[Assessment of two frailty scales for the preoperative period].

Background: In the perioperative context, a frailty evaluation scale must consider certain characteristics such as validation, execution speed, simplicity, the capacity to measure multiple dimensions and not being dependent on a cognitive or physical test that could not be performed prior to surgery. The test should select patients that could benefit from interventions aimed to improve their postoperative outcomes.

Aim: To validate two frailty evaluation scales for the perioperative period.

Old wild wolves: ancient DNA survey unveils population dynamics in Late Pleistocene and Holocene Italian remains.

Background: The contemporary Italian wolf () represents a case of morphological and genetic uniqueness. Today, Italian wolves are also the only documented population to fall exclusively within the mitochondrial haplogroup 2, which was the most diffused across Eurasian and North American wolves during the Late Pleistocene. However, the dynamics leading to such distinctiveness are still debated.

An online course fostering self-regulation of trainee teachers.

Self-regulated learning (SRL) can be fostered by teachers' behaviour and feedback and by the creation of suitable learning environments. This paper tackles the problem of how to develop attitudes and competences enabling teachers to act in support of their students' SRL. To this end, teachers should be aware of their own self-regulation of both learning and teaching behaviour, so as to cope flexibly with the needs of their students.

Obliquity-paced Pliocene West Antarctic ice sheet oscillations.

Thirty years after oxygen isotope records from microfossils deposited in ocean sediments confirmed the hypothesis that variations in the Earth's orbital geometry control the ice ages, fundamental questions remain over the response of the Antarctic ice sheets to orbital cycles. Furthermore, an understanding of the behaviour of the marine-based West Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS) during the 'warmer-than-present' early-Pliocene epoch ( approximately 5-3 Myr ago) is needed to better constrain the possible range of ice-sheet behaviour in the context of future global warming. Here we present a marine glacial record from the upper 600 m of the AND-1B sediment core recovered from beneath the northwest part of the Ross ice shelf by the ANDRILL programme and demonstrate well-dated, approximately 40-kyr cyclic variations in ice-sheet extent linked to cycles in insolation influenced by changes in the Earth's axial tilt (obliquity) during the Pliocene.