LE STUDIUM Multidisciplinary Journal

The report presents the main issues, experimental details and first results of the project “Attitudes and language use of international students during their stay in Orléans: the example of discourse markers in L2” (ESLO-L2), realized at the host laboratory “Laboratoire Ligérien de Linguistique” (LLL) between March and July 2023. The aim of the project was to apply the methodology of the corpus of oral French “Enquête SocioLinguistique à Orléans” (ESLO), conceived as a “city’s sound portrait” to the group of foreign exchange students at the University of Orléans. The research interest of the project was aimed at the questions of how the students’ perception of the city, its inhabitants and the French language changes during the first 5-6 months of their stay in Orléans and how the students’ language use in oral interaction develops during this period. The latter will be examined through the example of discourse marker use.

Insects are successful largely because they are highly efficient at optimizing nutrients for reproduction. To understand this efficiency, we have used the stable isotope tracer-tracee-based technique mass isotopomer distribution analysis (MIDA) to follow metabolic allocation in insects in vivo. Based largely on application of these techniques, we had three aims during the fellowship:  
a)    To adapt MIDA to study allocation of carbohydrates acquired during host feeding by the parasitoid Eupelmus vuiletti to fat production.
b)    To study sex pheromone storage in a moth (Bombyx mori).
c)    To write a significant, high impact review on insect physiology.
We successfully adapted MIDA to study fat acquisition in E. vuiletti. Essentially, females allowed to feed on a glucose drop, turned over their hemolymph trehalose substantially (ca. 30-40%). However, very little of this acquired sugar was converted to fat. Moreover, isotopic enrichment of fat was substantially less than that of the trehalose, indicating that other (non-labeled) sources of precursor are used for this fat synthesis. This supports the finding that parasitoids can synthesize fat, but only in very small amounts in comparison to their carbohydrate acquisition. These techniques were transferred to staff and students at IRBI.
Problems with supply of insects meant that we could not fully study sex pheromone storag in B. mori. However, we were able to demonstrate that females, when synthesizing pheromone, stored most pheromone on the gland cuticular surface, rather than intracellularly, thereby facilitating emission of pheromone.  
Finally, we wrote and submitted a proposal for a review on insect exocrine glands for the highly prestigious Annual Review of Entomology (2022 IF = 23.8). We were notified of the success of our proposal in December 2022. Thereafter , a considerable portion of the visit was dedicated to researching, synthesizing, and writing this review. The manuscript will be submitted in January 2024 and, hopefully, published in January 2025.
 

The accelerated digital development characterizing today's society multiplies and blurs educational contexts. In this regard, it becomes necessary to create learning spaces supported by ICT (Information and Communication Technology) that integrate formal and informal contexts, where each person decides what, how, and when to learn. From this perspective, the proposal is to create learning ecologies with learning resources based on a content curation process that retrieves, develops, and shares educational digital content according to the interests and informational needs of the professors. This study aims to analyze the learning resources that make up the learning ecologies available to professors at the University of Orléans. The presentation includes the theoretical foundations underpinning the research and its main results from the qualitative perspective of educational research.

This paper presents a security architecture for the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), striving to protect sensitive data stored, processed, and transferred in such a system. It is based on a 5-layer architecture for IoMT systems and defines security mechanisms and techniques that can be employed on the different layers in order to protect medical data in its whole lifecycle adequately. Additionally, we also discuss the most common security requirements and attacks from literature which served as the basis for the security architecture. The former can be implemented on various heterogenous IoMT devices and environments.

The Earth’s radiation environment couples to the upper atmosphere through precipitation of energetic electrons in high-latitude regions. This precipitation is driven by electromagnetic waves in the plasma environment around the Earth, including waves generated by lightning discharges. We use data from the DEMETER mission, built and operated by LPC2E between 2004-2010, to better understand the propagation characteristics of these lightning-generated signals and their effects on the radiation environment. Further, we use lessons and heritage from the DEMETER mission to inform design decisions and data analysis techniques for the upcoming CANVAS mission, a collaboration between the University of Colorado Boulder and LPC2E. CANVAS is expected to launch in mid-2024.

The use of residual biomass from forest harvesting for energy production is viewed as a means to reduce fossil-fuel consumption. However, the impact of wood energy harvesting on soil and future site productivity remains a major concern. During this fellowship, we analysed why forest biomass harvesting of whole trees in Quebec reduced soil organic carbon (C) and total nitrogen (N) reserves in certain sites. We also estimated soil C and N labile and stable fractions in the Centre-Val de Loire region in France, and its relationship with current soil sensitivity indices to residual biomass harvesting. This research shed new insights on soil properties that could explain their sensitivity or resilience to forest biomass harvesting. We believe that this fellowship made a significant contribution to scientific knowledge and address pressing societal challenges.

In this project, we investigated the pharmacological effects of steroid hormones on gonadotropin receptors, FSHR and LHR, transiently expressed in HEK293 cells. For this, we used BRET technology to assess receptor-G protein activation as well as -arrestin recruitment upon treatment of cells with gonadotropins, FSH or hCG, in the absence or presence of increasing doses of 3 different steroid hormones (SH), estradiol, testosterone, and progesterone. We observed that SH to different extent significantly modulate FSH/hCG-promoted BRET signals between receptor/G protein as well as receptor/-arrestin pairs. Tis indicate an allosteric mode of action of SH on FSHR and LHR. Moreover, we observed differential effects of SH on receptor/-arrestin pair when comparing FSHR and LHR by decreasing (for FSHR) or increasing (for LHR) the BRET responses. Interestingly, we also observed significant BRET increase with vasopressin (V2R) and angiotensin II (AT1R) receptors. This suggests a more general feature of SH allosterically targeting GPCRs with potential implications in physiology and pathophysiology.

The activity was mainly addressed to study the scientific production of Leonardo da Vinci by means of an integrated approach that combines exact and human sciences. A huge interest was focused on dynamics, topic of great interest for Leonardo as it emerges in several points of his notebooks where he discussed relevant aspects of this physics branch and developed conceptions that evolved over the time. Within this general goal, the following specific issues have been also taken into account: i) recognition and comparative source analysis of the network of scholars, artisans and texts for a reconstruction of the cultural, scientific and technical framework in which Leonardo elaborated his concepts; ii) impact of the Leonardo’s work on the present research fields; iii) impact of the Leonardo’s work on the present educational field; iv) evaluation of the Leonardo’s work as an innovative tool for the “third culture” promotion. In this framework, the analysis of the Leonardo’s studies followed two driving lines: i) to place his findings in his time context and
ii)  to establish connections with the current cultural approaches.
The activity has been carried out at the Centre d’Etudes Supérieures de la Renaissance (CESR) of Tours. The performed study has a great relevance for the valorisation of the Centre-Val de Loire region where Leonardo spent the last three years of his life.
 

Housing problems of youth are rarely considered in the context of youth health, although housing problems can be seen as a source of worry and stress, which, as evidenced by past studies, is negatively associated with health. Thus, the main aim of the present study was to examine whether and how housing stability, quality, and perception of having a housing problem were related to stress and assessment of health among Slovenian youth. Additionally, the study explored the effect of youth's economic background, as differences in health outcomes are often attributed to differences in socioeconomic status. The results indicated significant direct and indirect relationships between the financial situation of the family, housing status, living conditions, and fear of having a housing problem. Latter was statistically significantly associated with the feeling of stress, which in turn was significantly related to the health assessment among youth. The results also indicated that poor living conditions directly affected the youth’s health assessment. Implications for future work are suggested.

The Calculus of Constructions is one of the most powerful systems of constructive logic. It consists of three logical levels: proofs, propo-sitions, kinds. The kinds are the types of operations, i.e., construc-tions of propositions. Both, the level of propositions and the level of kinds, are closed under general rules of quantification. A model construction involves giving meaning to the objects of each of the three levels in such a way that the quantification rules are satisfied. The aim is to give a construction that uses ordered structures, known as domains. In the present work domain constructions used for the interpretation of the quantification constructs are presented in a general way and computability issues are discussed.