Prenatal Hyperandrogenization Induces Metabolic and Endocrine Alterations Which Depend on the Levels of Testosterone Exposure

Prenatal hyperandrogenism is able to induce polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) in rats. The aim of the present study was to establish if the levels of prenatal testosterone may determine the extent of metabolic and endocrine alterations during the adult life. Pregnant Sprague Dawley rats were prenatally injected with either 2 or 5 mg free testosterone (groups T2 and T5 respectively) from day 16 to day 19 day of gestation. Female offspring from T2 and T5 displayed different phenotype of PCOS during adult life. Offspring from T2 showed hyperandrogenism, ovarian cysts and ovulatory cycles whereas those from T5 displayed hyperandrogenism, ovarian cysts and anovulatory cycles. Both group showed increased circulating glucose levels after the intraperitoneal glucose tolerance test (IPGTT; an evaluation of insulin resistance). IPGTT was higher in T5 rats and directly correlated with body weight at prepubertal age. However, the decrease in the body weight at prepubertal age was compensated during adult life. Although both groups showed enhanced ovarian steroidogenesis, it appears that the molecular mechanisms involved were different. The higher dose of testosterone enhanced the expression of both the protein that regulates cholesterol availability (the steroidogenic acute regulatory protein (StAR)) and the protein expression of the transcriptional factor: peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma (PPAR gamma). Prenatal hyperandrogenization induced an anti-oxidant response that prevented a possible pro-oxidant status. The higher dose of testosterone induced a pro-inflammatory state in ovarian tissue mediated by increased levels of prostaglandin E (PG) and the protein expression of cyclooxygenase 2 (COX2, the limiting enzyme of PGs synthesis). In summary, our data show that the levels of testosterone prenatally injected modulate the uterine environment and that this, in turn, would be responsible for the endocrine and metabolic abnormalities and the phenotype of PCOS during the adult life

Indirect analysis of a moving grate furnace: Flue gas moisture sensing and faulty condition on packed bed

The paper issues from the results of several experimental campaigns that have been performed monitoring the combustion quality on an industrial moving grate furnace, showing up the overall complexity of the regulation on a packed bed. One of most effective quantity about furnace regulation is fuel moisture level, on this purpose a simple and effective method to probe fuel moisture will be presented. This paper also explores the correlations between abnormal evaporation rates obtained with the presented moisture sensing method and abnormal pollutant emissions observed during experimental campaigns. These unexpected transients of operation marked out by abnormal pollutant emission and long recovery time are known as “bed illness” phenomena

Mimo modelling of a moving grate furnace by finite impulse response filters

Moving grate furnaces have large diffusion as CHP plants due to economical feasibility and the ability to process low grade biomass fuels. Unfortunately, packed beds combustion is an high complexity combustion phenomenon and as result these plants are strongly affected by regulation issues which almost inhibit to successfully transfer results from numerical studies. However there is considerable margin to improve performances on pollutant emissions and efficiency by utilizing advanced regulation strategies. The most advanced control strategies adopt a model- based approach to deal with intrinsic high non linearity and complexity of the physics on packed bed combustion. In this paper data obtained from several experimental campaigns have been evaluated on the purpose to obtain an effective MIMO black box modeling of different furnace processes. Data are collected via a particular closed loop swinging regulation to exploit high frequency modal response of the furnace. The model used for parametric linear MIMO analysis utilize Finite Response Filters scheme applied on direct measured quantities or soft sensed ones. The resulting transfer functions from system identification procedures allow good prediction on local furnace behaviors and these can be utilized for synthesis of advanced controllers

Generating preview instances for the face validation of entity-relationship schemata: the acyclic case

We describe a mapping of Extended Entity-Relationship schemata to Answer Set Programming that allows us to generate informative example instances of the relational database that is implied by the conceptual schema. Such instances may be submitted to people involved in the requirements phase as a glimpse of what instances are allowed by the E-R schema at hand, thus enhancing database comprehension and so-called face validation

Research facility assessment for biomass combustion in moving grate furnaces

The paper deals with the experimental activities on a biomass combustion test-bed. More in detail, experimental campaigns have been devoted to investigate the operation of a biomass moving grate furnace.A research-oriented facility based on a moving grate furnace (350kW) has been set up in order to perform experimental activities in a wide range of test configurations. The paper reports the description of the complete biomass-plant and the assessment of the system operation. As first step, the chemical and physical properties of the used wooden biomass have been preliminarily investigated. Once the biomass-fuel has been characterized, investigations have been devoted to point out the operation of the furnace. It has been operated at full load, highlighting the influence of biomass on particulate matter emission

Finding instances of deduction and abduction in clinical experimental transcripts

This article describes the design and implementation of a prototype that analyzes and classifies transcripts of interviews collected during an experiment that involved lateral-brain damage patients. The patients' utterances are classified as instances of categorization, prediction and explanation (abduction) based on surface linguistic cues. The agreement between our automatic classifier and human annotators is measured. The agreement is statistically significant, thus showing that the classification can be performed in an automatic fashion