Neural oscillations contribute to speech parsing via cortical tracking of hierarchical linguistic structures, including syllable rate. While the properties of neural entrainment have been largely probed with speech stimuli at either normal or artificially accelerated rates, the important case of natural fast speech has been largely overlooked. Using magnetoencephalography, we found that listening to naturally-produced speech was associated with cortico-acoustic coupling, both at normal (~6 syllables/s) and fast (~9 syllables/s) rates, with a corresponding shift in peak entrainment frequency.

Switchable and adaptive substrates emerged as valuable tools for the control of wetting and actuation of droplet motion. Here we report a computational study of the dynamics of an unstable thin liquid film deposited on a switchable substrate, modelled with a space and time varying contact angle. With a static pattern, all the fluid is drained into droplets located around contact angle minima, whereas for a sufficiently large rate of wettability variation a state consisting of metastable rivulets is observed.

In this paper we establish an higher integrability result for second derivatives of the local solution of elliptic equation div(A(x,Du))=0in?where ? ? R, n>= 2 and A(x, ?) has linear growth with respect to ? variable. Concerning the dependence on the x-variable, we shall assume that, for the map x-> A(x, ?) , there exists a non negative function k(x), such that |DxA(x,?)|?k(x)(1+|?|)for every ?? R and a.e. x? ?. It is well known that there exists a relationship between this condition and the regularity of the solutions of the equation.

The process of aircraft refueling has crucial impact in the performance of an airport. It is in fact of common knowledge that one of the most important indicators for benchmarking an airport is the punctuality of flights departure. To assure high results, the airplane service activities such as passengers boarding, baggage handling and aircraft refueling must not delay one another and the overall departure time.

We consider a variational model for two interacting species (or phases), subject to cross and self attractive forces. We show existence and several qualitative properties of minimizers. Depending on the strengths of the forces, different behaviors are possible: phase mixing or phase separation with nested or disjoint phases. In the case of Coulomb interaction forces, we characterize the ground state configurations.

In a computer-aided system for skin cancer diagnosis, hair removal is one of the main challenges to face before applying a process of automatic skin lesion segmentation and classification. In this paper, we propose a straightforward method to detect and remove hair from dermoscopic images. Preliminarily, the regions to consider as candidate hair regions and the border/corner components located on the image frame are automatically detected. Then, the hair regions are determined using information regarding the saliency, shape and image colors.

We present an all-around study of the visitors flow in crowded museums: a combination of Lagrangian field measurements and statistical analyses enable us to create stochastic digital-twins of the guest dynamics, unlocking comfort- and safety-driven optimizations. Our case study is the Galleria Borghese museum in Rome (Italy), in which we performed a real-life data acquisition campaign.

The aim of this paper is to study relaxation rates for the Cahn-Hilliard equation in dimension larger than one. We follow the approach of Otto and Westdickenberg based on the gradient flow structure of the equation and establish differential and algebraic relationships between the energy, the dissipation, and the squared H -1 distance to a kink.

The Michelson Interferometer for Passive Atmospheric Sounding (MIPAS) measured the middle-infrared limb emission spectrum of the atmosphere from 2002 to 2012 on board ENVISAT, a polar-orbiting satellite. Recently, the European Space Agency (ESA) completed the final reprocessing of MIPAS measurements, using version 8 of the level 1 and level 2 processors, which include more accurate models, processing strategies, and auxiliary data. The list of retrieved gases has been extended, and it now includes a number of new species with weak emission features in the MIPAS spectral range.