An Escape from Vardanyan's Theorem

Vardanyan’s Theorems [36, 37] state that QPL(PA)—the quantified provability logic of Peano Arithmetic—isΠ02 complete, and in particular that this already holds when the language is restricted to a single unary predicate. Moreover, Visser and de Jonge [38] generalized this result to conclude that it is impossible to computably axiomatize the quantified provability logic of a wide class of theories. However, the proof of this fact cannot be performed in a strictly positive signature. The system QRC1 was previously introduced by the authors [1] as a candidate first-order provability logic. Here we generalize the previously available Kripke soundness and completeness proofs, obtaining constant domain completeness. Then we show that QRC1 is indeed complete with respect to arithmetical semantics. This is achieved via a Solovaytype construction applied to constant domain Kripke models. As corollaries, we see that QRC1 is the strictly positive fragment of QGL and a fragment of QPL(PA)

FLEXiGUT: Rationale for exposomics associations with chronic low-grade gut inflammation

FLEXiGUT is the first large-scale exposomics study focused on chronic low-grade inflammation. It aims to characterize human life course environmental exposure to assess and validate its impact on gut inflammation and related biological processes and diseases. The cumulative influences of environmental and food contaminants throughout the lifespan on certain biological responses related to chronic gut inflammation will be investigated in two Flemish prospective cohorts, namely the “ENVIRONAGE birth cohort”, which provides follow-up from gestation to early childhood, and the “Flemish Gut Flora Project longitudinal cohort”, a cohort of adults. The exposome will be characterised through biomonitoring of legacy and emerging contaminants, mycotoxins and markers of air pollution, by analysing the available metadata on nutrition, location and activity, and by applying state-of-the-art -omics techniques, including metagenomics, metabolomics and DNA adductomics, as well as the assessment of telomere length and measurement of inflammatory markers, to encompass both exposure and effect. Associations between exposures and health outcomes will be uncovered using an integrated -omics data analysis framework comprising data exploration, pre-processing, dimensionality reduction and data mining, combined with machine learning-based pathway analysis approaches. This is expected to lead to a more profound insight in mechanisms underlying disease progression (e.g. metabolic disorders, food allergies, gastrointestinal cancers) and/or accelerated biological ageing

in vivo Monitoring with micro-implantable hypoxia sensor based on tissue acidosis

Hypoxia is a common medical problem, sometimes difficult to detect and caused by different situations. Control of hypoxia is of great medical importance and early detection is essential to prevent life threatening complications. However, the few current methods are invasive, expensive, and risky. Thus, the development of reliable and accurate sensors for the continuous monitoring of hypoxia is of vital importance for clinical monitoring. Herein, we report an implantable sensor to address these needs. The developed device is a low-cost, miniaturised implantable electrochemical sensor for monitoring hypoxia in tissue by means of pH detection. This technology is based on protonation/deprotonation of polypyrrole conductive polymer. The sensor was optimized in vitro and tested in vivo intramuscularly and ex vivo in blood in adult rabbits with respiration-induced hypoxia and correlated with the standard device ePOCTM. The sensor demonstrated excellent sensitivity and reproducibility; 46.4 ± 0.4 mV/pH in the pH range of 4–9 and the selectivity coefficient exhibited low interference activity in vitro. The device was linear (R2 = 0.925) with a low dispersion of the values (n = 11) with a cut-off of 7.1 for hypoxia in vivo and ex vivo. Statistics with one-way ANOVA (α = 0.05), shows statistical differences between hypoxia and normoxia states and the good performance of the pH sensor, which demonstrated good agreement with the standard device. The sensor was stable and functional after 18 months. The excellent results demonstrated the feasibility of the sensors in real-time monitoring of intramuscular tissue and blood for medical applications

Enhancing recommender systems with provider fairness through preference distribution awareness

Going beyond recommendations’ effectiveness, by ensuring properties such as unbiased and fair results, is an aspect that is receiving more and more attention in the literature. This means not only providing accurate recommendations but also ensuring that the visibility of providers aligns with user preferences and demographic representation, which has been identified as a key aspect of fairness in recommender systems. In particular, provider fairness enables the generation of results which are equitable for different (groups of) providers. In this paper, we raise the problem of how recommendations are distributed when enabling provider fairness. Indeed, on the one hand, users have clear preferences with respect to which providers they choose (e.g., Italian users mostly buy Italian food), so recommendations should reflect these preferences. On the other hand, content providers should be able to reach a diverse audience, and be visible across the different user groups that expressed a preference for them. Specifically, we consider demographic groups based on their continent of origin for both users and providers, and assess how the preferences of the user groups are distributed across the provider groups. We first show that the state-of-the-art models and the existing approaches that enable provider fairness do not reflect the original distribution of the user preferences. To enable this property, we propose a re-ranking approach that, thanks to the use of buckets associating users and items, favors what we call preference distribution-aware provider fairness. Results on two real-world datasets (i.e., the Book-Crossing and COCO) show that our approach can enable provider fairness and tailor the recommendations to the original distribution of the user preferences, with negligible losses in effectiveness. In particular, in the Books dataset, our approach obtains an overall disparity that is around 6%. On the other hand, in the case of the COCO dataset, the disparities are reduced to 2%

Agro-Food Supply Chains in Peri-Urban Agricultural Areas: Do They Contribute to Preserve Local Biodiversity? The Case of Baix Llobregat Agrarian Park.

Peri-urban regions, especially in the Mediterranean, face challenges like farmland loss dueto urban pressure. This study emphasizes retail stores as strategic focal points for evaluatingsocietal, economic, and production systems. It hypothesizes that analyzing retail stores inagricultural areas provides insights into traded and cultivated agrobiodiversity. Using the BaixLlobregat Agrarian Park (Catalonia, NE Iberian Peninsula) as a case study, this research examinesdifferent food retailers from short and conventional food supply chains. Results indicate variationsin plant diversity, origin, and seasonality among different retail stores. Farmers’ markets exhibithigher intraspecific diversity, contributing to local agrobiodiversity conservation. This studyobserves temporal changes in farmers’ markets, highlighting shifts influenced by socioeconomicfactors and climate change perceptions. Finally, this research underscores certain strategies topromote sustainable peri-urban local food systems and preserve agrobiodiversity, offering valuableinsights into food supply chain dynamics in peri-urban agricultural regions.</p

Ultra-fast, selective and pseudo-quantitative analysis of 99Tc in nuclear waste for screening purposes

Controlling radioactivity is essential in various fields, such as the decommissioning of nuclear power plants and nuclear medicine. In some cases, a full characterization of samples is not required; instead, a screening analysis that provides an overall indication of the activity present can be sufficient to determine if a sample is radioactive. This article introduces a new system called PSkits designed specifically for ultra-fast and selective screening detection of 99Tc. PSkits consist of a plastic scintillation layer attached to the bottom of a scintillation vial, coated with aliquat·336® as a selective extractant. In this study, the preparation of PSkits was optimized by adjusting the proportions of crosslinker, porogen, and the type of vial used. The analysis method was developed, and the selectivity against common interferences was tested by optimizing the rinsing media. Finally, PSkits were validated by analysing simulated nuclear waste samples and urine spiked samples, achieving satisfactory results with quantification errors below 50 %, demonstrating their effectiveness for the intended purpos

Il rincontro: Altiero Spinelli ed il PCI fra gli anni Settanta ed Ottanta

This paper analyses the last years of Altiero Spinelli’s political trajectory, focusing on the European federalist leader’s rapprochement with the PCI in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Starting positions were far apart: the Italian Communists had arrived at Europeanism after a long reflection influenced by the coordinates of the Cold War; Spinelli, persuaded in the past that the PCI would never fully embrace that view, accepted to confront a world, that of Berlinguer’s PCI, which, at least from the inside, was unknown to him. The research, in addition to bibliographic sources, is largely based on the personal archival papers of the federalist leader, some of his publications and the archive and press of the PCI

Polymorphic crystallization and transformation pathways of 1,2-dipalmitoyl-3-oleoyl-rac-glycerol (PPO) during a liquid–solid-liquid journey

The polymorphic behavior of triacylglycerol (TAG) crystals formed during the manufacturing process of lipid-based foodproducts relates directly to their textural and melting properties. In this work, we analyzed the polymorphic crystallizationand transformation behavior of 1,2-dipalmitoyl-3-oleoyl-rac-glycerol (PPO), a widespread TAG in edible fats and oils, duringthe application dynamic thermal treatments of cooling and heating. By implementing calorimetric, X-ray diffraction,and microscopy techniques, we mapped the polymorphic occurrence and the polymorphic transformation pathways of PPOas a function of the rate of thermal treatments. The results obtained were later compared to that reported for diverse TAGsin previous studies. Despite the overall crystallization and transformation behavior of PPO following a similar trend to otherTAGs close in fatty acid composition, we can highlight the much lower influence of varying cooling and heating conditionson the crystallization properties of this TAG. In more detail, crystalline forms of low stability were generally promotedduring crystallization, whereas transformations occurred always through the melt independently of the heating conditions.One may expect this behavior to influence the industrial processing and final properties of food products based on ediblefats containing PPO

Searching for Strong Gravitational Lenses

Strong gravitational lenses provide unique laboratories for cosmological and astrophysical investigations, but they must first be discovered – a task that can be met with significant contamination by other astrophysical objects and asterisms. Here we review strong lens searches, covering various sources (quasars, galaxies, supernovae, FRBs, GRBs, and GWs), lenses (early- and late-type galaxies, groups, and clusters), datasets (imaging, spectra, and lightcurves), and wavelengths. We first present the physical characteristics of the lens and source populations, highlighting relevant details for constructing targeted searches. Search techniques are described based on the main lensing feature that is required for the technique to work, namely one of: (i) an associated magnification, (ii) multiple spatially-resolved images, (iii) multiple redshifts, or (iv) a non-zero time delay between images. To use the current lens samples for science, and for the design of future searches, we list several selection biases that exist due to these discovery techniques. We conclude by discussing the future of lens searches in upcoming surveys and the new population of lenses that will be discovered

Better characterizing sleep beliefs for personalized sleep health promotion: the French sleep beliefs scale validation study

Background: The Sleep Beliefs Scale (SBS) is a well-known tool to design and monitor personalized sleep health promotion at an individual and population level. The lack of an established French version limits the development of effective interventions targeting these populations. Thus, the aim of this study was to validate the French version of the SBS in a representative sample of the general population. Methods: Quota sampling was used to recruit 1,004 participants (18–65 years, mean age: 43 years, 54% of female) who underwent an online survey to complete the SBS, and to assess sleep schedules, sleep quality and disorders, and mental health. Cronbach’s α coefficient, confirmatory factor analysis, item-internal consistency (IIC), and item discriminant validity (IDV) of the SBS were computed to assess internal validity while bivariate associations with sleep schedules, sleep quality and disorders, and mental health were used to assess external convergent and discriminant validity. Results: The mean score on the SBS was 12.3 ± 4.9. Item 19 (“Quiet & Dark”) showed the highest rate of correct answers (n = 801, 79.8%), while item 20 (“Recovering sleep”) showed the lowest rate of correct answers (n = 246, 24.5%). Overall, the SBS showed satisfactory internal consistency (α = 0.87) and confirmed the three-factor structure proposed by the original study. All items were found consistent (IIC > 0.4) and discriminant (IIC > IDV) except for item 20 (“recovering lost sleep by sleeping for a long time”). Females, older participants, and subjects with short time-in-bed, poor sleep quality, insomnia, and circadian rhythm disorder had higher SBS scores while participants with depressive symptoms had lower SBS scores. Conclusion: We successfully translated and validated the French version of the SBS in a representative sample, making it a reliable instrument for researchers and clinicians to assess and target sleep beliefs. Correct answers vary from 25 to 80% which underlines the importance of continuing sleep health promotion campaigns by targeting poorly understood behaviors. Our findings also shed light on the fickleness of beliefs that are prone to vary within individuals across time, in step with societal changes. Several associated factors were identified, thus contributing to our understanding of sleep beliefs and offering insights for personalized approaches to enhance sleep health and overall well-being