Publications related to Natural science

Hits and Misses: Digital Contact Tracing in a Pandemic

Traditional contact tracing is one of the most powerful weapons people have in the battle against a pandemic, especially when vaccines do not yet exist or do not afford complete protection from infection. But the effectiveness of contact tracing hinges on ...

SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD2023

SKA Science Data Challenge 2: analysis and results

Jean-Paul Richard Kneib, Xin Chen, Frédéric Courbin, Jean-Luc Starck, Emma Elizabeth Tolley, Yi Zhang, Lei Zhang, Hua Zhang, Xiuwei Zhang, Libo Yu, Claudio Gheller, Aymeric Alexandre Galan, Austin Chandler Peel, Mark Thomas Sargent, Yi Wang

The Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO) will explore the radio sky to new depths in order to conduct transformational science. SKAO data products made available to astronomers will be correspondingly large and complex, requiring the application of ad ...

OXFORD UNIV PRESS2023

Digital Intervention for Collaborative and Human-Centered Activities in Design-Based Learning Scenarios

Denis Gillet, Isabelle Barbara Marie-Hélène Cardia

Training science and engineering students to become responsible citizens and professionals requires novel and creative pedagogical approaches, such as design thinking. This concept relies on processes and tools to develop creativity and problem-solving ski ...

IEEE2023

OSSCAR, an open platform for collaborative development of computational tools for education in science

Giovanni Pizzi, Sara Bonella, Dou Du

In this paper we present the Open Software Services for Classrooms and Research (OSSCAR) platform. OSSCAR provides an open collaborative environment to develop and access educational resources in the form of web applications, for which various deployment m ...

ELSEVIER2023

Nucleation, propagation, and scale dependence of laboratory frictional ruptures; implications for earthquake mechanics

Federica Paglialunga

Earthquakes are natural phenomena that cause ground shaking and damage to people and infrastructures. Despite significant progress achieved in understanding how earthquakes start, propagate, and arrest, many aspects of their physics and mechanics remain no ...

EPFL2023

Circularity by stock in Sri Lanka: Economic necessity meets urban fabric renovation

Paolo Tombesi, Milinda Pathiraja

Persistent fiscal and political mismanagement, together with the financial pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic, have driven Sri Lanka into a social and economic crisis triggering a decrease in national foreign exchange reserves, an inability to purchase vit ...

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2023

Natural aging and vacancy trapping in Al-6xxx

William Curtin, Michele Ceriotti

Undesirable natural aging (NA) in Al-6xxx delays subsequent artificial aging (AA) but the size, composition, and evolution of clustering are challenging to measure. Here, atomistic details of early-stage clustering in Al-1% Mg-0.6%Si during NA are studied ...

Springer Heidelberg2023

A landmark environmental law looks ahead

Devis Tuia

In late December 1973, the United States enacted what some would come to call “the pitbull of environmental laws.” In the 50 years since, the formidable regulatory teeth of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) have been credited with considerable successes, ob ...

American Association for the Advancement of Science2023

Quantifying online citizen science: Dynamics and demographics of public participation in science

Jérôme Baudry, Steven Piguet

Citizen scientists around the world are collecting data with their smartphones, performing scientific calculations on their home computers, and analyzing images on online platforms. These online citizen science projects are frequently lauded for their pote ...

2023

How roughness emerges on natural and engineered surfaces

Jean-François Molinari, Ramin Aghababaei

Roughness, defined as unevenness of material surfaces, plays an important role in determining how engineering components or natural objects interact with other bodies and their environment. The emergence of fractal roughness on natural and engineered surfa ...

SPRINGER HEIDELBERG2023

Stronger serial dependence in the depth plane than the fronto-parallel plane between realistic objects: Evidence from virtual reality

David Pascucci

Visual estimates of stimulus features are systematically biased toward the features of previously encountered stimuli. Such serial dependencies have often been linked to how the brain maintains perceptual continuity. However, serial dependence has mostly b ...

2023

Three-dimensional fluid-driven frictional ruptures: theory and applications

Alexis Alejandro Sáez Uribe

Fluid-driven frictional ruptures are important in a broad range of subsurface engineering technologies and natural earthquake-related phenomena. Some examples of subsurface operations where borehole fluid injections can induce frictional slip are deep geot ...

EPFL2023

Ecosystem Scenarios as Environmental Futures - Implications for Participatory Framework Designs Integrating Social Capital Formation and Natural Capital Preservation

Charlotte Gisèle Weil

In integrated ecosystem assessment projects, scenarios provide alternative images of environmental futures as orientation knowledge for opinion-forming and decision-making. Participatory scenario frameworks provide the methodological basis for ecosystem sc ...

Tamkang Univ2023

Fast ion generation with ICRF waves and beams in the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator

Mike Machielsen

The largest operating stellarator, Wendelstein 7-X, is of the quasi-isodynamic type. For this design to scale up to a fusion reactor, several criteria must be met, one of them being good fast ion confinement. The latter still has to be tested experimentall ...

EPFL2023

First-person experience cannot rescue causal structure theories from the unfolding argument

Michael Herzog, Adrien Christophe Doerig, Aaron Schurger

We recently put forward an argument, the Unfolding Argument (UA), that integrated information theory (IIT) and other causal structure theories are either already falsified or unfalsifiable, which provoked significant criticism. It seems that we and the cri ...

Elsevier2022

Biological nanopores for single-molecule sensing

Matteo Dal Peraro, Chan Cao, Simon Finn Mayer

Evolution has found countless ways to transport material across cells and cellular compartments separated by membranes. Protein assemblies are the cornerstone for the formation of channels and pores that enable this regulated passage of molecules in and ou ...

2022

Advances in Magnetics Roadmap on Spin-Wave Computing

Qian Wang, Dirk Grundler, Xiuwei Zhang, Yiming Li

Magnonics addresses the physical properties of spin waves and utilizes them for data processing. Scalability down to atomic dimensions, operation in the GHz-to-THz frequency range, utilization of nonlinear and nonreciprocal phenomena, and compatibility wit ...

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers2022

Roadmap on Machine learning in electronic structure

Michele Ceriotti, Jigyasa Nigam, Andrea Grisafi, Max David Veit

In recent years, we have been witnessing a paradigm shift in computational materials science. In fact, traditional methods, mostly developed in the second half of the XXth century, are being complemented, extended, and sometimes even completely replaced by ...

IOP Publishing Ltd2022

Theory and application of a data-driven approach to compressive spectrometry in the assessment of neurophotic stimulation

Forrest Simon Webler

Recent advances in biology and neuroscience have elucidated pathways in which visible light initiates a signaling process, via the eye, responsible for activating direct and indirect biological responses. While the full impact of unnatural light patterns o ...

EPFL2022

Many-Body Self-Interaction and Polarons

Alfredo Pasquarello, Stefano Falletta

We address the many-body self-interaction in relation to polarons in density functional theory. Our study provides (i) a unified theoretical framework encompassing many-body and one-body forms of self-interaction and (ii) an efficient semilocal scheme for ...

2022