A search for lines in the bright X-ray afterglow of GRB120711A

GRB120711A, discovered and rapidly localized by the INTEGRAL satellite, attracted particular interest due to its high gamma-ray fluence, very bright X-ray afterglow, and the detection of a prompt optical transient and of long-lasting emission at GeV energies. A follow-up observation carried out with the XMM-Newton satellite has provided an X-ray spectrum in the 0.3-10 keV with unprecedented statistics for a GRB afterglow 20 hours after the burst. The spectrum is well fit by a power-law with photon index 1.87+-0.01, modified by absorption in our Galaxy and in the GRB host at z=1.4. A Galactic absorption consistent with that estimated from neutral hydrogen observations is obtained only with host metallicity lower than 0.05 of the Solar value. We report the results of a sensitive search for emission and absorption lines using the matched filter smoothing method (Rutledge and Sako 2003). No statistically significant lines were found. The upper limits on the equivalent width of emission lines, derived through Monte Carlo simulations, are few tens of eV, a factor about 10 lower than that of the possible lines reported in the literature for other bursts.Comment: Accepted for publication in A&

WHY DO RESEARCHERS COLLABORATE WITH INDUSTRY? AN ANALYSIS OF THE WINE SECTOR IN CHILE, SOUTH AFRICA AND ITALY

This paper explores the determinants of the linkages between industry and research organizations – including universities. We present new evidence on three wine producing areas – Piedmont, a region of Italy, Chile, South Africa - that have successfully reacted to the recent structural changes experienced in the industry worldwide. Based on an original data-set, we carry out an econometric exercise to study the microeconomic determinants of researchers' collaborations with industry. The evidence reveals that individual researcher characteristics, such as embeddedness in the academic system, age and sex, matter more than their publishing record or formal degrees.University-Industry Linkages, Innovation System, Wine Sector, Emerging Economies

Clusters of firms in space and time

The use of the K-functions (Ripley, 1977) has become recently popular in the analysis of the spatial pattern of firms. It was first introduced in the economic literature by Arbia and Espa (1996) and then popularized by Marcon and Puech (2003), Quah and Simpson (2003), Duranton and Overman (2005) and Arbia et al. (2008). In particular in Arbia et al. (2008) we used Ripley’s K-functions as instruments to study the inter-sectoral co-agglomeration pattern of firms in a single moment of time. All this researches have followed a static approach, disregarding the time dimension. Temporal dynamics, on the other hand, play a crucial role in understanding the economic and social phenomena, particularly when referring to the analysis of the individual choices leading to the observed clusters of economic activities. With respect to the contributions previously appeared in the literature, this paper uncovers the process of firm demography by studying the dynamics of localization through space-time K-functions. The empirical part of the paper will focus on the study of the long run localization of firms in the area of Rome (Italy), by concentrating on the ICT sector data collected by the Italian Industrial Union in the period 1920- 2005.Agglomeration, Non-parametric measures; Space-time K-functions, Spatial clusters, Spatial econometrics.

Neutrinoless double-beta decay

This paper introduces the neutrinoless double-beta decay the rarest nuclear weak process and describes the status of the research for this transition, both from the point of view of theoretical nuclear physics and in terms of the present and future experimental scenarios. Implications of this phenomenon on crucial aspects of particle physics are briefly discussed. The calculations of the nuclear matrix elements in case of mass mechanisms are reviewed, and a range for these quantities is proposed for the most appealing candidates. After introducing general experimental concepts—such as the choice of the best candidates, the different proposed technological approaches, and the sensitivity—we make the point on the experimental situation. Searches running or in preparation are described, providing an organic presentation which picks up similarities and differences. A critical comparison of the adopted technologies and of their physics reach in terms of sensitivity to the effective Majorana neutrino mass is performed. As a conclusion, we try to envisage what we expect round the corner and at a longer time scaleThis work was partially supported by the MICINN (Spain) (FPA2011-29854) ; by the Comunidad de Madrid (Spain) (HEPHACOS S2009-ESP-1473); by the Spanish Consolider-Ingenio 2010 Program, CPAN (CSD2007-00042

Integrating Inverse Reinforcement Learning and Direct Policy Search for Modeling Multipurpose Water Reservoir Systems

System identification and optimal control have always contributed to water resources systems planning and management. Although water control problems are commonly formulated as multi-objective Markov Decision Processes, accurately modeling reservoir systems controlled by human operators remains challenging due to the absence of a formal definition of the objective function guiding their behavior. In this letter, we introduce a mixed Reinforcement Learning approach to model the dynamics of multipurpose reservoir systems. Specifically, our method first uses Inverse Reinforcement Learning to extract the tradeoff among competing objectives from historical observations of the reservoir system dynamics. The identified objective function is then used in the formulation of an optimal control problem returning a closed-loop policy which allows the simulation of the observed dynamics of the reservoir system. We demonstrate the potential of the proposed method in a real-world application involving the multipurpose regulation of Lake Como in northern Italy. Results show that our approach effectively infers the tradeoff between flood control and water supply adopted in the observed system's operation, and yields a control policy that closely approximates the observed system dynamics

The LHAASO PeVatron bright sky: what we learned

The recent detection of 12 gamma-ray Galactic sources well above E > 100 TeV by the LHAASO observatory has been a breakthrough in the context of Cosmic Ray (CR) origin search. Although most of these sources are unidentified, they are often spatially correlated with leptonic accelerators, like pulsar and pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe). This dramatically affects the paradigm for which a gamma-ray detection at E > 100 TeV implies the presence of a hadronic accelerator of PeV particles (PeVatron). Moreover, the LHAASO results support the idea that sources other than the standard candidates, Supernova Remnants, can accelerate Galactic CRs. In this context, the good angular resolution of future Cherenkov telescopes, such as the ASTRI Mini-Array and CTA, and the higher sensitivity of future neutrino detectors, such as KM3NeT and IceCube-Gen2, will be of crucial importance. In this brief review, we want to summarize the efforts done up to now, from both theoretical and experimental points of view, to fully understand the LHAASO results in the context of the CR acceleration issue.Comment: Accepted for the special Issue "High Energy Multi-Messenger Astrophysics: Latest Research and Reviews" of the journal "Applied Science

Exploring the Climate Puzzle: A Surprising Twist in Fighting Climate Change

Sometimes, when scientists try to help people, they can end up with a surprise ending in which things do not work out as expected. Their “help” might even accidentally make the situation worse for some people. We wanted to know if this could be true for a strategy to slow down climate change: charging countries a fee when they cut down forests to create farmland. We used computers to predict what might happen if countries were charged different fees, to keep things fair. Specifically, countries with less money would only have to pay low (or no) fees, while rich countries would pay higher fees. However, our computer model showed that this plan could have unexpected negative consequences for water availability in some places that pay low fees, like certain regions in Africa. This tells us that, as we fight climate change, we must keep our eyes open for unintended consequences that could result from our attempts to help the planet

Analysis of heat kernel highlights the strongly modular and heat-preserving structure of proteins

In this paper, we study the structure and dynamical properties of protein contact networks with respect to other biological networks, together with simulated archetypal models acting as probes. We consider both classical topological descriptors, such as the modularity and statistics of the shortest paths, and different interpretations in terms of diffusion provided by the discrete heat kernel, which is elaborated from the normalized graph Laplacians. A principal component analysis shows high discrimination among the network types, either by considering the topological and heat kernel based vector characterizations. Furthermore, a canonical correlation analysis demonstrates the strong agreement among those two characterizations, providing thus an important justification in terms of interpretability for the heat kernel. Finally, and most importantly, the focused analysis of the heat kernel provides a way to yield insights on the fact that proteins have to satisfy specific structural design constraints that the other considered networks do not need to obey. Notably, the heat trace decay of an ensemble of varying-size proteins denotes subdiffusion, a peculiar property of proteins