Abstract
Around 80% of websites change significantly or disappear altogether after the first year, resulting in the loss of invaluable information. In this volatile scenario, preserving online content is increasingly essential. This is especially critical for local news outlets, which produce a wealth of information within the unique context of their communities but often lack sufficient archiving resources. In this paper, we take a significant step forward by leveraging the information preserved by the Portuguese Web Archive, Arquivo.pt, to recreate the website of a local news outlet. This online demo grants users direct access to previously lost news articles, images, and front covers, thus contributing to preserving local digital heritage. An IR system was also implemented to ensure easy access, along with a recommendation system based on BERT embeddings to suggest related news articles and enhance user engagement. As a final contribution, we also provide a Python package, enabling others to replicate the process of collecting, processing, retrieving, and recreating websites for local news outlets in Portugal. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.

Abstract
This study seeks to comprehensively analyze the multidimensional determinants underlying perceptions of safety, security, and comfort in transport mode choice, specifically focusing on private transport, public transport and walking. The research begins with an extensive literature review to identify and delve into the factors influencing perceptions of safety, security, and comfort across various transport modes. This inquiry is further enhanced by organizing two focused group sessions. A total of 35 key factors were identified, forming the basis for subsequent investigation. The study then progressed to the development and administration of a survey aimed at capturing responses from a diverse audience, with the goal of exploring the factors influencing perceptions related to different transport modes. A total of 302 responses were collected and meticulously analyzed to discern the factors impacting various relationships and to identify consistent perceptions across diverse transport modes. Additionally, a factor analysis was conducted to validate the findings derived from the data. The outcomes of this research constitute a significant contribution to the existing literature, offering valuable insights that pave the way for a more holistic understanding of the factors guiding transport mode choices. © The Author(s) 2025.

Abstract
Air pollution is a global challenge with deep implications in public health and environment. We examine air quality data from a monitoring station in Entrecampos, Lisbon, Portugal, using Symbolic Data Analysis. The dataset consists of hourly concentrations of nine pollutants during three years, which are logarithmically transformed and aggregated in intervals, taking the daily minimum and maximum values. The symbolic mean and variance are estimated for each variable through the method of moments, and the pairwise dependencies are captured using a bivariate copula. Symbolic principal component scores are obtained from the estimated covariance matrix and used to fit generalized extreme value distributions. Outlier maps, based on these distributions’ quantiles, are used to identify outlying observations. A comparative analysis with daily average-based outlier detection methods is conducted. The results show the relevance of Symbolic Data Analysis in revealing new insights into air quality. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.

Abstract
The aging of the Portuguese population is a multifaceted challenge that requires a coordinated and comprehensive response from society. In this context, social service institutions play a fundamental role in providing aid and support to the elderly, ensuring that they can enjoy a dignified and fulfilling life even in the face of the challenges of aging. This research proposes a Balanced Multiple Traveling Salesman Problem based on the Ant Colony Optimization algorithm (ACO-BmTSP) to solve a distribution of meals problem in the municipality of Mogadouro, Portugal. The Multiple Traveling Salesman Problem (mTSP) is an NP-complete problem where m salesmen perform a shortest tour between different cities, visiting each only once. The primary purpose is to minimize the sum of all distance traveled by all salesmen keeping the tours balanced. This paper shows the results of computing obtained for three, four, and five agents with this new approach and their comparison with other approaches like the standard Particle Swarm Optimization and Ant Colony Optimization algorithms. As can be seen, the ACO-BmTSP, in addition to obtaining much more equitable paths, also achieves better results in lower total costs. In conclusion, some benchmark problems were used to evaluate the efficiency of ACO-BmTSP, and the results clearly indicate that this algorithm represents a strong alternative to be considered when the problem size involves fewer than one hundred locations. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

Abstract
The lower refractive index sensitivity (RIS) of plasmonic nanoparticles (NP) in comparison to their plasmonic thin films counterparts hindered their wide adoption for wavelength-based sensor designs, wasting the NP characteristic field locality. In this context, high aspect-ratio colloidal core-shell Ag@Au nanorods (NRs) are demonstrated to operate effectively at telecommunication wavelengths, showing RIS of 1720 nm/RIU at 1350 nm (O-band) and 2325 nm/RIU at 1550 nm (L-band), representing a five-fold improvement compared to similar Au NRs operating at equivalent wavelengths. Also, these NRs combine the superior optical performance of Ag with the Au chemical stability and biocompatibility. Next, using a side-polished optical fiber, we detected glyphosate, achieving a detection limit improvement from 724 to 85 mg/L by shifting from the O to the C/L optical bands. This work combines the significant scalability and cost-effective advantages of colloidal NPs with enhanced RIS, showing a promising approach suitable for both point-of-care and long-range sensing applications at superior performance than comparable thin film-based sensors in either environmental monitoring and other fields.

Abstract
TCP is the default transport protocol of choice, namely for message-oriented middleware protocols (e.g., ZMTP, AMQP, MQTT) or distributed language runtimes (e.g., distributed Erlang), where exactly-once (EO) messaging is paramount. However, EO is only guaranteed within the TCP session, since reality shows that TCP connections can fail under many circumstances. Ensuring EO delivery ends up at the middleware layer, at the cost of higher complexity and lack of obliviouness - due to the use of permanent per-peer state. Moreover, using TCP at scale in highly concurrent systems leads to the need for TCP connection multiplexing, and possibly drastic performance loss due to head-of-line blocking. This paper introduces Exon, an oblivious exactly-once messaging protocol, and a corresponding lightweight library implementation over UDP. Exon uses a novel strategy of a per-message four-way protocol to ensure oblivious exactly-once messaging, with on-demand protocol-level "soft half-connections", established when needed and safely discarded. Exon achieves simultaneously: correctness with no timing assumptions, obliviousness, and performance through merging and pipelining basic protocol messages. Exon also employs a reliable delegation technique to handover the sending responsibility to a mediating node, without violating EO, when the sender the receiver are directly unreachable to each other and even if the message had already been delivered. The empirical evaluation of Exon demonstrates significant improvements over TCP in throughput and latency under packet loss, while maintaining a negligible overhead in healthy networks. © 2013 IEEE.