Risk assessment in the recovery of food for social solidarity purposes: preliminary data

The most recent study, conducted by Politecnico of Milan, on food surplus management in Italy, entitled Surplus Food Management Against Food Waste, shows that in the Italian food supply chain, the food surplus is around to 5.5 million tons/year, and the amount of food wasted is around to 5.1 million tons/year. During 2015, the charitable organizations (COs) belonging to Italian Food Bank Network, active in recovering and distributing food for social solidarity\u2019s purposes, reused 381.345 tons of food from 2.292 donors. The main supplying sources of the Banco Alimentare Network are: food industries, organized large-scale retail trade and collective catering service. The aim of this study was to analyze several aspects of the food surplus recovery thanks to the collaboration with the Fondazione Banco Alimentare Onlus (FBAO) and Caritas Italiana. In particular, two main features were analyzed in the food recovery chain: i) the microbiological profiles of specific food categories recovered from catering service with the aim to evaluate their conformity in relation to food safety and process criteria. For this purpose 11 samples were analyzed in four different moments: - T0: same day of the collection; - T1: after four hours of storage at 4\ub0C; - T2: 24 hours from the collection (storage at 4\ub0C);- T3: after four days at frozen storage (-18\ub0C).For all samples several were investigated microbiological parameters: enumeration of Mesophilic aerobic bacteria (AFNOR 3M 01/1-09/89), enumeration of Enterobacteriaceae (AFNOR 3M 01/06-09/97), enumeration of E. coli (AFNOR 3M 01/08-06/01), enumeration of coagulase-positive Staphylococci AFNOR 3M 01/ 9-04/03 A), enumeration of Bacillus cereus (UNI EN ISO 7932:2005), research of Salmonella spp. (UNI EN ISO 6579 (2008b) and research of Listeria monocytogenes (AFNOR BRD 07/4-09/98 (AFNOR, 2010a)). Furthermore, ii) the volunteer\u2019s knowledge on the correct hygienic procedures during the recovery, were evaluated by the 71 questionnaires with the aim to prevent foodborne diseases. The results show that the recovery of surplus from catering service and their reuse at COs should be planned with correct procedures, and the volunteer\u2019s knowledge on the hygienic aspects appear to be a critical point. The recovery and the charitable activities require an appropriate assessment and careful risk analysis, in order to manage the complexity of no profit organization

Automatización de una red de sensores inalámbricos Zigbee y desarrollo de aplicaciones sobre entornos GNU/Linux

Una red de sensores inalámbricos (WSN) está formada por dispositivos autónomos  (comúnmente llamados nodos o smart sensors). Estos dispositivos están formados por diversos sensores, un microcontrolador (el cuál adapta la señal de los sensores e implementa el protocolo de comunicación), memorias y un transceptor RF (que permite transmitir los datos de forma inalámbrica). Por lo cuál, estos nodos  cuentan con capacidades reducidas de cómputo, sensado y comunicación inalámbrica. Pueden ser utilizados por un gran número de aplicaciones, como ser: monitoreo y control de variables ambientales, industriales, domótica, etc.

Phi Meson Production in Heavy-Ion Collisions at SIS Energies

Phi meson production in heavy-ion collisions at SIS/GSI energies ($\sim 2$ GeV/nucleon) is studied in the relativistic transport model. We include contributions from baryon-baryon, pion-baryon, and kaon-antikaon collisions. The cross sections for the first two processes are obtained in an one-boson-exchange model, while that for the last process is taken to be of Breit-Wigner form through the phi meson resonance. The dominant contribution to phi meson production in heavy ion collisions at these energies is found to come from secondary pion-nucleon collisions. Effects due to medium modifications of kaon masses are also studied and are found to reduce the phi meson yield by about a factor of two, mainly because of increased phi decay width as a result of dropping kaon-antikaon masses. In this case, the $\phi/K^-$ ratio is about 4%, which is a factor of 2-3 below preliminary experimental data from the FOPI collaboration at GSI. Including also the reduction of phi meson mass in medium increases this ratio to about 8%, which is then in reasonable agreement with the data.Comment: 46 pages, including 21 postscript figure

Totally laparoscopic, multi-stage, restorative proctocolectomy for inflammatory bowel diseases. A prospective study on safety, efficacy and long-term results

Background: Laparoscopic ileo-pouch-anal anastomosis (IPAA) has been reported as having low morbidity and several advantages. Aims: To evaluate safety, efficacy and long-term results of laparoscopic IPAA, performed in elective or emergency settings, in consecutive unselected IBD patients. Methods: All the patients received totally laparoscopic 2-stage (proctocolectomy and IPAA \u2013 stoma closure) or 3-stage (colectomy \u2013 proctectomy and IPAA \u2013 stoma closure) procedure according to their presentation. Results: From July 2007 to July 2016, 160 patients entered the study. 50.6% underwent a 3-stage procedure and 49.4% a 2-stage procedure. Mortality and morbidity were 0.6% and 24.6%. Conversion rate was 3.75%. 8.7% septic complications were associated with steroids and Infliximab treatment (p = 0.0001). 3-stage patients were younger (p = 0.0001), with shorter disease duration (p = 0.0001), minor ASA scores of 2 and 3 (p = 0.0007), lower inflammatory index and better nutritional status (p = 0.003 and 0.0001), fewer Clavien-Dindo's grade II complications (p = .0001), reduced rates of readmission and reoperation at 90 days (p = 0.03), and shorter hospitalization (p = .0001), but with similar pouch and IPAA leakage, compared to 2-stage patients. 8 years pouch failure and definitive ileostomy were 5.1% and 3.7%. Conclusion: A totally laparoscopic approach is safe and feasible, with very low mortality and morbidity rates and very low conversion rate, even in multi-stage procedures and high-risk patients

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Highly-parallelized simulation of a pixelated LArTPC on a GPU

The rapid development of general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) is allowing the implementation of highly-parallelized Monte Carlo simulation chains for particle physics experiments. This technique is particularly suitable for the simulation of a pixelated charge readout for time projection chambers, given the large number of channels that this technology employs. Here we present the first implementation of a full microphysical simulator of a liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) equipped with light readout and pixelated charge readout, developed for the DUNE Near Detector. The software is implemented with an end-to-end set of GPU-optimized algorithms. The algorithms have been written in Python and translated into CUDA kernels using Numba, a just-in-time compiler for a subset of Python and NumPy instructions. The GPU implementation achieves a speed up of four orders of magnitude compared with the equivalent CPU version. The simulation of the current induced on 10^3 pixels takes around 1 ms on the GPU, compared with approximately 10 s on the CPU. The results of the simulation are compared against data from a pixel-readout LArTPC prototype

Differential expression of the retinoblastoma gene family members pRb/p105, p107, and pRb2/p130 in lung cancer

The Rb (retinoblastoma) gene family is composed of three members: the RE gene (one of the best-studied tumor suppressor genes) and two related genes, p107 and pRb2/ p130. These three proteins share many structural and functional features and play a fundamental role in growth control. Using immunocytochemical techniques, we evaluated a variety of lung tumor specimens for the expression of this family of proteins and compared protein expression with the histological grading of the tumors and with the expression of the proliferating cell nuclear antigen. These Rb family members displayed distinctive patterns when compared and contrasted using different parameters. The highest percentage of undetectable levels in all of the specimens examined and the tightest inverse correlation (P) with the histological grading and with proliferating cell nuclear antigen expression in the most aggressive tumor types were found for pRb2/p130, which may suggest an important role for this protein in the pathogenesis and progression of lung cancer