A continental-scale, georeferenced checklist of slime moulds (Eumycetozoa) for Central and Eastern Europe, supplemented with standardised environmental covariates and with a particular emphasis on forest ecosystems, has not previously been available. The absence of a harmonised corpus has constrained statistically supported tests of habitat- and substrate-related patterns and limited objective gap-mapping, particularly within forest ecosystems, where microclimatic buffering, dead-wood continuity and stand history are expected to be decisive; it has also hindered rigorous evaluation of slime moulds’ role as bioindicators of forest habitat types, substrate associations and gradients in anthropogenic pressure (naturalness).Literature discovery spanned multidisciplinary and domain-specific platforms; inclusion required a determinable taxon, a locality at least to country level and a year. Records were de-duplicated conservatively; names were harmonised to a single authority (Eumycetozoa.com) with GBIF Species backbone as a fallback and higher taxonomy was filled consistently. The resource comprises presence-only occurrences, a taxonomically standardised checklist and a reference set; the curated bibliography comprises 528 bibliographic entries. Coverage spans Austria, Belarus, Czechia, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Russia (European part), Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland and Ukraine. Event dates range from 1857 to 2025-08-01 and support ranges and mixed precision. Environmental content includes elevation, consolidated forest class, substrate category, habitat pressure, microhabitat, pH, air temperature, annual precipitation and stand age; controlled vocabularies comprise eight consolidated forest classes, ten substrate categories and seven habitat-pressure classes. The dataset is released under CC-BY-4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International), employs reproducible DwC mapping and stable identifier versioning and is suited to ecological and biogeographic analyses, including forest-focused modelling and gap analyses.
U uvjetima dugotrajne demografske krize koja je prisutna u Hrvatskoj, čija su glavna obilježja depopulacija i starenje stanovništva, dolazi do smanjenja broja članova kućanstava i povećanja njihove životne dobi. Ti su procesi u hrvatskim okvirima univerzalni, no postavlja se pitanje ima li prometna dostupnost u odnosu na regionalne centre utjecaja na brojnost i ostarjelost članova kućanstava. Za prostorni obuhvat istraživanja ove problematike odabrana je Karlovačka županija zato što je relativno blizu Zagrebu (najvećem i glavnom gradu Hrvatske), a županijsko središte Karlovac je u regionalnom kontekstu značajan centar. Karlovačka županija ujedno obuhvaća i periferan ruralni prostor pa postoje izražene razlike u prometnoj dostupnosti u odnosu na županijsko središte Karlovac. Promatrana županija je u istraživanom razdoblju zabilježila značajnu depopulaciju i starenje stanovništva. Uz to, smanjio se i ukupan broj kućanstava, kao i prosječan broj njihovih članova. Sukladno s tim, prisutan je i porast udjela samačkih kućanstava. Iako je demografsko stanje u cijeloj županiji vrlo nepovoljno, primjetno je da prometno izolirani ruralni prostori imaju nepovoljnije pokazatelje od urbanih i urbaniziranih dijelova županije.
Language and Literature, History of Central Europe
Temperature and host fruit availability are key factors influencing the life history traits of the Mediterranean fruit fly (medfly) (<i>Ceratitis capitata</i>). This study examines how developmental temperature and host fruit type affect adult longevity and fecundity in medflies from six populations spanning Southern to Central Europe. Larvae were reared on apples and bitter oranges at three constant temperatures (15, 20, and 25 °C), with pupae maintained under the same thermal conditions until adult emergence. Adults were then kept at 25 °C, with longevity and fecundity recorded daily. The results showed that higher developmental temperatures increased adult lifespan across all populations, regardless of host fruit. Similarly, fecundity rates in ovipositing females were higher at higher temperatures. Reproductive periods (pre-oviposition, oviposition, and post-oviposition) varied among populations, indicating population-specific responses. These findings underscore how temperature and host fruit availability shape medfly invasion dynamics, highlighting the species’ biological plasticity and adaptation to different environments. This research provides valuable insights for pest management, particularly in the context of climate change, offering strategies to mitigate the spread of medflies into new regions.
Martina Di Giuseppe, Lucia Scarlato, Lorenza Romani
et al.
<b>Background</b>: Neurocysticercosis is a parasitic infection of the central nervous system caused by the larval stage of <i>Taenia solium</i>. This disease is endemic in some countries in Central and South America, South and South-East Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. In North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia, only sporadic cases are documented. Moreover, reports of bacterial superinfection arising within neurocysticercotic lesions remain exceptionally scarce. <b>Methods</b>: We report a clinically severe and diagnostically challenging case of suspected neurocysticercosis with cerebral streptococcal superinfection in a 17-year-old Italian patient with Down syndrome and no history of travel to endemic regions. <b>Results</b>: The patient, with pre-existing epileptic encephalopathy, presented with progressive drowsiness and altered mental status, rapidly deteriorating to cardiorespiratory arrest. Neuroimaging demonstrated multiple ring-enhancing lesions, in conjunction with positive <i>Taenia solium</i> serology. <i>Streptococcus</i> spp. was identified in one neurosurgically drained lesion, consistent with secondary bacterial involvement in association with concurrent pneumonia. Combined antiparasitic therapy and targeted antimicrobial treatment resulted in sustained clinical and radiological improvement. <b>Conclusions</b>: In non-endemic settings, neurocysticercosis should remain within the differential diagnosis of unexplained epilepsy and multifocal CNS lesions. Although rare, bacterial superinfection warrants consideration in atypical presentations, particularly in individuals with concomitant infectious foci and underlying immune dysfunction such as that associated with Down syndrome.
This study examines the changes in secondary education for girls in Slovakia between 1948 and 1960 and their connection to women’s employment. During the socialist era, the education system underwent significant transformations driven by the political and economic objectives of the communist regime. The school reform led to the abolition of grammar schools and the expansion of vocational education, with an emphasis on technical and industrial fields. As a result, the number of girls attending industrial and vocational schools increased significantly, reflecting the state’s economic policy and the need to expand the labor force in the growing industrial sector. Although the regime promoted gender equality in education and employment, in practice, women were directed into specific fields such as healthcare, education, and administration. This study analyzes these changes based on archival documents, statistical data, and contemporary sources, highlighting the long-term effects of these reforms on women’s social status and labor market opportunities.
A personality of the humanist scholar and mining expert Hans Dernschwam (1494 – 1568/69) combined a major travelling appetite and a significant observation talent. His travelogue to the countries of Asia Minor from 1553–1555 has attracted also the attention of historians out of Europe. A thorough historiographical analysis of his work, however, still struggles with insufficient knowledge of Dernschwam’s actual biographical data. This paper focuses on the period of Hans Dernschwam’s life which is connected with the Červený Kameň (Slovakia, Vöröskő/Bibersburg/Rothenstein) estate in the western parts of the Kingdom of Hungary, and small town of Častá (Slovakia, Cseszte/Schattmannsdorf). A contextual analysis of the economic administration sources from the Červený Kameň estate from the 1530s–1550s, stored in the Slovenský národný archív (Slovak National Archive) in Bratislava, shows that Dernschwam’s handwritten note in Stöffler’s ephemerides on the real estate purchase in Častá in 1538 cannot be interpreted along F. Babinger’s line, namely as an unambiguous reference to a deed performed by the author of the note himself. Yes, Hans might have spent the autumn 1539 in the region below the Červený Kameň castle, but most probably, he may have stayed in the household of one of his brothers: either Matheus or Balthasar. When Matheus died in 1545 without an heir, Hans inherited his property. Although Anton Fugger’s letter from 16 August 1548, confirming the exemption of Hans Dernschwam’s property in Častá, does not specifically locate nor describe this property, when taking into consideration fortunes of Matheus’s family, the author of this paper takes the liberty of identifying this property with a house of Hans’s brother. At the end of the 1540s, after having served the Fugger family for many years, Hans moved from his Banská Bystrica home to a more peaceful environment in the area below the Little Carpathians. It is quite probable that it was in his new home in Častá, where he commenced to catalogue his extensive book collection. As Dernschwam’s property had a new owner at least from 1554 onwards and since later Červený Kameň estate sources do not confirm Hans’s presence in Častá, he must have returned back to Banská Bystrica, once he had come back from his travels in Asia Minor. Thus, he must have spent last years oh his life in Lower Hungarian mining region.
<p>The sediment fills of large terrestrial basins offer an opportunity to study and reconstruct regional-scale landscape history over time. An example of such a basin is the Upper Rhine Graben in central Europe, whose proximal, southern part has so far only sporadically been investigated sedimentologically. Three new drillings in close proximity have recovered the upper <span class="inline-formula">∼</span> 40–60 m of the Quaternary sedimentary infill near the eastern graben margin north of Freiburg, Germany. Grain sizes, the rounding and shape of clasts, and the petrographic composition of the deposits have been determined and statistically analysed. The cored intervals consist of glaciofluvial gravels derived from and deposited by the Rhine system. While no consistent trends of the morphometric properties could be found, we succeeded in distinguishing two subunits within the topmost stratigraphic unit (Neuenburg Formation, Fm) based on compositional (i.e. gravel petrographic) data. An upper subunit (Hartheim Subformation, Sfm) enriched in lithologies representative of the Alpine orogen could be separated from a lower subunit (Nambsheim Sfm) that is enriched in lithologies of an outer-Alpine origin. We correlate these findings with a shift in the pattern of meltwater discharge from the Rhine glacier lobe that may have delivered more Alpine material into the study region during the last than during the penultimate glaciation and highlight the value of quantitative approaches and appropriate statistical evaluation for gravel petrographic studies.</p>
Since the publication of Les cartulaires in 1993, the study of cartularies has evolved in two main directions: as part of a broader documentary culture and studying regional or textual patterns using digital tools and postmodern approaches. This article offers an overview of interpretive trends since then, focusing on monastic cartularies in northwestern Europe in the Central Middle Ages. It outlines the diverse discourses incorporated in these cartularies, involving patrimony, commemoration, communal identity, and history. It then explores the variable forms of monastic cartularies, including smaller groupings of charters, and their functions. It argues that monastic writers carefully framed their re-presentation charters from their archives, to impart multiple messages to their medieval audiences.
History (General) and history of Europe, History (General)
Let Y be a random variable whose moment generating function exists in a neighborhood of the origin. In this paper, we study the probabilistic central Bell polynomials associated with random variable Y, as probabilistic extension of the central Bell polynomials. In addition, we investigate the probabilistic central factorial numbers of the second kind associated with Y and the probabilistic central Fubini polynomials associated with Y. The aim of this paper is to derive some properties, explicit expressions, certain identities and recurrence relations for those polynomials and numbers.
Electronic health records include information on patients' status and medical history, which could cover the history of diseases and disorders that could be hereditary. One important use of family history information is in precision health, where the goal is to keep the population healthy with preventative measures. Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning techniques can assist with identifying information that could assist health professionals in identifying health risks before a condition is developed in their later years, saving lives and reducing healthcare costs. We survey the literature on the techniques from the NLP field that have been developed to utilise digital health records to identify risks of familial diseases. We highlight that rule-based methods are heavily investigated and are still actively used for family history extraction. Still, more recent efforts have been put into building neural models based on large-scale pre-trained language models. In addition to the areas where NLP has successfully been utilised, we also identify the areas where more research is needed to unlock the value of patients' records regarding data collection, task formulation and downstream applications.
The Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus merger was a major event in the history of the Milky Way. Studies on Milky Way satellite dwarf galaxies show that key elemental abundance patterns, which probe different nucleosynthetic channels, reflect the host galaxy's star formation history. We gather Mg, Fe, Ba, and Eu abundance measurements for Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus stars from the SAGA database and use [Fe/Mg], [Ba/Mg], [Eu/Mg], and [Eu/Ba], as a function of [Fe/H] to constrain the star formation history of Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus. We use the known star formation histories and elemental abundance patterns of the Sculptor and Fornax dwarf spheroidal galaxies as comparison. The elemental abundance ratios of [Fe/Mg], [Ba/Mg], [Eu/Mg], and [Eu/Ba] all increase with [Fe/H] in Gaia-Sausage- Enceladus. The [Eu/Mg] begins to increase at [Fe/H]= -2.0 and continues steadily, contrasting with the Sculptor dSph galaxy. The [Eu/Ba] increases and remains high across the [Fe/H] range, contrasting with that of the Sculptor dSph galaxy and deviating from the Fornax dSph galaxy at high [Fe/H]. The [Ba/Mg] is higher than those of the Sculptor dSph galaxy at the lowest [Fe/H] and gradually increases, similar to the Fornax dSph galaxy. We constrain three main properties of the Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus star formation history: 1) star formation started gradually, 2) it extended for over 2 Gyr, and 3) it was quenched around [Fe/H] of -0.5, likely when it fell into the Milky Way.
New institutionalism resurrected political institutions, arguing that they constrain behavior of political actors. Consequently, the consociational model was founded on the assumption that the institutions and practices associated with it create a structure of incentives for leaders of ethnic groups that should encourage them to moderate and cooperate. However, in post-conflict, deeply divided countries where institutions are weak and often externally imposed, political actors can interpret and exploit them, stretching their boundaries and adapting them to new conditions, or simply avoiding them. As Robert D. Putnam notes, “two centuries of constitution-writing around the world warn us that the designers of new institutions often write on water – institutional reform does not always change fundamental patterns of politics” (1993: 17). Following this statement, the main aim of the article is an analysis, rooted in the new institutionalism, of the relationship and the inevitable tension between political institutions and actors in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina. By proposing the term “rebound effect”, the paper tries to explain the dysfunctionality of the Bosnian model of consociationalism. Using congruence theory (Almond & Verba 1965), I also hypothesize that coherence between political actors (their political culture) and political institutions (the patterns of behavior they imply) is crucial for the so-called “behavioral realisation” of any constructed structure – institution, and, as a result, for the entire political system and its functionality
History of Central Europe, History of Balkan Peninsula
Vitamin-V is a project funded under the Horizon Europe program for the period 2023-2025. The project aims to create a complete open-source software stack for RISC-V that can be used for cloud services. This software stack is intended to have the same level of performance as the x86 architecture, which is currently dominant in the cloud computing industry. In addition, the project aims to create a powerful virtual execution environment that can be used for software development, validation, verification, and testing. The virtual environment will consider the relevant RISC-V ISA extensions required for cloud deployment. Commercial cloud systems use hardware features currently unavailable in RISC-V virtual environments, including virtualization, cryptography, and vectorization. To address this, Vitamin-V will support these features in three virtual environments: QEMU, gem5, and cloud-FPGA prototype platforms. The project will focus on providing support for EPI-based RISC-V designs for both the main CPUs and cloud-important accelerators, such as memory compression. The project will add the compiler (LLVM-based) and toolchain support for the ISA extensions. Moreover, Vitamin-V will develop novel approaches for validating, verifying, and testing software trustworthiness. This paper focuses on the plans and visions that the Vitamin-V project has to support validation, verification, and testing for cloud applications, particularly emphasizing the hardware support that will be provided.
Central limit theorems (CLTs) have a long history in probability and statistics. They play a fundamental role in constructing valid statistical inference procedures. Over the last century, various techniques have been developed in probability and statistics to prove CLTs under a variety of assumptions on random variables. Quantitative versions of CLTs (e.g., Berry--Esseen bounds) have also been parallelly developed. In this article, we propose to use approximation theory from functional analysis to derive explicit bounds on the difference between expectations of functions.
Abstract Central Europe around 1900 was marred with anxiety around the choice of career. This article weaves histories of education, labor, bureaucracy, and the social sciences to show how families reacted to changes in the labor market, including the opening of careers to talent and the mechanization of handicrafts. Parents found themselves unable to guide their children to a safe profession. Whereas previously, career choices were limited, changes in education and the labor market offered adolescents more options. Simultaneously, however, some occupations became endangered and others overcrowded. The erosion of labor stratification gave families the hope of social mobility but also upended their ontological security, as traditional roads to adulthood became impossible to follow. This article uses the discourse on career choice to write a history of this crisis. The discourse was born in early modern Europe to stop parents from forcing their children into a profession against the children’s wishes. In nineteenth-century Europe, however, parents and schools weaponized this discourse against each other to widen or narrow access to advanced education. Social scientists concerned with the industrial labor force joined the conversation by turning career choice into a matter of scientific expertise. Finally, the article shows how voluntary associations pioneered the provision of vocational guidance before state intervention after World War I. Thus, the article traces a significant transformation in the transition to adulthood and offers a prehistory of vocational guidance.
The association of weights in a distributed consensus protocol quantify the trust that an agent has on its neighbors in a network. An important problem in such networked systems is the uncertainty in the estimation of trust between neighboring agents, coupled with the losses arising from mistakenly associating wrong amounts of trust with different neighboring agents. We introduce a probabilistic approach which uses the historical data collected in the network, to determine the level of trust between each agent. Specifically, using the finite history of the shared data between neighbors, we obtain a configuration which represents the confidence estimate of every neighboring agent's trustworthiness. Finally, we propose a History-Data-Driven (HDD) distributed consensus protocol which translates the computed configuration data into weights to be used in the consensus update. The approach using the historical data in the context of a distributed consensus setting marks the novel contribution of our paper.