Ultraluminous x-ray sources (ULXs) in nearby galaxies shine brighter than any X-ray source in our Galaxy. ULXs are usually modeled as stellar-mass black holes (BHs) accreting at very high rates or intermediate-mass BHs. We present observations showing that NGC 5907 ULX is instead an x-ray accreting neutron star (NS) with a spin period evolving from 1.43 s in 2003 to 1.13 s in 2014. It has an isotropic peak luminosity of ∼1000 times the Eddington limit for a NS at 17.1 Mpc. Standard accretion models fail to explain its luminosity, even assuming beamed emission, but a strong multipolar magnetic field can describe its properties. These findings suggest that other extreme ULXs (x-ray luminosity ≥1041 erg s −1 ) might harbor NSs.Ultraluminous x-ray sources (ULXs) are observed in off-nucleus regions of nearby galaxiesand have x-ray luminosities in excess of a few 10 39 erg s −1 , which is the Eddington luminosity (L Edd ) for a black hole (BH) of 10 M (1). The L Edd sets an upper limit on the accretion luminosity (L acc ) of a compact object steadily accreting, since for L acc > L Edd accretion will be halted by radiation forces. For spherical accretion of fully ionized hydrogen, the limit can be written as, where σ T is the Thomson scattering cross section, m p is the proton mass, and M/M is the compact object mass in solar masses; for a 1.4 M neutron star (NS), the maximum accreting luminosity is ∼2×10 38 erg s −1 .The high luminosity of ULXs has thus been explained as accretion at or above the Eddington luminosity onto BHs of stellar origin (<80-100 M ), or onto intermediate-mass (10BHs (2, 3). However, if the emission of ULXs were beamed over a fraction b < 1 of the sky, their true luminosity, and thus also the compact object mass required not to exceed L Edd , would be reduced by the same factor. This possibility, together with the recent identification of two accreting NSs associated with the ∼10 40 erg s −1 M82 X-2 (4) and NGC 7793 P13 (5, 6) x-ray sources, have brought support to the view that most low-luminosity ULXs likely host a NS (7) 2 or a stellar-mass BH (8). For the most extreme ULXs with x-ray luminosity exceeding a few ×10 40 erg s −1 , BHs with masses in excess of 100 M are still commonly considered (9, 10).Despite several searches for coherent x-ray pulsations,no other ultraluminous x-ray source has been found to host a NS so far (11).Within the framework of "Exploring the X-ray Transient and variable Sky", EXTraS (12) Fig. 1 and Table 1). In all cases, a strong first period derivative term is present (see Table 1). The pulse shape is nearly sinusoidal, while the pulsed fraction (the semi-amplitude of the sinusoid divided by the average count rate)is energy dependent and increases from about 12% at low energies (<2.5 keV) to ∼20% in the hard band (>7 keV; Fig. 1).To derive constraints on the orbital period (P orb ), we applied a likelihood analysis to the two 2014 NuSTAR observations (see supplementary online text), which have the longest baseline. 3By assuming a circular orbit (as in the case of M...

The explosion of the data both in the biomedical research and in the healthcare systems demands urgent solutions. In particular, the research in omics sciences is moving from a hypothesis-driven to a data-driven approach. Healthcare is additionally always asking for a tighter integration with biomedical data in order to promote personalized medicine and to provide better treatments. Efficient analysis and interpretation of Big Data opens new avenues to explore molecular biology, new questions to ask about physiological and pathological states, and new ways to answer these open issues. Such analyses lead to better understanding of diseases and development of better and personalized diagnostics and therapeutics. However, such progresses are directly related to the availability of new solutions to deal with this huge amount of information. New paradigms are needed to store and access data, for its annotation and integration and finally for inferring knowledge and making it available to researchers. Bioinformatics can be viewed as the “glue” for all these processes. A clear awareness of present high performance computing (HPC) solutions in bioinformatics, Big Data analysis paradigms for computational biology, and the issues that are still open in the biomedical and healthcare fields represent the starting point to win this challenge.

Context. The EXTraS project to explore the X-ray Transient and variable Sky searches for coherent signals in the X-ray archival data of XMM-Newton. Aims. XMM-Newton performed more than 400 pointed observations in the region of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). We inspected the results of the EXTraS period search to systematically look for new X-ray pulsators in our neighbour galaxy. Methods. We analysed the XMM-Newton observations of two sources from the 3XMM catalogue which show significant signals for coherent pulsations. Results. 3XMM J051259.8-682640 was detected as source with hard X-ray spectrum in two XMM-Newton observations, revealing a periodic modulation of the X-ray flux with 956 s. As optical counterpart we identify an early-type star with Hα emission. The OGLE I-band light curve exhibits a regular pattern with three brightness dips which mark a period of ∼1350 d. The X-ray spectrum of 3XMM J051034.6-670353 is dominated by a super-soft blackbody-like emission component (kT ∼ 70 eV) which is modulated by nearly 100% with a period of ∼1418 s. From GROND observations we suggest a star with r' = 20.9 mag as possible counterpart of the X-ray source. Conclusions. 3XMM J051259.8-682640 is confirmed as a new Be/X-ray binary pulsar in the LMC. We discuss the long-term optical period as likely orbital period which would be the longest known from a high-mass X-ray binary. The spectral and temporal properties of the super-soft source 3XMM J051034.6-670353 are very similar to those of RX J0806.3+1527 and RX J1914.4+2456 suggesting that it belongs to the class of double-degenerate polars and is located in our Galaxy rather than in the LMC.

We discovered 2.8 s pulsations in the X-ray emission of the ultraluminous X-ray source (ULX) M51 ULX-7 within the UNSEeN project, which was designed to hunt for new pulsating ULXs (PULXs) with XMM-Newton. The pulse shape is sinusoidal, and large variations of its amplitude were observed even within single exposures (pulsed fraction from less than 5% to 20%). Source M51 ULX-7 is variable, generally observed at an X-ray luminosity between 10 39 and 10 40 erg s −1 , located in the outskirts of the spiral galaxy M51a at a distance of 8.6 Mpc. According to our analysis, the X-ray pulsar orbits in a 2 day binary with a projected semimajor axis  a i sin Unified Astronomy Thesaurus concepts: Neutron stars (1108); Stellar accretion (1578); X-ray sources (1822);

Abstract. The e-Science environment developed in the framework of the EU-funded DRIHM project was used to demonstrate its ability to provide relevant, meaningful hydrometeorological forecasts. This was illustrated for the tragic case of 4 November 2011, when Genoa, Italy, was flooded as the result of heavy, convective precipitation that inundated the Bisagno catchment. The Meteorological Model Bridge (MMB), an innovative software component developed within the DRIHM project for the interoperability of meteorological and hydrological models, is a key component of the DRIHM e-Science environment. The MMB allowed three different rainfall-discharge models (DRiFt, RIBS and HBV) to be driven by four mesoscale limited-area atmospheric models (WRF-NMM, WRF-ARW, Meso-NH and AROME) and a downscaling algorithm (Rain-FARM) in a seamless fashion. In addition to this multi-model configuration, some of the models were run in probabilistic mode, thus giving a comprehensive account of modelling errors and a very large amount of likely hydrometeorological scenarios ( > 1500). The multi-model approach proved to be necessary because, whilst various aspects of the event were successfully simulated by different models, none of the models reproduced all of these aspects correctly. It was shown that the resulting set of simulations helped identify key atmospheric processes responsible for the large rainfall accumulations over the Bisagno basin. The DRIHM e-Science environment facilitated an evaluation of the sensitivity to atmospheric and hydrological modelling errors. This showed that both had a significant impact on predicted discharges, the former being larger than the latter. Finally, the usefulness of the set of hydrometeorological simulations was assessed from a flash flood early-warning perspective.

During a search for coherent signals in the X-ray archival data of XMM-Newton, we discovered a modulation at 1.2 s in 3XMM J004301.4+413017 (3X J0043), a source lying in the direction of an external arm of M 31. This short period indicates a neutron star (NS). Between 2000 and 2013, the position of 3X J0043 was imaged by public XMM-Newton observations 35 times. The analysis of these data allowed us to detect an orbital modulation at 1.27 d and study the long-term properties of the source. The emission of the pulsar was rather hard (most spectra are described by a power law with < 1) and, assuming the distance to M 31, the 0.3-10 keV luminosity was variable, from ∼3 × 10 37 to 2 × 10 38 erg s −1 . The analysis of optical data shows that, while 3X J0043 is likely associated to a globular cluster in M 31, a counterpart with V 22 outside the cluster cannot be excluded. Considering our findings, there are two main viable scenarios for 3X J0043: a peculiar low-mass X-ray binary, similar to 4U 1822−37 or 4U 1626−67, or an intermediate-mass X-ray binary resembling Her X−1. Regardless of the exact nature of the system, 3X J0043 is the first accreting NS in M 31 in which the spin period has been detected.Key words: galaxies: individual: M 31 -X-rays: binaries -X-rays: individual: 3XMM J004301.4+413017. I N T RO D U C T I O NEXTraS (Exploring the X-ray Transient and variable Sky) is a project to explore systematically the serendipitous content of the XMM-Newton European Photon Imaging Camera (EPIC) pn (Strüder et al. 2001) and MOS (Turner et al. 2001) data in the temporal domain. The results will be released to the astronomical community in an easy-to-use form. The project includes a search for fast transients missed by standard image analysis, as well as the search and characterization of variability (both periodical and aperiodical) in hundreds of thousands of sources, spanning more than nine orders of magnitude in time-scale (from <1 s to >10 yr) and

Cloud computing opens new perspectives for small-medium biotechnology laboratories that need to perform bioinformatics analysis in a flexible and effective way. This seems particularly true for hybrid clouds that couple the scalability offered by general-purpose public clouds with the greater control and ad hoc customizations supplied by the private ones. A hybrid cloud broker, acting as an intermediary between users and public providers, can support customers in the selection of the most suitable offers, optionally adding the provisioning of dedicated services with higher levels of quality. This paper analyses some economic and practical aspects of exploiting cloud computing in a real research scenario for the in silico drug discovery in terms of requirements, costs, and computational load based on the number of expected users. In particular, our work is aimed at supporting both the researchers and the cloud broker delivering an IaaS cloud infrastructure for biotechnology laboratories exposing different levels of nonfunctional requirements.

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