We investigate the role of the accretion history in shaping the depletion radius of dark matter halos using a large cosmological N-body simulation. We show that the inner depletion radius, rescaled by the virial radius, depends strongly on the recent mass accretion rate (MAR) measured over a dynamical timescale, while exhibiting only weak dependence on halo mass. While this dependence mirrors that of the splashback radius and the two radii are tightly correlated, the depletion radius exhibits a more nuanced response to the detailed accretion mode. Specifically, we find that the dependence on MAR steepens at lower redshifts, aligning with self-similar spherical collapse models yet contrasting with the behavior of the splashback radius. This redshift dependence is largely driven by dynamic events, as it diminishes significantly when halos undergoing recent major mergers are excluded. Furthermore, we identify a dichotomy in the drivers of the depletion radius. For slowly accreting halos, the MAR is the primary dependence, whereas for rapidly accreting halos, other properties (shape, spin, concentration, and formation time of the central subhalo) related to the anisotropic or perturbed accretion mode also play a significant role. These results establish the depletion radius as a sensitive physical probe of the detailed accretion history of dark matter halos, complementary to the splashback radius.
Background West Nile virus (WNV) outbreaks in birds, humans, and livestock have occurred in multiple areas in Europe and have had a significant impact on animal and human health. The patterns of emergence and spread of WNV in Europe are very different from those in the US and understanding these are important for guiding preparedness activities. Methods We mapped the evolution and spread history of WNV in Europe by incorporating viral genome sequences and epidemiological data into phylodynamic models. Spatially explicit phylogeographic models were developed to explore the possible contribution of different drivers to viral dispersal direction and velocity. A “skygrid-GLM” approach was used to identify how changes in environments would predict viral genetic diversity variations over time. Findings Among the six lineages found in Europe, WNV-2a (a sub-lineage of WNV-2) has been predominant (accounting for 73% of all sequences obtained in Europe that have been shared in the public domain) and has spread to at least 14 countries. In the past two decades, WNV-2a has evolved into two major co-circulating clusters, both originating from Central Europe, but with distinct dynamic history and transmission patterns. WNV-2a spreads at a high dispersal velocity (88km/yr–215 km/yr) which is correlated to bird movements. Notably, amongst multiple drivers that could affect the spread of WNV, factors related to land use were found to strongly influence the spread of WNV. Specifically, the intensity of agricultural activities (defined by factors related to crops and livestock production, such as coverage of cropland, pasture, cultivated and managed vegetation, livestock density) were positively associated with both spread direction and velocity. In addition, WNV spread direction was associated with high coverage of wetlands and migratory bird flyways. Conclusion Our results suggest that—in addition to ecological conditions favouring bird- and mosquito- presence—agricultural land use may be a significant driver of WNV emergence and spread. Our study also identified significant gaps in data and the need to strengthen virological surveillance in countries of Central Europe from where WNV outbreaks are likely seeded. Enhanced monitoring for early detection of further dispersal could be targeted to areas with high agricultural activities and habitats of migratory birds.
Frederik J. Zuiderveen Borgesius, Wilfred Steenbruggen
In the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) provides comprehensive rules for the processing of personal data. In addition, the EU lawmaker intends to adopt specific rules to protect confidentiality of communications, in a separate ePrivacy Regulation. Some have argued that there is no need for such additional rules for communications confidentiality. This Article discusses the protection of the right to confidentiality of communications in Europe. We look at the right's origins to assess the rationale for protecting it. We also analyze how the right is currently protected under the European Convention on Human Rights and under EU law. We show that at its core the right to communications confidentiality protects three individual and collective values: privacy, freedom of expression, and trust in communication services. The right aims to ensure that individuals and organizations can safely entrust communication to service providers. Initially, the right protected only postal letters, but it has gradually developed into a strong safeguard for the protection of confidentiality of communications, regardless of the technology used. Hence, the right does not merely serve individual privacy interests, but also other more collective interests that are crucial for the functioning of our information society. We conclude that separate EU rules to protect communications confidentiality, next to the GDPR, are justified and necessary.
Zefanya Bramantasaputra, Dea Daniella Wangsawijaya, Bharathram Ganapathisubramani
The present study experimentally investigates the recovery of smooth-wall turbulent boundary layers (TBLs) following non-equilibrium pressure gradients (PGs). The imposed pressure gradient history (PGH) comprises favourable-adverse pressure gradient (FAPG) sequences of varying strength, followed by recovery to zero-pressure-gradient (ZPG) conditions. Hot-wire anemometry measurements were obtained at multiple downstream stations in the recovery region, with friction Reynolds numbers $Re_τ$ ranging from 2000 to 6000 depending on downstream development. Comparative analysis at matched $Re_τ$ and Clauser pressure gradient parameter $β$ enables clear assessment of history effects on TBL behaviour. Results show that increasing PGH strength enhances the wake in mean velocity profiles and amplifies turbulence intensities across the boundary layer, including the inner peak, logarithmic region, and outer peak (a signature of APG). Downstream, the mean flow gradually recovers toward a ZPG-like state, but turbulence in the outer region retains a lasting impact of PGH. Spectral analysis indicates that PGH primarily affects outer-layer scales, introducing a distinct PG peak and modifying the VLSM peak - with energy amplification dependent on PGH strength and spatial characteristics governed by history effects. Downstream recovery involves merging of large-scale wavelengths and the reorganisation of turbulence structures toward a ZPG-like state - although the `recovered' VLSM streamwise length becomes shortened due to the mixing of lengthscales with the PG peak. These results demonstrate that even under matched local parameters, TBLs retain a clear imprint of their upstream history, consistent with the findings of Preskett et al. (2025); moreover, this study provides new insights regarding the central role of scale interactions in the recovery mechanism of TBL subjected to complex PGH.
Asha Vincent, Jürgen Müller, Christian Lisdat
et al.
Chronometric levelling is a novel technique for the realisation of the International Height Reference System (IHRS). A detailed study of this technique is carried out through closed-loop simulations, aiming to unify regional/local height systems (LHS) in Europe and Brazil. Focusing on a unification accuracy of 1 cm, realistic scenarios with various error parameters/vertical datum parameters in LHS and clock observation uncertainties were analysed. The errors associated with local heights raised from datum offsets, local vertical datum alignment discrepancies in latitude and longitude, accumulated tilts depending on the distance from the reference tide gauge and levelling point elevation-dependent offsets were introduced. Clocks achieving a fractional uncertainty of 10^-18 and 10^-17 were assumed in the simulations, considering temporal correlations of clock intrinsic uncertainties, external effects on clock observations such as tidal effects, propagation delay in terms of link uncertainties and presence of outliers. We determine the preferred distributions of clocks in a network for the best estimation of error parameters. The estimation of the error parameters is related to the spatial distribution of the clocks, hence, an optimal setup of placing clocks at the most distant levelling points, reference tide gauges and elevated points is implemented. Further, a configuration of clock distribution is proposed with master clocks and local clocks with reduced links. Taking into consideration all these realistic constraints, a unification accuracy of 1 cm can be obtained. The unified European and Brazilian height systems are further related to the global geoid such that all geoid-related heights achieve an accuracy of 3 cm.
A Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg Megyei Levéltára fontos feladatának tartja az iratok megőrzése mellett azok megismertetését is. Ennek érdekében több mint három évtizeddel ezelőtt olyan programokat indított el, amelyek lehetőséget adnak a régió történetét feldolgozó kutatók és kutatások, valamint a legfontosabb dokumentumok bemutatására. A rendszeres rendezvény sorozatok, a megjelentetett kiadványok ismertté tették a levéltár munkáját. Az iskolákkal, egyetemekkel, múzeumokkal, könyvtárakkal kialakított szakmai kapcsolatok mellett az intézmény igyekszik figyelemmel lenni napjaink iratképzőire, a helytörténet iránt érdeklődő szélesebb nagyközönségre is. Az információátadásban és -cserében napjainkban egyre nagyobb szerep jut a számítógépnek: a levéltár is több honlapot üzemeltet, fent van a közösségi oldalakon, a forrásokat adatbázisok segítségével teszi felhasználóbaráttá.
History of Central Europe, Social sciences (General)
In the early 1950s, Stalinist Czechoslovakia saw a discussion about what form education for the deaf should take in the socialist future, which was then allegedly being rapidly built. The answer to this question was not offered by official ideology or party programmes, and was therefore negotiated by a number of different actors: in addition to experts, whose involvement is not surprising, there were also those whose voices would normally not be heard — parents and the deaf themselves. Together, they raised the question of hearing impairment, its (ab)normality in socialist society and argued about the possibilities, means and indeed the need to “correct” it.
Thousands of users consult digital archives daily, but the information they can access is unrepresentative of the diversity of documentary history. The sequence-to-sequence architecture typically used for optical character recognition (OCR) - which jointly learns a vision and language model - is poorly extensible to low-resource document collections, as learning a language-vision model requires extensive labeled sequences and compute. This study models OCR as a character level image retrieval problem, using a contrastively trained vision encoder. Because the model only learns characters' visual features, it is more sample efficient and extensible than existing architectures, enabling accurate OCR in settings where existing solutions fail. Crucially, the model opens new avenues for community engagement in making digital history more representative of documentary history.
We argue that observations of the reionization history can be used as a probe of primordial density fluctuations, particularly on small scales. Although the primordial curvature perturbations are well constrained from measurements of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies and large-scale structure, these observational data probe the curvature perturbations only on large scales, and hence its information on smaller scales will give us further insight on primordial fluctuations. Since the formation of early galaxies is sensitive to the amplitude of small-scale perturbations, and then, in turn, gives an impact on the reionization history, one can probe the primordial power spectrum on small scales through observations of reionization. In this work, we focus on the running spectral indices of the primordial power spectrum to characterize the small-scale perturbations, and investigate their impact on the reionization history using the numerical code \texttt{21cmFAST}, which adopts a simple but commonly used reionization model. We also derive the constraints on the running spectral indices from observations of the reionization history indicated by the luminosity function of the Lyman-$α$ emitters. We show that the reionization history, in combination with large-scale observations such as CMB, would be a useful tool to investigate primordial density fluctuations.
This article presents an analysis of a collection of studies by Tamбs Krausz, a famous Hungarian historian, professor at the Eцtvцs Loránd University of Budapest. The collection contains articles by the scholar for the period between 1980 and 2020. The Review highlights the key topics of the articles presented in the collection: the history of the Russian Revolution, the Second World War, and the role of the Hungarian troops in it, youth movements in Europe and the world in the 1960s–1970s, and the crisis and collapse of the USSR. The review proves that the key processes of the world’s development in the twentieth century are assessed by Tamбs Krausz through the prism of his worldview, from the standpoint of a left-wing intellectual who was formed in the atmosphere of socialist Hungary, where the degree of spiritual freedom was higher than in the Soviet Union. The Hungarian historian critically assesses both the experience of the USSR in the 1940s–1980s and the current situation in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The review substantiates the conclusion that, according to Tamás Krausz, the socialist experiment was an attempt to implement an alternative variant of the development of society, and to ensure compliance with the principles of social justice.
History (General) and history of Europe, Language and Literature
Conversational question generation (CQG) serves as a vital task for machines to assist humans, such as interactive reading comprehension, through conversations. Compared to traditional single-turn question generation (SQG), CQG is more challenging in the sense that the generated question is required not only to be meaningful, but also to align with the occurred conversation history. While previous studies mainly focus on how to model the flow and alignment of the conversation, there has been no thorough study to date on which parts of the context and history are necessary for the model. We argue that shortening the context and history is crucial as it can help the model to optimise more on the conversational alignment property. To this end, we propose CoHS-CQG, a two-stage CQG framework, which adopts a CoHS module to shorten the context and history of the input. In particular, CoHS selects contiguous sentences and history turns according to their relevance scores by a top-p strategy. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performances on CoQA in both the answer-aware and answer-unaware settings.
LA-CoNGA physics (for Latin-American alliance for Capacity buildiNG in Advance physics) is an ERASMUS+ project aiming to support the modernization of university infrastructure and its pedagogical offer in advanced physics in four Latin-American countries: Colombia, Ecuador, Perú and Venezuela. This project is co-funded by the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency of the European Commission. This virtual teaching and research network comprises three partner universities in Europe and eight in Latin America; high-level scientific partners (CEA, CERN, CNRS, DESY, ICTP), and several and two industrial partners. During 2019 we prepared the syllabuses and selected the lecturers. In 2020 the strict lockdowns modified our pedagogical strategies. The planned model -- an eight-node network of universities made-up by local groups for discussions -- was transformed into low-quality home participation. We simplified the connectivity requirements to the minimum bandwidth to operate remote labs. We also changed the lecture interaction and evaluation model, balancing the teamwork on course projects and continuous evaluation based on class exercises. Despite the lockdown scenario, we managed to support the needs of our instrumentation and computing courses thanks to the contribution and enthusiasm of our partners. With the support of 30 instructors, we gave 100 lectures to 67 students in four countries. We are now promoting the second cohort due to start in January 2022
Zoo-archaeological and genetic evidence suggest that pigs were domesticated independently in Central China and Eastern Anatolia along with the development of agricultural communities and civilizations. However, the genetic history of domestic pigs, especially in China, has not been fully explored. In this study, we generated 42 complete mitochondrial DNA sequences from ∼7500- to 2750-year-old individuals from the Yellow River basin. Our results show that the maternal genetic continuity of East Asian domestic pigs dates back to at least the Early to Middle Neolithic. In contrast, the Near Eastern ancestry in European domestic pigs saw a near-complete genomic replacement by the European wild boar. The majority of East Asian domestic pigs share close haplotypes, and the most recent common ancestor of most branches dates back to less than 20,000 years before present, inferred using new substitution rates of whole mitogenomes or combined protein-coding regions. Two major population expansion events of East Asian domestic pigs coincided with changes in climate, widespread adoption of introduced crops, and the development of agrarian societies. These findings add to our understanding of the maternal genetic composition and help to complete the picture of domestic pig evolutionary history in East Asia.
Born January 1, 1993, after it split with Slovakia, the Czech Republic is one of the youngest members of the European Union. Despite its youth as a nation, this land and the areas just outside its modern borders boasts an ancient and intricate past. With "A History of the Czech Lands", editors Jaroslav Panek and Oldrich Tuma - along with several scholars from the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and Charles University Prague - provide one of the most complete historical accounts of this region to date. Panek and Tuma's history begins in the Neolithic era and follows the development of the state as it transformed into the Kingdom of Bohemia during the ninth century, into Czechoslovakia after World War I, and finally into the Czech Republic. Such a tumultuous political past arises in part from a fascinating native people, and "A History of the Czech Lands" profiles the Czechs in great detail, delving into past and present traditions and explaining how generation after generation adapted to a perpetually changing government and economy. In addition, the contributors examine the many minorities that now call these lands home - Jews, Slovaks, Poles, Germans, Ukrainians, and others - and how each group's migration to the region has contributed to life in the Czech Republic today. The first study in English with this scope and ambition, "A History of the Czech Lands" is essential for scholars of Slavic, Central, and East European studies and a must-read for those who trace their ancestry to these lands.