Summary Background A new betacoronavirus—Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV)—has been identified in patients with severe acute respiratory infection. Although related viruses infect bats, molecular clock analyses have been unable to identify direct ancestors of MERS-CoV. Anecdotal exposure histories suggest that patients had been in contact with dromedary camels or goats. We investigated possible animal reservoirs of MERS-CoV by assessing specific serum antibodies in livestock. Methods We took sera from animals in the Middle East (Oman) and from elsewhere (Spain, Netherlands, Chile). Cattle (n=80), sheep (n=40), goats (n=40), dromedary camels (n=155), and various other camelid species (n=34) were tested for specific serum IgG by protein microarray using the receptor-binding S1 subunits of spike proteins of MERS-CoV, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus, and human coronavirus OC43. Results were confirmed by virus neutralisation tests for MERS-CoV and bovine coronavirus. Findings 50 of 50 (100%) sera from Omani camels and 15 of 105 (14%) from Spanish camels had protein-specific antibodies against MERS-CoV spike. Sera from European sheep, goats, cattle, and other camelids had no such antibodies. MERS-CoV neutralising antibody titres varied between 1/320 and 1/2560 for the Omani camel sera and between 1/20 and 1/320 for the Spanish camel sera. There was no evidence for cross-neutralisation by bovine coronavirus antibodies. Interpretation MERS-CoV or a related virus has infected camel populations. Both titres and seroprevalences in sera from different locations in Oman suggest widespread infection. Funding European Union, European Centre For Disease Prevention and Control, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.
This work proposes that Aztec dynastic history was recast by its 16th century recorders, not merely to glorify ancestors but to make sense out of the trauma of conquest and colonialism. "The Aztec Kings" takes into account the Aztec cyclical conception of time - which required that history constantly be reinterpreted to achieve continuity between past and present - and to treat indigenous historical traditions as symbolic statements in narrative form. Susan Gillespie focuses on the dynastic history of the Mexica of Tenochtitlan, whose stories reveal how "history" was used to construct, elaborate and rectify concepts concerning the nature of rulership and the cyclical nature of the cosmos, and how the Spanish conquest was projected deep into the Aztec past in order to make history accommodate that event. By demonstrating that most of Aztec history is nonliteral, she aims to shed light on Aztec culture and on the function of history in society. By relating the cyclical structure of Aztec dynastic history to similar traditions of African and Polynesian peoples, she introduces a broader perspective on the question of the function of history in society and on how and why history must change.
Stellar halos of galaxies retain crucial clues to their mass assembly history. It is in these galactic components that the remains of cannibalised galactic building blocks are deposited. For the case of the Milky Way, the opportunity to analyse the stellar halo's structure on a star-by-star basis in a multi-faceted approach provides a basis from which to infer its past and assembly history in unrivalled detail. Moreover, the insights that can be gained about the formation of the Galaxy not only help constrain the evolution of our Milky Way, but may also help place constraints on the formation of other disc galaxies in the Universe. This paper includes a summary of work undertaken during a PhD thesis aiming to make progress toward answering the most fundamental question in the field of Galactic archaeology: "How did the Milky Way form?" Through the effort to answer this question, we summarise new insights into aspects of the history of assembly and evolution of our Galaxy and measurements of the structure of various of its Galactic components.
We develop and apply a new framework for reconstructing the ionization history during the epoch of recombination with combinations of cosmic microwave background (CMB), baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) and supernova data. We find a wide range of ionization histories that are consistent with current CMB data, and also that cosmological parameter constraints are significantly weakened once freedom in recombination is introduced. BAO data partially break the degeneracy between cosmological parameters and the recombination model, and are therefore important in these reconstructions. The 95% confidence upper limits on H0 are 80.1 (70.7) km/s/Mpc given CMB (CMB+BAO) data, assuming no other changes are made to the standard cosmological model. Including Cepheid-calibrated supernova data in the analysis drives a preference for non-standard recombination histories with visibility functions that peak early and exhibit appreciable skewness. Forthcoming measurements from SPT-3G will reduce the uncertainties in our reconstructions by about a factor of two.
There are about 6000 stars, that can be seen with the naked eye and have been observed for centuries for various purposes. More modern investigations using advanced telescopes show that our Milky Way, a quite common galaxy, consists of about 100 -- 400 billion stars. And, it is estimated that there are between 200 billion to 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe -- all of them consist mostly of stars, and sending observable signals which also represents nothing more than a superposition of the light of individual stars. So we can conclude that the most common observable objects in the Universe are $\textit{stars}$. In this chapter, we focus on the long history of the observation of stars (compared to studies in other fields of science) to find out more about the nature of these objects.
The article analyses how the names Katiuska and Rebeca, associated with characters from theatre and film, became common terms in Spanish fashion vocabulary to describe specific garments. The first term comes from the Spanish operetta Katiuska, la mujer rusa (1931) and refers to high waterproof boots, inspired by the protagonist’s attire. The popularity of the work led to the adoption of this name for a practical type of footwear for both adults and children. The name rebeca is derived from Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rebecca, adapted from the novel by Daphne du Maurier and released in Spain in 1942. The knit cardigan worn by the protagonist became popular in Spain under this name. Despite their foreign origins, both terms were fully integrated into Spanish and have endured in the language to this day. The lexical history of these terms is studied based on a corpus of 20th-century press, the databases of the Rae and Asale, and a dictionary corpus with the goal of reconstructing their early stages, diffusion, and consolidation in the Spanish language, as well as identifying various factors that contributed to their success.
Cet article aborde les interprétations des Comunidades de Castille (1520-1521) dans plusieurs récits de la vie et du règne de Charles Quint publiés hors d’Espagne, depuis la période suivant immédiatement la mort de l’empereur, où paraissent à Venise les textes d’Alfonso de Ulloa et de Lodovico Dolce, jusqu’à la fin du XVIIIe siècle où paraît en Angleterre l’œuvre monumentale de William Roberston. Il s’intéresse aux sources utilisées et aux relations entre ces différents textes – ainsi, l’ouvrage d’Ulloa, où on trouve une trace des propos d’Antonio de Guevara, est amplement diffusé et encore présent dans l’histoire de Robertson – et met en valeur, en dépit de ces phénomènes de circulation et d’influences, le changement d’interprétation des Comunidades dans les écrits rédigés en Angleterre, après la révolution de 1649 et jusqu’aux Lumières.
History (General) and history of Europe, History of Spain
Fabian Paischer, Thomas Adler, Vihang Patil
et al.
In a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), an agent typically uses a representation of the past to approximate the underlying MDP. We propose to utilize a frozen Pretrained Language Transformer (PLT) for history representation and compression to improve sample efficiency. To avoid training of the Transformer, we introduce FrozenHopfield, which automatically associates observations with pretrained token embeddings. To form these associations, a modern Hopfield network stores these token embeddings, which are retrieved by queries that are obtained by a random but fixed projection of observations. Our new method, HELM, enables actor-critic network architectures that contain a pretrained language Transformer for history representation as a memory module. Since a representation of the past need not be learned, HELM is much more sample efficient than competitors. On Minigrid and Procgen environments HELM achieves new state-of-the-art results. Our code is available at https://github.com/ml-jku/helm.
Environments in Reinforcement Learning are usually only partially observable. To address this problem, a possible solution is to provide the agent with information about the past. However, providing complete observations of numerous steps can be excessive. Inspired by human memory, we propose to represent history with only important changes in the environment and, in our approach, to obtain automatically this representation using self-supervision. Our method (TempAl) aligns temporally-close frames, revealing a general, slowly varying state of the environment. This procedure is based on contrastive loss, which pulls embeddings of nearby observations to each other while pushing away other samples from the batch. It can be interpreted as a metric that captures the temporal relations of observations. We propose to combine both common instantaneous and our history representation and we evaluate TempAl on all available Atari games from the Arcade Learning Environment. TempAl surpasses the instantaneous-only baseline in 35 environments out of 49. The source code of the method and of all the experiments is available at https://github.com/htdt/tempal.
Ignacio Panizo Santos, María Jesús Berzal Tejero, Isabel Ostolaza Elizondo
Los autores publican veinte documentos relacionados con el reinado de Catalina de Foix y Juan de Albret y la conquista de Navarra por Fernando el Católico. Dichos documentos se conservan en las secciones de Diversos e Inquisición del Archivo Histórico Nacional.
Laia Delfa-Lobato, Joan Guàrdia-Olmos, Joan Guàrdia-Olmos
et al.
Museums and cultural institutions are increasingly striving to respond to the interests and needs of the society that hosts them. This means, apart from other actions, that these institutions must be involved in the health and wellbeing of society, and the creation of cultural activities aimed at people with cognitive impairment, a group of individuals that is growing worldwide due to the aging of society and the increasing prevalence of dementia. The involved sectors are aware of the potential and benefits of activities for this population, even though there is much research to be conducted. To date, no systematic review has focused on the benefits of cultural activities for cognitively impaired people. This study aimed to explore the benefits of different modalities of cultural activities with evidence from 145 studies from various databases, which met the inclusion criteria. Significant improvements in general cognition, quality of life (QoL), emotional wellbeing, socialization, and communication were generally reported after interventions, with a reduction in depression symptoms. There was not enough evidence to prove memory, language, or daily functioning improvements attributable to cultural interventions. There were no significant reductions reported in apathy, sadness, agitation, or anxiety.
List of Illustrations vii Preface xi Chapter 1: Imperial Trajectories 1 Chapter 2: Imperial Rule in Rome and China 23 Chapter 3: After Rome: Empire, Christianity, and Islam 61 Chapter 4: Eurasian Connections: The Mongol Empires 93 Chapter 5: Beyond the Mediterranean: Ottoman and Spanish Empires 117 Chapter 6: Oceanic Economies and Colonial Societies: Europe, Asia, and the Americas 149 Chapter 7: Beyond the Steppe: Empire-Building in Russia and China 185 Chapter 8: Empire, Nation, and Citizenship in a Revolutionary Age 219 Chapter 9: Empires across Continents: The United States and Russia 251 Chapter 10: Imperial Repertoires and Myths of Modern Colonialism 287 Chapter 11: Sovereignty and Empire: Nineteenth-Century Europe and Its Near Abroad 331 Chapter 12: War and Revolution in a World of Empires: 1914 to 1945 369 Chapter 13: End of Empire? 413 Chapter 14: Empires, States, and Political Imagination 443 Suggested Reading and Citations 461 Index 481
This is a study of the history of the asteroids in the main asteroid belt. Collisions have been the dominant process. Every asteroid has been impacted by others a multitude of times, with consequences of cratering, erosion, spin increments, fragmentation, and occasional catastrophic disruption and dispersion. Extensive information for asteroid orbits, sizes, shapes, composition, and rotation rates of those asteroids is now available. Those are a result of their history, but to interpret them requires understanding the processes. That understanding can be improved by simulations of the history. A simulation needs robust models of the dynamical and collisional events. Such models have evolved substantially in the last few decades. Here I present current models, a method, and a code "SSAH" for stochastic simulations of the history of the main belt. That code gives a framework upon which existing and future models can be based. The results lead to new paradigms for asteroid histories including the distribution of spins; the irrelevance of strength spin limits; the "unusual" spins of 2001 OE84; and of large slow-spinning tumbling objects (Mathilde); the "V-shape" in the spin versus diameter plot; the non-Maxwellian distribution of spins of a given diameter range; the numbers of expected tumblers, and more. At the same time, the simulations expose gaps in our knowledge that require further research. The SSAH code is freely available for the use of others.