Affective Temperaments and Somatization Among Unipolar Depression Patients and Healthy Controls

Introduction Literature describes important comorbidity rates between somatization and mood disorders. Furthermore, there are data suggesting an association between affective temperament and somatization traits in healthy subjects. Objective In the present observational study, we investigated affective temperaments and somatization aspects in clinical and healthy samples. Aim The study focused on differences between unipolar depressive inpatients (DEP) and controls (C). Method We administered to 20 DEP and 20 C following questionnaires: Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview (MINI), 17-item Self Rating Depression Scale (SDS), Hypomania check list 32(HCL-32), Self Rating Anxiety Scale (SAS), DCPR diagnostic criteria for psychosomatic research, Brief TEMPS-A, Modified Somatic Perception Questionnaire (MSPQ), Somatosensory Amplification Scale-SSAS. DEP and C were matched for age, sex and marital status. Result About temperaments, ANOVA showed that DEP were more cyclothymic (p Conclusion Our data suggest that DEP present an important affective temperamental dysregulation. Relative to somatization aspects, DEP show a greater vulnerability than C

Unraveling the Electrochemical Mechanism in Tin Oxide/MXene Nanocomposites as Highly Reversible Negative Electrodes for Lithium‐Ion Batteries

Lithium-ion batteries are constantly developing as the demands for power and energy storage increase. One promising approach to designing high-performance lithium-ion batteries is using conversion/alloying materials, such as SnO$_{2}$. This class of materials does, in fact, present excellent performance and ease of preparation; however, it suffers from mechanical instabilities during cycling that impair its use. One way to overcome these problems is to prepare composites with bi-dimensional materials that stabilize them. Thus, over the past 10 years, two-dimensional materials with excellent transport properties (graphene, MXenes) have been developed that can be used synergistically with conversion materials to exploit both advantages. In this work, a 50/50 (by mass) SnO$_{2}$/Ti$_{3}$C$_{2}$T$_{z}$ nanocomposite is prepared and optimized as a negative electrode for lithium-ion batteries. The nanocomposite delivers over 500 mAh g$^{–1}$ for 700 cycles at 0.1 A g$^{–1}$ and demonstrates excellent rate capability, with 340 mAh g$^{–1}$ at 8 A g$^{–1}$. These results are due to the synergistic behavior of the two components of the nanocomposite, as demonstrated by ex situ chemical, structural, and morphological analyses. This knowledge allows, for the first time, to formulate a reaction mechanism with lithium-ions that provides partial reversibility of the conversion reaction with the formation of SnO

An integrated cryogenic optical modulator

Integrated electrical and photonic circuits (PIC) operating at cryogenic temperatures are fundamental building blocks required to achieve scalable quantum computing, and cryogenic computing technologies. Optical interconnects offer better performance and thermal insulation than electrical wires and are imperative for true quantum communication. Silicon PICs have matured for room temperature applications but their cryogenic performance is limited by the absence of efficient low temperature electro-optic (EO) modulation. While detectors and lasers perform better at low temperature, cryogenic optical switching remains an unsolved challenge. Here we demonstrate EO switching and modulation from room temperature down to 4 K by using the Pockels effect in integrated barium titanate (BaTiO3)-based devices. We report the nonlinear optical (NLO) properties of BaTiO3 in a temperature range which has previously not been explored, showing an effective Pockels coefficient of 200 pm/V at 4 K. We demonstrate the largest EO bandwidth (30 GHz) of any cryogenic switch to date, ultra-low-power tuning which is 10^9 times more efficient than thermal tuning, and high-speed data modulation at 20 Gbps. Our results demonstrate a missing component for cryogenic PICs. It removes major roadblocks for the realisation of novel cryogenic-compatible systems in the field of quantum computing and supercomputing, and for interfacing those systems with the real world at room-temperature

QRouteMe: A Multichannel Information System to Ensure Rich User-Experience in Exhibits and Museums

In this article the QRouteMe system is presented. QRouteMe is a multichannel information system built to ensure rich user experiences in exhibits and museums. The system starts from basic information about a particular exhibit or museum while delivering a wide user experience based on different distribution channels. The organization of the systems’ components allow to build different solutions that can be simultaneously delivered on different media. A wide range of media from touch-screen installations to portable devices like smartphones have been used. The used devices can communicate each others to increase the usability and the user experience for the visitors. Another important feature of the system is the definition of an inexpensive auto-localization system based on fiduciary marks distributed all around the building. In this article the system is presented from an architectural and functional point of view. A case study and analysis of experimental results are also provided in a real environment where the system was deployed

Mitochondrial myopathy and comorbid major depressive disorder. effectiveness of dTMS on gait and mood symptoms

Background: Mitochondrial myopathies (MMs) often present with leukoencephalopathy and psychiatric symptoms, which do not respond to or worsen with psychiatric drugs. Case report: A 67-year-old woman with a 10-year history of probable chronic progressive external ophthalmoplegia, an MM, had drug-resistant, anxious-depressive symptoms. Since she had never had seizures, we proposed 20 sessions of deep transcranial magnetic stimulation (dTMS) for her depression. Surprisingly, besides the expected improvement of depression, we observed marked improvement of movement disorder that lasted as long as the patient was undergoing dTMS. She also improved her performance on neuropsychological tests of executive function and cognitive speed. Depressive symptom improvement was persistent, while anxiety symptoms recurred after the end of the sessions. Conclusions: dTMSmay be an alternative antidepressant strategy in patients withMMs, provided that they are free from seizures. The mechanism of improvement of motor disturbance may relate to dorsolateral prefrontal cortex stimulation and improved executive function and needs further investigation

Harmonic (Quantum) Neural Networks

Harmonic functions are abundant in nature, appearing in limiting cases of Maxwell's, Navier-Stokes equations, the heat and the wave equation. Consequently, there are many applications of harmonic functions from industrial process optimisation to robotic path planning and the calculation of first exit times of random walks. Despite their ubiquity and relevance, there have been few attempts to incorporate inductive biases towards harmonic functions in machine learning contexts. In this work, we demonstrate effective means of representing harmonic functions in neural networks and extend such results also to quantum neural networks to demonstrate the generality of our approach. We benchmark our approaches against (quantum) physics-informed neural networks, where we show favourable performance.Comment: 12 pages (main), 7 pages (supplementary), 7 figure

Long lasting octreotide LAR therapy in non functioning pancreatic neuroendocrine carcinoma

Non functioning endocrine pancreatic tumors (NF-PETs) have absent or low hormone secretion without symptoms and constitue ~60% of PETs. At diagnosis more than 50% of patients have liver metastases and almost 40% are not candidates for radical surgery because of either locally advanced disease or unresectable metastases. We described the case of a 47-year-old woman with a pancreatic carcinoma with secondarism in the liver not suitable for radical surgery. Histological test of liver metastases showed positivity for endocrine well-differentiated non functioning carcinoma expressing receptors for somatostatin with very low proliferation index (Ki67 < 2%). After this diagnosis she started a specific treatment with octreotide analogues which achieved durable stabilization of the disease