Covid-19 pandemics has fostered a pervasive use of facemasks all around the world. While they help in preventing infection, there are concerns related to the possible impact of facemasks on social communication. The present study investigates how emotion recognition, trust attribution and re-identification of faces differ when faces are seen without mask, with a standard medical facemask, and with a transparent facemask restoring visual access to the mouth region. Our results show that, in contrast to standard medical facemasks, transparent masks significantly spare the capability to recognize emotional expressions. Moreover, transparent masks spare the capability to infer trustworthiness from faces with respect to standard medical facemasks which, in turn, dampen the perceived untrustworthiness of faces. Remarkably, while transparent masks (unlike standard masks) do not impair emotion recognition and trust attribution, they seemingly do impair the subsequent re-identification of the same, unmasked, face (like standard masks). Taken together, this evidence supports a dissociation between mechanisms sustaining emotion and identity processing. This study represents a pivotal step in the much-needed analysis of face reading when the lower portion of the face is occluded by a facemask.

The design of hypersonic airbreathing vehicles is a challenging objective due to the intrinsic complexity of propulsion-airframe integration in combination with an engine cycle design able to operate over a wide Mach number range. This is one of the objectives of EC co-funded project LAPCAT-II aiming to reduce antipodal flights to less than 2 to 4 hours. Among the several studied vehicles in the preceding project LAPCAT-I, only aircraft designs for Mach 5 and 8 flights were retained in the present project. Starting from the available Mach 5 vehicle and its related pre-cooled turbo-ramjet, assumed performance figures of different components were now assessed in more detail numerically and experimentally. Though the cruise flight of the Mach 8 vehicle based on a scramjet seemed feasible, further refinement was needed. In support to the integrated vehicle design, dedicated aerodynamic and propulsive experiments were done for the different components as well as for the complete vehicle. This included also the mutual verification of the windtunnels within Europe. In parallel, modelling implementation and validation on high-speed aerodynamics and propulsion were performed. The validated tools gave confidence to assess the performances of the fully integrated vehicles to comply with the mission goals. Finally, the impact of the emissions onto the climate was evaluated. Nomenclature

The reconciliation of systems of time series subject to both temporal and contemporaneous constraints can be solved in such a way that the temporal profiles of the original series be preserved ‘at best’ (the movement preservation principle). A new feasible simultaneous reconciliation procedure is presented, which exploits the sparsity of the linear system to be solved. A two-step reconciliation strategy might be more suitable in the case of large systems.We compare the results of the simultaneous and two-step approaches for two data sets from real life