A preliminary numerical investigation of airborne droplet dispersion in aircraft cabins

The emergence of the novel coronavirus has led to a global pandemic which has led to the airline industry facing severe losses. For air travel to recover, airlines need to ensure safe air travel. In this paper, the authors have modelled droplet dispersion after a single breath from an index patient. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations are conducted using the k-w SST turbulence model in ANSYS Fluent. The authors have taken into consideration several parameters such as the size of the mouth opening, the velocity of the cabin air as well as the number of droplets being exhaled by the index patient to ensure a realistic simulation. Preliminary results indicate that after a duration of 20s, droplets from the index patient disperse within a 10 m2 cabin area. About 75% of the droplets are found the disperse for up to 2m axially behind the index patient. This could possess an enhanced risk to passengers sitting behind the index patient. Ultimately, this paper provides an insight into the potential of CFD to visualise droplet dispersal and give impetus to ensuring necessary mitigating measures can be taken to reduce the risk of infection through droplet dispersal

Analysing occupational safety culture through mass media monitoring

In the last years, a group of researchers within the National Institute for Insurance against Accidents at Work (INAIL) has launched a pilot project about mass media monitoring in order to find out how the press deal with the culture of safety and health at work. To monitor mass media, the Institute has created a relational database of news concerning occupational injuries and diseases, that was filled with information obtained from the newspaper articles about work-related accidents and incidents, including the text itself of the articles. In keeping with that, the ultimate objective is to identify the major lines for awareness-raising actions on safety and health at work. In a first phase of this project, 1,858 news articles regarding 580 different accidents were collected; for each injury, not only the news texts but also several variables were identified. Our hypothesis is that, for different kind of accidents, a different language is used by journalists to narrate the events. To verify it, a text clustering procedure is implemented on the articles, together with a Lexical Correspondence Analysis; our purpose is to find language distinctions connected to groups of similar injuries. The identification of various ways in reporting the events, in fact, could provide new elements to describe safety knowledge, also establishing collaborations with journalists in order to enhance the communication and raise people attention toward workers' safety

search for cpt and lorentz symmetry violation in neutral kaons at kloe kloe 2

The KLOE experiment at the DAΦNE φ -factory of the INFN Frascati Laboratory collected data corresponding to 2.5 fb−1 of integrated luminosity. Neutral kaon pairs produced in φ decays offers a unique possibility to perform tests of fundamental discrete symmetries. In this contribution the entanglement of the two kaons is exploited to search for possible violation of CPT symmetry and Lorentz invariance in the context of the Standard-Model Extension (SME) framework. A new approach to the analysis of φ → KSKL → π+π−,π+π− events has been adopted allowing us to independently measure all four CPT violating parameters ∆aμ appearing for neutral kaons in the SME. The final KLOE results on ∆aμ are presented: ∆a0 = (−6.0± 7.7stat ± 3.1syst)× 10−18 GeV ∆aX = ( 0.9± 1.5stat ± 0.6syst)× 10−18 GeV ∆aY = (−2.0± 1.5stat ± 0.5syst)× 10−18 GeV ∆aZ = ( 3.1± 1.7stat ± 0.5syst)× 10−18 GeV We also shortly discuss the perspectives for a new measurement using the KLOE-2 apparatus equipped with a new inner tracker

Soil structure and bypass flwo processes in a Vertsol under sprinkler and drip irrigation.

In this paper morphological and physical characteristics, as well as flow behaviour of a Mediterranean Vertisol under the influence of two different irrigation systems currently used for irrigation, i.e. drip and sprinkler systems, were compared. No differences in soil texture, compaction and in potential cracking were found on cores from the two fields. However, field application of methylene blue showed the presence of continuous macropores, penetrating up to depths of 20-25 cm from the soil surface, in the field where the drip system was in use (field 1). This was considered to be the pre-existing soil structure. Instead, macropores terminating at a depth ranging between 5 and 10 cm from the soil surface were observed in the sprinkler irrigated field (field 2). The same difference in terms of macropores' continuity was also observed on soil cores sampled from the two irrigated fields. The higher raindrop impact and the non-point water application involved in the sprinkler irrigation system were assumed to have determined, during several years, the different depth of penetration of the macropores in the two fields. A different hydraulic behaviour was evidenced by laboratory measurement of bypass flow on soil cores taken from the two fields. Specifically, higher values of the saturated hydraulic conductivity were found in the cores from the drip irrigated field compared to those sampled in the sprinkler field. In addition no bypass flow was measured in the columns under the sprinkler field, while high rates and amounts of bypass flow were obtained in the cores taken from the drip irrigated field. The different hydraulic behaviour observed in the cores taken from the drip and from the sprinkler irrigated field was in agreement with the difference in terms of macropores' continuity between the two fields. Being bypass flow a mechanism inducing leaching of solutes, results of this investigation suggest that irrigation systems affecting soil structure, and altering macropores' continuity, should be avoided in clay soils. (c) 2006 Published by Elsevier B.

A preliminary numerical investigation of airborne droplet dispersion in aircraft cabins

The emergence of the novel coronavirus has led to a global pandemic which has led to the airline industry facing severe losses. For air travel to recover, airlines need to ensure safe air travel. In this paper, the authors have modelled droplet dispersion after a single breath from an index patient. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations are conducted using the k-w SST turbulence model in ANSYS Fluent. The authors have taken into consideration several parameters such as the size of the mouth opening, the velocity of the cabin air as well as the number of droplets being exhaled by the index patient to ensure a realistic simulation. Preliminary results indicate that after a duration of 20s, droplets from the index patient disperse within a 10 m2 cabin area. About 75% of the droplets are found the disperse for up to 2m axially behind the index patient. This could possess an enhanced risk to passengers sitting behind the index patient. Ultimately, this paper provides an insight into the potential of CFD to visualise droplet dispersal and give impetus to ensuring necessary mitigating measures can be taken to reduce the risk of infection through droplet dispersal

One special question to start with: can HIF/NFkB be a target in inflammation?

Hypoxia and Inflammation are strictly interconnected with important consequences at clinical and therapeutic level. While cell and tissue damage due to acute hypoxia mostly leads to cell necrosis, in chronic hypoxia, cells that are located closer to vessels are able to survive adapting their phenotype through the expression of a number of genes, including proinflammatory receptors for alarmins. These receptors are activated by alarmins released by necrotic cells and generate signals for master transcription factors such as NFkB, AP1, etc. which control hundreds of genes for innate immunity and damage repair. Clinical consequences of chronic inflammatory reparative response activation include cell and tissue remodeling, damage in the primary site and, the systemic involvement of distant organs and tissues. Thus every time a tissue environment becomes stably hypoxic, inflammation can be activated followed by chronic damage and cell death or repair with vessel proliferation and fibrosis. This pathway can occur in cancer, myocardial infarction and stroke, diabetes, obesity, neurodegenerative diseases, chronic and autoimmune diseases and age-related diseases. Interestingly, proinflammatory gene expression can be observed earlier in hypoxic tissue cells and, in addition, in activated resident or recruited leukocytes. Herewith, the reciprocal relationships between hypoxia and inflammation will be shortly reviewed to underline the possible therapeutic targets to control hypoxia-related inflammation in a number of epidemiologically important human diseases and conditions