The role of extracellular vesicles in bone metastasis

Multiple types of cancer have the specific ability to home to the bone microenvironment and cause metastatic lesions. Despite being the focus of intense investigation, the molecular and cellular mechanisms that regulate the metastasis of disseminated tumor cells still remain largely unknown. Bone metastases severely impact quality of life since they are associated with pain, fractures, and bone marrow aplasia. In this review, we will summarize the recent discoveries on the role of extracellular vesicles (EV) in the regulation of bone remodeling activity and bone metastasis occurrence. Indeed, it was shown that extracellular vesicles, including exosomes and microvesicles, released from tumor cells can modify the bone microenvironment, allowing the formation of osteolytic, osteosclerotic, and mixed mestastases. In turn, bone-derived EV can stimulate the proliferation of tumor cells. The inhibition of EV-mediated crosstalk between cancer and bone cells could represent a new therapeutic target for bone metastasis

Cellular and molecular mediators of bone metastatic lesions

Bone is the preferential site of metastasis for breast and prostate tumor. Cancer cells establish a tight relationship with the host tissue, secreting factors that stimulate or inhibit bone cells, receiving signals generated from the bone remodeling activity, and displaying some features of bone cells. This interplay between tumor and bone cells alters the physiological bone remodeling, leading to the generation of a vicious cycle that promotes bone metastasis growth. To prevent the skeletal-related events (SRE) associated with bone metastasis, approaches to inhibit osteoclast bone resorption are reported. The bisphosphonates and Denosumab are currently used in the treatment of patients affected by bone lesions. They act to prevent or counteract the SRE, including pathologic fractures, spinal cord compression, and pain associated with bone metastasis. However, their primary effects on tumor cells still remain controversial. In this review, a description of the mechanisms leading to the onset of bone metastasis and clinical approaches to treat them are described

Young children do not integrate visual and haptic information

Several studies have shown that adults integrate visual and haptic information (and information from other modalities) in a statistically optimal fashion, weighting each sense according to its reliability. To date no studies have investigated when this capacity for cross-modal integration develops. Here we show that prior to eight years of age, integration of visual and haptic spatial information is far from optimal, with either vision or touch dominating totally, even in conditions where the dominant sense is far less precise than the other (assessed by discrimination thresholds). For size discrimination, haptic information dominates in determining both perceived size and discrimination thresholds, while for orientation discrimination vision dominates. By eight-ten years, the integration becomes statistically optimal, like adults. We suggest that during development, perceptual systems require constant recalibration, for which cross-sensory comparison is important. Using one sense to calibrate the other precludes useful combination of the two sources

PopRank: Ranking pages' impact and users' engagement on Facebook

Users online tend to acquire information adhering to their system of beliefs and to ignore dissenting information. Such dynamics might affect page popularity. In this paper we introduce an algorithm, that we call PopRank, to assess both the Impact of Facebook pages as well as users' Engagement on the basis of their mutual interactions. The ideas behind the PopRank are that i) high impact pages attract many users with a low engagement, which means that they receive comments from users that rarely comment, and ii) high engagement users interact with high impact pages, that is they mostly comment pages with a high popularity. The resulting ranking of pages can predict the number of comments a page will receive and the number of its posts. Pages impact turns out to be slightly dependent on pages' informative content (e.g., science vs conspiracy) but independent of users' polarization.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure

Validating corruption risk measures: a key step to monitoring SDG progress

The Agenda 2030 recognises corruption as a major obstacle to sustainable development and integrates its reduction among SDG targets, in view of developing peaceful, just and strong institutions. In this paper, we propose a method to assess the validity of corruption indicators within an Item Response Theory framework, which explicitly accounts for the latent and multidimensional facet of corruption. Towards this main aim, a set of fifteen red flag indicators of corruption risk in public procurement is computed on data included in the Italian National Database of Public Contracts. Results show a multidimensional structure composed of sub-groups of red flag indicators i. measuring distinct corruption risk categories, which differ in nature, type and entity, and are generally non-superimposable; ii. mirroring distinct dynamics related to specific SDG principles and targets

Anti-Glass patterns and real motion perception: Same or different mechanisms?

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Visual spatial integration in the elderly.

PURPOSE. To investigate the effect of ageing on contour integration in subjects whose ages ranged from 20 to 99 years. METHODS. Detection thresholds were measured for a closed chain of Gabor patches oriented tangentially to a circle (target) embedded in a background of randomly positioned and oriented Gabors (noise). Detection thresholds were measured for different distances of elements composing the target. RESULTS. Sensitivity decreases gradually with age at all interelement distances. Sensitivity decreases with increasing interelement distance, in both young and elderly subjects. The decrease of integration capability with age is not related to a decrease in contrast sensitivity. CONCLUSIONS. Overall, the data provide evidence of a deterioration of cortical functionality with age, in agreement with other studies on texture and motion processing

Structural Patterns of the Occupy Movement on Facebook

In this work we study a peculiar example of social organization on Facebook: the Occupy Movement -- i.e., an international protest movement against social and economic inequality organized online at a city level. We consider 179 US Facebook public pages during the time period between September 2011 and February 2013. The dataset includes 618K active users and 753K posts that received about 5.2M likes and 1.1M comments. By labeling user according to their interaction patterns on pages -- e.g., a user is considered to be polarized if she has at least the 95% of her likes on a specific page -- we find that activities are not locally coordinated by geographically close pages, but are driven by pages linked to major US cities that act as hubs within the various groups. Such a pattern is verified even by extracting the backbone structure -- i.e., filtering statistically relevant weight heterogeneities -- for both the pages-reshares and the pages-common users networks