Non-communicable chronic diseases (NCCDs) are the main cause of morbidity and mortality globally. Demographic aging has resulted in older populations with more complex healthcare needs. This necessitates a multilevel rethinking of healthcare policies, health education and community support systems with digitalization of technologies playing a central role. The European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Aging (A3) working group focuses on well-being for older adults, with an emphasis on quality of life and healthy aging. A subgroup of A3, including multidisciplinary stakeholders in health care across Europe, focuses on the palliative care (PC) model as a paradigm to be modified to meet the needs of older persons with NCCDs. This development paper delineates the key parameters we identified as critical in creating a public health model of PC directed to the needs of persons with NCCDs. This paradigm shift should affect horizontal components of public health models. Furthermore, our model includes vertical components often neglected, such as nutrition, resilience, well-being and leisure activities. The main enablers identified are information and communication technologies, education and training programs, communities of compassion, twinning activities, promoting research and increasing awareness amongst policymakers. We also identified key ‘bottlenecks’: inequity of access, insufficient research, inadequate development of advance care planning and a lack of co-creation of relevant technologies and shared decision-making. Rethinking PC within a public health context must focus on developing policies, training and technologies to enhance person-centered quality life for those with NCCD, while ensuring that they and those important to them experience death with dignity.

Fewer than 200 radiocarbon (14C) dates with secure contextual information are available for Cuba, making it challenging to reconstruct Caribbean indigenous population dynamics, their identities and interactions. In this paper, we discussed 21 accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) 14C dates from two mounds (M1 and M2) at the Playa del Mango site (Granma province, Cuba), traditionally associated with the Banwaroid stone tool tradition. The ΔR calculated for the site was –132.0 ± 176 and –164.0 ± 68. The chronology of burials from the peripheral area of M2 suggested that the cemetery was continuously used from at least cal BC 116–AD 241 (2 σ). The domestic area of M2 was used at minimum between cal BC 55–AD 435 (2 σ), which encompasses the use of the funerary areas. An isolated human tooth from M1 [cal AD 125–435 (2 σ)] suggested that this funerary area is later than the one at the periphery of M2, and possibly contemporaneous with the later formation of the M2 shell midden. The archaeological assemblage of the “Banwaroid tradition” is widely distributed in Cuba, and mixed with other archaeological traditions, supporting that a complex web of human interactions took place in the Caribbean in precolonial times.

Bipartite networks represent pairwise relationships between nodes belonging to two distinct classes. While established methods exist for analyzing unipartite networks, those for bipartite network analysis are somewhat obscure and relatively less developed. Community detection in such instances is frequently approached by first projecting the network onto a unipartite network, a method where edges between node classes are encoded as edges within one class. Here we test seven different projection schemes by assessing the performance of community detection on both: (i) a real-world dataset from social media and (ii) an ensemble of artificial networks with prescribed community structure. A number of performance and accuracy issues become apparent from the experimental findings, especially in the case of long-tailed degree distributions. Of the methods tested, the “hyperbolic” projection scheme alleviates most of these difficulties and is thus the most robust scheme of those tested. We conclude that any interpretation of community detection algorithm performance on projected networks must be done with care as certain network configurations require strong community preference for the bipartite structure to be reflected in the unipartite communities. Our results have implications for the analysis of detected community structure in projected unipartite networks.

In this work, we study the optical properties of 58 CSS/GPS radio sources selected from the literature in order to determine the impact of the radio-jet in the circumnuclear environment of these objects. We obtained optical spectra for all sources from SDSS-DR12 and performed a stellar population synthesis using the Starlight code. Our results indicate that the sample is dominated by intermediate to old stellar populations and there is no strong correlation between optical and radio properties of these sources.

We analyzed the inner 320 × 535 pc2 of the elliptical galaxy NGC 1052 with integral field spectroscopy, both in the optical and in the near-infrared (NIR). The stellar population analysis revealed a dominance of old stellar populations from the optical data, and an intermediate-age ring from NIR data. When combining optical+NIR data, optical results were favoured. The emission-line analysis revealed five kinematic components, where two of them are unresolved and probably associated with the active galactic nucleus (AGN), one is associated with large-scale shocks, one with the radio jets, and the last could be explained by either a bipolar outflow, rotation in an eccentric disc or a combination of a disc and large-scale gas bubbles. Our results also indicate that the emission within the galaxy is caused by a combination of shocks and photoionization by the AGN.

Understanding the interplay between the phenomena of active galactic nuclei (AGN) and starbursts remains an open issue in studies of galaxy evolution. The galaxy NGC 34 is the remnant of the merger of two former gas-rich disc galaxies and it also hosts a strong nuclear starburst. In this work, we map the ionized and molecular gas present in the nuclear regions of the galaxy NGC 34 using adaptive optics (AO) assisted near infrared (NIR) integral field unity (IFU) observations. Our main goals are to better constrain the energy source of this object and to use NGC 34 as a laboratory to probe the AGN-starburst connection in the context of galaxy evolution and AGN feeding and feedback processes.

We present a numerical methodology for construction of reduced-order models (ROMs) of fluid flows through the combination of flow modal decomposition and regression analysis. Spectral proper orthogonal decomposition is applied to reduce the dimensionality of the model and, at the same time, filter the proper orthogonal decomposition temporal modes. The regression step is performed by a deep feedforward neural network (DNN), and the current framework is implemented in a context similar to the sparse identification of nonlinear dynamics algorithm. A discussion on the optimization of the DNN hyperparameters is provided for obtaining the best ROMs and an assessment of these models is presented for a canonical nonlinear oscillator and the compressible flow past a cylinder. Then the method is tested on the reconstruction of a turbulent flow computed by a large eddy simulation of a plunging airfoil under dynamic stall. The reduced-order model is able to capture the dynamics of the leading edge stall vortex and the subsequent trailing edge vortex. For the cases analysed, the numerical framework allows the prediction of the flow field beyond the training window using larger time increments than those employed by the full-order model. We also demonstrate the robustness of the current ROMs constructed via DNNs through a comparison with sparse regression. The DNN approach is able to learn transient features of the flow and presents more accurate and stable long-term predictions compared to sparse regression.

Two female snapper-choking isopods Cymothoa excisa (body length 11 and 14 mm) were in the buccal cavity of two invasive lionfish Pterois volitans (total length 294 and 301 mm) collected in Alacranes Reef, southern Gulf of Mexico. This is the first record of C. excisa parasitizing invasive lionfish P. volitans in coral reefs of the Western Atlantic, where these isopods appear to have infected the host through adult prey-predator transfer.

Social wasps can face many challenges during their colony cycle, including the presence of parasites. The order Strepsiptera is among the main parasites of the wasp genus Polistes. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of an endoparasite species on the host Polistes ferreri, with the hypothesis that females of this social wasp would undergo morphophysiological alterations as well as changes in their cuticular chemical profile caused by the obligate endoparasite. On average, parasitism was found in 10% of the colonies studied. All the parasitized females showed filamentous ovarioles without developing oocytes, which indicates a physiological castration. Moreover, the endoparasites present in the gaster of females caused its volume to increase, and the presence of endoparasites changed the cuticular chemical profiles of females, confirming our hypothesis. It is likely that this parasitism effect could hamper the maintenance of wasp colonies.

The characteristics of silicon films deposited by plasma depend strongly on the reactor parameters. In our experiments, the two-level factorial design was implemented. Pressure, silane and hydrogen flows were set at high and low values for the synthesis of silicon films. Results showed that the flows of silane and hydrogen played a key role, being the influence of pressure low. In particular, the samples at high level of hydrogen exhibited the lowest deposition rate and photosensitivity. On the other hand, the samples at low level of hydrogen showed crystalline regions and high deposition rate. For the lowest dilution ratio, nano/meso-structured silicon films were obtained, showing high photosensitivity and high roughness that increases the scattering of light. These characteristics of our films make them suitable to be used in photovoltaics.

We present the observed “continuum” levels of polarization as a function of time for four well-observed Type II-Plateau supernovae (SNe II-P; Fig. 1), the class of SNe decisively determined to arise from red supergiant stars (Smartt 2009). All four objects show temporally increasing degrees of polarization through the end of the photospheric phase, with some exhibiting early-time polarization that challenge existing models (e.g., Dessart and Hillier 2011) to reproduce. A fundamental ejecta asymmetry is present in this photometrically diverse sample of type II SNe, and it probably takes different forms (e.g., 56Ni blobs/fingers, large scale deformation). We acknowledge support from NSF grants AST-1009571 and AST-1210311.

Twelve accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon dates from the shell-matrix site of Canímar Abajo (Matanzas, Cuba) are reported. Eleven were obtained directly from human bone collagen in burials and one was obtained from charcoal recovered from a burial context. The site stratigraphy presents two episodes of burial activity separated by a shell midden layer. The AMS dates fall into two compact clusters that correlate remarkably well with the stratigraphy. The older burial dates to between 1380–800 cal BC (2σ) and the younger one to between cal AD 360–950 (2σ). The AMS dates are compared to eight conventional 14C dates previously obtained on shell and charcoal. One of the conventional dates on charcoal (5480–5380 cal BC; 2σ) has been reported as the oldest 14C date in the Caribbean region; its context and reliability are clarified. The suite of AMS dates provides one of the most reliable chronometric dating of a cultural context during this timeframe in Cuba. The correlation of 14C and stratigraphy establishes a solid chronology for investigating the important economic and ritual features of Canímar Abajo.