOVA test revealed no significant gauger effect on species identity (R2 = 0.69, p = 0.58). Our findings show that morphometric studies are reproducible when observers follow the standard protocol; hence, morphometric findings are widely transferable and will remain a valuable data source for alpha taxonomy.
Kunsmann-Leutiger E, Straßner C, Schalhorn F
et al.
Elke Kunsmann-Leutiger,1,* Cornelia Straßner,2,* Friederike Schalhorn,3 Regina Stolz,3 Gabriele Stotz-Ingenlath,1 Nicola Buhlinger-Göpfarth,2 Martina Bentner,2 Stefanie Joos,3 Jan Valentini,3 Eckhard Frick1 1Department of Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany; 2Department of General Practice and Health Services Research, University Hospital Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany; 3Institute of General Practice and Interprofessional Care, University Hospital Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Eckhard FrickDepartment of Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy, Technical University of Munich, Langerstrasse 3, München, 81675, GermanyTel +498923862230Fax +498923862402Email eckhard.frick@tum.deBackground: This study presents a concept for training general practitioners (GPs) in taking a spiritual history. In the same workshop, medical assistants (MAs) were trained in counselling elderly, chronically ill patients on social activities and home remedies. After the training, GPs and MAs will apply the acquired skills in their practices within the scope of the HoPES3 intervention study, which aims at raising patients’ self-efficacy.Methods: Sixteen GPs and 18 MAs were trained in a 5-hour workshop and completed an evaluation questionnaire.Results: All participants reported great satisfaction. In particular, 85% of GPs (n=11) affirmed increased capacity to address patients’ spiritual needs. About 88% (n=15) of MAs were satisfied with the training, yet expressed difficulties in integrating theoretical knowledge into daily professional routine.Discussion: While the evaluation of the workshop is promising, the results of the randomized-controlled trial evaluating the effectiveness of the complete HoPES3 intervention have to be awaited.Conclusion: To our knowledge, this is the first interdisciplinary, holistic care training in primary care in Germany. It fosters GPs’ and MAs’ competency in providing a proactive support in spirituality, social activities, and home remedies to their patients. If the concept proves to be effective, it could be integrated into existing care models and curriculums and provide clear guidance on how to consider elderly patients’ spiritual needs and strengthen their self-efficacy in primary care settings.Keywords: primary care, spiritual care, holistic care, elderly patients, medical assistents
Abstract The notion of science diplomacy (SD) has increasingly gained momentum in recent years, however, it remains an empirically largely underexplored topic. This paper contributes to the study of SD by taking an instrument-centred perspective and focusses on science and innovation centres (SIC), a novel policy instrument in the science diplomacy toolbox. SIC are distinct units or satellite institutes, established by governments abroad, operating at the nexus of higher education, research, innovation, and diplomacy. Based on a comparative analysis, this article examines the rise of SIC in Germany and Switzerland. By means of applying a policy instrumentation lens, the career and development of the two SIC is retraced and insights are generated into their political instrumentation. Doing so contributes to unfold the blackbox of what is generally labelled as SD. In-depth interviews and analysis serve as the empirical foundation of this study. Ultimately, the results of this policy instrument study uncover the similarities and differences in SIC development and reveal their political instrumentation over time. It becomes evident that the objectives linked to SIC, and hence SD, are clearly motivated by national needs. Furthermore, notions of SD are reflective of a certain Zeitgeist that is mirrored in the design of an overall, new, policy yet also marks a relabelling of long-existing practices. This study, accordingly, contributes to the knowledge base of SD as it enhances the scholarly understanding of SD instruments in terms of history, actors and political instrumentation while also offering a theoretical anchoring.
History of scholarship and learning. The humanities, Social Sciences
The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, Kazunori Akiyama, Antxon Alberdi
et al.
When surrounded by a transparent emission region, black holes are expected to reveal a dark shadow caused by gravitational light bending and photon capture at the event horizon. To image and study this phenomenon, we have assembled the Event Horizon Telescope, a global very long baseline interferometry array observing at a wavelength of 1.3 mm. This allows us to reconstruct event-horizon-scale images of the supermassive black hole candidate in the center of the giant elliptical galaxy M87. We have resolved the central compact radio source as an asymmetric bright emission ring with a diameter of 42 ± 3 μ as, which is circular and encompasses a central depression in brightness with a flux ratio ≳10:1. The emission ring is recovered using different calibration and imaging schemes, with its diameter and width remaining stable over four different observations carried out in different days. Overall, the observed image is consistent with expectations for the shadow of a Kerr black hole as predicted by general relativity. The asymmetry in brightness in the ring can be explained in terms of relativistic beaming of the emission from a plasma rotating close to the speed of light around a black hole. We compare our images to an extensive library of ray-traced general-relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations of black holes and derive a central mass of M = (6.5 ± 0.7) × 10 ^9 M _⊙ . Our radio-wave observations thus provide powerful evidence for the presence of supermassive black holes in centers of galaxies and as the central engines of active galactic nuclei. They also present a new tool to explore gravity in its most extreme limit and on a mass scale that was so far not accessible.