Ozone in Lombardy: Years 1998-1999

Photochemical pollutants, especially ozone, have reached very high levels in Lombardy in recent years, with peaks of up to 150 ppb in late spring and summer. Lombardy, lying on the Po Plain, supports a large number of cities and industries and these, along with heavy traffic, produce copious amounts of primary pollutants such as nitrogen oxides and numerous volatile organic compounds. Furthermore, the peculiar orography of this region fosters the stagnation of air masses on a basin-scale and the presence of diurnal breezes towards northern areas, along with the evolution of the Mixing Layer, spread the polluted air masses over a large territory. Numerous stations in Lombardy give the concentrations of ozone and of nitrogen oxides. In this paper, ozone measurements carried out at the plain area around Milan and at pre-alpine sites in the spring and summer 1998 and 1999 will be shown and discussed, focusing on the months of May and July. The study of temporal and spatial behaviour of ozone goes hand in hand with the analysis of the Boundary Layer’s evolution. A number of radon stations were operating in Milan and in other sites in Lombardy. Measurements of atmospheric concentrations of radon yield an index of atmospheric stability, of the formation of thermal inversion, of convective turbulence, and of the movement of air masses, and hence they are very relevant to the understanding of the conditions of atmospheric pollutants

Haplotype block structure study of the CFTR gene. Most variants are associated with the M470 allele in several European populations

An average of about 1700 CFTR (cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator) alleles from normal individuals from different European populations were extensively screened for DNA sequence variation. A total of 80 variants were observed: 61 coding SNSs (results already published), 13 noncoding SNSs, three STRs, two short deletions, and one nucleotide insertion. Eight DNA variants were classified as non-CF causing due to their high frequency of occurrence. Through this survey the CFTR has become the most exhaustively studied gene for its coding sequence variability and, though to a lesser extent, for its noncoding sequence variability as well. Interestingly, most variation was associated with the M470 allele, while the V470 allele showed an 'extended haplotype homozygosity' (EHH). These findings make us suggest a role for selection acting either on the M470V itself or through an hitchhiking mechanism involving a second site. The possible ancient origin of the V allele in an 'out of Africa' time frame is discussed

Adaptabilidade e estabilidade das cultivares de trigo avaliadas no ensaio estadual do Rio Grande do Sul, no ano 2008.

Área: Melhoramento, Aptidão Industrial e Sementes

QoS-Aware Distributed Resource Allocation for Hybrid FDMA/TDMA Multicellular Networks

This paper considers a multicellular network using a hybrid FDMA/TDMA medium access with a complete reuse of the resources among neighboring cells. The resource allocation mechanism runs in a completely distributed way, tracking the traffic dynamics, adapting itself to the channel and interference condition and provid- ing QoS differentiation among different traffic classes. The proposed algorithm performs both spectral efficiency optimization, by exploiting information on channel and interference, and traffic differentiation at MAC level, by means of a weighted share of the bandwidth among different priority traffic flows. The traffic differentiation mechanism, which is the original contribution presented in this paper, works locally on each cell but exploits values of interference measurements in order to acquire information on the neighboring cells load, with the goal of implementing a collaborative algorithm. Interference measurement is the only form of communication among cells and no explicit signalling is assumed. The aim of the proposed algorithm is to provide traffic differentiation at the MAC level in a global perspective, where the share of the bandwidth inside a cell depends also on the priority of the traffic in the surrounding cells. Finally, the algorithm is tested and validate on a multicellular network with a static and a time–variant channel, thus confirming its behavior