To what extent are consumers' perception and acceptance of alternative meat production systems affected by information? The case of cultured meat

Meat grown in labs, also known as cultured meat, is currently under development and will likely soon be available on supermarket shelves. Such new meat-based products may tackle some of the most controversial societal concerns related to the industry, in particular animal wellbeing and environmental impacts, with further potential improvements concerning food security. However, due to its high degree of novelty, it remains unclear how consumers view this type of food product, particularly in terms of beliefs regarding its intrinsic attributes such as safety, nutrients and flavor characterization, and its positive externalities concerning the environment, animal welfare, and food security. The present study aims at unveiling the perception, acceptance, and willingness to try, buy, and pay a premium price for cultured meat in the Italian context, deconvoluting the effect of providing positive information to consumers. Such investigation offers new insights for the development of targeted marketing strategies by deepening the understanding of consumers' perception of this lab-grown food product. Indeed, the study reveals that positive information affects the consumers' perception towards safety and nutritional characteristics of cultured meat and the willingness to pay a premium price for this new food product accordingly. The global meat production system is currently under pressure, particularly for its environmental and animal wellbeing impacts, as well as for the increasing protein demand worldwide. In this regard, cultured meat is currently a hot topic in the industrial, political, and societal arenas, revealing itself as the potential relief for the issues above. However, its high degree of novelty may hamper the extent of consumers' acceptance. This research assesses for which beliefs concerning intrinsic attributes and positive externalities, the provision of information is a sufficient tool for affecting the perception and acceptance of cultured meat on a panel of Italian consumers. Changes in perception and willingness to try, buy, and pay are assessed by measuring the variation before and after the provision of positive information related to the product. The results show that perception is affected by positive information concerning safety and nutritional characteristics, whereas the opposite occurs regarding the product flavor. Furthermore, findings reveal that, while the willingness to buy increases after providing positive information, the willingness to try does not. Finally, information on intrinsic attributes and positive externalities of the cultured meat would have to be combined with different approaches for further enhancement of consumers' perception and acceptance

Alternative agri‐food systems under a market agencements approach: The case of multifunctional farming activity in a peri‐urban area

(1) Background: A large body of literature is available on the environmental, social, and economic sustainability of alternative food systems, but not much of it is devoted to the dynamics underlying their design and implementation, more specifically the processes that make an alternative food system successful or not in terms of its sustainability aims. This gap seems to be particularly critical in studies concerning alternative food systems in urban and peri‐urban agriculture (UPA). This paper explores how the design and implementation of multifunctional farming activity in a peri‐urban area surrounding the city of Reggio Emilia in the Emilia‐Romagna region of Italy impact the achievement of its sustainability aims. (2) Methods: The environmental, social, and economic components of this project are explored in light of the sociology of market agencements. This method brings up the motivations of the human entities involved in the project, the role played by nonhuman entities, and the technical devices used for the fulfillment of the project’s aims. (3) Results: The alternative food system under study lacked a robust design phase and a shared definition of the project aims among all the stakeholders involved. This ended in a substantial mismatch between project aims and consumer expectations. (4) Conclusions: When a comprehensive design stage is neglected, the threefold aim concerning sustainability might not be achievable. In particular, the design of alternative food systems must take into account the social environment where it is intended to be put in place, especially in UPA, where consumers often live in suburban neighborhoods wherein the sense of community is not strong, thus preventing them from getting involved in a community‐based project. In such cases, hybridization can play a role in the sustainability of alternative food networks, provided that some trade‐offs occur among the different components of sustainability—some components of sustainability will be fully achieved, while others will not

Glutamate induces autophagy via the two-pore channels in neural cells

NAADP (nicotinic acid adenine dinucleotide phosphate) has been proposed as a second messenger for glutamate in neuronal and glial cells via the activation of the lysosomal Ca2+ channels TPC1 and TPC2. However, the activities of glutamate that are mediated by NAADP remain unclear. In this study, we evaluated the effect of glutamate on autophagy in astrocytes at physiological, non-toxic concentration. We found that glutamate induces autophagy at similar extent as NAADP. By contrast, the NAADP antagonist NED-19 or SiRNA-mediated inhibition of TPC1/2 decreases autophagy induced by glutamate, confirming a role for NAADP in this pathway. The involvement of TPC1/2 in glutamate-induced autophagy was also confirmed in SHSY5Y neuroblastoma cells. Finally, we show that glutamate leads to a NAADP-dependent activation of AMPK, which is required for autophagy induction, while mTOR activity is not affected by this treatment. Taken together, our results indicate that glutamate stimulates autophagy via NAADP/TPC/AMPK axis, providing new insights of how Ca2+ signalling glutamate-mediated can control the cell metabolism in the central nervous system

Adverse reactions to oncologic drugs: spontaneous reporting and signal detection

Oncology is one of the areas of medicine with the most active research being conducted on new drugs. New pharmacological entities frequently enter the clinical arena, and therefore, the safety profile of anticancer products deserves continuous monitoring. However, only very severe and (unusual) suspected adverse drug reactions (ADRs) are usually reported, since cancer patients develop ADRs very frequently and some practical selectivity must be used. Notably, a recent study was able to identify 76 serious ADRs reported in updated drug labels of oncologic drugs and 50% of them (n = 38) were potentially fatal. Of these, 49 and 58%, respectively, were not described in initial drug labels. The aims of this article are to provide an overview about spontaneous reporting of ADRs of oncologic drugs and to discuss the available methods to analyze the safety of anticancer drugs using databases of spontaneous ADR reporting

Mapping InSAR deformation of low and moderate earthquakes

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High Levels of β-Amyloid, Tau, and Phospho-Tau in Red Blood Cells as Biomarkers of Neuropathology in Senescence-Accelerated Mouse

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is the most common Neurodegenerative Disease (ND), primarily characterised by neuroinflammation, neuronal plaques of β-amyloid (Aβ), and neurofibrillary tangles of hyperphosphorylated tau. α-Synuclein (α-syn) and its heteroaggregates with Aβ and tau have been recently included among the neuropathological elements of NDs. These pathological traits are not restricted to the brain, but they reach peripheral fluids as well. In this sense, Red Blood Cells (RBCs) are emerging as a good model to investigate the biochemical alterations of aging and NDs. Herein, the levels of homo- and heteroaggregates of ND-related proteins were analysed at different stages of disease progression. In particular, a validated animal model of AD, the SAMP8 (Senescence-Accelerated Mouse-Prone) and its control strain SAMR1 (Senescence-Accelerated Mouse-Resistant) were used in parallel experiments. The levels of the aforementioned proteins and of the inflammatory marker interleukin-1β (IL-1β) were examined in both brain and RBCs of SAMP8 and SAMR1 at 6 and 8 months. Brain Aβ, tau, and phospho-tau (p-tau) were higher in SAMP8 mice than in control mice and increased with AD progression. Similar accumulation kinetics were found in RBCs, even if slower. By contrast, α-syn and its heterocomplexes (α-syn-Aβ and α-syn-tau) displayed different accumulation kinetics between brain tissue and RBCs. Both brain and peripheral IL-1β levels were higher in SAMP8 mice, but increased sooner in RBCs, suggesting that inflammation might initiate at a peripheral level before affecting the brain. In conclusion, these results confirm RBCs as a valuable model for monitoring neurodegeneration, suggesting peripheral Aβ, tau, and p-tau as potential early biomarkers of AD

Efficient Battery Usage in Wireless-Powered Cell-Free Systems with Self-Energy Recycling

This paper investigates wireless-powered cell-free systems, in which the users send their uplink data signal while simultaneously harvesting energy from network nodes and user terminals - including the transmitting user terminal itself - by performing self-energy recycling. In this rather general setting, a closed-form lower bound of the amount of harvested energy and the achieved signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio expressions are derived. Then, to improve the energy efficiency, we formulate the problem of minimizing the users' battery energy usage while satisfying minimum data rate requirements. Due to the non-convexity of the problem, a novel alternating optimization algorithm is proposed, and its proof of convergence is provided. Finally, numerical results show that the proposed method is more efficient than a state-of-art algorithm in terms of battery energy usage and outage rate.Comment: Accepted as a correspondance at IEEE TV

Mixed Coherent and Non-Coherent Transmission for Multi-CPU Cell-Free Systems

Existing works on cell-free systems consider either coherent or non-coherent downlink data transmission and a network deployment with a single central processing unit (CPU). While it is known that coherent transmission outperforms noncoherent transmission when assuming unlimited fronthaul links, the former requires a perfect timing synchronization, which is practically not viable over a large network. Furthermore, relying on a single CPU for geographically large cell-free networks is not scalable. Thus, to realize the expected gains of cellfree systems in practice, alternative transmission strategies for realistic multi-CPU cell-free systems are required. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel downlink data transmission scheme that combines and generalizes the existing coherent and non-coherent transmissions. The proposed transmission scheme, named mixed transmission, works based on the realistic assumption that only the access points (APs) controlled by a same CPU are synchronized, and thus transmit in a coherent fashion, while APs from different CPUs require no synchronism and transmit in a non-coherent manner. We also propose extensions of existing clustering algorithms for multi-CPU cell-free systems with mixed transmission. Simulation results show that the combination of the proposed clustering algorithms with mixed transmission have the potential to perform close to the ideal coherent transmission.Comment: Submitted for possible publication in IEEE conferenc

Dietary Supplement, Containing the Dry Extract of Curcumin, Emblica and Cassia, Counteracts Intestinal Inflammation and Enteric Dysmotility Associated with Obesity

Intestinal epithelial barrier (IEB) impairment and enteric inflammation are involved in the onset of obesity and gut-related dysmotility. Dietary supplementation with natural plant extracts represents a useful strategy for the management of body weight gain and systemic inflammation associated with obesity. Here, we evaluate the efficacy of a food supplement containing the dry extract of Curcumin, Emblica and Cassia in counteracting enteric inflammation and motor abnormalities in a mouse model of obesity, induced by a high-fat diet (HFD). Male C57BL/6 mice, fed with standard diet (SD) or HFD, were treated with a natural mixture (Curcumin, Emblica and Cassia). After 8 weeks, body weight, BMI, liver and spleen weight, along with metabolic parameters and colonic motor activity were evaluated. Additionally, plasma LBP, fecal calprotectin, colonic levels of MPO and IL-1β, as well as the expression of occludin, TLR-4, MYD88 and NF-κB were investigated. Plant-based food supplement administration (1) counteracted the increase in body weight, BMI and metabolic parameters, along with a reduction in spleen and liver weight; (2) showed strengthening effects on the IEB integrity; and (3) reduced enteric inflammation and oxidative stress, as well as ameliorated the colonic contractile dysfunctions. Natural mixture administration reduced intestinal inflammation and counteracted the intestinal motor dysfunction associated with obesity