Soft self-assembled nanoparticles with temperature-dependent properties

The fabrication of versatile building blocks that are reliably self-assemble into desired ordered and disordered phases is amongst the hottest topics in contemporary material science. To this end, microscopic units of varying complexity, aimed at assembling the target phases, have been thought, designed, investigated and built. Such a path usually requires laborious fabrication techniques, especially when a specific funcionalisation of the building blocks is required. Telechelic star polymers, i.e., star polymers made of a number $f$ of di-block copolymers consisting of solvophobic and solvophilic monomers grafted on a central anchoring point, spontaneously self-assemble into soft patchy particles featuring attractive spots (patches) on the surface. Here we show that the tunability of such a system can be widely extended by controlling the physical and chemical parameters of the solution. Indeed, at fixed external conditions the self-assembly behaviour depends only on the number of arms and/or on the ratio of solvophobic to solvophilic monomers. However, changes in temperature and/or solvent quality makes it possible to reliably change the number and size of the attractive patches. This allows to steer the mesoscopic self-assembly behaviour without modifying the microscopic constituents. Interestingly, we also demonstrate that diverse combinations of the parameters can generate stars with the same number of patches but different radial and angular stiffness. This mechanism could provide a neat way of further fine-tuning the elastic properties of the supramolecular network without changing its topology.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures. Submitted to Nanoscal

AutoDIAL: Automatic DomaIn Alignment Layers

Classifiers trained on given databases perform poorly when tested on data acquired in different settings. This is explained in domain adaptation through a shift among distributions of the source and target domains. Attempts to align them have traditionally resulted in works reducing the domain shift by introducing appropriate loss terms, measuring the discrepancies between source and target distributions, in the objective function. Here we take a different route, proposing to align the learned representations by embedding in any given network specific Domain Alignment Layers, designed to match the source and target feature distributions to a reference one. Opposite to previous works which define a priori in which layers adaptation should be performed, our method is able to automatically learn the degree of feature alignment required at different levels of the deep network. Thorough experiments on different public benchmarks, in the unsupervised setting, confirm the power of our approach.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1702.06332 added supplementary materia

Abatacept to treat chronic intestinal pseudo-obstruction in five systemic sclerosis patients with a description of the index case:

Chronic intestinal pseudo-obstruction is a severe complication of systemic sclerosis. Inflammatory neuropathy and immunological alterations have a prominent role in the development of systemic scle..

Limiting the valence: advancements and new perspectives on patchy colloids, soft functionalized nanoparticles and biomolecules

Limited bonding valence, usually accompanied by well-defined directional interactions and selective bonding mechanisms, is nowadays considered among the key ingredients to create complex structures with tailored properties: even though isotropically interacting units already guarantee access to a vast range of functional materials, anisotropic interactions can provide extra instructions to steer the assembly of specific architectures. The anisotropy of effective interactions gives rise to a wealth of self-assembled structures both in the realm of suitably synthesized nano- and micro-sized building blocks and in nature, where the isotropy of interactions is often a zero-th order description of the complicated reality. In this review, we span a vast range of systems characterized by limited bonding valence, from patchy colloids of new generation to polymer-based functionalized nanoparticles, DNA-based systems and proteins, and describe how the interaction patterns of the single building blocks can be designed to tailor the properties of the target final structures

Childhood obesity and environmental pollutants: a dual relationship

The rise in obesity rates is an alarming global health concern. Despite obesity is mainly due to an unbalanced energy intake and expenditure, several recent studies suggest that it could be a consequence of exposure during critical developmental windows to environmental chemicals disrupting endocrine functions. This suggests that a shift is occurring in the human body pathways used to integrate changing nutritional and environmental variables and to maintain metabolic balance and body weight. This review highlights the role of pesticides, in particular endocrine disrupter ones, on obesity pathogenesis in childhood and summarizes the current under-standing of the major environmental influences on pediatric obesity. (www.actabiomedica.it)

A Numerical Modelling Approach for Time-Dependent Deformation of Hot Forming Tools under the Creep-Fatigue Regime

The present study was aimed at predicting the time-dependent deformation of tools used in hot forming applications subjected to the creep-fatigue regime. An excessive accumulated plastic deformation is configured as one of the three main causes of premature failure of tools in these critical applications and it is accumulated cycle by cycle without evident marks leading to noncompliant products. With the aim of predicting this accumulated deformation, a novel procedure was developed, presented, and applied to the extrusion process as an example. A time-hardening primary creep law was used and novel regression equations for the law's coefficients were developed to account not only for the induced stress-temperature state but also for the dwell-time value, which is determined by the selected set of process parameters and die design. The procedure was validated against experimental data both on a small-scale extrusion die at different stress, temperature, load states, and for different geometries and on an industrial extrusion die which was discarded due to the excessive plastic deformation after 64 cycles. A numerical-experimental good agreement was achieved

Experimental assessment of hot-work tool steels performances under the creep-fatigue regime

In the present research an innovative testing method, specifially developed to characterize the tool steels under creep-fatigue conditions, was carried out an a TQ1 hot-work tool steel. The experimental campaign consisted of different testing conditions and part of the specimens were nitrided to account for the specific surface state of the tools. Tests were performed on a 10tons MTS fatigue machine equipped with a heating furnace. A creep-fatigue loading type was applied to the specimens, i.e. a cyclic load with a dwell-time, in order to properly reproduce the conditions acting on a hot forging or extrusion tool. Then, under a constant temperature of 520°C, the effects of four different load levels and 2 different values of dwell-times were evaluated. In addition, selected test conditions were replicated with the specimens not nitrided with the aim to evalute and quantify the influence of the superficial treatment. Final results were presented in terms of fatigue curves of the TQ1 and compared to the performances of the H11 tool steel tested in a previous research by the same authors