Open research Europe最新文献

This article investigates the memorialization of migrant women across transcultural landscapes, and analyses results from the Register of Migrant Women Landmarks in Europe (hereinafter RMWLE), central to the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) action project "Women on the Move" (CA19112 - WEMov). It serves as reference for subsequent research based on data from this Register, for which data collection is continuing. The RMWLE registers toponyms, such as monuments, plaques, streets and other infrastructures named after women with a significant history of migration. It honours aspects rarely prioritized in memorialisation agendas, which are skewed towards men's stories, and towards the more linear biographies of sedentary figures whose European, national, and regional memorialisation have remained uncomplicated by migration. This Deep Data study reveals recurring patterns at the level of Europe in the memorialisation of these women migrants. The diversity of stories, the richness and the prominence of landmarks devoted to men compared to women is a subject well-covered in memorialisation studies. This unbalance is compounded by the data from our register which shows landmarks on women migrants that are sometime tokenized, often marginalized, and which reproduce the bias towards nurture and care that have besieged the memorialisation of women in general. It further shows that the memorialisation process and the political and cultural mechanisms of official celebration often work against the recognition of cross-border careers and stories. The intersectionality of the project, highlighting both gender and migration, uncovers a political landscape of toponyms - and we reflect on how this register can help combat cultural prejudice by recovering migration episodes. The RMWLE helps us reflect on the defining impact of migration episodes, a reality rarely underlined in the biographies of famous women. This article favours a storytelling approach, to counter dominant cultural narratives and knowledge practices.

Background: Every few years, juvenile Kemp's ridley turtles ( Lepidochelys kempii) are stranded on the Dutch coasts. The main population distribution of this critically endangered species primarily inhabits the Gulf of Mexico and the east coast of the United States. This study focuses on five reports from the Netherlands between 2007 and 2022, where juvenile turtles were reported to strand alive during the winter, albeit in a hypothermic state. At ambient ocean temperatures between 10°C and 13°C, Kemp's ridley turtles begin to show an inability to actively swim and remain afloat on the ocean's surface, a condition termed 'cold stunning'. Understanding their transport in cold-stunned state can help improve the rehabilitation process of stranded turtles.

Methods: Cold-stunned turtles are back-tracked as passive, virtual particles from their stranding location using Lagrangian flow modelling. This study investigates when and where these juvenile turtles cross the threshold temperatures between 10° C and 14° C before stranding by tracking the temperature along the trajectories.

Results: As expected, the simulations show the transport of the cold-stunned turtles via the English Channel. More surprisingly, the analysis suggests they likely experience cold-stunning in the southern North Sea region and encounter temperatures below 10°C for only a few days to up to three weeks, and below 12°C for up to a month before stranding.

Conclusions: The estimate of cold-stunned drift duration of the turtles provides additional knowledge about their health status at the time of stranding. Adherence to rehabilitation protocols for Kemp's ridley and post-release monitoring are recommended to improve their long-term survival.

Amid public concern surrounding the proprietary and exploitative use of personal data by corporations and public institutions, and its consequences from a sociotechnical perspective, narratives around digital commons have recently emerged, framing potential alternatives. This paper presents the co-creation of the Digital Democracy and Data Commons Manifesto through a collaborative writing sprint, drawing on principles of openness, diversity, and inclusivity. The manifesto articulates a technopolitical vision for data governance that prioritizes community control over data. We analyze the manifesto's evolution throughout the process, demonstrating its capacity to address contemporary concerns such as data extractivism and algorithmic governance. Our approach is based on participatory design methods, more concretely on a collaborative writing sprint, to co-create a manifesto on alternatives to current datafication, digital inequalities, and lack of citizen control over personal data. On the one hand, we describe the process of implementing a sprint approach for collaboratively writing a topic-specific manifesto, in the context of the broader EU project DECODE (Decentralised Citizen Owned Data Ecosystems). On the other hand, we present and analyse the main results from the content structure of the manifesto over its initial and final versions, which moved progressively as a cohesive text away from a scholarly and policy-oriented tone.

Conventional drug administration often results in systemic action, thus needing high dosages and leading to potentially pronounced side effects. Targeted delivery, employing carriers like nanoparticles, aims to release drugs at a target site, but only a small fraction of nanoparticles actually reaches it. Microrobots have been proposed to overcome this issue since they can be guided to hard-to-reach sites and locally deliver payloads. To enhance their functionality, we propose microrobots made as deformable capsules with hydrogel shells and aqueous cores, having the potential added advantages of biocompatibility, permeability, and stimulus-responsiveness. Endowing microrobots with deformability could allow them to navigate inside capillaries and cross barriers to finally reach the target site. In this study, we present a cost-effective method for fabricating core-shell structures without the use of organic solvents, surfactants, or extreme pH conditions unlike other techniques (e.g. Layer by Layer). The process begins with the dripping of a mixture of hydrogels, agarose and alginate, into a solution to gelate the drops into beads. After they are loaded with calcium ions at different concentrations, they are immersed in an alginate solution to form the shell. Finally, the beads are heated to let the agarose melt and diffuse out, leaving a liquid core. By varying the concentration of calcium ions, we obtain shells of different thicknesses. To estimate it, we have developed a method using the colour intensity from microscope images. This allowed us to observe that lowering the calcium ions concentration below a threshold does not lead to the formation of continuous shells. For higher concentrations, although the core may remain partially gelled, continuous shells successfully form. Therefore, our fabrication process could find applications in drug delivery, encapsulation systems, and microrobotics.

People with injuries to the peripheral nervous system suffer from paralysis of the facial muscles, fingers and hands or toes and feet, often for the rest of their lives, due to its poor functional regeneration. Therefore, to improve patients' quality of life, there is an urgent need for conduits that effectively support the healing of large defects in nerve pathways through specific guidance of nerve cells. This paper describes two specific methods for achieving directed growth of Schwann cells, a type of glial cells that can support the regeneration of the nerve pathway by guiding the neuronal axons in the direction of their alignment. One method uses aligned polyamide-6 (PA-6) nanofibers produced via electrospinning on a very fast rotating structured collector, which enables easy nanofiber detachment, without additional effort. The other method implies the exposure of a poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) foil to a KrF* laser beam, that renders a nanorippled surface topography. Schwann cell growth on these substrates was inspected after one week of cultivation by means of scanning electron microscopy (SEM). For both methods we show that Schwann cells grow in a certain direction, predetermined by nanofiber and nanoripple orientation. In contrast, cells cultivated on randomly oriented nanofibers or unstructured surfaces, show an omnidirectional growth behavior. These two methods can be used to produce nerve conduits for the treatment of injuries to the peripheral nervous system.

Background: Earth Observation (EO) datasets have become vital for decision support applications, particularly from open satellite portals that provide extensive historical datasets. These datasets can be integrated with in-situ data to power artificial intelligence mechanisms for accurate forecasting and trend analysis. However, researchers and data scientists face challenges in finding appropriate EO datasets due to inconsistent metadata structures and varied keyword descriptions. This misalignment hinders the discoverability and usability of EO data.

Methods: To address this challenge, the EIFFEL ontology (EIFF-O) is proposed. EIFF-O introduces taxonomies and ontologies to provide (i) global classification of EO data and (ii) linkage between different datasets through common concepts. The taxonomies specified by the European Association of Remote Sensing Companies (EARSC) have been formalized and implemented in EIFF-O. Additionally, EIFF-O incorporates:1.An Essential Climate Variable (ECV) ontology, defined by the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS), is embedded and tailored for Climate Change (CC) applications.2.The Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) ontology is included to facilitate linking datasets to specific targets.3.The ontology extends schema.org vocabularies and promotes the use of JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data (JSON-LD) formats for semantic web integration.

Results: EIFF-O provides a unified framework that enhances the discoverability, usability, and application of EO datasets. The implementation of EIFF-O allows data providers and users to bridge the gap between varied metadata descriptions and structured classification, thereby facilitating better linkage and integration of EO datasets.

Conclusions: The EIFFEL ontology represents a significant advancement in the organization and application of EO datasets. By embedding ECV and SDG ontologies and leveraging semantic web technologies, EIFF-O not only streamlines the data discovery process but also supports diverse applications, particularly in Climate Change monitoring and Sustainable Development Goals achievement. The open-source nature of the ontology and its associated tools promotes rapid adoption among developers.

Background: Energy communities and local electricity markets (e.g., as peer-to-peer trading) are on the rise due to increasingly decentralized electricity generation and favorable adjustment of the legal framework in many European countries.

Methods: This work applies a bi-level optimization model for dynamic participation in peer-to-peer electricity trading to determine the optimal parameters of new participants who want to join an energy community, based on the preferences of the members of the original community (e.g., environmental, economic, or mixed preference). The upper-level problem chooses optimal parameters by minimizing an objective function that includes the prosumers' cost-saving and emission-saving preferences, while the lower level problem maximizes community welfare by optimally allocating locally generated photovoltaic (PV) electricity between members according to their willingness-to-pay. The bi-level problem is solved by transforming the lower level problem by its corresponding Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions.

Results: The results demonstrate that environment-oriented prosumers opt for a new prosumer with high PV capacities installed and low electricity demand, whereas profit-oriented prosumers prefer a new member with high demand but no PV system capacity, presenting a new source of income. Sensitivity analyses indicate that new prosumers' willingness-to-pay has an important influence when the community must decide between two new members.

Conclusions: The added value of this work is that the proposed method can be seen as a basis for a selection process between a large number of potential new community members. Most important future work will include optimization of energy communities over the horizon several years.

A series of fluid-structure-interaction (FSI) experiments is presented for studying water-wave interactions with a flexible beam in a wide range of sea conditions, thereby yielding a repository of FSI test-case data. The aim is to use these experimental data in order to validate FSI solvers commonly employed by the maritime industry in the design of fixed-foundation, offshore wind turbines. The experimental set-up allows simultaneous measurements of beam deflections and their effect on incident and reflected waves. In addition, the study is carried out in a wide range of sea conditions ranging from regular-to-irregular and moderate-to-extreme wave height and steepness. The study of such a wide range of conditions makes the experiments suitable for providing reliable data in the validation of a suite of mathematical and numerical FSI solvers, i.e., linear, nonlinear and high-fidelity. The data from the experiments are made publicly available through open-source data-sharing platforms.

At convergent margins, plates collide producing a subduction process. When an oceanic plate collides with a continental plate, the denser (i.e., oceanic) plate subducts beneath the less dense (continental) plate. This process results in the transportation of carbon and other volatiles into Earth's deep interior and is counterbalanced by volcanic outgassing. Sampling deeply-sourced seeps and fumaroles throughout a convergent margin allows us to assess the processes that control the inventory of volatiles and their interaction with the deep subsurface microbial communities. The Andean Convergent Margin is volcanically active in four distinct zones: the Northern Volcanic Zone, the Central Volcanic Zone, the Southern Volcanic Zone and the Austral Volcanic Zone, which are each characterised by significantly different subduction parameters like crustal thickness, age of subduction and subduction angle. These differences can change subduction dynamics along the convergent margin, possibly influencing the recycling efficiency of carbon and volatiles and its interaction with the subsurface microbial communities. We carried out a scientific expedition, sampling along a ~800 km convergent margin segment of the Andean Convergent Margin in the Central Volcanic Zone of northern Chile, between 17 °S and 24 °S, sampling fluids, gases and sediments, in an effort to understand interactions between microbiology, deeply-sourced fluids, the crust, and tectonic parameters. We collected samples from 38 different sites, representing a wide diversity of seep types in different geologic contexts. Here we report the field protocols and the descriptions of the sites and samples collected.

The COST EU-PoTaRCh Action establishes a network focused on the past, present, and future significance, production, and use of major forest by-products in Europe and beyond. The Action centers around forest by-products-primarily potash, tar, resin, and charcoal (PoTaRCh), along with plant extracts-which have been produced and utilized for over 100,000 years due to their unique chemical, biological, and therapeutic properties. The primary goal of the Action is to demonstrate the importance of these products for the socio-economic development of European countries and beyond, as well as their impact on biodiversity and the natural environment. The Action's objectives are organized into five Working Groups (WGs), each aligned with specific areas of interest: heritage, chemical characterization, archaeology, environmental history, and future perspectives of PoTaRCh materials. A key aspect of the Action is its support for stakeholders outside the scientific community who possess knowledge of PoTaRCh products through their use in industries such as production, education, and the promotion of forests' natural and cultural heritage. In doing so, the Action brings together stakeholders with diverse activity profiles, including museums, state forests, the forestry industry, associations dedicated to preserving traditions, and the tourism sector. The EU-PoTaRCh Action adheres to the three key principles of COST's inclusiveness policy: participation of inclusiveness target countries, gender balance, and the involvement of young researchers, including in leadership positions.