A ring resonators optical sensor for multiple biomarkers detection

In the recent years, the number of Point-Of-Care-Tests (POCTs) available for clinical diagnostic has steadily increased. POCTs provide a near-patient testing with the potential to generate a result quickly so that appropriate treatment can be implemented, leading to improved clinical outcomes compared to traditional laboratory testing. Technological advances, such as miniaturization of sensors and improved instrumentation, have revolutionized POCTs, enabling the development of smaller and more accurate devices. In this context, it has also gained increasing importance the screening of various analytes simultaneously to increase specificity and improve the characterization of the disease. This study is aimed at developing and characterizing a photonic integrated circuit for multiple markers detection, which represents the functional core towards a full developed POCT device for clinical pathology applications. The photonic sensor, based on microring resonators (MRRs), is functionalized by immobilizing specific antibodies on a copolymer layer deposited on the MRR’s surfaces. Surface chemical techniques were employed to analyse the surface chemical characteristics while fluorescence microscopy was involved to analyse the resulting bioreceptor surface density. The photonic sensor is characterized for the parallel detection of two biomarkers, the C-Reactive Protein (CRP) and the Creatine-Kinase-MB (CK-MB). The analyte-antibody binding curves were obtained both in buffer and in filtered un-diluted artificial saliva showing promising results both in terms of sensitivity, with limit of detection (LOD) of 103 pM for CRP and 140 pM for CK-MB, and in terms of specificity. These encouraging results let the assembly of a highly sensitive POC device for molecular diagnostics

Discussion and Demonstration of RF-MEMS Attenuators Design Concepts and Modules for Advanced Beamforming in the Beyond-5G and 6G Scenario—Part 2

In this paper, different concepts of reconfigurable RF-MEMS attenuators for beamforming applications are proposed and critically assessed. Capitalizing on the previous part of this work, the 1-bit attenuation modules featuring series and shunt resistors and low-voltage membranes (7–9 V) are employed to develop a 3-bit attenuator for fine-tuning attenuations (<−10 dB) in the 24.25–27.5 GHz range. More substantial attenuation levels are investigated using fabricated samples of coplanar waveguide (CPW) sections equipped with Pi-shaped resistors aiming at attenuations of −15, −30, and −45 dB. The remarkable electrical features of such configurations, showing flat attenuation curves and limited return losses, and the investigation of a switched-line attenuator design based on them led to the final proposed concept of a low-voltage 24-state attenuator. Such a simulated device combines the Pi-shaped resistors for substantial attenuations with the 3-bit design for fine-tuning operations, showing a maximum attenuation level of nearly −50 dB while maintaining steadily flat attenuation levels and limited return losses (<−11 dB) along the frequency band of interest

Geophysical Characterization of the Interiors of Ganymede, Callisto and Europa by ESA’s JUpiter ICy moons Explorer

The JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE) of ESA was launched on 14 April 2023 and will arrive at Jupiter and its moons in July 2031. In this review article, we describe how JUICE will investigate the interior of the three icy Galilean moons, Ganymede, Callisto and Europa, during its Jupiter orbital tour and the final orbital phase around Ganymede. Detailed geophysical observations about the interior of the moons can only be performed from close distances to the moons, and best estimates of signatures of the interior, such as an induced magnetic field, tides and rotation variations, and radar reflections, will be obtained during flybys of the moons with altitudes of about 1000 km or less and during the Ganymede orbital phase at an average altitude of 490 km. The 9-month long orbital phase around Ganymede, the first of its kind around another moon than our Moon, will allow an unprecedented and detailed insight into the moon’s interior, from the central regions where a magnetic field is generated to the internal ocean and outer ice shell. Multiple flybys of Callisto will clarify the differences in evolution compared to Ganymede and will provide key constraints on the origin and evolution of the Jupiter system. JUICE will visit Europa only during two close flybys and the geophysical investigations will focus on selected areas of the ice shell. A prime goal of JUICE is the characterisation of the ice shell and ocean of the Galilean moons, and we here specifically emphasise the synergistic aspects of the different geophysical investigations, showing how different instruments will work together to probe the hydrosphere. We also describe how synergies between JUICE instruments will contribute to the assessment of the deep interior of the moons, their internal differentiation, dynamics and evolution. In situ measurements and remote sensing observations will support the geophysical instruments to achieve these goals, but will also, together with subsurface radar sounding, provide information about tectonics, potential plumes, and the composition of the surface, which will help understanding the composition of the interior, the structure of the ice shell, and exchange processes between ocean, ice and surface. Accurate tracking of the JUICE spacecraft all along the mission will strongly improve our knowledge of the changing orbital motions of the moons and will provide additional insight into the dissipative processes in the Jupiter system. Finally, we present an overview of how the geophysical investigations will be performed and describe the operational synergies and challenges

Point Cloud Pre-training with Diffusion Models

Pre-training a model and then fine-tuning it on downstream tasks has demonstrated significant success in the 2D image and NLP domains. However, due to the unordered and non-uniform density characteristics of point clouds, it is non-trivial to explore the prior knowledge of point clouds and pre-train a point cloud backbone. In this paper, we propose a novel pre-training method called Point cloud Diffusion pre-training (PointDif). We consider the point cloud pre-training task as a conditional point-to-point generation problem and introduce a conditional point generator. This generator aggregates the features extracted by the backbone and employs them as the condition to guide the point-to-point recovery from the noisy point cloud, thereby assisting the backbone in capturing both local and global geometric priors as well as the global point density distribution of the object. We also present a recurrent uniform sampling optimization strategy, which enables the model to uniformly recover from various noise levels and learn from balanced supervision. Our PointDif achieves substantial improvement across various real-world datasets for diverse downstream tasks such as classification, segmentation and detection. Specifically, PointDif attains 70.0% mIoU on S3DIS Area 5 for the segmentation task and achieves an average improvement of 2.4% on ScanObjectNN for the classification task compared to TAP. Furthermore, our pre-training framework can be flexibly applied to diverse point cloud backbones and bring considerable gains

Gigante di ferro o cuore di ciccia? RIflessioni sull'incarnazione tecnologica e sull'Homo Cyberneticus

The progress of bionic and robotic biotechnology for both therapeutic and enhancement goals forces us to investigate the intersection of healthcare, ethics, and philosophy in the context of human augmentation. As the "cyborg" is progressively becoming a concrete possibility, new bioethical questions about the growing integration of technology into the human body are rising. Drawing attention to the most recent breakthroughs, such as a fully implantable bionic skin with wireless sensory capabilities, the aim is not only to explore the effective potential impact on individuals' lives, addressing issues of health monitoring, comfort, and extended capabilities but also to address the concept of embodiment: both promises and threats of an increased level of integration and acceptance of biotechnological enhancement must be highlighted. Since the pursuit of this progress is not merely “to wear” these advancements but to seamlessly integrate them, blurring the distinction between the biological body and the augmented one, both scientists and humanists need to focus on the need for a deeper understanding of the human brain's capacity to adapt to such enhancements. Thus, the speculation on the future trajectory of human-robot fusion helps to spot the most compelling questions regarding the most profound changes in the human experience of health and wellness. Some of these have yet to be formulated, even though they represent the most concrete and "human" challenge that cybernetic humans will present to us: how will the relationship of care vary in the presence of an increasingly bionic body? Which parts of our bodies will still be able to feel pain? Will we still have an aging body? Or will we rather speak of a body that is progressively malfunctioning because it is poorly designed? Will physicians become more and more like precision mechanics? How will the language of health, care and well-being change

Constraints on directionality effect of nuclear recoils in a liquid argon time projection chamber

The direct search for dark matter in the form of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMP) is performed by detecting nuclear recoils produced in a target material from the WIMP elastic scattering. The experimental identification of the direction of the WIMP-induced nuclear recoils is a crucial asset in this field, as it enables unmistakable modulation signatures for dark matter. The Recoil Directionality (ReD) experiment was designed to probe for such directional sensitivity in argon dual-phase time projection chambers (TPC), that are widely considered for current and future direct dark matter searches. The TPC of ReD was irradiated with neutrons at the INFN Laboratori Nazionali del Sud. Data were taken with nuclear recoils of known directions and kinetic energy of 72 keV, which is within the range of interest for WIMP-induced signals in argon. The direction-dependent liquid argon charge recombination model by Cataudella et al. was adopted and a likelihood statistical analysis was performed, which gave no indications of significant dependence of the detector response to the recoil direction. The aspect ratio R of the initial ionization cloud is R < 1.072 with 90% confidence level

Search for non-resonant Higgs boson pair production in final states with leptons, taus, and photons in pp collisions at √s = 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector

A search is presented for non-resonant Higgs boson pair production, targeting the bbZZ, 4V (V = W or Z), VVττ, 4τ, γγVV and γγττ decay channels. Events are categorised based on the multiplicity of light charged leptons (electrons or muons), hadronically decaying tau leptons, and photons. The search is based on a data sample of proton-proton collisions at = 13 TeV recorded with the ATLAS detector during Run 2 of the Large Hadron Collider, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 140 fb−1. No evidence of the signal is found and the observed (expected) upper limit on the cross-section for non-resonant Higgs boson pair production is determined to be 17 (11) times the Standard Model predicted cross-section at 95% confidence level under the background-only hypothesis. The observed (expected) constraints on the HHH coupling modifier, κλ, are determined to be −6.2 < κλ < 11.6 (−4.5 < κλ < 9.6) at 95% confidence level, assuming the Standard Model for the expected limits and that new physics would only affect κλ