Rosemonde I. Power, Swaid Abdullah, Heather S. Walden
et al.
Abstract Heartworms (Dirofilaria immitis) are parasitic nematodes that cause significant cardiopulmonary-associated morbidity and mortality in canids worldwide. The global spread of heartworms is believed to have occurred alongside the dispersal of modern domesticated dogs over the past few hundred years. However, this conclusion has been based on limited sampling, both geographically and numerically. To test this theory more rigorously, we analyse the whole genomes of 127 adult heartworm specimens collected from mammalian carnivore hosts across Australia, the USA, Central America, Europe, and Asia. Here we show distinct genetic differences between heartworms from different continents, indicating a more ancient dispersal in canid hosts than previously recognised. Using genetic diversity and admixture analyses, we find an Asian origin for Australian heartworms, aligning with the arrival of dingoes into Australia via Asia thousands of years ago; however, we cannot exclude the alternate hypothesis that heartworms were also introduced from Asia in post-colonial times. Finally, the genetic relatedness between European and Central American heartworms suggests that modern dispersal, potentially associated with human colonisation of the Americas by Europeans, occurred with domesticated dogs. This work sheds light on the population dynamics and deep evolutionary history of a globally widespread parasite of veterinary significance.
This article analyzes the correspondence of brothers Francisco and Juan Verdugo from the second quarter of the 17th century, conducted in Spanish. The study seeks to shed light on the nature of fraternal relations in the period under examination, which were seriously disrupted as a result of property disputes in the 1630s. In addition, a thematic analysis of the letters from the 1640s will be carried out, focusing on military and political events, family ties, and mutual support between the brothers.
Looking into early Christian–Muslim relations seems to be the outcome of greater interest in Islam transcultural encounters due to current issues of mass migration. Sicily presents an informative example of the interaction between different ethnic and religious groups over centuries. Several scholars, including Jeremy Johns, Alex Metcalfe and Julie Taylor, have explored the social and administrative position of Christians and Muslims within the complex society of Sicily, although their contributions were largely from the umbrella of Norman Sicily from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries. Thus, there is a need to shift away from the Normans’ experience to exploring Christian–Muslim relations in Sicily during the ninth through eleventh centuries, especially the expansion, society and activities during the rule of the Fāṭimids of Ifrīqiya (909–965) and their Kalbid allies (948–1053). These forms of relationships are not only important for Sicily but for the whole region of the central Mediterranean. This paper will build on the works of Umberto Rizzitano and other scholars to explore the relations between the Arabs and Muslims and the Christians in Sicily during the Muslim rule of the Island. Using Arabic and Islamic sources, including travel accounts by the Muslim geographer Ibn Ḥawqal (d. 988), this paper aims to discuss the lives of Christians and their dynamic exchanges with Muslims within the social and political complexities of Aghlabid and Fāṭimid Sicily as well as Sicily’s link to North Africa (Ifrīqiya). Sicily’s proximity to North Africa and to Europe has been an essential aspect of its history, which facilitated movement of communities between these regions. The paper will also compare the policies of the Fāṭimids towards Christians in Sicily with their relations towards their Christian subjects in Cairo, Egypt. It will show the pragmatic aspects of this relationship concerning marriage, legal status, the movement of people, and cultural and intellectual exchange. Christians and Muslims practised cultural hybridisation that brought changes in Sicily with respect to language, religion, and social habits, resulting in a distinctive Sicilian multicultural identity.
The Mamunids are the second dynasty that ruled Khorezm from 995 to 1017. The territory of the Mamunids state mainly covered the territory of the historical and cultural region of Khorezm, which had developed in ancient times in the lower reaches of the Amu Darya on the left and right banks of the mighty Central Asian river. The Mamunids dynasty left a bright mark in the history of civilization. The Mamunids era was a period of economic prosperity and the rise of trade relations between Central Asia and Eastern Europe. The article reflects the economic sphere of Khorezm under the rule of the state of the Khorezmshahs of the Mamunids.
History of scholarship and learning. The humanities
SWAMI L. COSTA, RAFAEL B. LOUZADA, SILMARA CECÍLIA NEPOMUCENO
et al.
Abstract This study aimed to recognize the biogeographic patterns, richness, and diversity levels of the Brazilian endemic genus Orthophytum and identify their biotic components through a parsimony analysis of endemicity (PAE), to better understand the evolutionary history of this group and develop strategies for the conservation of its species. We prepared a database for the 54 currently known species of Orthophytum, including their geographical locations as obtained from digital databases of the principal herbaria of Brazil, Europe, and the USA. A parsimony analysis of endemicity (PAE) was used to delimit the areas of endemism based on two grids’ sizes (1º x 1º and 2º × 2º). The majority rule consensus tree resulting from the PAE indicated three areas of endemism with high bootstrap, diversity, and richness indices: the northern portion of the Espinhaço Range, the southern portion of the Espinhaço Range, and the central portion of the Atlantic Forest. The recognition of those distribution patterns reveals a high number of microendemic species, which is discussed here.
We examine whether there are deviations of the local central oxygen abundances in spiral galaxies from the general metallicity gradients. We compare the values of the central intersect oxygen abundances estimated from the metallicity gradient based on the integral field unit (IFU) spectroscopy from the Mapping Nearby Galaxies at the Apache Point Observatory (MaNGA) survey and the local central oxygen abundances obtained from the single-fibre observations from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Special attention is placed on galaxies with recent and currently ongoing central starbursts (cSB galaxies). We selected a sample of 30 cSB galaxies from our total sample of 381 MaNGA galaxies, using the decrease in the Dn4000 index (a stellar age indicator) in the circumnuclear region as the selection criterion. We found that the local central oxygen abundances follow the general metallicity gradients in the galaxies well and agree with the central intersect abundances within uncertainties of the central abundances determinations. Starbursts in the centres of cSB galaxies do not produce noticeable oxygen enrichments. The central starbursts imply that an appreciable amount of gas is present at the centres of cSB galaxies. The gas at the centre of galaxy can serve not only as a raw material for the star formation, but also as a fuel for the activity of the galactic nucleus (AGN). We found that the AGN is the main source of the ionising radiation at the centres of six cSB galaxies in our sample.
With the recent emergence of powerful instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs), various helpful conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems have been deployed across many applications. When prompted by users, these AI systems successfully perform a wide range of tasks as part of a conversation. To provide some sort of memory and context, such approaches typically condition their output on the entire conversational history. Although this sensitivity to the conversational history can often lead to improved performance on subsequent tasks, we find that performance can in fact also be negatively impacted, if there is a task-switch. To the best of our knowledge, our work makes the first attempt to formalize the study of such vulnerabilities and interference of tasks in conversational LLMs caused by task-switches in the conversational history. Our experiments across 5 datasets with 15 task switches using popular LLMs reveal that many of the task-switches can lead to significant performance degradation.
Wenling An, Chenxi Xu, Slobodan B. Marković
et al.
Abstract Widespread and frequent droughts have affected most parts of Europe over recent years, but it remains unclear when this synchronous drying trend began and how it has been influenced by anthropogenic forcing. Here we reconstruct and explore the history of drought in southern Europe over the past 300 years using an annual record of tree-ring oxygen isotopes from a site in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The reconstruction suggests that the onset of the drying trend in southern Europe occurred around the 1850s, which is consistent with previous studies demonstrating the extensive and long-lasting drying across central and western European areas. The evidence from CMIP6 model and reanalysis data demonstrates that anthropogenic warming has enhanced the strength of land–atmosphere coupling and exacerbated the widespread drying trend since the 1850s.
We introduce Dynamic Contextual Markov Decision Processes (DCMDPs), a novel reinforcement learning framework for history-dependent environments that generalizes the contextual MDP framework to handle non-Markov environments, where contexts change over time. We consider special cases of the model, with a focus on logistic DCMDPs, which break the exponential dependence on history length by leveraging aggregation functions to determine context transitions. This special structure allows us to derive an upper-confidence-bound style algorithm for which we establish regret bounds. Motivated by our theoretical results, we introduce a practical model-based algorithm for logistic DCMDPs that plans in a latent space and uses optimism over history-dependent features. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on a recommendation task (using MovieLens data) where user behavior dynamics evolve in response to recommendations.
Jan Hus was a Bohemian preacher who was burned at the stake at the Council of Constance in 1415. However, Hus’s legacy well outlived his death, and six centuries later, he continues to be considered a symbol of Czech identity today. Using his letters written in exile and while awaiting trial at Constance, this article explores key aspects of Hus’s theology and how they gave momentum to the movement that arose after his death and has experienced an unparalleled longevity. Hus’s pursuit of truth, his frustrations with the practices of the church at the time, and his allegiance to Czech-speaking people resonated beyond the religious realm and paved the way for an early form of protonationalism.
History of Central Europe, History of scholarship and learning. The humanities
In this paper, the authors define the mixed $λ$-central Morrey spaces and the mixed $λ$-central $BMO$ spaces. The boundedness of the fractional integral operators $T_α$ and its commutators $[b, T_α]$ are established on the mixed $λ$-central Morrey spaces, respectively. Furthermore, we also extend these results to the generalized mixed central Morrey spaces.
AbstractThe decade before the First World War saw a heightened level of social and political conflicts throughout Germany and Austria-Hungary. Strikes in pre-1914 central Europe have largely been examined as part of the development of the workers’ movement, but much less often from the perspective of the employers and government elites. Their strategies to counteract “strike terrorism” included hiring replacement workers through private strikebreaking agents, who provided a variety of services such as recruitment, transportation, housing, and providing “willing workers” with weapons for their self-defense. The discourses around “strike terrorism,” and the repressive strategies to counter it, are a lens through which we can look afresh at some of the most crucial issues in the history of central European empires in the prewar years, namely the structure of violence embedded in social conflicts, migration, growing political antagonism, and fears surrounding social democracy. This article analyzes the public debate around the protection of “willing workers” as well as concrete episodes of antilabor violence in a transnational framework. It offers a reassessment of social conflicts in the period following the 1905 social mobilizations in central Europe, and it explores the circulation of antilabor measures between Germany and Austria-Hungary, their radicalizing impact, and their connections with labor migration patterns.
For the past thirty years, the history of the nobility has been one of the fields of social history that have mobilized most researchers. This trend is largely due to the interest shown in new family collections, in correspondence and in private writings. We see this abundant mass of publications as being the reflection of the diversity of the nobility. A first block of authors have isolated noble categories: parliamentary nobility, “second” order nobility, poor nobility, etc. A second type of research has focused on personages emblematic of their milieus, and finally, some historians have been interested in comparisons with other European aristocracies. The second section of the article will show how the transformations of the monarchical state engendered mutations in the second order. Finally, it will be shown how scholarship on social changes has more particularly studied differences between town and country, material culture and mobility and noble culture.
Miroslav Šmíd, Marek Lečbych, Jaromír Šmerda
et al.
Předmětem tohoto pojednání jsou v prvé řadě doklady sídlištních a pohřebních aktivit z počátku starého eneolitu z Dambořic, patřící kultuře nálevkovitých pohárů. Z pohledu aktuální chronologie jde o starší fázi baalberského stupně moravsko-dolnorakouské skupiny uvedené kultury. Do současné doby bylo prozkoumáno deset sídlištních objektů s reprezentativní kolekcí keramiky a šest hrobů s pohřby v natažené poloze bez výbavy. Lokalita je dalším příkladem donedávna neregistrovaných pohřebních zvyklostí místní skupiny nálevkovitých pohárů a současně příležitostí představit tento fenomén starého eneolitu na Moravě v širších souvislostech. Součástí příspěvku je také vyhodnocení antropologického materiálu a prezentace radiouhlíkových dat, které z něj byly získány.