New discoveries with geophysics in the Accademia of Hadrian's Villa near Tivoli (Rome)

The Accademia Pilot Project concerns one of the lesser known buildings of Hadrian's Villa, the Accademia, which is still in private property and is not open to the public. One of the most significant and unique features of this building – and of the whole Villa – is a network of subterranean service corridors, which was seldom studied. <br><br> For the first time we used Geophysics at Hadrian's Villa, to explore the subterranean tunnels of the Accademia and reconstruct their layout. The survey was done by archaeologist Anna Maria Marras for her Master thesis in Geo-technology (Marras, 2008) and gave very interesting results

On explicit lower bounds and blow-up times in a model of chemotaxis

Abstract. This paper is concerned with a parabolic Keller-Segel system in R^n, with n = 2 and 3, under Neumann boundary conditions on the boundary. Firstly important theoretical and general results dealing with lower bounds for blow-up time estimates are summarized and analyzed. Secondly, a resolution method is proposed and used to both compute the real blow-up times of such unbounded solutions and analyze and discuss some of their properties

Characterization methodology for re-using marble slurry in industrial applications

Nowadays calcium carbonate has a great importance in different industrial fields and currently there is the opportunity of appreciate the potential value of marble waste and convert it into marketable products. Marble slurry samples, collected from different dimension stone treatment plants in Orosei marble district (Sardinia - Italy), were chemically, physically, mineralogically, and morphologically analyzed and the obtained data were evaluated for compatibility with the marketable micronized CaCO3 specifications required by some industrial sectors, estimating the prospects of recovered CaCO3 utilization. Besides the economic benefits, transforming a waste into an important economic resource involves environmental advantages, due to reduced marble waste landfills, and sustainability promotion

Dictionary Attacks on Speaker Verification

In this paper, we propose dictionary attacks against speaker verification - a novel attack vector that aims to match a large fraction of speaker population by chance. We introduce a generic formulation of the attack that can be used with various speech representations and threat models. The attacker uses adversarial optimization to maximize raw similarity of speaker embeddings between a seed speech sample and a proxy population. The resulting master voice successfully matches a non-trivial fraction of people in an unknown population. Adversarial waveforms obtained with our approach can match on average 69% of females and 38% of males enrolled in the target system at a strict decision threshold calibrated to yield false alarm rate of 1%. By using the attack with a black-box voice cloning system, we obtain master voices that are effective in the most challenging conditions and transferable between speaker encoders. We also show that, combined with multiple attempts, this attack opens even more to serious issues on the security of these systems

Performance tests of an AGIPD 0.4 assembly at the beamline P10 of PETRA III

The Adaptive Gain Integrating Pixel Detector (AGIPD) is a novel detector system, currently under development by a collaboration of DESY, the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, the University of Hamburg and the University of Bonn, and is primarily designed for use at the European XFEL. To verify key features of this detector, an AGIPD 0.4 test chip assembly was tested at the P10 beamline of the PETRA III synchrotron at DESY. The test chip successfully imaged both the direct synchrotron beam and single 7.05 keV photons at the same time, demonstrating the large dynamic range required for XFEL experiments. X-ray scattering measurements from a test sample agree with standard measurements and show the chip's capability of observing dynamics at the microsecond time scale.Comment: revised version after peer revie

A distal renal tubular acidosis showing hyperammonemia and hyperlactacidemia

Introduction: distal renal tubular acidosis (dRTA) presents itself with variable clinical manifestations and often with late expressions that impact on prognosis. Case report: A 45-day-old male infant was admitted with stopping growth, difficult feeding and vomiting after meals. Clinical tests and labs revealed a type 1 renal tubular acidosis, even if the first blood tests showed ammonium and lactate increase. We had to exclude metabolic diseases before having a certain diagnosis. Conclusions: blood and urine investigations and genetic tests are fundamental to formulate dRTA diagnosis and to plan follow-up, according to possible phenotypic expressions of recessive and dominant autosomal forms in patients with dRTA

First measurements of the Fe oxidation state of spinel inclusions inolivine single crystals from Vulture (Italy) with the in situ synchrotronmicro-Mossbauer technique

The redox state of the Earth's upper mantle (i.e., oxygen fugacity, f(O2)) is a key variable that influences numerous processes occurring at depth like the mobility of volatile species, partial melting, and metasomatism. It is linked to the oxidation state of peridotite rocks, which is normally determined through the available oxythermobarometers after measuring the chemical composition of equilibrated rock-forming minerals and the Fe3+ in redox-sensitive minerals like spinel or garnet. To date, accurate measurements of Fe3+ / Sigma Fe in peridotites have been limited to those peridotites (e.g., harzburgites and lherzolites) for which an oxythermobarometer exists and where spinel (or garnet) crystals can be easily separated and measured by conventional Fe-57 Mossbauer spectroscopy. Wehrlitic rocks have been generally formed by the interaction of a lherzolite with carbonatitic melts and, therefore, have recorded the passage of (metasomatic) fluids at mantle conditions. However, no oxythermobarometer exists to determine their equilibrium f(O2).The aim of this study was to retrieve the f(O2) of the mantle beneath Mt. Vulture volcano (Italy) through the study of a wehrlitic lapillus emitted during the last eruption (similar to 140 kyr ago) that contain olivines with multiple tiny spinel inclusions with sizes &lt; 40 mu m. To our knowledge, the Fe oxidation state of these inclusions has been never determined with the Mossbauer technique due to their small sizes.Here, we present measurements of the Fe3+ / Sigma Fe using in situ synchrotron Mossbauer spectroscopy coupled with chemical and spectroscopic analysis of both host olivine and spinel inclusions.The results show Fe3+ / Sigma Fe ratios of 0.03-0.05 for olivine and 0.40-0.45 for the included spinels, the latter of which appear higher than those reported in literature for mantle spinel harzburgites and lherzolites. Given the evidence of the mantle origin of the trapped spinels, we propose that the high f(O2) (between 0.81 and 1.00 log above the fayalite-magnetite-quartz buffer; FMQ) likely results from the interaction between the pristine spinel lherzolite and a CO2-rich metasomatic agent prior to the spinel entrapment in olivines at mantle depths