Protected Areas are subject to long-term modifications associated with climate and environmental change, enhancing the risk of ecosystem collapse, tipping points and unexpected responses to droughts, fires, floods and other individual events.

The expansion of biological species in natural environments is usually described as the combined effect individual spatial dispersal and growth. In the case of aquatic ecosystems flow transport can also be extremely relevant as an extra, advection induced, dispersal factor. We designed and assembled a dedicated microfluidic device to control and quantify the expansion of populations of E. coli bacteria under both co-flowing and counter-flowing conditions, measuring the front speed at varying intensity of the imposed flow.

This paper investigates the problem of quantifying the impact of unex- pected deviations of mortality trend on a longevity indexed life annuity in a Solvency II perspective. Solvency II quantitative requirements regulate the margins required to offset the insurance risk in a one year risk horizon. Indeed, the idea of deepening the expected changes of future mortality rates over a single year is gaining. In the following the authors propose a com- putational tractable approach to assess the technical provisions by means of an internal model, in line with Solvency II directives.

Given a population of N elements with their geographical positions and the genetic (or lexical) distances between couples of elements (inferred, for example, from lexical differences between dialects which are spoken in different towns or from genetic differences between animal populations living in different faunal areas) a very interesting problem is to reconstruct the geographical positions of individuals using only genetic/lexical distances.

Proteins are the core and the engine of every process in cells thus the study of mechanisms that drive the regulation of protein expression, is essential. Transcription factors play a central role in this extremely complex task and they synergically co-operate in order to provide a fine tuning of protein expressions. In the present study, we designed a mathematically well-founded procedure to investigate the mutual positioning of transcription factors binding sites related to a given couple of transcription factors in order to evaluate the possible association between them.

We numerically study the behavior of self-propelled liquid droplets whose motion is triggered by a Marangoni-like flow. This latter is generated by variations of surfactant concentration which affect the droplet surface tension promoting its motion. In the present paper a model for droplets with a third amphiphilic component is adopted. The dynamics is described by Navier-Stokes and convection-diffusion equations, solved by the lattice Boltzmann method coupled with finite-difference schemes. We focus on two cases.