Cytokine and Lipid Mediator Regulation of Group 2 Innate Lymphoid Cells (ILC2s) in Human Allergic Airway Disease.

The recent discovery of group 2 innate lymphoid cells (ILC2s) has caused a paradigm shift in the understanding of allergic airway disease pathogenesis. Prior to the discovery of ILC2s, Th2 cells were largely thought to be the primary source of type 2 cytokines; however, activated ILC2s have since been shown to contribute significantly, and in some cases, dominantly to type 2 cytokine production. Since the discovery of ILC2s in 2010, many mediators have been shown to regulate their effector functions. Initial studies identified the epithelial derived cytokines IL-25, IL-33, and TSLP as activators of ILC2s, and recent studies have identified many additional cytokine and lipid mediators that are involved in ILC2 regulation. ILC2s and their mediators represent novel therapeutic targets for allergic airway diseases and intensive investigation is underway to better understand ILC2 biology and upstream and downstream pathways that lead to ILC2-driven airway pathology. In this review, we will focus on the cytokine and lipid mediators that regulate ILC2s in human allergic airway disease, as well as highlight newly discovered mediators of mouse ILC2s that may eventually translate to humans

Leonardo on hydrostatic force: a research engineering approach towards the idea of hydrostatic pressure?

As evidenced by many scholars, hydraulics was one of the main interests of Leonardo da Vinci; his manuscripts are full of drawings and projects on water, accompanied by a variety of notes, subtle meditations, and some remarkable considerations. Leonardo's expertise in this field surely comes, first of all, from the well-established technical tradition of his time. But the particular approach that he often adopts to study and solve the problems encountered in his activity as an engineer sometimes led him to revise or innovate some aspects of this tradition. This approach, that today reminds us the methods of research engineering, is effectively resumed by Hunter Rouse in his volume 'Engineering Hydraulics': "Practically every problem in engineering hydraulics involves the prediction by either analytical or experimental methods of one or more characteristics of flow. There are, in brief, three different bases for such prediction. The first is that of "engineering experience" gained in the field by each individual engineer. The second is the laboratory method of studying each specific problem by means of scale models. The third is the process of theoretical analysis. The most effective solution of almost any problem will be obtained by combining the best features of all three methods of approach." Examples of this kind of method are given by Leonardo's personal experiences, laboratory studies and theoretical analyses on hydrostatics (especially on pressure and buoyancy) that were stimulated by the necessity of solving specific problems in the field of navigation or in the construction of canals, banks, reservoirs and scale

Universal resonant ultracold molecular scattering

The elastic scattering amplitudes of indistinguishable, bosonic, strongly-polar molecules possess universal properties at the coldest temperatures due to wave propagation in the long-range dipole-dipole field. Universal scattering cross sections and anisotropic threshold angular distributions, independent of molecular species, result from careful tuning of the dipole moment with an applied electric field. Three distinct families of threshold resonances also occur for specific field strengths, and can be both qualitatively and quantitatively predicted using elementary adiabatic and semi-classical techniques. The temperatures and densities of heteronuclear molecular gases required to observe these univeral characteristics are predicted. PACS numbers: 34.50.Cx, 31.15.ap, 33.15.-e, 34.20.-bComment: 4 pages, 5 figure

The dependence of the molecular first hyperpolarizabilities of merocyanines on ground-state polarization and length

We report here the dipole moment (µ) and first hyperpolarizability (β) determined by electric field-induced second harmonic generation, for several merocyanine dyes containing an 1,3,3-trimethylindoline heterocycle as a ‘donor’ in which the ‘acceptor’ end of the molecule and the polyene bridge length was systematically varied; dyes with hexamethine bridges gave positive β, while that with a dimethine bridge gave a negative β value

The variable phase method used to calculate and correct scattering lengths

It is shown that the scattering length can be obtained by solving a Riccati equation derived from variable phase theory. Two methods of solving it are presented. The equation is used to predict how long-range interactions influence the scattering length, and upper and lower bounds on the scattering length are determined. The predictions are compared with others and it is shown how they may be obtained from secular perturbation theory.Comment: 7 pages including 3 figure

Medea nunc sum: Staging, Ekphrasis, and Identity in Seneca's Medea

This thesis analyzes the use of vivid descriptive language in Seneca’s tragedy Medea, with an emphasis on the fourth act of the play. I argue that the nurse’s speech in this act functions as an ekphrasis, a term commonly used to refer to the verbal description of visual art. The nurse’s ekphrasis emphasizes Medea’s magical prowess and her alarming refusal to conform to social norms, and the following speech delivered by Medea herself responds to the nurse’s ekphrasis and overturns its stylistic conventions. This “ekphrastic collapse,” I argue, occurs when Medea’s magical performance—the visual art component of the ekphrasis—coexists onstage with her own verbal description of her work. In order to fully examine the “ekphrastic collapse” of Medea’s monologue, I engage with the current scholarly debate over the intended medium of Senecan tragedy, and ultimately argue that Seneca’s plays were intended for the stage, not for a reading or recitation. It is on the stage that Medea must kill her children in order for the fifth act of Seneca’s play to maintain the dramatic momentum of the first four acts, and it is on the stage that Medea delivers the ekphrasis of her own performative ritual act. The collapse of ekphrastic convention that results from Medea’s assumption of the dual roles of art object and narrator allows her to realize her own mythical and dramatic potential as a violator of societal and literary boundaries

FreeREA: Training-Free Evolution-based Architecture Search

In the last decade, most research in Machine Learning contributed to the improvement of existing models, with the aim of increasing the performance of neural networks for the solution of a variety of different tasks. However, such advancements often come at the cost of an increase of model memory and computational requirements. This represents a significant limitation for the deployability of research output in realistic settings, where the cost, the energy consumption, and the complexity of the framework play a crucial role. To solve this issue, the designer should search for models that maximise the performance while limiting its footprint. Typical approaches to reach this goal rely either on manual procedures, which cannot guarantee the optimality of the final design, or upon Neural Architecture Search algorithms to automatise the process, at the expenses of extremely high computational time. This paper provides a solution for the fast identification of a neural network that maximises the model accuracy while preserving size and computational constraints typical of tiny devices. Our approach, named FreeREA, is a custom cell-based evolution NAS algorithm that exploits an optimised combination of training-free metrics to rank architectures during the search, thus without need of model training. Our experiments, carried out on the common benchmarks NAS-Bench-101 and NATS-Bench, demonstrate that i) FreeREA is the first method able to provide very accurate models in minutes of search time; ii) it outperforms State of the Art training-based and training-free techniques in all the datasets and benchmarks considered, and iii) it can easily generalise to constrained scenarios, representing a competitive solution for fast Neural Architecture Search in generic constrained applications.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figurre