Search

Earth Observations (EO) have become crucial for advancing climate and Earth System research, enabling significant scientific discoveries. Advanced EO missions, such as ESA’s Earth Explorers and the EU's Copernicus Programme, provide vast data volumes and continuous and global observations with cutting-edge technology, a vital resource for understanding processes and interactions within Earth's sub-systems, offering critical evidence of climate change impacts on society and ecosystems. Open access to such data products has been instrumental in facilitating global scientific collaboration and innovation. Reproducibility in Earth Science is essential for validating discoveries, enabling the scientific community to trust and build upon each other’s work. Open data, coupled with open-source software, is key to achieving this reproducibility, ensuring transparency, and facilitating peer review. Addressing scientific challenges requires collaborative efforts supported by fit-for-purpose technology to enable new insights and ensuring they are FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable), trustable and up to date, supporting long-term climate studies and action-driven science. Several initiatives within ESA’s Earth Observation Programme are fostering FAIR and Open Science. EarthCODE is one such initiative, focusing on implementing ESA’s vision of EO Open Science and Innovation by adopting FAIR and Open principles in Earth Science activities funded by ESA’s FutureEO Programme. EarthCODE leverages existing European platform solutions for effective cloud-based analyses of EO data and higher-level geospatial products. It aims to ensure the persistence of end-to-end scientific workflows and provide means for managing open research data, including data, code, and documentation. EarthCODE aims to make Earth Science research more reproducible, transparent, and collaborative, driving progress in understanding and addressing global environmental challenges.

The Deep Earth System Data Lab (DeepESDL) provides an AI-ready, collaborative environment for researchers aiming to study the Earth's complex dynamics using various datasets and empirical approaches. Recently opened to Early Adopters, it builds on projects like CAB-LAB and ESDL, utilizing well-established Python and Julia technology stacks. DeepESDL offers programmatic access to extensive analysis-ready data cubes and computational resources, enabling researchers to focus on analysis without extensive preparations. Scientists can use persistently available data cubes or generate user-tailored cubes from own data or publicly available datasets. The goal is to streamline data processing through empirical or AI methods within high-dimensional Earth Observation workflows. DeepESDL addresses the complete research cycle, from discovery of earth data to powerful analyses, collaborative scientific research, advanced data visualisation and publication of results, promoting FAIR and Open Science. Apart from serving as a research environment, DeepESDL showcases scientific use cases and supports educational purposes through capacity building, academic programs, and Open Science initiatives. This paper presents an overview of DeepESDL.

The "Cubes and Clouds" Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) addresses the growing challenges and opportunities in Earth Observation (EO) data analysis posed by the exponential growth of satellite missions and data volumes. This course introduces cloud-native EO concepts and open science principles, facilitating collaboration and data sharing within the EO community.Key topics covered in the MOOC include data discovery, processing workflows, and data sharing using real-world examples like snow cover mapping in the Alps. Participants engage with interactive lessons, videos, and hands-on coding exercises, leveraging freely available geospatial data and emphasizing open data principles and interoperability.The course infrastructure seamlessly integrates with cloud platforms like the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem, enabling learners to apply concepts in a practical, cloud-based environment. Initial user statistics indicate strong interest, particularly among early-career professionals and researchers, with participant surveys suggesting increased confidence in using EO cloud platforms and embracing open science practices upon course completion.Overall, "Cubes and Clouds" serves as a valuable resource for the EO community, fostering transparency, collaboration, and innovation in geospatial science. Future developments aim to expand course content and attract diverse user groups, ensuring broader accessibility and long-term impact in advancing cloud-native EO and open science initiatives.

Aims: Acute heart failure (AHF) is typified by inflammatory and oxidative stress responses, which are associated with unfavorable patient outcomes. Given the anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties of high-density lipoprotein (HDL), this study sought to examine the relationship between impaired HDL function and mortality in AHF patients. The complex interplay between various HDL-related biomarkers and clinical outcomes remains poorly understood. Methods: HDL subclass distribution was quantified by nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Lecithin–cholesterol acyltransferase (LCAT) activity, cholesterol ester transfer protein (CETP) activity, and paraoxonase (PON-1) activity were assessed using fluorometric assays. HDL-cholesterol efflux capacity (CEC) was assessed in a validated assay using [3H]-cholesterol-labeled J774 macrophages. Results: Among the study participants, 74 (23.5 %) out of 315 died within three months after hospitalization due to AHF. These patients exhibited lower activities of the anti-oxidant enzymes PON1 and LCAT, impaired CEC, and lower concentration of small HDL subclasses, which remained significant after accounting for potential confounding factors. Smaller HDL particles, particularly HDL3 and HDL4, exhibited a strong association with CEC, PON1 activity, and LCAT activity. Conclusions: In patients with AHF, impaired HDL CEC, HDL antioxidant and anti-inflammatory function, and impaired HDL metabolism are associated with increased mortality. Assessment of HDL function and subclass distribution could provide valuable clinical information and help identify patients at high risk.

Open Science is a catalyst for innovation. Across the Earth Observation value chain, from R&D to prototyping new products and development of commercial applications, openness can play an important role by promoting long-term sustainable, community-contributed science and technology. The FAIR principles provide essential support to implementing Open Science, by offering guidelines for how researchers can adapt their EO and Earth Science practice to enable that their work (taking place increasingly in the cloud) and results are discovered, accessed, used, and reproduced by others. The Open Science Data Catalogue (OSC) (https://opensciencedata.esa.int) is an ESA Open Science activity aiming to enhance the discoverability and use of the various scientific and value-added results (i.e. data, code, documentation) achieved in Earth System Science research activities funded by ESA EO. The OSC provides open access for the scientific community to geoscience products (based on EO data from ESA and non-ESA missions and other geospatial information and models) across the whole spectrum of Earth Science domains. The OSC adheres to FAIR principles and promotes reproducibility of scientific studies. The OSC makes use of various Open-Source geospatial technologies such as pycsw, PySTAC, and OpenLayers and tries to contribute back to these projects in terms of software and standardisation. This paper reviews the EO OSC architecture, technology stack, and illustrates how this tool can be used to discover and publish Earth System Science products from ESA activities. It also looks at future evolutions of the product and how it contributes to ESA’s EO Open Science and Innovation goals.

Although research into multimodal stance-taking has gained momentum over the past years, the multimodal construction of so-called stacked stances has not yet received systematic attention in the literature. Mocking enactments are a prime example of such complex social actions as they are layered both interactionally and stance-related, and they rely significantly on the use of bodily visual resources, depicting rather than describing events and stances. Using Du Bois’ Stance Triangle as a framework, this study investigates mocking enactments as a case study to unravel the multimodal aspects of layered stance expressions. Drawing on three data sets—music instruction in Dutch, German, and English, spontaneous face-to-face interactions among friends in Dutch, and narrations on past events in Flemish Sign Language (VGT)—this study provides a qualitative exploration of mocking enactments across different communicative settings, languages, and modalities. The study achieves three main objectives: (1) illuminating how enactments are used for mocking, (2) identifying the layers of stance-taking at play, and (3) examining the multimodal construction of mocking enactments. Our analysis reveals various different uses of enactments for mocking. Aside from enacting the target of the mockery, participants can include other characters and viewpoints, highlighting the breadth of the phenomenon under scrutiny. Second, we uncover the layered construction of stance on all axes of the Stance Triangle (evaluation, positioning, and alignment). Third, we find that mocking enactments are embedded in highly evaluative contexts, indexed by the use of bodily visual resources. Interestingly, not all mocking enactments include a multimodally exaggerated depiction, but instead, some merely allude to an absurd hypothetical scenario. Our findings contribute to the growing body of literature on multimodal stance-taking, by showing how a nuanced interpretation of the Stance Triangle can offer a useful framework for analyzing layered stance acts.

In small Alpine catchments, floods are mostly triggered by surface runoff generation during convective heavy precipitation events. Their magnitude also depends on the antecedent soil moisture content, which was shown in several previous studies. This study aims at understanding (a) which sites change their surface runoff response to rainfall events with high precipitation intensity under very moist pre-conditions to what extent and (b) on which site characteristics this depends on. Therefore, we conducted repeated rainfall simulation experiments (40–80 m2, 1 h, 100 mm h−1) at 20 sites in five Eastern Alpine areas and analyzed their results on the basis of soil-physical parameters derived from collected soil samples.The hay meadow sites reacted with a strong increase in surface runoff to reduced saturation deficits, the pasture sites showed a smaller but visible response. The forest sites had the highest water retention capacities. The change in the surface runoff response is a function of the saturation deficit at the beginning of the initial experiment (r = −0.58). The soil physical parameters, especially the fine pore fraction (r = 0.56), correlate with the difference of the total surface runoff coefficient between the initial and the repeated experiment. The fine pore fraction also shows a high correlation (r = −0.78) with the saturation deficit at the beginning of the initial experiment, although pores of this fraction were saturated during all experiments. (Non-quantifiable) Land use effects, which in turn influence the soil physical parameters, play an important role in explaining how the surface runoff response in the repeated rainfall simulation experiment differs from the initial experiment. The information on land use and soil characteristics allowed the sites to be categorized into four types in terms of surface runoff disposition and the increase in total surface runoff coefficient in the second rainfall simulation experiment.

Stance-taking, the public act of positioning oneself toward objects, people or states of affairs, has been studied in many fields of research. Recently, its multimodal realization in interaction has received increasing attention. The current contribution aims to take stock of research on multimodal stance-taking so far, and to present possible avenues for future research. We systematically gathered and appraised 76 articles that investigate the involvement of bodily-visual resources in stance-taking in interaction. The critical appraisal focused on two dimensions of the stance act: form-function relations constituting it, and its dynamic organization in interaction. Regarding form-function relations, we found systematic involvement of specific bodily-visual resources in different stance acts, as well as patterns of multimodal intensification and mitigation of stances. As for its dynamic organization, the review discusses how stance-taking is organized temporally throughout an interaction, with all participants involved carefully negotiating and adapting their stances to one another. Finally, attention is paid to the broader context of stance-taking, including its role in different social and societal contexts. Based on this review, we were able to identify several gaps in the literature, and avenues for future research. We argue that much potential for broadening the scope of research lies in increasing the methodological diversity in approaching multimodal stance-taking, as well as in cross-linguistic studies and varying settings and participant constellations. In conclusion, research into multimodal stance-taking is vibrant, with ample opportunities for future work. This review can be considered as a call to action to move beyond the premise that stance-taking is multimodal, and further investigate this intriguing and fundamental human capacity.

COVID-19, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, emerged as a global pandemic in late 2019, resulting in significant global public health challenges. The emerging evidence suggests that diminished high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol levels are associated with the severity of COVID-19, beyond inflammation and oxidative stress. Here, we used nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to compare the lipoprotein and metabolic profiles of COVID-19-infected patients with non-COVID-19 pneumonia. We compared the control group and the COVID-19 group using inflammatory markers to ensure that the differences in lipoprotein levels were due to COVID-19 infection. Our analyses revealed supramolecular phospholipid composite (SPC), phenylalanine, and HDL-related parameters as key discriminators between COVID-19-positive and non-COVID-19 pneumonia patients. More specifically, the levels of HDL parameters, including apolipoprotein A-I (ApoA-I), ApoA-II, HDL cholesterol, and HDL phospholipids, were significantly different. These findings underscore the potential impact of HDL-related factors in patients with COVID-19. Significantly, among the HDL-related metrics, the cholesterol efflux capacity (CEC) displayed the strongest negative association with COVID-19 mortality. CEC is a measure of how well HDL removes cholesterol from cells, which may affect the way SARS-CoV-2 enters cells. In summary, this study validates previously established markers of COVID-19 infection and further highlights the potential significance of HDL functionality in the context of COVID-19 mortality.

In this contribution, we examine the way in which orchestra conductors use the space around them to convey aspects of musical dynamics. In music, dynamics refers to the intensity of volume of notes and sounds and its interpretation is highly context-bound. We approach dynamics as a phenomenon of emergent and construed meaning in interaction, induced by the music score and the interpretation in situ by musicians and the conductor. Conductors' movement-based instructions on dynamics result in highly complex usage events. This study aims at disentangling these instances by asking how conductors move and use the space around them to instruct on (un)desired aspects of musical dynamics, zooming in on movement direction as a central formal feature. We find ourselves at the crossroads of cognitive and interactional linguistics, aligning with existing studies on the interactional and contextually embedded nature of music interaction. From a cognitive linguistic perspective, this endeavor translates as the identification of the construal mechanisms (metaphor, specificity and viewpoint) that underlie and therefore motivate movement directions in the specific instances under examination. The analysis is based on 10h of video data from a corpus recorded during rehearsals of five conductors instructing their respective orchestras in Dutch. Our data reveal that conductors use different movement patterns, some of which appear to involve opposite movement directions for expressing a similar music dynamical aspect, e.g., depending on the usage event, a vertical upward movement can mean both a request for playing louder and softer. By taking into account different construal mechanisms, we are able to provide an encompassing multimodal analysis, in which these allegedly deviating oppositional movements appear as consistently motivated (metaphorical) expressions, which profile a similar target concept involving different viewpoints.

Tyrosine kinase 2 (TYK2) is a member of the Janus kinase/signal transducer and activator of transcription pathway, which is central in cytokine signaling. Previously, germline TYK2 mutations have been described in two patients developing de novo T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemias (T-ALL) or precursor B-ALL. The mutations (P760L and G761V) are located within the regulatory pseudokinase domain and lead to constitutive activation of TYK2. We demonstrate the transformation capacity of TYK2 P760L in hematopoietic cell systems including primary bone marrow cells. In vivo engraftment of TYK2 P760L-expressing cell lines led to development of leukemia. A kinase inhibitor screen uncovered that oncogenic TYK2 acts synergistically with the PI3K/AKT/mTOR and CDK4/6 pathways. Accordingly, the TYK2-specific inhibitor deucravacitinib (BMS986165) reduces cell viability of TYK2 P760L-transformed cell models and ex vivo cultured TYK2 P760L-mutated patient- derived xenograft cells most efficiently when combined with mTOR or CDK4/6 inhibitors. Our study thereby pioneers novel treatment options for patients suffering from TYK2-driven acute leukemia.

Innate lymphoid cells (ILC) play a significant role in the intestinal immune response and T-bet+ CD127+ group 1 cells (ILC1) have been linked to the pathogenesis of human inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). However, the functional importance of ILC1 in the context of an intact adaptive immune response has been controversial. In this report we demonstrate that induced depletion of T-bet using a Rosa26-Cre-ERT2 model resulted in the loss of intestinal ILC1, pointing to a post-developmental requirement of T-bet expression for these cells. In contrast, neither colonic lamina propria (cLP) ILC2 nor cLP ILC3 abundance were altered upon induced deletion of T-bet. Mechanistically, we report that STAT1 or STAT4 are not required for intestinal ILC1 development and maintenance. Mice with induced deletion of T-bet and subsequent loss of ILC1 were protected from the induction of severe colitis in vivo. Hence, this study provides support for the clinical development of an IBD treatment based on ILC1 depletion via targeting T-bet or its downstream transcriptional targets.