Search Results (75)

Conservation managers increasingly employ reinforcement techniques to bolster declining populations by reintroducing non-wild individuals born in captivity into natural habitats, but success rates remain modest. In this study, the success is evaluated of reinforcement efforts using satellite tracking and field observation data collected between 2010 and 2021. It focuses on 13 non-wild individuals, as follows: seven red-crowned cranes Grus japonensis, two white-naped cranes Antigone vipio, and four demoiselle cranes Anthropoides virgo, as well as five wild individuals including two red-crowned cranes and three white-naped cranes. The assessment criteria included survival, movement, and reproduction, utilizing a comprehensive scoring method. The scoring process indicates that more timely field observation records and the movement pattern scoring combining models and trajectories can improve the accuracy of estimation. From the results, although wild individuals generally achieve higher scores across these metrics, statistical differences were not significant possibly due to limited sample size. Notably, non-wild individuals frequently displayed residence, nomadic, or abnormal migration. In addition, field observations underscored the benefits of pairing non-wild individuals with their wild counterparts to enhance migration success. So in order to enhance migration success, it is advisable to release non-wild individuals approaching sexual maturity in proximity to wild subadult flocks during the breeding or summering periods. Additionally, during the overwintering phase, these individuals should be released in areas where wild populations are concentrated. Full article

The Lobster Eye Imager for Astronomy (LEIA) is the pathfinder of the wide-field X-ray telescope used in the Einstein Probe mission. In this study, we present an image of the Virgo Cluster taken by LEIA in the 0.5–4.5 keV band with an exposure time of ∼17.3 ks in the central region. This extended emission is generally consistent with the results obtained by ROSAT. However, the field is affected by bright point sources due to the instrument’s Point Spread Function (PSF) effect. Through fitting of the LEIA spectrum of the Virgo Cluster, we obtained a temperature of 2.1−0.1+0.3 keV, which is consistent with the XMM-Newton results (∼2.3 keV). Above 1.6 keV, the spectrum is dominated by the X-ray background. In summary, this study validates LEIA’s extended source imaging and spectral resolution capabilities for the first time. Full article

The inevitable impacts of climate change have reverberated across ecosystems and caused substantial global biodiversity loss. Climate-induced habitat loss has contributed to range shifts at both species and community levels. Given the importance of identifying suitable habitats for at-risk species, it is imperative to assess potential current and future distributions, and to understand influential environmental factors. Like many species, the Demoiselle crane is not immune to climatic pressures. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan provinces in Pakistan are known wintering grounds for this species. Given that Pakistan is among the top five countries facing devastating effects of climate change, this study sought to conduct species distribution modeling under climate change using data collected during 4 years of field surveys. We developed a Maximum Entropy distribution model to predict the current and projected future distribution of the species across the study area. Future habitat projections for 2050 and 2070 were carried out using two representative concentration pathways (RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5) under three global circulation models, including HADGEM2-AO, BCC-CSM1-1, and CCSM4. The most influential factors shaping Demoiselle Crane habitat suitability included the temperature seasonality, annual mean temperature, terrain ruggedness index, and human population density, all of which contributed significantly to the suitability (81.3%). The model identified 35% of the study area as moderately suitable (134,068 km²) and highly suitable (27,911 km²) habitat for the species under current climatic conditions. Under changing climate scenarios, our model predicted a major loss of the species’ current suitable habitat, with shrinkage and shift towards western–central areas along the Pakistan–Afghanistan boarder. The RCP 8.5, which is the extreme climate change scenario, portrays particularly severe consequences, with habitat losses reaching 65% in 2050 and 85% in 2070. This comprehensive study provides useful insights into the Demoiselle Crane habitat’s current and future dynamics in Pakistan. Full article

NICE—Noise Interactive Catalogue Explorer—is a web service developed for rapid-qualitative glitch analysis in gravitational wave data. Glitches are transient noise events that can smother the gravitational wave signal in data recorded by gravitational wave interferometer detectors. NICE provides interactive graphical tools to support detector noise characterization activities, in particular, the analysis of glitches from past and current observing runs, passing from glitch population visualization to individual glitch characterization. The NICE back-end API consists of a multi-database structure that brings order to glitch metadata generated by external detector characterization tools so that such information can be easily requested by gravitational wave scientists. Another novelty introduced by NICE is the interactive front-end infrastructure focused on glitch instrumental and environmental origin investigation, which uses labels determined by their time–frequency morphology. The NICE domain is intended for integration with the Advanced Virgo, Advanced LIGO, and KAGRA characterization pipelines and it will interface with systematic classification activities related to the transient noise sources present in the Virgo detector. Full article

Continuous gravitational-wave (CW) signals are long-lasting quasi-monochromatic gravitational-wave signals expected to be emitted by rapidly rotating non-axisymmetric neutron stars. Depending on the rotational frequency and sky location of the source, certain CW signals may behave in a similar manner to narrow-band artifacts present in ground-based interferometric detectors. Part of the detector characterization tasks in the current generation of interferometric detectors (Advanced LIGO, Advanced Virgo, and KAGRA) aim at understanding the origin of these narrow artifacts, commonly known as "spectral lines". It is expected that similar tasks will continue after the arrival of next-generation detectors (e.g., Einstein Telescope and Cosmic Explorer). Typically, a fraction of the observed lines in a given detector can be associated to one or more instrumental causes; others, however, have an unknown origin. In this work, we assess the similarity of CW signals to spectral lines in order to understand whether a CW signal may be mistaken for a noise artifact. Albeit astrophysically unlikely, our results do not rule out the possibility of a CW signal being visible in the detector’s power spectrum. Full article

Endometriosis has a prevalence of 10% worldwide in premenopausal women. Probably, endometriosis begins early in the life of young girls, and it is commonly diagnosed later in life. The prevalence of deep infiltrating endometriosis (DIE) in adolescence is currently unknown due to diagnostic limits and underestimation of clinical symptoms. Dysmenorrhea is a common symptom in adolescents affected by DIE, often accompanied by dyspareunia and chronic acyclic pelvic pain. Ultrasonography—either performed transabdominal, transvaginal or transrectal—should be considered the first-line imaging technique despite the potential for missed diagnosis due to early-stage disease. Magnetic resonance imaging should be preferred in the case of virgo patients or when ultrasonographic exam is not accepted. Diagnostic laparoscopy is deemed acceptable in the case of suspected DIE not responding to conventional hormonal therapy. An early medical and/or surgical treatment may reduce disease progression with an immediate improvement in quality of life and fertility, but at the same time, painful symptoms may persist or even recur due to the surgery itself. The aim of this narrative review is to report the prevalence of DIE in adolescents, describe the pathogenetic theories and discuss the management in adolescent women, including the challenging road to diagnosis and the treatment alternatives. Full article

Despite the archaeological importance of Aqua Virgo, a Roman aqueduct built in 19 BC and still functioning nowadays, there is a lack of information about the mortars coming from the inner duct. This work aims to investigate the mortars from Aqua Virgo and Aqueduct Y, an unidentified aqueduct running under the first one in the La Rinascente area (between Via del Nazareno and Via dei Due Macelli, Rome, IT) through Optical Microscopy (OM), X-ray Powder Diffraction (XRPD) and Scanning Electron Microscopy with Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy (SEM-EDS). The aim is to understand which materials guarantee such longevity and differentiate between different intervention phases. Local natural materials with pozzolanic behaviour—in particular, Pozzolane Rosse—and ceramic fragments are widely employed, mixed or not, for the realisation of the hydraulic mortars under investigation, independently of the intervention phase. Of particular interest is the discovery of an amorphous binder composed of Si, Al, Ca, K and Mg in some samples characterised by the absence of calcite. Full article

Athena (advanced telescope for high-energy astrophysics) is an ESA large-class mission, at present under a re-definition “design-to-cost” phase, planned for a prospective launch at L1 orbit in the second half of the 2030s. It will be an observatory alternatively focusing on two complementary instruments: the X-IFU (X-ray Integral Field Unit), a TES (TransitionEdge Sensor)-based kilo-pixel array which is able to perform simultaneous high-grade energy spectroscopy (~3 eV@7 keV) and imaging over 4′ FoV (field of view), and the WFI (Wide Field Imager), which has good energy spectral resolution (~170 eV@7 keV) and imaging on wide 40′ × 40′ FoV. Athena will be a truly transformational observatory, operating in conjunction with other large observatories across the electromagnetic spectrum available in the 2030s like ALMA, ELT, JWST, SKA, CTA, etc., and in multi-messenger synergies with facilities like LIGO A+, Advanced Virgo+, LISA, IceCube and KM3NeT. The Italian team is involved in both instruments. It has the co-PIship of the cryogenic instrument for which it has to deliver the TES-based Cryogenic AntiCoincidence detector (CryoAC) necessary to guarantee the X-IFU sensitivity, degraded by a primary particle background of both solar and galactic cosmic ray (GCR) origins, and by secondary electrons produced by primaries interacting with the materials surrounding the main detector. The outcome of Geant4 studies shows the necessity for adopting both active and passive techniques to guarantee the residual particle background at 5 × 10⁻³ cts cm⁻² s⁻¹ keV⁻¹ level in 2–10 keV scientific bandwidth. The CryoAC is a four-pixel detector made of Si-suspended absorbers sensed by Ir/Au TESes placed at <1 mm below the main detector. After a brief overview of the Athena mission, we will report on the particle background reduction techniques highlighting the impact of the Geant4 simulation on the X-IFU focal plane assembly design, then hold a broader discussion on the CryoAC program in terms of detection chain system requirements, test, design concept against trade-off studies and programmatic. Full article

Available inventories of baryonic mass in the universe are based largely on galactic data and empirical calculations made >20 years ago. Values falling below cosmological estimates underlie proposals that certain rarified gassy regions could have extremely high T, which motivated absorption measurements and hydrodynamic models. Yet, the shortfall remains. We inventory the total baryonic mass, focusing on gravitational interactions and updated measurements. A recent analytical inverse method for analyzing galactic rotation curves quantified how baryon mass and associated volumetric density (ρ) depend on distance (r) from galactic centers. The model is based on the dynamical consequences of the observed oblate shape of galaxies and the Virial Theorem. The parameter-free solution provides ρ(r) ∝ 1/r² which describes star-rich galactic interiors, gas-rich outer discoids, circumgalactic media, and gradation into intergalactic media. Independent observational determinations of baryonic ρ validate that our 1/r² result describes baryons alone. This solution shows that total baryonic mass associated with any galaxy is 2.4 to 40 times detectable luminosity, depending on galaxy size and spacing. Luminosity data within 50 Mpc show that Andromeda equivalents separated by ~1 Mpc represent the local universe. Combining the above yields (6 ± 2) × 10⁻²⁵ kg m⁻³ for the present-day universe. Three other approaches support this high density: (1) evaluating trends and luminosity data near 1000 Mpc; (2) using a recent estimate for the number of galaxies in the universe; (3) calculating an energy balance. We discuss uncertainties in the critical density. Implications of large baryonic ρ are briefly discussed. Full article

In April 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration successfully imaged a supermassive black hole (SMBH) for the first time, revealing the apparent “shadow” cast by the dark compact object M87* in the center of the elliptical galaxy Virgo A [...] Full article

General relativity is one of the pillars of modern physics. For decades, the theory has been mainly tested in the weak-field regime with experiments in the solar system and radio observations of binary pulsars. Until 2015, the strong-field regime was almost completely unexplored. Thanks to new observational facilities, the situation has dramatically changed in the last few years. Today, we have gravitational wave data of the coalesce of stellar-mass compact objects from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration, images at mm wavelengths of the supermassive black holes in M87* and Sgr A* from the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, and X-ray data of accreting compact objects from a number of X-ray missions. Gravitational wave tests and black hole imaging tests are certainly more popular and are discussed in other articles of this Special Issue. The aim of the present manuscript is to provide a pedagogical review on X-ray tests of general relativity with black holes and to compare these kinds of tests with those possible with gravitational wave data and black hole imaging. Full article

Upcoming LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA (LVK) observational runs offer new opportunities to probe the central engines of extreme transient events. Cosmological gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) and core-collapse supernovae (CC-SNe), in particular, are believed to be powered by compact objects, i.e., a neutron star (NS) or black hole (BH). A principal distinction between an NS and BH is the energy reservoir in the angular momentum EJ. Per unit mass, this reaches a few percent in a rapidly rotating NS and tens of percent in a Kerr BH, respectively. Calorimetry by EGW on a descending chirp may break the degeneracy between the two. We review this approach, anticipating new observational opportunities for planned LVK runs. GRB170817A is the first event revealing its central engine by a descending chirp in gravitational radiation. An accompanying energy output EGW≃3.5%M⊙c2 is observed during GRB170817A in the aftermath of the double neutron star merger GW170817. The progenitors of normal long GRBs, on the other hand, are the rare offspring of CC-SNe of type Ib/c. Yet, the extended emission to SGRBs (SGRBEEs) shares similar durations and the same Amati-relation of the prompt GRB emission of LGRBs, pointing to a common central engine. The central engine of these extreme transient events has, hitherto, eluded EM observations alone, even when including neutrino observations, as in SN1987A. The trigger signaling the birth of the compact object and the evolution powering these events is expected to be revealed by an accompanying GW signal, perhaps similar to that of GRB170817A. For GRB170817A, EGW exceeds EJ in the initial hyper-massive neutron star (HMNS) produced in the immediate aftermath of GW170817. It identifies the spin-down of a Kerr BH of mass ∼2.4M⊙ defined by the total mass of GW170817. This observation is realized in spectrograms generated by Butterfly matched filtering, a time-symmetric analysis with equal sensitivity to ascending and descending chirps, calibrated by signal injection experiments. It is implemented on a heterogeneous computing platform with synaptic parallel processing in F90/C++/C99 under bash. A statistical significance of 5.5σ is derived from multi-messenger event timing, based on a probability of false alarm (PFA) factored over a probability p1=8.3×10−4 by causality and a p-value p2=4.9×10−5 of consistency between H1 and L1 observations. For upcoming observations, this approach may be applied to similar emissions from SNIb/c and GRBs in the Local Universe, upon the mass-scaling of present results by the mass of their putative black hole-central engines. Full article

Cone snails, as a type of marine organism, have rich species diversity. Traditionally, classifications of cone snails were based mostly on radula, shell, and anatomical characters. Because of these phenotypic features’ high population variability and propensity for local adaptation and convergence, identifying species can be difficult and occasionally inaccurate. In addition, mitochondrial genomes contain high phylogenetic information, so complete mitogenomes have been increasingly employed for inferring molecular phylogeny. To enrich the mitogenomic database of cone snails (Caenogastropoda: Conidae), mitogenomes of four Conus species, i.e., C. imperialis (15,505 bp), C. literatus (15,569 bp), C. virgo (15,594 bp), and C. marmoreus (15,579 bp), were characterized and compared. All 4 of these mitogenomes included 13 protein-coding genes, 2 ribosomal RNA genes, 22 tRNA genes, and non-coding regions. All the Protein Codon Genes (PCGs) of both newly sequenced mitogenomes used TAA or TAG as a terminal codon. Most PCGs used conventional start codon ATG, but an alternative initiation codon GTG was detected in a gene (NADH dehydrogenase subunit 4 (nad4)) of C. imperialis. In addition, the phylogenetic relationships were reconstructed among 20 Conus species on the basis of PCGs, COX1, and the complete mitogenome using both Bayesian Inference (BI) and Maximum Likelihood (ML). The phylogenetic results supported that C. litteratus, C. quercinus, and C. virgo were clustered together as a sister group (PP = 1, BS = 99), but they did not support the phylogenetic relation of C. imperialis and C. tribblei (PP = 0.79, BS = 50). In addition, our study established that PCGs and complete mitogenome are the two useful markers for phylogenetic inference of Conus species. These results enriched the data of the cone snail’s mitochondrion in the South China Sea and provided a reliable basis for the interpretation of the phylogenetic relationship of the cone snail based on the mitochondrial genome. Full article

Females of frog-biting midges (Corethrellidae) obtain their blood meals from male calling frogs. While the morphology of the feeding apparatus is well studied in hematophagous Diptera that impact humans, frog-biting midges have received far less attention. We provide a detailed micromorphological examination of the piercing blood-sucking proboscis and maxillary palpus in three Corethrella species using scanning electron microscopy and histological semi-thin sectioning. We also compare the sensilla found on the proboscis tip and the palpus of Corethrella with other piercing blood-sucking Diptera. Corethrella spp. have a proboscis length of about 135 µm, equipped with delicate mandibular piercing structures composing the food canal together with the labrum and hypopharynx. Their proboscis composition is plesiomorphic and more similar to other short-proboscid hematophagous Culicomorpha (e.g., Simuliidae), in contrast to the phylogenetically more closely related long-proboscid Culicidae. As in other short-proboscid taxa, the salivary canal in Corethrella spp. transitions into an open salivary groove with one mandible forming a seal, whereas in Culicidae the salivary canal is closed until the tip of the proboscis. We discuss the possible functional constraints of very short, piercing blood-sucking proboscises (e.g., dimensions of host blood cells) that may limit the size of the food canal. Full article

The orbital evolution of a binary system consisting of two primordial black hole clusters is investigated. Such clusters are predicted in some theoretical models with broken symmetry in the inflation Lagrangian. A cluster consists of the most massive central black hole surrounded by many smaller black holes. Similar to single primordial black holes, clusters can form gravitationally bounded pairs and merge during their orbital evolution. The replacement of single black holes by such clusters significantly changes the entire merger process and the final rate of gravitational wave bursts in some parameter ranges (with sufficiently large cluster radii). A new important factor is the tidal gravitational interaction of the clusters. It leads to an additional dissipation of the orbital energy, which is transferred into the internal energy of the clusters or carried away by black holes flying out of the clusters. Comparison with the data of gravitational-wave telescopes allows one to constrain the fractions of primordial black holes in clusters, depending on their mass and compactness. Even the primordial black hole fraction in the composition of dark matter ≃1 turns out to be compatible with LIGO/Virgo observational data, if the black holes are in clusters. Full article