Good prenatal detection rate of major birth defects in HIV-infected pregnant women in Italy

What's already known about this topic? Exposure to antiretroviral treatment in pregnancy does not seem to increase the risk of birth defects, but there is no information on the rate of prenatal detection of such defects. What does this study adds? We provide for the first time, in a national case series, information about prenatal detection rate in women with HIV (51.6% for any major defect, 66.7% for chromosomal abnormalities, and 85% for severe structural defect

Assessing Aggregate Human Exposure to Toluene In Europe

20th Annual Conference of the International-Society-for-Environmental-Epidemiology, Oct 12-16, 2008, Pasadena, C

Single-carrier 400G 64QAM and 128QAM DWDM field trial transmission over metro legacy links

\u3cp\u3eWe report on the results of a field trial carried out on a Telecom Italia metro link, targeting short data center interconnect applications. The test-bed presented realistic transmission conditions, such as an average 0.3-dB/km attenuation and usage of legacy erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) only. We transmitted a net bit rate of 400 Gb/s on a single carrier with 64 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) and 128QAM over 156 km. Error-free transmission over 80 km for single carrier dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) 30 × 400 G 64QAM and 30 × 400 G 128QAM (one half of the C-band) is reported. The net spectral efficiency, for both schemes, is 7.11 b/s/Hz.\u3c/p\u3

Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy for Quantitative Analysis: Results of a Large-Scale European Multi-Instrument Interlaboratory Study

Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) is a powerful and sensitive technique for the detection of fingerprint signals of molecules and for the investigation of a series of surface chemical reactions. Many studies introduced quantitative applications of SERS in various fields, and several SERS methods have been implemented for each specific application, ranging in performance characteristics, analytes used, instruments, and analytical matrices. In general, very few methods have been validated according to international guidelines. As a consequence, the application of SERS in highly regulated environments is still considered risky, and the perception of a poorly reproducible and insufficiently robust analytical technique has persistently retarded its routine implementation. Collaborative trials are a type of interlaboratory study (ILS) frequently performed to ascertain the quality of a single analytical method. The idea of an ILS of quantification with SERS arose within the framework of Working Group 1 (WG1) of the EU COST Action BM1401 Raman4Clinics in an effort to overcome the problematic perception of quantitative SERS methods. Here, we report the first interlaboratory SERS study ever conducted, involving 15 laboratories and 44 researchers. In this study, we tried to define a methodology to assess the reproducibility and trueness of a quantitative SERS method and to compare different methods. In our opinion, this is a first important step toward a "standardization" process of SERS protocols, not proposed by a single laboratory but by a larger community

Asymptotics of the frequency of a surface wave trapped by a slightly inclined barrier in a liquid layer

A two-dimensional statement of the scattering problem for an oblique incident surface wave by an obstacle in the form of a submerged barrier is considered. If the barrier is vertical, the discrete spectrum of the problem is shown to be empty, but for an inclined barrier an eigenvalue appears below the threshold of the continuous spectrum and the corresponding trapped mode decays exponentially in the direction perpendicular to the obstacle. The behaviour of the eigenvalue is analyzed for small values of the angle of inclination from the vertica