Summary Resistance to activated protein C (APC) has been demonstrated to be a risk factor for venous thromboembolism, but it is not known whether this phenotype is consistent over time. We reinvestigated 2580 subjects from the Vicenza Thrombophilia and Atherosclerosis (VITA) Project to evaluate the prevalence of a consistent APC resistance phenotype in the population. Among the 433 subjects with an APC resistance at first visit, the phenotype was confirmed in all the 74 factor V (FV) Leiden carriers and in 124 of 359 FV Leiden negative subjects (34%). The prevalence of a confirmed phenotype, not associated with FV Leiden, was 4·8% in our population. In a subgroup of subjects previously investigated for heritability of the APC resistance, we confirmed the APC resistance phenotype in seven of 39 (17·9%) subjects with an APC resistant sibling but only in 20 of 408 (4·9%) subjects without a sibling with the same phenotype (P = 0·005). Among the 124 FV Leiden negative subjects with a persistent APC resistance phenotype, 40 (32%) had a plasma factor VIII coagulant activity level above 150 IU/dl and eight (6·4%) were carriers of the G20210A prothrombin allele. APC resistance not due to FV Leiden is a frequent and consistent phenotype in the general population, with a possibly strong genetic influence.

As part of the Hubble Space Telescope UV Legacy Survey of Galactic Globular Clusters, 110 parallel fields were observed with the Wide Field Channel of the Advanced Camera for Surveys, in the outskirts of 48 globular clusters, plus the open cluster NGC 6791. Totalling about 0.3 square degrees of observed sky, this is the largest homogeneous Hubble Space Telescope photometric survey of Galalctic globular clusters outskirts to date. In particular, two distinct pointings have been obtained for each target on average, all centred at about 6.5 arcmin from the cluster centre, thus covering a mean area of about 23 arcmin 2 for each globular cluster. For each field, at least one exposure in both F475W and F814W filters was collected. In this work, we publicly release the astrometric and photometric catalogues and the astrometrised atlases for each of these fields.

We report the discovery of an optical Einstein Ring in the Sculptor constellation, IAC J010127-334319, in the vicinity of the Sculptor Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy. It is an almost complete ring (∼ 300 • ) with a diameter of ∼ 4.5 arcsec. The discovery was made serendipitously from inspecting Dark Energy Camera (DECam) archive imaging data. Confirmation of the object nature has been obtained by deriving spectroscopic redshifts for both components, lens and source, from observations at the 10.4 m Gran Telescopio CANARIAS (GTC) with the spectrograph OSIRIS. The lens, a massive early-type galaxy, has a redshift of z = 0.581 while the source is a starburst galaxy with redshift of z = 1.165. The total enclosed mass that produces the lensing effect has been estimated to be M tot = (1.86 ± 0.23) · 10 12 M ⊙ .