About 6 million years ago, the Mediterranean basin was the location of one of the most extraordinary events in the recent geological history of the Earth: the Messinian Salinity Crisis. Restriction of the seawater exchange between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean led to excess evaporation and deposition on the bottom of the deep Mediterranean basins of a 1.5 km-thick salt layer. Research on this event initiated a long-term scientific controversy. COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) and Marie Skłodowska-Curie European Training Networks were identified as the most appropriate tools to address and solve the controversy using a highly cross-disciplinary approach.

The Coma Recovery Scale-Revised (CRS-R) is the gold standard of responsiveness assessment in patients with disorder of consciousness. The purpose of this study is to search for the efficacy of the caregivers’ involvement in the evaluation of responsiveness in these patients. Responsiveness assessment was performed in 15 patients with CRS-R. The CRS-R was administered with and without the emotional stimulation of the primary caregiver at different times. Our preliminary findings seem to suggest that, including also the caregivers during CRS-R assessment, may obtain better responsiveness scoring than that obtained by professionals and might reduce the misdiagnosis rate.

We present here the results obtained from studying the resolved stellar populations of two dwarf irregular galaxies in the nearby Universe. These galaxies, DDO 68 and NGC 4449, were studied within the Legacy ExtraGalactic UV Survey, an HST program aimed to uncover the many ways in which the star formation (SF) process occurs at different scales. Thanks to the deep photometry obtained in different bands (from λ2704 Å to λ8057 Å), we were able to connect the location and timescales of the star forming regions within the galaxies to merging and interaction with gas clouds and satellites, a crucial aspect of galaxy evolution, even in such small systems. From the color-magnitude diagrams of the analyzed galaxies we were able to recover their star formation history (up to ∼ 2 − 3 Gyr ago since we do not observe the oldest main sequence turn-off or horizontal branch, due to the systems’ distance), finding that the SF never really stopped, but proceeded continuously even with the succession of high and low activity. The time intervals where we find higher SF rates in the two galaxies well agree with the dynamical timescales of previous interactions events, which might represent a major channel for triggering the SF in relatively isolated galaxies.

We present two pilot studies for the search and characterization of accretion events in star-forming dwarf galaxies. Our strategy consists of two complementary approaches: i) the direct search for stellar substructures around dwarf galaxies through deep wide-field imaging, and ii) the characterization of the chemical properties in these systems up to large galacto-centric distances. We show our results for two star-forming dwarf galaxies, the starburst irregular NGC 4449, and the extremely metal-poor dwarf DDO 68.

In this work, the correlation between the number of nonbridging oxygen (NBO) atoms and the thermal and optical properties of TeO2–Li2O–MoO3 glasses was studied. Samples containing (100 − x)TeO2–x(Li2O–MoO3) with x = 10, 15, 20, and 25 mol% were investigated by Raman and Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopies. From the optical absorption measurements, the band gap energies were determined. The Raman and FTIR results showed that with increasing x, the TeO4 units transform into TeO3+1 units and then into TeO3 units, while the Mo coordination changes from 4 → 6. This transformation corresponds to a decrease in the total number of NBO with increasing x in this glass matrix. The decrease in the NBO is also confirmed by the increase in band gap energies and the decrease in the optical basicity, indicating a more polymerized network with increasing x.

Color-magnitude diagrams of resolved stellar populations are the most powerful tool to derive the star formation histories of galaxies. In this review the method to infer star formation histories by comparing synthetic color-magnitude diagrams to deep, high-precision, multi-color photometry is briefly outlined, and our current knowledge of the star formation history of systems within the local Volume is summarized.