Publications

The 2014 report focuses on storytelling by looking back on an exceptional and challenging year, providing a round-up of the essential steps taken by COST in developing a modern networking concept welcoming all innovative ideas across any S&T field.

In this journal released by Springer, the main findings of the COST Positive Network are explored in 5 articles centered around ‘Interindividual Variation in Response to Consumption of Plant Food Bioactives and Determinants Involved’.

This Open Access textbook provides students and researchers in the life sciences with essential practical information on how to quantitatively analyze data images. It refrains from focusing on theory, and instead uses practical examples and step-by step protocols to familiarize readers with the most commonly used image processing and analysis platforms such as ImageJ, MatLab and Python. Besides gaining knowhow on algorithm usage, readers will learn how to create an analysis pipeline by scripting language; these skills are important in order to document reproducible image analysis workflows.

The textbook is chiefly intended for advanced undergraduates in the life sciences and biomedicine without a theoretical background in data analysis, as well as for postdocs, staff scientists and faculty members who need to perform regular quantitative analyses of microscopy images.

This open access book, published in the Soft and Biological Matter series, presents an introduction to selected research topics in the broad field of flowing matter, including the dynamics of fluids with a complex internal structure -from nematic fluids to soft glasses- as well as active matter and turbulent phenomena.

Flowing matter is a subject at the crossroads between physics, mathematics, chemistry, engineering, biology and earth sciences, and relies on a multidisciplinary approach to describe the emergence of the macroscopic behaviours in a system from the coordinated dynamics of its microscopic constituents.

Depending on the microscopic interactions, an assembly of molecules or of mesoscopic particles can flow like a simple Newtonian fluid, deform elastically like a solid or behave in a complex manner. When the internal constituents are active, as for biological entities, one generally observes complex large-scale collective motions. Phenomenology is further complicated by the invariable tendency of fluids to display chaos at the large scales or when stirred strongly enough. This volume presents several research topics that address these phenomena encompassing the traditional micro-, meso-, and macro-scales descriptions, and contributes to our understanding of the fundamentals of flowing matter.

This book is the legacy of the COST Action MP1305 “Flowing Matter”.

This open access book addresses the various disciplinary aspects of nature-based solutions in flood risk management on private land. In recent decades, water management has been moving towards nature-based solutions. These are assumed to be much more multi-purpose than traditional “grey infrastructures” and seem to be regarded as a panacea for many environmental issues. At the same time, such measures require more – and mostly privately owned – land and more diverse stakeholder involvement than traditional (grey) engineering approaches. They also present challenges related to different disciplines. Nature-based solutions for flood risk management not only require technical expertise, but also call for interdisciplinary insights from land-use planning, economics, property rights, sociology, landscape planning, ecology, hydrology, agriculture and other disciplines to address the challenges of implementing them. Ultimately, nature-based flood risk management is a multi-disciplinary endeavor. Featuring numerous case studies of nature-based flood risk management accompanied by commentaries, this book presents brief academic reflections from two different disciplinary perspectives that critically highlight which specific aspects are of significance, and as such, underscore the multi-disciplinary nature of the challenges faced.

This document reports the State of the Art of science and practice on three topics
related to smart and healthy ageing at home: furniture and habitats, Information and
Communication Technologies (ICT), and healthcare. The reports were prepared by
the working groups of COST Action CA16226, Sheld-on. Sheld-on is a network of
researchers, user representatives, industry members, and other stakeholders. The three
domains covered in this report were the areas of interest for three working groups from
the COST Action. The aim of each working group was to assess the State of the Art for
disciplinary understanding, identification of advances in smart furniture and habitat,
products, industries and success stories. The findings on these topics of all working
groups are compiled here. Due to the different backgrounds of the members of each
of the working groups, the document is divided in three separate parts that can be
considered as separate State of the Art reports. The goal of this document is to be used
as input in the fourth working group of Sheld-on COST Action: Solutions for Ageing
Well at Home, in the Community, and at Work, where experts from the three different
domains converge to a single working group in order to achieve the action objectives.

At the end of a rush lasting over half a century, in which CMOS technology has been experiencing a constant and breathtaking increase of device speed and density, Moore’s law is approaching the insurmountable barrier given by the ultimate atomic nature of matter. A major challenge for 21st century scientists is finding novel strategies, concepts and materials for replacing silicon-based CMOS semiconductor technologies and guaranteeing a continued and steady technological progress in next decades. Among the materials classes candidate to contribute to this momentous challenge, oxide films and heterostructures are a particularly appealing hunting ground. The vastity, intended in pure chemical terms, of this class of compounds, the complexity of their correlated behaviour, and the wealth of functional properties they display, has already made these systems the subject of choice, worldwide, of a strongly networked, dynamic and interdisciplinary research community. Oxide science and technology has been the target of a wide four-year project, named Towards Oxide-Based Electronics (TO-BE), that has been recently running in Europe and has involved as participants several hundred scientists from 29 EU countries. In this review and perspective paper, published as a final deliverable of the TO-BE Action, the opportunities of oxides as future electronic materials for Information and Communication Technologies ICT and Energy are discussed. The paper is organized as a set of contributions, all selected and ordered as individual building blocks of a wider general scheme. After a brief preface by the editors and an introductory contribution, two sections follow. The first is mainly devoted to providing a perspective on the latest theoretical and experimental methods that are employed to investigate oxides and to produce oxide-based films, heterostructures and devices. In the second, all contributions are dedicated to different specific fields of applications of oxide thin films and heterostructures, in sectors as data storage and computing, optics and plasmonics, magnonics, energy conversion and harvesting, and power electronics.