A TDDFT study of the excited states of DNA bases and their assemblies

We present a detailed study of the optical absorption spectra of DNA bases and base pairs, carried out by means of time dependent density functional theory. The spectra for the isolated bases are compared to available theoretical and experimental data and used to assess the accuracy of the method and the quality of the exchange-correlation functional: Our approach turns out to be a reliable tool to describe the response of the nucleobases. Furthermore, we analyze in detail the impact of hydrogen bonding and $\pi$-stacking in the calculated spectra for both Watson-Crick base pairs and Watson-Crick stacked assemblies. We show that the reduction of the UV absorption intensity (hypochromicity) for light polarized along the base-pair plane depends strongly on the type of interaction. For light polarized perpendicular to the basal plane, the hypochromicity effect is reduced, but another characteristic is found, namely a blue shift of the optical spectrum of the base-assembly compared to that of the isolated bases. The use of optical tools as fingerprints for the characterization of the structure (and type of interaction) is extensively discussed.Comment: 31 pages, 8 figure

Bluetooth Mesh Technology for the Joint Monitoring of Indoor Environments and Mobile Device Localization: A Performance Study

Bluetooth Mesh is a recent SIG standard enabling the deployment of multi-hop Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) over Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) communication links. The standard introduces many novel and interesting features in the Internet of Things (IoT) domain, such as the seamless integration among sensors and mobile and wearable devices, and the support for a wide range of different IoT application profiles. At the same time, fine-grained assessments of the performance are still needed to understand the potential of the technology. In this paper, we investigate the usage of Bluetooth Mesh solutions for the joint monitoring of indoor spaces and humans. Through the deployment of a test-bed, we evaluate the performance of Bluetooth Mesh WSNs under varying traffic loads and network sizes. In addition, by exploiting the short-range, multi-hop communications, we propose a procedure for the indoor localization of mobile devices and evaluate its accuracy. The results demonstrate that the technology supports reasonable delivery ratio under high traffic loads, however the network and localization performance sharply decreases when increasing the number of hops between the source and destination nodes

“Eravamo come schiavi”. Famiglie contadine a Mussolinia-Arborea/ fonti orali e dinamiche socio-economiche = “We were as slaves”.Peasant families in Mussolinia-Arborea: oral sources and socio-economic dynamics

Documenti d’archivio e testimonianze orali illustrano le vicende delle famiglie mezzadrili che, giunte in Sardegna negli anni del fascismo, ingaggiate dalla Società Bonifiche Sarde per colonizzare la piana di Terralba, divennero assegnatarie dei loro poderi dopo la riforma agraria del 1950. Sono soprattutto le fonti orali a rivelarsi essenziali per ricostruire i termini dell’emarginazione sociale e dell’isolamento a cui questi nuclei familiari furono costretti nella tenuta aziendale e il senso della lotta che essi vollero ingaggiare per superare la soggezione mezzadrile e, grazie alla riforma agraria, conquistare l’emancipazione sociale ed economica

WoTwins: Automatic Digital Twin Generator for the Web of Things

Digital Twins are crucial in Industry 4.0 IoT scenarios, as they replicate physical assets and enable important tasks such as predictive analytics, what-if scenarios and real time monitoring. The heterogeneity of IoT use cases usually makes the development of digital twins extremely application-specific as well as prone to interoperability issues. To overcome these two challenges, we propose WoTwins, a framework that, on one side, leverages the W3C Web of Things (WoT) standard to model data and entities, and, on the other side, generates automatically Digital Twins of existing Web Things by modeling their state space through a Markov Decision Process (MDP) graph and by predicting its behavior though Machine Learning techniques. We conduct experiments on a simulated use cases related to IoT robotics to evaluate our proposa

A Survey on the Web of Things

The Web of Things (WoT) paradigm was proposed first in the late 2000s, with the idea of leveraging Web standards to interconnect all types of embedded devices. More than ten years later, the fragmentation of the IoT landscape has dramatically increased as a consequence of the exponential growth of connected devices, making interoperability one of the key issues for most IoT deployments. Contextually, many studies have demonstrated the applicability of Web technologies on IoT scenarios, while the joint efforts from the academia and the industry have led to the proposals of standard specifications for developing WoT systems. Through a systematic review of the literature, we provide a detailed illustration of the WoT paradigm for both researchers and newcomers, by reconstructing the temporal evolution of key concepts and the historical trends, providing an in-depth taxonomy of software architectures and enabling technologies of WoT deployments and, finally, discussing the maturity of WoT vertical markets. Moreover, we identify some future research directions that may open the way to further innovation on WoT systems

Quantitative Storytelling: Science, Narratives, and Uncertainty in Nexus Innovations

Innovations are central instruments of sustainability policies. They project future visions onto technological solutions and enable win-win framings of complex sustainability issues. Yet, they also create new problems by interconnecting different resources such as water, food, and energy, what is known as the â WEF nexus.â In this paper, we apply a new approach called Quantitative Storytelling (QST) to the assessment of four innovations with a strong nexus component in EU policy: biofuels, shale gas, electric vehicles, and alternative water resources. Recognizing irreducible pluralism and uncertainties, QST inspects the relationships between the narratives used to frame sustainability issues and the evidence on those issues. Our experiences outlined two rationales for implementing QST. First, QST can be used to question dominant narratives that promote certain innovations despite evidence against their effectiveness. Second, QST can offer avenues for pluralistic processes of co-creation of alternative narratives and imaginaries. We reflect on the implementation of QST and on the role played by different uncertainties throughout these processes. Our experiences suggest that while the role of nexus assessments using both numbers and narratives may not be instrumental in directly inducing policy change, they are valuable means to open discussions on innovations outside of dominant nexus imaginaries. © The Author(s) 2021.The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research has been funded by the European Union’s H2020 project MAGIC: Moving towards Adaptive Governance in Complexity (MAGIC GA No. 689669); European Union’s FP7 project IANEX: Integrated Assessment of the Nexus: The Case of Hydraulic Fracturing, Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship GA No. 623593; and Spanish Ministry of Science’s Juan de la Cierva Fellowship (IJC2019-038847-I/AEI/10.13039/501100011033)

Interoperability in Open IoT Platforms: WoT-FIWARE Comparison and Integration

The rapid and exponential growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has been generating a new breed of technologies that introduce several different protocols and interfaces. The Web of Things (WoT) architecture stands out as an emerging and poten- tial solution to improve interoperability across IoT platforms by describing well-defined software interfaces. However, few studies analyze and compare WoT to other interoperability solutions proposed in the IoT literature. In this paper, we attempt to bridge the gap by three main contributions. First, we qualitative compare the WoT approach with the well-known FIWARE- based interoperability solution.Second, based on the previous analysis, we design and implement a connector to bridge the WoT architecture to the FIWARE ecosystem. Third, we conduct a performance analysis emulating a real IoT-based environment to understand scalability, response time, and computer resource usage of the two interoperability solutions. The results reveal that conceptual design choices impact the applications’ performance: the WoT architecture effectively enables interoperability across IoT Platforms, though it incorporates several characteristics that hinder the implementation of applications. On the other hand, the FIWARE IoT Agent solution is platform-specific. Hence new implementations are needed for each different IoT data model

Effect of Tomato Peel Extract Grown under Drought Stress Condition in a Sarcopenia Model

Tomatoes and their derivates represent an important source of natural biologically active components. The present study aims to investigate the protective effect of tomato peel extracts, grown in normal (RED-Ctr) or in drought stress (RED-Ds) conditions, on an experimental model of sarcopenia. The phenolic profile and total polyphenols content (TPC) of RED-Ctr and RED-Ds were determined by Ultra High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (UHPLC) analyses coupled to electrospray ionization high-resolution mass spectrometry (ESI-HR-MS). Human skeletal muscle myoblasts (HSMM) were differentiated in myotubes, and sarcopenia was induced by dexametha- sone (DEXA) treatment. Differentiation and sarcopenia were evaluated by both real-time PCR and immunofluorescent techniques. Data show that myosin heavy chain 2 (MYH2), troponin T (TNNT1), and miogenin (MYOG) were expressed in differentiated myotubes. 5 μg Gallic Acid Equivalent (GAE/mL) of TPC from RED-Ds extract significantly reduced muscle atrophy induced by DEXA. Moreover, Forkhead BoxO1 (FOXO1) expression, involved in cell atrophy, was significantly decreased by RED-Ds extract. The protective effect of tomato peel extracts depended on their qualitative polyphenolic composition, resulting effectively in the in vitro model of sarcopenia

Dynamic Adaptive Video Streaming on Heterogeneous TVWS and Wi-Fi Networks

Nowadays, people usually connect to the Internet through a multitude of different devices. Video streaming takes the lion's share of the bandwidth, and represents the real challenge for the service providers and for the research community. At the same time, most of the connections come from indoor, where Wi-Fi already experiences congestion and coverage holes, directly translating into a poor experience for the user. A possible relief comes from the TV white space (TVWS) networks, which can enhance the communication range thanks to sub-GHz frequencies and favorable propagation characteristics, but offer slower datarates compared with other 802.11 protocols. In this paper, we show the benefits that TVWS networks can bring to the end user, and we present CABA, a connection aware balancing algorithm able to exploit multiple radio connections in the favor of a better user experience. Our experimental results indicate that the TVWS network can effectively provide a wider communication range, but a load balancing middleware between the available connections on the device must be used to achieve better performance. We conclude this paper by presenting real data coming from field trials in which we streamed an MPEG dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP video over TVWS and Wi-Fi. Practical quantitative results on the achievable quality of experience for the end user are then reported. Our results show that balancing the load between Wi-Fi and TVWS can provide a higher playback quality (up to 15% of average quality index) in scenarios in which the Wi-Fi is received at a low strength

Joint Power Control and Structural Health Monitoring in Industry 4.0 Scenarios using Eclipse Arrowhead and Web of Things

The integration of legacy IoT ecosystems in Industry 4.0 scenarios requires human effort to adapt single devices. This process would highly benefit from features like device lookup, loose coupling and late binding. In this paper, we tackle the issue of integrating legacy monitoring systems and actuation systems in an industrial scenario, by looking into the Web of Things (WoT) as a communication standard and the Eclipse Arrowhead Framework (AHF) as a service orchestrator. More specifically, we propose a general architectural approach to enable closed-loop automation between the above mentioned legacy systems by leveraging the adaptation of the WoT to the AHF. Then, we develop a rule-based engine that enables the control of the actuation based on sensor values. Finally, we present a proof-of-concept use case where we integrate a Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) scenario with a power control actuation subsystem using the developed component