Liron Goren, Tamar Feldstein-Farkash, Joachim Langeneck
et al.
The genus Loimia Malmgren, 1866 (Annelida: Terebellidae) represents a taxonomically challenging group of tubicolous polychaetes, with many species showing high morphological conservatism and unresolved systematic boundaries. The presence of Loimia medusa (Savigny, 1822) along the Mediterranean coasts has historically been reported, but recent studies suggest that this species is restricted to the Red Sea and Arabian Gulf, with the Mediterranean records likely reflecting misidentifications. Here, we use an integrative taxonomic approach combining detailed morphological analyses and mitochondrial markers (COI and 16S rDNA) to reassess the diversity in Loimia along the coasts of Israel, Cyprus, and Lebanon. Specimens were collected at shallow waters from Akhziv, Bat Yam, and Tel Aviv beaches (Israel, 2017 and 2025), Episkopi and Larnaka Bays (Cyprus, 2024), and Bar El Mubarakh and Bar es Slaiyeb Bays (Lebanon, 2022). Our results reveal the presence of two new species: Loimia hannae sp. nov. and Loimia saraiae sp. nov., both morphologically distinct from other known species in the genus, including Indo-Pacific relatives. Phylogenetic reconstructions further support their recognition as different species, with COI genetic distances exceeding 12% from closest congeners. Furthermore, observed intraspecific variability, particularly in L. hannae, confirms the importance of accounting for ontogenetic morphological variation when delineating species within this genus. These findings not only expand the known diversity of Loimia in the Mediterranean. While our integrative approach clearly distinguishes these two new species from known Indo-Pacific congeners, their status in the Mediterranean –whether native, non-indigenous, or cryptogenic– remains uncertain and can only be resolved through broader geographic sampling and historical evidence.
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.
The Portrait of the Romanian L2 User as a Young (Romanian!) Man. The present study represents an attempt to sketch the portrait of a speaker of Romanian as a foreign language - a speaker, however, not at all ordinary, who does not fit into the categories already attested in the literature and who contains, in itself, a linguistic paradox: it refers to a less common, but increasingly numerous, category of young emigrant students of Romanian origin, native speakers of Romanian as an ethnic/heritage language, who have completed their entire pre-university school system in another country and in a language other than Romania/Romanian, and whom we meet as students enrolled in the specialization "Romanian language and literature" at universities abroad, therefore, by default, as a foreign language. Their profile is quite heterogeneous, even within the group, which makes it extremely interesting and challenging for who teaches. The process of creating a schematic, typical portrait of such a learner/speaker requires a necessarily interdisciplinary approach (linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics), and its completion in terms of teaching strategies and methodology is still an open chapter, still being drafted and constantly updated. I should mention that all the data and information on which our analysis will be based are drawn from the experience of teaching Romanian abroad, within the Romanian language lectureship at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, and from our own research on this subject carried out in recent years.
Portretul vorbitorului de RL2 ca tânăr român (în străinătate). Studiul de față reprezintă o încercare de creionare a portretului unui vorbitor de limbă română în varianta ei de limbă străină – un vorbitor, însă, deloc obișnuit, care nu intră în categoriile deja atestate în literatura de specialitate și care conține, în sine, un paradox lingvistic: este vorba despre o categorie de studenți mai puțin obișnuită, dar tot mai numeroasă, de tineri emigrați, de origine română, vorbitori nativi de limba română ca limbă etnică/moștenită, care au parcurs întregul sistem școlar pre-universitar într-o altă țară și într-o altă limbă decât România/limba română și pe care îi întâlnim ca studenți înscriși la specializarea „limba și literatura română” la universități din străinătate, deci, implicit, ca limbă străină. Profilul lor este un profil aparte, destul de eterogen chiar și în cadrul grupului, de aceea extrem de interesant și de provocator pentru cel de la catedră. Procesul de creionare a unui portret schematic, tip, al unui astfel de student/vorbitor presupune o abordare obligatoriu interdisciplinară (lingvistică, sociolingvistică, psiholingvistică), iar completarea lui, din punctul de vedere al strategiilor și al metodologiei didactice rămâne, încă, un capitol deschis, în curs de redactare și de actualizare continuă. Menționez că toate datele și informațiile pe care se va baza analiza noastră sunt extrase din experiența personală de predare a limbii române în străinătate, în cadrul lectoratului de limba română de la Universitatea Sapienza din Roma, Italia și din cercetările proprii pe acest subiect întreprinse în ultimii ani.
Cuvinte-cheie: limbă maternă, heritage language, migrație, achiziție, învățare, limbă străină, predare
Article history: Received 23 January 2025; Revised 18 March 2025; Accepted 7 April 2025; Available online 10 June 2025; Available print 30 June 2025.
AbstractSince the sinking of SS Arandora Star 84 years ago, the memory of this tragic wartime incident has been strongly held and developed within the British Italian community, moving through several phases, from oblivion to recognition and commemoration to a more recent growing awareness in a wider mnemonic community of interest. The aim of this special issue is threefold: to raise further the profile of the Arandora Star; to consolidate and secure the uncertain historical foundations of the event; and to advance the historiography by introducing new facts and perspectives and uncovering previously hidden or unknown aspects both of the past and the continuing afterlife. The six articles presented move logically through the history and stages of memory evolution and its manifestation – internment and deportation, the sinking itself, material, cultural and political aspects of the deathscape, oral histories, the multimedia ‘archive’, with finally, an embarkation listing to plug a serious knowledge gap.
Elisa Colaizzo, Luca Prosperini, Antonio Petrucci
et al.
Several recent studies reported on some patients developing Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD) following coronavirus disease 2019, but, to the best of our knowledge, this case is the first reported in Italy on an onset of a CJD genetic form (gCJD) immediately after COVID-19 infection. We present a 51-year-old woman with a positive family history for CJD, who, two months after a mild SARS-CoV-2 infection, presented a rapidly progressing dementia diagnosed as CJD through clinical features, imaging, electroencephalography, and cerebrospinal fluid analysis. Genetic testing revealed the E200K mutation (p.Glu200Lys) c.598G>A, with homozygosity for methionine (MET) at codon 129, thus confirming the diagnosis of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease. She passed away two months later. Interestingly, our case confirms that homozygous E200K gCJD patients are characterized by a relatively younger age of onset; moreover, it also sheds light on the neurodegeneration underlying both prion diseases and COVID-19 infection. In our opinion, the rising global prevalence of neurodegenerative complications following COVID-19 disease adds urgency to the study of this potential relationship, mostly in elderly patients who may experience worse long-lasting outcomes systemically and within the nervous system.
In 1985 in Genoa Rosa Leonardi - who had already been involved in the direction of various avant-garde galleries in the previous decades - opened a new exhibition space called Leonardi V-Idea with the exhibition Nel vuoto del ritorno, which presented computer videos made by the Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici collective. This is the beginning of a twenty-year activity that will see the gallery qualify itself as one of the most important venues in Italy for the promotion of computer art, through exhibitions, events, conferences, and debates. In addition to group exhibitions that documented the constant updates in the sector (in 1989, for example, La Bellezza dei Frattali), the gallery hosted personal exhibitions of experimental artists such as Massimo Contrasto, the aforementioned Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici, PostMachina and Tommaso Tozzi. The material relating to this particular area of interest of the gallery, consisting of documents still partly unpublished and including works of computer art by various Italian artists, is today conserved in Genova at the Leonardi V-Idea Archives and the University of Genoa Archives of Contemporary Art. Through the study of these materials, the essay intends to offer a contribution on the history of computer art and its diffusion between the eighties and nineties of the last century.
Sabrina Lo Brutto, Antonina Badalucco, Rocco Iacovera
et al.
The latest reorganization of the Vertebrate collections preserved at the “Pietro Doderlein” Museum of Zoology of the University of Palermo (Italy) has made it possible to draw up a check-list of the Mammal taxa present in the stuffed (M), fluid-preserved (ML) and anatomical (AN) collections. The intervention was planned under the National Biodiversity Future Center (NBFC) agenda, focused on the enhancement of Italian natural history museums. The growing interest in museum collections strongly demands databases available to the academic and policy world. In this paper, we record 679 specimens belonging to 157 specific taxa arranged in 58 families and 16 orders. Most of the species (75.1%) come from the Palaearctic Region (southern Mediterranean and North Africa), with a minority of taxa coming from the Afrotropical (7.8%), Neotropical (4.6%), Indo-Malayan (3.4%) and Australasian (1%) regions. Among the 24% of the taxa listed in the IUCN categories as threatened (VU, EN, CR, RE) the specimens of the Sicilian wolf, a regional endemic subspecies that became extinct in the last century, stand out. Even if small (<1000 specimens), the collection of mammals of the Museum of Zoology is an important asset for research on biodiversity in the Mediterranean area, representing an international reference for those wishing to conduct morphological and genetic studies in this area.
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.
This paper aims to retrace a piece of the history of Oriental Studies in Rome and, more broadly, in Italy in the first years of the 20th century. Starting from unpublished documents, it chronicles the events related to the establishment of the Oriental School at the University of Rome (1904) and the subsequent reorganisation effort its professors – directed by I. Guidi – had hoped for. This attempt was the occasion for F.L. Pullé, in his role of member of the High Council for Public Education, to draw up a detailed report on Italian Oriental Studies which put forth a series of concrete proposals for a more general renewal of this field. In addition to allowing a better understanding of the history of Roman – and, more generally, Italian – Oriental Studies, the events recounted herein are emblematic of a broader effort, sustained by the same Orientalists since the mid-nineteenth century, to give a recognisable identity and a unitary orientation to a diverse group of disciplines.
Languages and literature of Eastern Asia, Africa, Oceania
This article aims to show the role of archaeological research and heritage enhancement in the political, social and economic development of the Sultanate of Oman. Although archaeological research in the Sultanate of Oman began well before the accession to the throne of Sultan Qaboos bin Said Al Said, it became a real political and social issue during his reign. Archaeological excavations were first entrusted to Western researchers (mostly from institutions located in the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy or Germany), thus contributing to the country's emergence on the international scene. The Sultanate now has its own archaeological service and trains Omani archaeologists. This archaeological research will not only shed light on the Prehistory and history of this territory, it will also define a heritage that will mark the identity of the Sultanate of Oman. The Omani heritage is highlighted by the inscription of five sites on the Unesco World Heritage List between 1987 and 2018. This heritage, unique in the Gulf region, is a response to the choice of high-end tourism development in order to diversify the country's economy. The Sultanate of Oman is thus building the image of an open and culturally rich country to which UNESCO, an internationally recognised institution, provides a choice guarantee. At the same time, university courses in the fields of culture and heritage are offered to encourage young Omanis to work in the tourism sector. The development of this sector has also contributed to the modernisation of the country and its infrastructure in order to link the most important sites to the capital, Muscat, thus opening up previously isolated regions.
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.
Francesco Corea, Silvia Ciotti, Antonella Cometa
et al.
Background: During the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for a broader implementation of telemedicine for many diseases has become apparent. Televisits are one type of telemedicine in which clinical visits are conducted remotely using an audio-visual connection with the patient at home. The use of televisits is more established in Stroke care but was also recently formally evaluated for Multiple Sclerosis (MS). This retrospective case series describes patient characteristics and reasons for televisits in persons with MS during the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak in Italy, which was declared in February 2020. Methods: Recruitment occurred in a general hospital based MS clinic during Italy’s lockdown months period (9 March–18 May). Each subject completed at least one televisit. The baseline data included were demographics and MS history; reasons for the remote house calls were analyzed focusing on COVID-19 related needs. Results: Forty-six participants completed at least one study visit. The patients enrolled were more often females suffering from Relapsing Remitting Multiple Sclerosis (RRMS). Half of the patients had an intermediate level of education and lived within a 60 min drive from the clinic. These patients predominately had a short disease duration and were mostly involved in oral treatment. The main reasons for the call were drug use and counseling on social distancing. In 5 cases, COVID-19 infection was reported. Conclusions: Televisits during the COVID-19 outbreak demonstrated their utility as a care delivery method for MS. Hence, it is vital to facilitate the implementation of this technology in common practice to both face infectious threats and increase accessibility of the health care system.
Consumerism is a new phenomenon created in the 21st century that can play a substantial role in the destruction of national resources of any country. Nowadays, concerning the ever-increasing improvement of fashion in the world, consumerism in the field of textiles and clothing is raised more than ever. Considering the wasteful consumption of products may bring about remarkable damages to the environment, presently certain methods such as no waste clothes production with a sustainability approach are under attention and survey. Researches accomplished in this regard resulted in the initiation of methods that are used by designers around the world as leading methods. Since this approach is an unprecedented opinion that is still in the route of extension and expansion, just a few studies have been conducted regarding the results obtained so far from designing zero-waste clothes and the experiences of consumers' awareness of this approach. The present research, regarding its objective, is of applied type based on descriptive-analytical method and procedure. Data collection is achieved by library method, relying on documents, written sources, and the internet. It challenges the discovery of the roots in this being formed field using the point of view proposed by Keith Fletcher. By explaining the experiences of this researcher in holding workshops related to this opinion, the out comings are surveyed. The obtained results confirm the application of various techniques such as digital printing patterns and the use of updated universal technology for the elimination of wastes.
We present a new method that incorporates the horizontal branch morphology into synthetic colour-magnitude diagram based star formation history determinations. This method, we call MORGOTH, self-consistently takes into account all the stellar evolution phases up to the early asymptothic giant branch, flexibly modelling red giant branch mass loss. We test MORGOTH on a range of synthetic populations, and find that the inclusion of the horizontal branch significantly increases the precision of the resulting star formation histories. When the main sequence turn-off is detected, MORGOTH can fit the star formation history and the red giant branch mass loss at the same time, efficiently breaking this degeneracy. As part of testing MORGOTH, we also model the observed colour-magnitude diagram of the well studied Sculptor dwarf spheroidal galaxy. We recover a new more detailed star formation history for this galaxy. Both the new star formation history and the red giant branch mass loss we determined for Sculptor with MORGOTH are in good agreement with previous analyses, thus demonstrating the power of this new approach.
The Maxey-Riley equation has been extensively used by the fluid dynamics community to study the dynamics of small inertial particles in fluid flow. However, most often, the Basset history force in this equation is neglected. Including the Basset force in numerical solutions of particulate flows involves storage requirements which rapidly increase in time. Thus the significance of the Basset history force in the dynamics has not been understood. In this paper, we show that the Maxey-Riley equation in its entirety can be exactly mapped as a forced, time-dependent Robin boundary condition of the one-dimensional heat equation, and solved using the Unified Transform Method. We obtain the exact solution for a general homogeneous time-dependent flow field, and apply it to a range of physically relevant situations. In a particle coming to a halt in a quiescent environment, the Basset history force speeds up the decay as stretched-exponential at short time while slowing it down to a power-law relaxation, $\sim t^{-3/2}$, at long time. A particle settling under gravity is shown to relax even more slowly to its terminal velocity ($\sim t^{-1/2}$), whereas this relaxation would be expected to take place exponentially fast if the history term were to be neglected. For a general flow, our approach makes possible a numerical scheme for arbitrary but smooth flows without increasing memory demands and with spectral accuracy. We use our numerical scheme to solve an example spatially varying flow of inertial particles in the vicinity of a point vortex. We show that the critical radius for caustics formation shrinks slightly due to history effects. Our scheme opens up a method for future studies to include the Basset history term in their calculations to spectral accuracy, without astronomical storage costs. Moreover our results indicate that the Basset history can affect dynamics significantly.
Over time there has been a strong relationship between the history of education in the Iberian Peninsula and the one in Italy. This relationship has been renovated, particularly, in a sensitive period of contemporaneity: during the first third of the 20th century within the framework of the international movement of the New School; under the fascist influence towards Franco´s regime; and most recently, in the 1970´s and 80´s. At this time, Spain´s influences originated mainly from the broad movement for construction of a democratic reform of education, with a progressive socio- political emphasis, with a singular incidence of texts and guiding principles elaborated and developed by the Movimento de Cooperazione Educativa. This occurred when Spanish constitutional democracy was being built, with a strong professional and social mobilisation in support of a progressive renovation of schools.
We constrain the history of reionization using the data from Planck 2015 Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature and polarization anisotropy observations. We also use prior constraints on the reionization history at redshifts $\sim7-8$ obtained from Lyman-$α$ emission observations. Using the free electron fractions at different redshifts as free parameters, we construct the complete reionization history using polynomials. Our construction provides an extremely flexible framework to search for the history of reionization as a function of redshifts. We present a conservative and an optimistic constraint on reionization that are categorized by the flexibilities of the models and datasets used to constrain them, and we report that CMB data marginally favors extended reionization histories. In both the cases, we find the mean values of optical depth to be larger ($\approx0.09$ and $0.1$) than what we find in standard steplike reionization histories ($0.079\pm0.017$). At the same time we also find that the maximum free electron fraction allowed by the data for redshifts more than 15 is $\sim0.25$ at 95.4\% confidence limit in the case of optimistic constraint.
Recent work on the history of General Relativity by Renn, Sauer, Janssen et al. shows that Einstein found his field equations partly by a physical strategy including the Newtonian limit, the electromagnetic analogy, and energy conservation. Such themes are similar to those later used by particle physicists. How do Einstein's physical strategy and the particle physics derivations compare? What energy-momentum complex(es) did he use and why? Did Einstein tie conservation to symmetries, and if so, to which? Einstein used an identity from his assumed linear coordinate covariance x'= Mx to relate it to the canonical tensor. Usually he avoided using matter Euler-Lagrange equations and so was not well positioned to use or reinvent the Herglotz-Mie-Born understanding that the canonical tensor was conserved due to translation symmetries, a result with roots in Lagrange, Hamilton and Jacobi. Whereas Mie and Born were concerned about the canonical tensor's asymmetry, Einstein did not need to worry because his Entwurf Lagrangian is modeled not so much on Maxwell's theory as on a scalar theory. As a result, it also has 3 ghosts, failing a 1920s-30s a priori particle physics stability test with antecedents in Lagrange's and Dirichlet's stability work. This critique of the Entwurf theory can be compared with Einstein's 1915 critique of his Entwurf theory for not admitting rotating coordinates and not getting Mercury's perihelion right. Particle physics also can be useful in the historiography of gravity and space-time. This topic can be a useful case study in the history of science on recently reconsidered questions of presentism, whiggism and the like.