Multi-Scale Monitoring of Rupestrian Heritage: Methodological Approach and Application to a Case Study

Most of the artistic heritage in the Mediterranean basin is hosted in rupestrian hypogeum whose peculiarity is given by the presence of at least one open side, which makes them particularly sensitive to meteorological conditions. This makes mandatory the monitoring of both indoor and outdoor environmental parameters to analyze the cause–effect relationship between microclimatic inside and outside the hypogeum. The paper proposes a spatial and temporal multi-scale methodological approach applied to a rupestrian church in Matera, which hosts precious wall paintings, particularly vulnerable to the effects of environmental parameters. The approach is based on the analysis of data acquired by three platforms: indoor, close-range outdoor, and outdoor data from a meteorological station and weather forecast from the COSMO 5 model. The method allowed to characterize the relationships between the indoor and outdoor parameters at different spatial and temporal scales. The results showed a significant correlation between the parameters, thus opening new opportunities for the monitoring of the rupestrian heritage based on the use of data systematically available, such as those from meteorological stations and meteorological forecast

CMS Monte Carlo production in the WLCG computing Grid

Monte Carlo production in CMS has received a major boost in performance and scale since the past CHEP06 conference. The production system has been re-engineered in order to incorporate the experience gained in running the previous system and to integrate production with the new CMS event data model, data management system and data processing framework. The system is interfaced to the two major computing Grids used by CMS, the LHC Computing Grid (LCG) and the Open Science Grid (OSG). Operational experience and integration aspects of the new CMS Monte Carlo production system is presented together with an analysis of production statistics. The new system automatically handles job submission, resource monitoring, job queuing, job distribution according to the available resources, data merging, registration of data into the data bookkeeping, data location, data transfer and placement systems. Compared to the previous production system automation, reliability and performance have been considerably improved. A more efficient use of computing resources and a better handling of the inherent Grid unreliability have resulted in an increase of production scale by about an order of magnitude, capable of running in parallel at the order of ten thousand jobs and yielding more than two million events per day

Distributed Computing Grid Experiences in CMS

The CMS experiment is currently developing a computing system capable of serving, processing and archiving the large number of events that will be generated when the CMS detector starts taking data. During 2004 CMS undertook a large scale data challenge to demonstrate the ability of the CMS computing system to cope with a sustained data-taking rate equivalent to 25% of startup rate. Its goals were: to run CMS event reconstruction at CERN for a sustained period at 25 Hz input rate; to distribute the data to several regional centers; and enable data access at those centers for analysis. Grid middleware was utilized to help complete all aspects of the challenge. To continue to provide scalable access from anywhere in the world to the data, CMS is developing a layer of software that uses Grid tools to gain access to data and resources, and that aims to provide physicists with a user friendly interface for submitting their analysis jobs. This paper describes the data challenge experience with Grid infrastructure and the current development of the CMS analysis system

MRI analysis for Hippocampus segmentation on a distributed infrastructure

Medical image computing raises new challenges due to the scale and the complexity of the required analyses. Medical image databases are currently available to supply clinical diagnosis. For instance, it is possible to provide diagnostic information based on an imaging biomarker comparing a single case to the reference group (controls or patients with disease). At the same time many sophisticated and computationally intensive algorithms have been implemented to extract useful information from medical images. Many applications would take great advantage by using scientific workflow technology due to its design, rapid implementation and reuse. However this technology requires a distributed computing infrastructure (such as Grid or Cloud) to be executed efficiently. One of the most used workflow manager for medical image processing is the LONI pipeline (LP), a graphical workbench developed by the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging (http://pipeline.loni.usc.edu). In this article we present a general approach to submit and monitor workflows on distributed infrastructures using LONI Pipeline, including European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) and Torque-based batch farm. In this paper we implemented a complete segmentation pipeline in brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). It requires time-consuming and data-intensive processing and for which reducing the computing time is crucial to meet clinical practice constraints. The developed approach is based on web services and can be used for any medical imaging application

The Trifluoromethyl Group as a Bioisosteric Replacement of the Aliphatic Nitro Group in CB1 Receptor Positive Allosteric Modulators (PAMs)

The Supporting Information is available free of charge on the ACS Publications website at DOI: 10.1021/acs.jmedchem.9b00252. Experimental procedures, characterization of all intermediates and target compounds, and copies of NMR spectra of compounds 1, 39-57. Molecular formula strings of target compounds are available. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. We gratefully thank Signal Pharma and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Proof of Principle grants PPP-125784 and PP2-139101 for financial support and fellowship (C.C.T), NIH grants R01DA039942, P30DA033934 and VCU School of Pharmacy start-up funds (A.H.L.). We thank the EPSRC National Crystallography Service (University of Southampton) for the X-ray data collection. We are grateful to Dr Monica Sani (CNR-ICRM, Milan, Italy) and Mr Massimo Frigerio (Politecnico di Milano, Italy) for the synthesis of two tetrazole-substituted indoles (Het-1 and Het-2)Peer reviewedPostprin

Optimization of Italian CMS Computing Centers via MIUR funded Research Projects

In 2012, 14 Italian Institutions participating LHC Experiments (10 in CMS) have won a grant from the Italian Ministry of Research (MIUR), to optimize Analysis activities and in general the Tier2/Tier3 infrastructure. A large range of activities is actively carried on: they cover data distribution over WAN, dynamic provisioning for both scheduled and interactive processing, design and development of tools for distributed data analysis, and tests on the porting of CMS software stack to new highly performing / low power architectures

Intestinal inflammation and increased intestinal permeability in Plasmodium chabaudi AS infected mice

Background: Gastrointestinal symptoms are commonly associated with acute Plasmodium spp infection. Malaria-associated enteritis may provide an opportunity for enteric pathogens to breach the intestinal mucosa, resulting in life-threatening systemic infections. Methods: To investigate whether intestinal pathology also occurs during infection with a murine model of mild and resolving malaria, C57BL/6J mice were inoculated with recently mosquito-transmitted Plasmodium chabaudi AS. At schizogony, intestinal tissues were collected for quantification and localisation of immune mediators and malaria parasites, by PCR and immunohistochemistry. Inflammatory proteins were measured in plasma and faeces and intestinal permeability was assessed by FITC-dextran translocation after oral administration. Results: Parasitaemia peaked at approx. 1.5% at day 9 and resolved by day 14, with mice experiencing significant and transient anaemia but no weight loss. Plasma IFNγ, TNFα and IL10 were significantly elevated during peak infection and quantitative RT-PCR of the intestine revealed a significant increase in transcripts for ifng and cxcl10. Histological analysis revealed parasites within blood vessels of both the submucosa and intestinal villi and evidence of mild crypt hyperplasia. In faeces, concentrations of the inflammatory marker lactoferrin were significantly raised on days 9 and 11 and FITC-dextran was detected in plasma on days 7 to 14. At day 11, plasma FITC-dextran concentration was significantly positively correlated with peripheral parasitemia and faecal lactoferrin concentration. Conclusions: In summary, using a relevant, attenuated model of malaria, we have found that acute infection is associated with intestinal inflammation and increased intestinal permeability. This model can now be used to explore the mechanisms of parasite-induced intestinal inflammation and to assess the impact of increased intestinal permeability on translocation of enteropathogens

N-Oleoyl-glycine reduces nicotine reward and withdrawal in mice.

Cigarette smokers with brain damage involving the insular cortex display cessation of tobacco smoking, suggesting that this region may contribute to nicotine addiction. In the present study, we speculated that molecules in the insular cortex that are sensitive to experimental traumatic brain injury (TBI) in mice might provide leads to ameliorate nicotine addiction. Using targeted lipidomics, we found that TBI elicited substantial increases of a largely uncharacterized lipid, N-acyl-glycine, N-oleoyl-glycine (OlGly), in the insular cortex of mice. We then evaluated whether intraperitoneal administration of OlGly would alter withdrawal responses in nicotine-dependent mice as well as the rewarding effects of nicotine, as assessed in the conditioned place preference paradigm (CPP). Systemic administration of OlGly reduced mecamylamine-precipitated withdrawal responses in nicotine-dependent mice and prevented nicotine CPP. However, OlGly did not affect morphine CPP, demonstrating a degree of selectivity. Our respective in vitro and in vivo observations that OlGly activated peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor alpha (PPAR-α) and the PPAR-α antagonist GW6471 prevented the OlGly-induced reduction of nicotine CPP in mice suggests that this lipid acts as a functional PPAR-α agonist to attenuate nicotine reward. These findings raise the possibility that the long chain fatty acid amide OlGly may possess efficacy in treating nicotine addiction

Improvements of LHC data analysis techniques at Italian WLCG sites. Case-study of the transfer of this technology to other research areas

In 2012, 14 Italian institutions participating in LHC Experiments won a grant from the Italian Ministry of Research (MIUR), with the aim of optimising analysis activities, and in general the Tier2/Tier3 infrastructure. We report on the activities being researched upon, on the considerable improvement in the ease of access to resources by physicists, also those with no specific computing interests. We focused on items like distributed storage federations, access to batch-like facilities, provisioning of user interfaces on demand and cloud systems. R&D on next-generation databases, distributed analysis interfaces, and new computing architectures was also carried on. The project, ending in the first months of 2016, will produce a white paper with recommendations on best practices for data-analysis support by computing centers