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International audience; The Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer (MSE) is a 10m-class, wide-field (1.5 sq. degree) and high-multiplex (< 3000 fibers) spectroscopic facility that will replace the 3.6m Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. With backend spectrographs operating at low (R ~ 3000), moderate (R ~ 6000) and high (R ~ 20/40 k) spectral resolution across the 0.36 – 1.8 µm range, MSE will be poised to address a variety of science questions among which the nature of dark matter, the origin of the elements in the periodic table, the mass of the neutrino, whilst enabling a new era of rapid-response and time-domain astronomy. This paper is a status report of the MSE Low Moderate Resolution spectrograph design, from the Conceptual Design Review (CoDR) towards the Preliminary Design Phase (PDP).

Following the arrival of MATISSE, the second-generation of VLTI instrumentation is now complete and was simultaneously enhanced by a major facility upgrade including the NAOMI Adaptive Optics on the Auxiliary Telescopes. On the Unit Telescopes, significant efforts were also made to improve the injection stability into VLTI instruments. On top of GRAVITY's own evolution, its fringe tracker is now being used to allow coherent integrations on MATISSE (the so-called GRA4MAT project). Meanwhile, operations also evolved to be more flexible and make the most of an extended observing parameter space. In this context, we present an overview of the current VLTI performances. Finally, we will report on on-going improvements such as the extension of the longest baselines.

The telescope Main Structure and the Dome of the ELT are being procured by ESO as an integrated system together with the auxiliary building and the service plants, and are supplied by the ACe Consortium. From the start of the contract, signed in May 2016, major progress has been achieved. During the design phase various challenging technical issues had to be solved, not least given the size of the ELT and the environmental conditions at Cerro Armazones in Chile. As per today the system has been developed, detail designed, reviewed, and is completing the Final Design Review process. Procurement of long lead or schedule critical items was assured by using specific Critical Design Reviews. Manufacturing in Europe and construction in Chile have started and are proceeding, although delays were encountered due to various issues including the Covid-19 pandemic. In this paper we will describe the advancement reached by the project and discuss some technical aspects associated to the design. The status of the design, of the manufacturing and of the construction on site will be described.

Electrolyte-insulator-semiconductor (EIS) field-effect sensors belong to a new generation of electronic chips for biochemical sensing, enabling a direct electronic readout. The review gives an overview on recent advances and current trends in the research and development of chemical sensors and biosensors based on the capacitive field-effect EIS structure—the simplest field-effect device, which represents a biochemically sensitive capacitor. Fundamental concepts, physicochemical phenomena underlying the transduction mechanism and application of capacitive EIS sensors for the detection of pH, ion concentrations, and enzymatic reactions, as well as the label-free detection of charged molecules (nucleic acids, proteins, and polyelectrolytes) and nanoparticles, are presented and discussed.

Exploring the new area in the pursuit of technological innovations has been a continuing process. Establishing habitat for scientific activities has been one of the Indian missions during Expeditions. R&DE (ENGRS), in collaboration with the erstwhile Department of Ocean Development and other scientific institutions in the country has been attempting to establish habitats in Antarctica for last two decades. Establishing Dakshin Gangotri and Maitri station in Antarctica is a creditable achievement of Indian Expeditions. This report gives brief idea on Scientific/Engineering contribution of R&DE (Engineers) in Antarctica.

Accurate measurements of above ground biomass are important to evaluate its contribution as a CO2 absorption source. If global canopy height model can be obtained, we can make an appropriate evaluation. This is MOLI’s mission. Moreover, MOLI can improve the accuracy of digital terrain model. In this paper, we will report on the development status of MOLI for LIDAR observation from space by mounting on the Japanese Experiment Module with International Space Station.

Quality control procedures have been developed at the Laboratoire de Mesure du Carbone 14 (LMC14) national laboratory throughout the years of operation. Routine procedures are applied to sample preparation depending on their composition and their size. The tuning of the ARTEMIS AMS facility, hosted by the LMC14 laboratory, uses an accurate procedure. A batch of unknown samples is measured with accompanying samples (primary and secondary standards and blanks), which give a powerful set of data to control the quality of each measurement. A homemade database has been created to store the sample information and study the evolution of the accompanying samples. The LMC14 laboratory participated in the Sixth International Radiocarbon Intercomparison, SIRI. The results are presented here, with statistical tests to assess the quality of the preparations and measurements done at the LMC14 national laboratory. To obtain a reliable radiocarbon (14C) age by AMS, 1 mg of sample is required in routine analysis. Recently, the LMC14 developed a new procedure dedicated to microsamples, allowing the size of samples to be reduced and contributing to opening 14C dating to materials that were previously unreachable. This new procedure has been successfully tested on valuable Cultural Heritage samples: lead white mural paintings.

Over the last two decades, drug delivery systems have evolved at a tremendous rate. Synthetic nanoparticles have played an important role in the design of vaccine and their delivery as many of them have shown improved safety and efficacy over conventional formulations. Nanocarriers formulated by natural, biological building blocks have become an important tool in the field biomedicine. A successful nanocarrier must have certain properties like evading the host immune system, target specificity, cellular entry, escape from endosomes, and ability to release material into the cytoplasm. Some or all of these functions can be performed by viruses making them a suitable candidate for naturally occurring nanocarriers. Moreover, viruses can be made non-infectious and non-replicative without compromising their ability to penetrate cells thus making them useful for a vast spectrum of applications. Currently, various carrier molecules are under different stages of development to become bio-nano capsules. This review covers the advances made in the field of viruses as potential nanocarriers and discusses the related technologies and strategies to target specific cells by using virus inspired nanocarriers. In future, these virus-based nano-formulations will be able to provide solutions towards pressing and emerging infectious diseases.

According to last year’s status report on the global burden of cancer, colorectal carcinoma is a rising major medical concern with an estimated rate of over 1.8 million new patients and 881,000 cessations annually, making it the second main cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide (1). Of all colorectal cancer patients, 40–76% will develop colorectal liver metastases (CRLM) in the course of their disease (2-4).

This editorial provides a follow-up to the status report in Environmental Earth Sciences (EES) of 2017. It includes the refined aims and scope of the journal (see "Scope and shape"), honors the most cited papers contributing to the 2019 impact factor (IF) (see Most cited topics and papers), and provides information on the current status of EES (see "Progress report").

Rapid urbanisation, a steady increase in the number of vehicles, speeding, negligence in road safety, and other factors have led to the inevitable worldwide growth of road traffic accidents involving pedestrians. According to the 'Global Status Report on Road Safety' released by the World Health Organization, road traffic collisions are one of the leading causes of death for people of all ages, with approximately 1.35 million road fatality deaths occurring globally each year. Figures from the report also highlight that a large part of road deaths involves pedestrians as the most vulnerable road users. Therefore, forensic examination of vehicle-pedestrian collisions has become increasingly important in the detection, investigation and reduction of road casualties and permanent development of this discipline is urgently needed. Thus, this article aims to review the capability and effectiveness of forensic examination in tackling road fatalities and explores the most important aspects of this discipline, such as nature of a vehicle-pedestrian collision, common issues resolved by this type of examination and typical physical evidence used in the reconstruction of vehicle-pedestrian collisions. Moreover, the paper outlines the latest advances and approaches in the field.

The International Laser Ranging Service (ILRS) Analysis Standing Committee (ASC) plans to complete the re-analysis of the SLR data since 1983 to end of this year by early 2021. This will ensure that the ILRS contribution to ITRF2020 will be available to ITRS by February 2021, as agreed by all space geodetic techniques answering its call. In preparation for the development of this contribution, the ILRS completed the re-analysis of all data (1983 to present), based on an improved modeling of the data and a novel approach that ensures the results are free of systematic errors in the underlying data. The new approach was developed after the completion of ITRF2014, the ILRS ASC devoting almost entirely its efforts on this task. A Pilot Project initially demonstrated the robust estimation of persistent systematic errors at the millimeter level, leading us to adopt a consistent set of a priori corrections for data collected in past years. The initial reanalysis used these corrections, leading to improved results for the TRF attributes, reflected in the resulting new time series of the TRF origin and scale. The ILRS ASC will now use the new approach in the development of its operational products and as a tool to monitor station performance, extending the history of systematics for each system that will be used in future re-analysis. The new operational products form a seamless extension of the re-analysis series, providing a continuous product based on our best knowledge of the ground system behavior and performance, without any dependence whatsoever on a priori knowledge of systematic errors (although information provided by the stations from their own engineering investigations are always welcome and taken into consideration). The presentation will demonstrate the level of improvement with respect to the previous ILRS product series and give a glimpse of what is to be expected from the development of a preliminary version of the ITRF2020.

According to the World Health Organization global status report on road safety, traffic accidents are the eighth leading cause of death in the world, and nearly one-fifth of the traffic accidents were cause by driver distractions. Inspired by the famous two-stream convolutional neural network (CNN) model, we propose a driver behavior analysis system using one spatial stream ConvNet to extract the spatial features and one temporal stream ConvNet to capture the driver&rsquo, s motion information. Instead of using three-dimensional (3D) ConvNet, which would suffer from large parameters and the lack of a pre-trained model, two-dimensional (2D) ConvNet is used to construct the spatial and temporal ConvNet streams, and they were pre-trained by the large-scale ImageNet. In addition, in order to integrate different modalities, the feature-level fusion methodology was applied, and a fusion network was designed to integrate the spatial and temporal features for further classification. Moreover, a self-compiled dataset of 10 actions in the vehicle was established. According to the experimental results, the proposed system can increase the accuracy rate by nearly 30% compared to the two-stream CNN model with a score-level fusion.

KLOE-2 has recorded 5.5 fb−1 of e+e− collisions at 1.019 GeV. A status report of the experiment plans and current analyses is given, including recent results in the KS sector that at the φ-factory is uniquely tagged by KL identification. Our attempt to exploit the lepton-tagging technique to identify virtual γγ processes in the high-luminosity environment of the φ-factory, the progress on the searches in the dark sector and in the analysis of the η → π0γγ decays are presented.

This paper provides results of an investigation into the research literature of intercultural mediation and how intercultural mediation has been implemented in Europe. To this end, a systematic quantitative literature review was conducted, which identified 77 conceptual and empirical manuscripts for this study. The review showed that little agreement exists on precisely what intercultural mediation is and how it should be structured and supported as a profession. The empirical works identified in this study can be characterized as ad hoc in nature, capitalizing on circumstances. The result is a patchwork of concepts and studies that collectively do not provide sufficient support or foundation for the use of intercultural mediation. In order to move the field forward, we argue that an immediate next step should be the development of a well-thought, systematic research program, grounded in the existing literature. A strong recommendation found in the literature is the use of evaluation to illustrate the value of intercultural mediation. Evaluation can provide data that could help those in authority make defensible decisions about policy support for intercultural mediation. Finally, considering the current situation in European schools, we propose that in the field of mediation the intercultural approach be implemented.

Road crashes and resulting fatalities and injuries have evolved as a major issue across the globe. According to the Global Status Report on Road Safety 2018 [1] published by World Health Organization, the burden of road traffic injuries and deaths is borne by vulnerable road users living in low-and middle-income countries where deaths are increasing due to abrupt growth in number of motorized transport. It is estimated that road crashes alone are responsible for 3 to 4 percent of GDP loss in India. Considering the severity of the issue it is important to identify underlying factors of road crashes to reduce the damage caused to human lives and national asset. By applying various Machine Learning algorithms on road crash data, workable models can be built which can predict outcome based on past trends of road crashes.

The South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI), in collaboration with the Centre for Invasion Biology (CIB) at Stellenbosch University, is currently in the process of compiling the second National Status Report on Biological Invasions in South Africa. This report has to be produced by October 2020, as required by regulations under the National Environmental Management: Biodiversity Act (Act 10 of 2004). We are inviting you to submit comments, corrections, and queries on the attached report (the first order draft of the second status report on biological invasions ). We have prepared a standard form for commenting that you can fill in if you wish, but if you would prefer to send in your inputs in your own format, please indicate the page and line numbers to which your comment refers. The first report (available to download at https://www.sanbi.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/National-Status-Report-web-6MB.pdf) was comprehensive, this report is an update (see the supplementary material for a plan on when the next comprehensive report will be produced). Many of the technical details (and data on which the report is based like the list of alien species) are available in the supplementary appendices . Please also consider commenting on these as it is possible that there are errors with the information, if so, we would appreciate your assistance in identifying these errors and welcome suggestions on how to rectify them. If you are in a position to provide additional information, we would be very grateful, and will aim to ensure all contributors are appropriately acknowledged. If you do not wish to be named, please let us know. We would like as many people and organisations to make inputs as possible, so please pass the report on to anyone you think might be able to contribute. We will capture all comments received during this commenting period and our responses to them in a database that will be available on request once the report has been released. Comments to be sent to: Monica Klaas (M.Klaas@sanbi.org.za) By: Thursday 17 February 2020 Form for commenting: Appendix 5 This is a “first order draft”. It outlines the format and sections of the intended report, and provides some preliminary findings, but many of the estimates of indicator values will change as a result of ongoing analysis, and because of inputs received during this review period. Therefore the results should not be viewed as indicative. They are simply demonstrative of what the final report will look like. Notes are added to the text to indicate where additional analyses are pending. Thank you in advance for your comments, this report relies on the active participation of a wide range of stakeholders, and we appreciate you taking the time to engage with us. Yours sincerely, Dr Tsungai Zengeya (on behalf of the second status report drafting team) Kirstenbosch, Wednesday 18 December 2019

The South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI), in collaboration with the Centre for Invasion Biology (CIB) at Stellenbosch University, is currently in the process of compiling the second National Status Report on Biological Invasions in South Africa. This report has to be produced by October 2020, as required by regulations under the National Environmental Management: Biodiversity Act (Act 10 of 2004). This is a “second-order draft”. It represents a version that is expected to be substantially similar to the final report and has been put together in part to address the comments raised during the review of the first-order draft. However, some of the estimates of indicator values will change as a result of ongoing analysis. Notes are added to the text to indicate where additional analyses are pending. We are inviting you, as either a member of our Research and Advisory Committee (RAC) or as an external reviewer, to submit comments, corrections, and queries on this the second-order draft of South Africa’s second national status report on biological invasions. We have prepared a standard form for commenting that you can fill in if you wish (see below), but if you would prefer to send in your inputs in your own format, please indicate the page and line numbers to which your comment refers. The first report was comprehensive, this report is an update (see the supplementary material for a plan on when the next comprehensive report will be produced). Many of the technical details (and data on which the report is based like the list of alien species) are available in the supplementary appendices. Please also consider commenting on these. If you are in a position to provide additional information, we would be very grateful, and will aim to ensure all contributors are appropriately acknowledged. If you do not wish to be named, please let us know. This round of commenting is specifically for the RAC and selected expert reviewers, but if you know of people who have data or could check some of the facts, please let us know. We will capture all comments received during this review period and our responses to them in a database that will be available on request once the report has been released. Comments to be sent to: Monica Klaas (M.Klaas@sanbi.org.za) By: Monday 25 May 2020 Form for commenting: Appendix 7 https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1tz-woFbCy_urhc5wF7fKV_xJjx_OXQwl Thank you in advance for your comments, we appreciate you taking the time to engage with us. Yours sincerely, Dr Tsungai Zengeya (on behalf of the second status report drafting team) Kirstenbosch, May 2020