Endocrine disruptors and obesity

The purpose of this review is to summarise current evidence that some environmental chemicals may be able to interfere in endocrine regulation of energy metabolism and adipose tissue structure. Recent findings demonstrate that such endocrine disrupting chemicals, termed “obesogens”, can promote adipogenesis and cause weight gain. This includes compounds to which the human population is exposed in daily life through their use in pesticides/herbicides, industrial and household products, plastics, detergents, flame retardants and ingredients in personal care products. Animal models and epidemiological studies have shown that an especially sensitive time for exposure is in utero or the neonatal period. In summarising the actions of obesogens, it is noteworthy that as their structures are mainly lipophilic, their ability to increase fat deposition has the added consequence of increasing the capacity for their own retention. This has the potential for a vicious spiral not only of increasing obesity but also increasing retention of other lipophilic pollutant chemicals with an even broader range of adverse actions. This might offer an explanation as to why obesity is an underlying risk factor for so many diseases including cancer

Long-lasting sequences of BGP updates

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the protocol that makes the various networks composing the Internet communicate to each other. Routers speaking BGP exchange updates to keep the routing up-to-date and allow such communication. This usually is done to reflect changes in the routing configurations or as a consequence of link failures. In the Internet as a whole it is normal that BGP updates are continuously exchanged, but for any specific IP prefix, these updates are supposed to be concentrated in a short time interval that is needed to react to a network change. On the contrary, in this paper we show that there are many IP prefixes involved in quite long sequences consisting of a large number of BGP updates. Namely, examining ∼30 billion updates collected by 172 observation points distributed worldwide, we estimate that almost 30% of them belong to sequences lasting more than one week. Such sequences involve 222285 distinct IP prefixes, approximately one fourth of the number of announced prefixes. We detect such sequences using a method based on the Discrete Wavelet Transform. We publish an online tool for the exploration and visualization of such sequences, which is open to the scientific community for further research. We group together sequences that exhibit common behaviours. For this purpose, we devise a clusterization algorithm able to group the sequences based on their similarity in time. We highlight four categories of clusters, which are attributable to different types of Internet events. Our online tool allows also to explore and to visualize the computed clusters

Blockchain-Based Tracking of the Supply Chain of the Italian Craft Beer Sector

In the Italian craft beer market, many small breweries and pubs propose a large number of products to beerlovers. In this highly fragmented market, it is hard for the beerlovers to assess the quality of a beer and it is hard for breweries and pubs to inform the beerlover of the quality of their offer. Supply chain tracking is an interesting tool to improve transparency of food markets. However, standard tracking approaches are challenging in highly fragmented contexts for several reasons. In this paper, we show how it is possible to realize a blockchain-based supply chain tracking tailored for the highly fragmented sector of the Italian craft beer. We collaborated with one of the players of that market to analyze the specific problems of that context and we report the results of this analysis. We show a design that addresses those problems and might be generalized to support tracking in other highly fragmented sectors. We estimate costs and that turn out to be affordable for that sector