Kevin Linka, M. Peirlinck, F. Sahli Costabal
et al.
Abstract For the first time in history, on March 17, 2020, the European Union closed all its external borders in an attempt to contain the spreading of the coronavirus 2019, COVID-19. Throughout two past months, governments around the world have implemented massive travel restrictions and border control to mitigate the outbreak of this global pandemic. However, the precise effects of travel restrictions on the outbreak dynamics of COVID-19 remain unknown. Here we combine a global network mobility model with a local epidemiology model to simulate and predict the outbreak dynamics and outbreak control of COVID-19 across Europe. We correlate our mobility model to passenger air travel statistics and calibrate our epidemiology model using the number of reported COVID-19 cases for each country. Our simulations show that mobility networks of air travel can predict the emerging global diffusion pattern of a pandemic at the early stages of the outbreak. Our results suggest that an unconstrained mobility would have significantly accelerated the spreading of COVID-19, especially in Central Europe, Spain, and France. Ultimately, our network epidemiology model can inform political decision making and help identify exit strategies from current travel restrictions and total lockdown.
In 1451/52, an opposition of the estates formed in the Duchy of Austria under the leadership of Ulrich von Eitzing against the ruling prince, King Frederick III. The aim of this so-called “Mailberger Bund” was to end Frederick’s guardianship over his cousin Ladislaus Postumus and transfer power to the latter. Although it was Ulrich von Eitzing who motivated a large part of the estates to participate in the Mailberger Bund, he was soon ousted from his leadership position by his allies. Using historical network analysis, this case study examines the extent to which Ulrich von Eitzing’s “social capital” that he brought to the league contributed to this loss of power. The study also contributes to the discussion of network analysis as a method in historical studies.
Archaeology, Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology
The paper deals with the graphite pottery from the La Tène period in selected regions in the south of central Slovakia: in Gemer, Malohont and Novohrad. It points out the state of research on graphite pottery, its distribution and typology, as well as the perspective of archaeological research on this type of source. Graphite pottery comes from 31 archaeological sites, mainly from settlements. Most of the ceramic fragments are from prospections, but some of the finds are also from rescue or systematic archaeological excavations. The analysed assemblage is dominated by fragments from graphite situlae with vertically ridged surfaces, which were shaped using a potter’s wheel. Among the decorative elements beneath the neck of the vessels, the motif of the so-called wheat spike or branchlet is represented several times. Gro graphite pottery from the studied regions belongs to the Middle-Late La Tène period, i.e. to the LTC-LTD stages. Further knowledge about this specific category of pottery from the La Tène period will certainly be expanded in the future by mineralogical-petrographical analyses of graphite pottery fragments and generally more emphasis on the research of archaeological sites and on the detailed processing of archaeological material from the La Téne period in the studied regions.
ABSTRACT Global climate change is a critical factor influencing biodiversity and ecosystem stability by altering the suitable habitats of many species. Sargentodoxa cuneata is an endemic and relict plant species in China. Identifying its suitable habitats across different periods and glacial refugia helps explain how S. cuneata survived Quaternary climate fluctuations, which is crucial for informing its future conservation. However, long‐term tracking of its distribution and systematic description of biogeographical evolution remain scarce. Here, we compare 10 species distribution models to assess their predictive performance. Ultimately, we apply a random forest model to simulate the suitable habitats of S. cuneata under past, present, and future climate scenarios and integrate fossil records to analyze its biogeographical history. We find that S. cuneata once had a much broader distribution, likely originating in North America, with subsequent migration to Europe and Asia, and its range has gradually contracted, now primarily persisting in East Asia. It is currently distributed mainly south of the Qinling‐Huaihe Line in China, particularly in mid‐ and low‐altitude mountainous regions with abundant precipitation and moderate temperatures. During the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, ~22,000 years ago) and Mid‐Holocene (MH, ~6000 years ago), its suitable habitat contracted significantly, with extremely suitable areas nearly disappearing due to colder climate. Glacial refugia are identified in three mountain ranges within Central and South China. Model simulations under two different climate scenarios suggest that while the total suitable habitat of S. cuneata may expand, extremely suitable areas could decline, with a northward expansion and southern contraction. This study will provide insights into the long‐term impact of climate change on relict plant species and contribute to a better understanding of the evolutionary history of East Asian flora.
Despite the fact that three main official languages were used in the Ottoman Empire (Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, Persian), in the 15th–16th centuries, the Ottomans also used Slavonic tongue and Cyrillic letters in pragmatic literacy (letters, edicts, charters), diplomacy, and communication with their vassal states and neighbouring countries. However, the language and the script were labelled with different names by 15th–16th-century authors. The main aim of the work is to present, compare, and analyse some terms (used as glossonyms and/or graphonyms) found in medieval and early modern sources created in various European states. Additionally, the article tries to consider why the Ottomans decided to use the language and the script. Moreover, it sheds light on a Slavonic and Cyrillic network, formed and developed by the Ottomans in reference to former (Christian and South Slavic) patterns, employed in Slavonic chanceries of medieval Balkan states.
History of Central Europe, History of Balkan Peninsula
Autoregressive video generation relies on history context for content consistency and storytelling. As video histories grow longer, efficiently encoding them remains an open problem - particularly for personal users and local workflows where compute and memory budgets are limited. We present a lightweight history encoder that maps long video histories into short-length embeddings, pretrained with a frame query objective that learns to attend to content features at arbitrary temporal positions. The pretraining stage provides the encoder with dense history coverage on large-scale video data; the subsequent finetuning stage adapts the pretrained encoder under an autoregressive video generation objective to establish content-level consistency. In this way, the lightweight embeddings achieve comparable performance to heavier alternatives. We evaluate the framework with ablative settings and discuss the architecture designs.
Abdella Mohameda, Christian Hendricksb, Xiangyu Hua
Growing interest in decarbonization and Arctic accessibility has renewed attention on Europe-Asia shipping corridors. The Northern Sea Route (NSR) is often portrayed as a 30-40% shortcut relative to Suez, with savings propagated to time, fuel, and CO2. The effect of enforcing sea-only feasibility on these baselines, and its downstream impact on time, fuel, and CO2, remains under-examined. We compare great-circle baselines with sea-only routes computed via A-star search (A*) on a 0.5-degree grid between Northern Europe and Northeast Asia across the Suez, Cape of Good Hope, and NSR corridors under three waypoint philosophies. Distances are mapped to voyage time using corridor-typical speeds and to fuel/CO2 using main- and auxiliary-engine accounting. Sea-only routing preserves the ranking NSR < Suez < Cape but compresses NSR's advantage once realistic speeds are applied. NSR remains shortest (about 8000-10000 nm versus 11000-12000 nm for Suez), yet typical durations differ modestly and fuel/CO2 savings over Suez are small and variant-dependent. Equal-speed tests restore geometric ordering, and endpoint sensitivity shows larger NSR gains for more northern East Asian ports. The framework provides a reproducible, corridor-agnostic benchmark for later integration of sea ice, weather, regulatory overlays, and AIS data in dynamic Arctic voyage planning.
The Xinjiang region in northwest China is a historically important geographical passage between East and West Eurasia. By sequencing 201 ancient genomes from 39 archaeological sites, we clarify the complex demographic history of this region. Bronze Age Xinjiang populations are characterized by four major ancestries related to Early Bronze Age cultures from the central and eastern Steppe, Central Asian, and Tarim Basin regions. Admixtures between Middle and Late Bronze Age Steppe cultures continued during the Late Bronze and Iron Ages, along with an inflow of East and Central Asian ancestry. Historical era populations show similar admixed and diverse ancestries as those of present-day Xinjiang populations. These results document the influence that East and West Eurasian populations have had over time in the different regions of Xinjiang. Description 5000 years of Xinjiang genetics The Xinjiang region of China is bordered by mountains and represents an important historical region. Sampling ancient genomes, Kumar et al. investigated the changes in populations of this region over time from the Bronze Age, ~5000 to 3000 years before the present (BP), covering the Iron Age, ~3000 to 2000 years BP, and into the Historical Era, ~2000 years BP. This analysis identified that older individuals represented ancestries from Steppe cultures, and that a later inflow of East and Central Asian ancestry entered the region around the end of the Bronze Age toward the beginning of the Iron Age. During the Historical Era, mixing continued but retained a core Steppe component such that populations form a genetic continuum. This retention of genetic continuity in a central population is surprising because it represents patterns more typically observed in isolated populations. Furthermore, these genetic links identify a previously unknown lineage that could potentially explain the spread of the Indo-European languages. —LMZ Modern Xinjiang populations result from Steppe ancestries mixed with waves of admixture from surrounding areas.
Isabel Alves, Joanna Giemza, Michael G. B. Blum
et al.
Abstract The demographical history of France remains largely understudied despite its central role toward understanding modern population structure across Western Europe. Here, by exploring publicly available Europe-wide genotype datasets together with the genomes of 3234 present-day and six newly sequenced medieval individuals from Northern France, we found extensive fine-scale population structure across Brittany and the downstream Loire basin and increased population differentiation between the northern and southern sides of the river Loire, associated with higher proportions of steppe vs. Neolithic-related ancestry. We also found increased allele sharing between individuals from Western Brittany and those associated with the Bell Beaker complex. Our results emphasise the need for investigating local populations to better understand the distribution of rare (putatively deleterious) variants across space and the importance of common genetic legacy in understanding the sharing of disease-related alleles between Brittany and people from western Britain and Ireland.
Se-eun Yoon, Ahmad Bin Rabiah, Zaid Alibadi
et al.
Customers reach out to online live chat agents with various intents, such as asking about product details or requesting a return. In this paper, we propose the problem of predicting user intent from browsing history and address it through a two-stage approach. The first stage classifies a user's browsing history into high-level intent categories. Here, we represent each browsing history as a text sequence of page attributes and use the ground-truth class labels to fine-tune pretrained Transformers. The second stage provides a large language model (LLM) with the browsing history and predicted intent class to generate fine-grained intents. For automatic evaluation, we use a separate LLM to judge the similarity between generated and ground-truth intents, which closely aligns with human judgments. Our two-stage approach yields significant performance gains compared to generating intents without the classification stage.
Margarita Hernanz, Marco Feroci, Yuri Evangelista
et al.
The eXTP mission is a major project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), with a large involvement of Europe. Its scientific payload includes four instruments: SFA, PFA, LAD and WFM. They offer an unprecedented simultaneous wide-band Xray timing and polarimetry sensitivity. A large European consortium is contributing to the eXTP study, both for the science and the instrumentation. Europe is expected to provide two of the four instruments: LAD and WFM; the LAD is led by Italy and the WFM by Spain. The WFM for eXTP is based on the design originally proposed for the LOFT ESA M3 mission, that underwent a Phase A feasibility study. It will be a wide field of view X-ray monitor instrument working in the 2-50 keV energy range, achieved with large-area Silicon Drift Detectors (SDDs), similar to the ones used for the LAD but with better spatial resolution. The WFM will consist of 3 pairs of coded mask cameras with a total combined field of view (FoV) of 90x180 degrees at zero response and a source localisation accuracy of ~1 arc min. The main goal of the WFM is to provide triggers for the target of opportunity observations of the SFA, PFA and LAD, in order to perform the core science programme, dedicated to the study of matter under extreme conditions of density, gravity and magnetism. In addition, the unprecedented combination of large field of view and imaging capability, down to 2 keV, of the WFM will allow eXTP to make important discoveries of the variable and transient X-ray sky, and provide X-ray coverage of a broad range of astrophysical objects covered under 'observatory science', such as gamma-ray bursts, fast radio bursts, gravitational wave electromagnetic counterparts. In this paper we provide an overview of the WFM instrument, explaining its design, configuration, and anticipated performance.
Ganglin Tian, Camille Le Coz, Anastase Alexandre Charantonis
et al.
Sub-seasonal wind speed forecasts provide valuable guidance for wind power system planning and operations, yet the forecast skills of surface winds decrease sharply after two weeks. However, large-scale variables exhibit greater predictability on this time scale. This study explores the potential of leveraging non-linear relationships between 500 hPa geopotential height (Z500) and surface wind speed to improve sub-seasonal wind speed forecast skills in Europe. Our proposed framework uses a Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) or a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to regress surface wind speed from Z500. Evaluations on ERA5 reanalysis indicate that the CNN performs better due to its non-linearity. Applying these models to sub-seasonal forecasts from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, various verification metrics demonstrate the advantages of non-linearity. Yet, this is partly explained by the fact that these statistical models are under-dispersive since they explain only a fraction of the target variable variance. Introducing stochastic perturbations to represent the stochasticity of the unexplained part from the signal helps compensate for this issue. Results show that the perturbed CNN performs better than the perturbed MLR only in the first weeks, while the perturbed MLR's performance converges towards that of the perturbed CNN after two weeks. The study finds that introducing stochastic perturbations can address the issue of insufficient spread in these statistical models, with improvements from the non-linearity varying with the lead time of the forecasts.
Today, like never before, humanity is developing a fear of self-destruction. After the development of atomic weapons, the current nuclear weapon, although considered a weapon of deterrence, threatens the world with an apocalypse from which it could not recover. Faced with this situation, after the second war, the ultimate question nagging people's minds is the following: what weapon would be used in the next war? As a result, saving humanity from the catastrophe that is looming on the horizon requires recourse to the founding values of good governance and the culture of peace. Despite the old European democracy and the emerging African democracies, we still wonder about the trajectories to take to combine peace in a world which, more and more, is heading towards its extinction. With the current Russian-Ukrainian conflicts, introducing a war at the doorstep of Europe, as well as the putsches recorded in Africa, with the establishment of military juntas, the case of Mali in 2020 and 2021, of Guinea in 2021, of Niger and Burkina Faso in 2022, of Gabon in 2023, also the increase in the authoritarian regime in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Rwanda, without forgetting the establishment of the ghost state in the Central African Republic, etc. there is reason to question the idealistic and realistic aims of democratic values. History has made democracy not only a system of management of public affairs par excellence, but also a way of living and a way of being. Founded on the values of freedom and tolerance, democratization requires our appropriate resolution to expose a systematic method that can lead to the construction of a culture dedicated to dialogue and the peaceful management of conflicts. Democratization, through the combination of good governance and the culture of peace, constitutes a process which requires a method bringing together both a part linked to the form, relating to the political and institutional organization, and a part linked to the substance, relating to the behavior of political actors.
Jeyhun Aliyev, Mahnur Alakbarova, Aytan Garayusifova
et al.
Abstract Background Azerbaijan currently ranks thirteenth in global incidence of human brucellosis, with an estimated annual incidence through 2000 at over 50 cases per million. Brucella melitensis has been isolated from patients and is thought to have been acquired through contact with small ruminants or as a foodborne infection. To reduce the burden of human brucellosis, the Azerbaijani government began in 2002, a nationwide vaccination control campaign in small ruminants. There is serological evidence of bovine brucellosis (presumably due to Brucella abortus) in Azerbaijan, but no prevalence estimates were available when this study started in March 2017. The aim of this study was to isolate and identify Brucella spp. from cow milk in the Ganja region, where brucellosis takes a heavy toll on humans and livestock. Results Blood and milk samples were collected from cows (n = 1075) in early lactation (up to 90-days) in farms that had a history of previous positive serological results and abortions. Twenty-two out of 57 milk samples collected from seropositive cows, showed growth on Farrell’s media, when incubated with 5% CO2. Eight additional milk samples showed growth in the absence of CO2. The classical biotyping classified them as Brucella abortus (22) and Brucella melitensis (8). RT-PCR confirmed that strains belonged to the genus Brucella. MLVA profiles were obtained for DNA extracted from two B. abortus and six B. melitensis strains. While the B. abortus genetic profile was described in the MLVA database, matching the profile of B. abortus strains isolated in East Europe, Central Asia and China, we found a new genotype for the B. melitensis strains isolated in Azerbaijan, clustering with strains belonging to the American clade, rarely identified in the region. Conclusion Despite the implementation of the vaccination program in small ruminants, our results suggest that spill-over events of B. melitensis from small ruminants to cattle have occurred. However, cattle are likely to be primarily infected with B. abortus, which warranted the implementation of a bovine brucellosis program. Such a program started in fall 2017. In the Ganja region, cattle should be considered as a potential source of B. abortus and B. melitensis for humans.
The presented paper deals with the national minority of Transylvanian Saxons in Romania. It describes the historical story of the community and the importance of festivities. Based on long-term field research, it describes and analyzes the problems associated with reconstructing the ethnic identity of the community. Primarily, it focuses on the issue of social conditionality of memory. The paper presents the individual responders' recollections of the fundamental events in the community's history in the second half of the 20th century. Methodologically, it follows the tradition of ethnographic research, building on theoretical concepts of ethnicity (T. H. Eriksen, B. Anderson, A. D. Smith) and memory studies (M. Halbwachs, J. Assmann, P. Nora).
Auxiliary sciences of history, History of Central Europe