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Ni/CeO2 catalysts are very active and selective for total hydrogenation of CO2 to methane, but the nature of the active sites is still unclear. The surface of a Ni/CeO2 catalyst has been monitored under CO2 methanation conditions by Near Ambient Pressure-XPS (NAP-XPS) using synchrotron radiation, and has been concluded that the species involved in the redox processes taking place during the CO2 methanation mechanism are the Ni2+-CeO2/Ni0 and Ce4+/Ce3+ pairs. In addition, a small fraction of nickel is present on the catalyst surface forming NiO and Ni2+-carbonates/hydroxyls (around 20% of the total surface nickel), but these species do not participate in the redox processes of the methanation mechanism. Under CO2 methanation conditions the H2 reduction rate of the Ni2+-CeO2/Ni0 and Ce4+/Ce3+ couples is much faster than their CO2 reoxidation rate (2 times faster, at least, at 300ºC), but a certain proportion of nickel always remains oxidized under reaction conditions. The high activity of Ni/CeO2 catalysts for CO2 methanation is tentatively attributed to the simultaneous presence of Ni2+-CeO2 and Ni0 active sites where CO2 and H2 are expected to be efficiently dissociated, respectively. Generalitat Valenciana, Spain (PROMETEO/2018/0765) Ministry for Science and Innovation MICINN, Spain (Projects PID2019-105960RB-C21 and PID2019-105960RB-C22) Junta de Andalucía, Spain (Project P18-RTJ-2974); European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program (Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 713567) Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre, Ireland (award 12/RC/2278_P2) ALBA synchrotron, Spain (Proposal number: ID 2020094556).

Tissue-thin parchment made it possible to produce the first pocket Bibles: Thousands were made in the 13th century. The source of this parchment, often called “uterine vellum,” has been a long-standing controversy in codicology. Use of the Latin term abortivum in many sources has led some scholars to suggest that the skin of fetal calves or sheep was used. Others have argued that it would not be possible to sustain herds if so many pocket Bibles were produced from fetal skins, arguing instead for unexpected alternatives, such as rabbit. Here, we report a simple and objective technique using standard conservation treatments to identify the animal origin of parchment. The noninvasive method is a variant on zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry (ZooMS) peptide mass fingerprinting but extracts protein from the parchment surface by using an electrostatic charge generated by gentle rubbing of a PVC eraser on the membrane surface. Using this method, we analyzed 72 pocket Bibles originating in France, England, and Italy and 293 additional parchment samples that bracket this period. We found no evidence for the use of unexpected animals; however, we did identify the use of more than one mammal species in a single manuscript, consistent with the local availability of hides. These results suggest that ultrafine vellum does not necessarily derive from the use of abortive or newborn animals with ultrathin hides, but could equally well reflect a production process that allowed the skins of maturing animals of several species to be rendered into vellum of equal quality and fineness. International audience

Abstract. This paper aims to extend and update the survey of extreme wave events in Ireland that was previously carried out by O’Brien et al. (2013). The original catalogue highlighted the frequency of such events dating back as far as the turn of the last ice age and as recent as 2012. Ireland's marine territory extends far beyond its coastline and is one of the largest seabed territories in Europe. It is therefore not surprising that extreme waves have continued to occur regularly since 2012, particularly considering the severity of weather during the winters of 2013–2014 and 2015–2016. In addition, a large number of storm surges have been identified since the publication of the original catalogue. This paper updates the O’Brien et al. (2013) catalogue to include events up to the end of 2017. Storm surges are included as a new category and events are categorised into long waves (tsunamis and storm surges) and short waves (storm and rogue waves). New results prior to 2012 are also included and some of the events previously documented are reclassified. Important questions regarding public safety, services and the influence of climate change are also highlighted. An interactive map has been created to allow the reader to navigate through events: https://drive.google.com/open?id=19cZ59pDHfDnXKYIziYAVWV6AfoE&usp=sharing.

Electric fields are involved in numerous physiological processes, including directional embryonic development and wound healing following injury. To study these processes in vitro and/or to harness electric field stimulation as a biophysical environmental cue for organised tissue engineering strategies various electric field stimulation systems have been developed. These systems are overall similar in design and have been shown to influence morphology, orientation, migration and phenotype of several different cell types. This review discusses different electric field stimulation setups and their effect on cell response. This work has been supported by Science Foundation Ireland, Career Development Award (Grant Agreement Number: 15/CDA/3629) and Science Foundation Ireland / European Regional Development Fund (Grant Agreement Number: 13/RC/2073). This work has also received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, grant agreement No. 866126. The funding agencies were not involved in the design of the study; in the data collection, analysis and interpretation; and in the writing of the manuscript. peer-reviewed

In this paper, we tackle the problem of domain adaptation of statistical machine translation (SMT) by exploiting domain-specific data acquired by domain-focused crawling of text from the World Wide Web. We design and empirically evaluate a procedure for automatic acquisition of monolingual and parallel text and their exploitation for system training, tuning, and testing in a phrase-based SMT framework. We present a strategy for using such resources depending on their availability and quantity supported by results of a large-scale evaluation carried out for the domains of environment and labour legislation, two language pairs (English---French and English---Greek) and in both directions: into and from English. In general, machine translation systems trained and tuned on a general domain perform poorly on specific domains and we show that such systems can be adapted successfully by retuning model parameters using small amounts of parallel in-domain data, and may be further improved by using additional monolingual and parallel training data for adaptation of language and translation models. The average observed improvement in BLEU achieved is substantial at 15.30 points absolute.

This paper presents the results of the premier shared task organized alongside the Confer- ence on Machine Translation (WMT) 2018. Participants were asked to build machine translation systems for any of 7 language pairs in both directions, to be evaluated on a test set of news stories. The main metric for this task is human judgment of translation quality. This year, we also opened up the task to additional test suites to probe specific aspects of transla- tion.

Abstract. A unique stratigraphic sequence of fossil leaves of Eotrigonobalanus furcinervis (extinct trees of the beech family, Fagaceae) from central Germany has been used to derive an atmospheric pCO2 record with multiple data points spanning the late middle to late Eocene, two sampling levels which may be earliest Oligocene, and two samples from later in the Oligocene. Using the inverse relationship between the density of stomata and pCO2, we show that pCO2 decreased continuously from the late middle to late Eocene, reaching a relatively stable low value before the end of the Eocene. Based on the subsequent records, pCO2 in parts of the Oligocene was similar to latest Eocene values. These results show that a decrease in pCO2 preceded the large shift in marine oxygen isotope records that characterizes the Eocene–Oliogocene transition. This may be related to the "hysteresis effect" previously proposed – where a certain threshold of pCO2 change was crossed before the cumulative effects of this and other factors resulted in rapid temperature decline, ice build up on Antarctica and hence a change of climate mode.