The recent COVID-19 pandemic came alongside with an "infodemic", with online social media flooded by often unreliable information associating the medical emergency with popular subjects of disinformation. In Italy, one of the first European countries suffering a rise in new cases and dealing with a total lockdown, controversial topics such as migrant flows and the 5G technology were often associated online with the origin and diffusion of the virus.

The present work is inspired by the recent developments in laboratory experiments made on chips, where the culturing of multiple cell species was possible. The model is based on coupled reaction-diffusion-transport equations with chemotaxis and takes into account the interactions among cell populations and the possibility of drug administration for drug testing effects.

Here some issues are studied, related to the numerical solution of Richards' equation in a one dimensional spatial domain by a technique based on the Transversal Method of Lines (TMoL). The core idea of TMoL approach is to semi-discretize the time derivative of Richards' equation: afterward a system of second order differential equations in the space variable is derived as an initial value problem. The computational framework of this method requires both Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions at the top of the column. The practical motivation for choosing such a condition is argued.

In this study, we computationally corroborate the flow of rock glaciers against borehole measurements, within the context of a model previously developed (2020). The model is, here, tested against the simulation of the sliding motion of the Murtel-Corvatsch alpine glacier, which is characterized in detail in the literature with internal structure description and borehole deformations measurement.

We study numerically the effect of thermal fluctuations and of variable fluid-substrate interactions on the spontaneous dewetting of thin liquid films. To this aim, we use a recently developed lattice Boltzmann method for thin liquid film flows, equipped with a properly devised stochastic term. While it is known that thermal fluctuations yield shorter rupture times, we show that this is a general feature of hydrophilic substrates, irrespective of the contact angle $\theta$. The ratio between deterministic and stochastic rupture times, though, decreases with $\theta$.

In this paper, we study the retrieval of water vapor profiles from simulated FORUM measurements. We show that the bias towards the a-priori introduced by the Optimal Estimation technique can be reduced by using larger errors for the a-priori. Reducing the strength of the a-priori may, however, cause unphysical oscillations in the resulting profiles because of the ill-conditioning of the retrieval problem. An a-posteriori regularization technique, the Iterative Variable Strength method, is thus applied to reduce the amplitude of the oscillations.

Drug research, therapy development, and other areas of pharmacology and medicine can benefit from simula- tions and optimization of mathematical models that contain a mathematical description of interactions between systems elements at the cellular, tissue, organ, body, and population level. This approach is the foundation of systems medicine and precision medicine. Here, simulated experiments are performed with computers (in silico) first, and they are then replicated through lab experiments (in vivo or in vitro) or clinical studies.

Despite the international guidelines on the containment of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, the European scientific community was not sufficiently prepared to coordinate scientific efforts. To improve preparedness for future pandemics, we have initiated a network of nine European-funded Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) Actions that can help facilitate inter-, multi-, and trans-disciplinary communication and collaboration.