Inflammatory bowel diseases and human reproduction: A comprehensive evidence-based review

To evaluate the effects of inflammatory bowel diseases (IBDs) on human reproduction, we reviewed the current literature using a systematic search for published studies (articles and/or abstracts) without limits for English language. We searched on Medline (through PubMed), the Institute for Scientific Information, the Web of Science and the websites for the registration of controlled trials (http://controlled-trials.com/). Bibliographies of retrieved articles, books, expert opinion review articles and reviewed bibliographies from subject experts were manually searched. Titles and abstracts were screened initially, and potential relevant articles were identified and reviewed. Whenever possible, data were analyzed by comparing IBD patients vs healthy controls, and patients with active IBDs vs those with disease in remission. The effects of IBDs on female fertility, fertility in infertile couples, pregnancy and male infertility were examined separately. Patients with IBDs in remission have normal fertility. At the moment, there is no established guideline for the preservation of fertility in women with IBD undergoing surgery. Further data are needed regarding guidelines for the management of these patients. Data regarding IBDs and infertility are currently completely lacking. Considering the prevalence of intestinal pathology in young adults of childbearing age, this field is of great scientific and clinical interest, opening up important future perspectives. Another important and as yet unexplored point is the response to treatments for infertility in patients with IBDs. In particular, the question is whether the reproductive outcomes (clinical and biological) can be influenced by the IBD of one of the partners. The goals for successful reproductive outcomes in IBD population are correct counseling and disease remission. IBDs significantly affect several reproductive aspects of human (female, male, couple) reproduction. Further data are needed to develop guidelines for the clinical management of subjects of reproductive age with IBDs. © 2014 Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved

EVIDENCE OF OPPORTUNISTIC FEEDING BETWEEN ICHTHYOSAURS AND THE OLDEST OCCURRENCE OF THE HEXANCHID SHARK NOTIDANODON FROM THE UPPER JURASSIC OF NORTHERN ITALY

In 2016, two fossil marine reptiles were re-discovered in the collections of the Museo Civico di Storia Naturale di Verona. Originally recovered near Asiago, Vicenza province (northern Italy) from an outcrop of the Rosso Ammonitico Veronese Fm. (Middle-Upper Jurassic), they were never described. Morphological analysis carried out under UV-light allowed enhancing contrast with the surrounding matrix and better identifying some anatomical details. Both specimens consist of partially articulated postcranial elements from two distinct ichthyosaurs, including vertebrae, ribs, and some fragmentary elements of the appendicular skeleton. The first specimen V7101 is here tentatively assigned to Ophthalmosauridae based on a combination of features shared with other taxa in this family, such as the regionalization of the vertebral column. Taphonomical analysis suggests a long exposure of the carcass on the sea floor before burial; two teeth of the hexanchiform shark Notidanodon found near the ribcage could indicate scavenging. An ichthyosaur tooth most probably not belonging to the same specimen was found stuck on a rib and can also be attributed to scavenging – the first ever record of this interaction between two ichthyosaurs. The second specimen V7102 is represented by a poorly preserved partial vertebral column and is here referred to Ichthyosauria indet. due to the absence of taxonomically significant characters. Calcareous nannofossil data and microfacies analyses allow us to assign both specimens to the basal Kimmeridgian. This makes the two Notidanodon teeth associated with V7101 the oldest recorded occurrence of this genus

Reliability-oriented resource management for High-Performance Computing

Reliability is an increasingly pressing issue for High-Performance Computing systems, as failures are a threat to large-scale applications, for which an even single run may incur significant energy and billing costs. Currently, application developers need to address reliability explicitly, by integrating application-specific checkpoint/restore mechanisms. However, the application alone cannot exploit system knowledge, which is not the case for system-wide resource management systems. In this paper, we propose a reliability-oriented policy that can increase significantly component reliability by combining checkpoint/restore mechanisms exploitation and proactive resource management policies

The MANGO FET-HPC Project: an overview

© 2015 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.In this paper, we provide an overview of the MANGO project and its goal. The MANGO project aims at addressing power, performance and predictability (the PPP space) in future High-Performance Computing systems. It starts from the fundamental intuition that effective techniques for all three goals ultimately rely on customization to adapt the computing resources to reach the desired Quality of Service (QoS). From this starting point, MANGO will explore different but interrelated mechanisms at various architectural levels, as well as at the level of the system software. In particular, to explore a new positioning across the PPP space, MANGO will investigate system-wide, holistic, proactive thermal and power management aimed at extreme-scale energy efficiency.The MANGO project starts in October 2015 and is funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 FET-HPC program. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 671668.Flich Cardo, J.; Agosta, G.; Ampletzer, P.; Atienza Alonso, D.; Cilardo, A.; Fornaciari, W.; Kovac, M.... (2015). The MANGO FET-HPC Project: an overview. IEEE Computer Society. https://doi.org/10.1109/CSE.2015.57

Intracytoplasmic morphologically selected sperm injection versus conventional intracytoplasmic sperm injection: A randomized controlled trial

Background: Intracytoplasmic morphologically selected sperm injection (IMSI) is still proposed and employed in the clinical practice to improve the reproductive outcome in infertile couples scheduled for conventional intracytoplasmic sperm injection (cICSI). The aim of the current randomized controlled trial (RCT) was to test the hypothesis that IMSI gives a better live birth delivery rate than cICSI. Methods: Infertile couples scheduled for their first cICSI cycle for male factor were allocated using a simple randomization procedure. All available biological and clinical data were recorded and analyzed in a triple-blind fashion. Results: Our final analysis involved the first 121 patients (48 and 73 subjects for IMSI and cICSI arm, respectively) because the trial was stopped prematurely on the advice of the data safety and monitoring Committee because of concerns about IMSI efficacy at the first interim analysis. No significant difference between arms was detected in rates of clinical pregnancy per embryo transferred [11/34 (32.3 %) vs. 15/64 (23.4 %); odds ratio (OR) 1.56, 95 % (confidence interval) CI 0.62–3.93, P = 0.343] and of live birth delivery [9/48 (18.8 %) vs. 11/73 (15.1 %); OR 1.30, 95%CI 0.49–3.42, P = 0.594). Conclusion: Current data did not support the routine use of IMSI in the clinical practice for improving cICSI results in unselected infertile couples with male factor

Dynamic modeling of inter-instruction effects for execution time estimation

The market for embedded applications is facing a growing interest in power consumption issues. The work presented is intended to provide a new model to estimate software-level power consumption of 32-bit microprocessors. This model extends previous ones by considering dynamic inter-instruction effects that take place during code execution, providing a static means to characterize their energy consumption. The model is formally sound; it is conceived for a generic architecture and it has been preliminarily validated on the Intel486/sup TM/ architecture

TEXTAROSSA: Towards EXtreme scale Technologies and Accelerators for euROhpc hw/Sw Supercomputing Applications for exascale

To achieve high performance and high energy efficiency on near-future exascale computing systems, three key technology gaps needs to be bridged. These gaps include: energy efficiency and thermal control; extreme computation efficiency via HW acceleration and new arithmetics; methods and tools for seamless integration of reconfigurable accelerators in heterogeneous HPC multi-node platforms. TEXTAROSSA aims at tackling this gap through a co-design approach to heterogeneous HPC solutions, supported by the integration and extension of HW and SW IPs, programming models and tools derived from European research.This work is supported by the TEXTAROSSA project G.A. n.956831, as part of the EuroHPC initiative.Peer ReviewedArticle signat per 51 autors/es: Giovanni Agosta, Daniele Cattaneo, William Fornaciari, Andrea Galimberti, Giuseppe Massari, Federico Reghenzani, Federico Terraneo, Davide Zoni, Carlo Brandolese (DEIB – Politecnico di Milano, Italy, [email protected]) | Massimo Celino, Francesco Iannone, Paolo Palazzari, Giuseppe Zummo (ENEA, Italy, [email protected]) | Massimo Bernaschi, Pasqua D’Ambra (Istituto per le Applicazioni del Calcolo (IAC) - CNR, Italy, [email protected]) | Sergio Saponara, Marco Danelutto, Massimo Torquati (University of Pisa, Italy, [email protected]) | Marco Aldinucci, Yasir Arfat, Barbara Cantalupo, Iacopo Colonnelli, Roberto Esposito, Alberto R. Martinelli, Gianluca Mittone (University of Torino, Italy, [email protected]) | Olivier Beaumont, Berenger Bramas, Lionel Eyraud-Dubois, Brice Goglin, Abdou Guermouche, Raymond Namyst, Samuel Thibault (Inria - France, [email protected]) | Antonio Filgueras, Miquel Vidal, Carlos Alvarez, Xavier Martorell (BSC - Spain, [email protected]) | Ariel Oleksiak, Michal Kulczewski (PSNC, Poland, [email protected], [email protected]) | Alessandro Lonardo, Piero Vicini, Francesca Lo Cicero, Francesco Simula, Andrea Biagioni, Paolo Cretaro, Ottorino Frezza, Pier Stanislao Paolucci, Matteo Turisini (INFN Sezione di Roma - Italy, [email protected]) | Francesco Giacomini (INFN CNAF - Italy, [email protected]) | Tommaso Boccali (INFN Sezione di Pisa - Italy, [email protected]) | Simone Montangero (University of Padova and INFN Sezione di Padova - Italy, [email protected]) | Roberto Ammendola (INFN Sezione di Roma Tor Vergata - Italy, [email protected])Postprint (author's final draft

Immunological features of patients affected by Barraquer-Simons syndrome

Background: C3 hypocomplementemia and the presence of C3 nephritic factor (C3NeF), an autoantibody causing complement system over-activation, are common features among most patients affected by Barraquer-Simons syndrome (BSS), an acquired form of partial lipodystrophy. Moreover, BSS is frequently associated with autoimmune diseases. However, the relationship between complement system dysregulation and BSS remains to be fully elucidated. The aim of this study was to provide a comprehensive immunological analysis of the complement system status, autoantibody signatures and HLA profile in BSS. Thirteen subjects with BSS were recruited for the study. The circulating levels of complement components, C3, C4, Factor B (FB) and Properdin (P), as well as an extended autoantibody profile including autoantibodies targeting complement components and regulators were assessed in serum. Additionally, HLA genotyping was carried out using DNA extracted from peripheral blood mononuclear cells. Results: C3, C4 and FB levels were significantly reduced in patients with BSS as compared with healthy subjects. C3NeF was the most frequently found autoantibody (69.2% of cases), followed by anti-C3 (38.5%), and anti-P and anti- FB (30.8% each). Clinical data showed high prevalence of autoimmune diseases (38.5%), the majority of patients (61.5%) being positive for at least one of the autoantibodies tested. The HLA allele DRB1*11 was present in 54% of BSS patients, and the majority of them (31%) were positive for *11:03 (vs 1.3% allelic frequency in the general population). Conclusions: Our results confirmed the association between BSS, autoimmunity and C3 hypocomplementemia. Moreover, the finding of autoantibodies targeting complement system proteins points to complement dysregulation as a central pathological event in the development of BSS.This work was supported by Instituto de Salud Carlos III (Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, Gobierno de España) and Fondos FEDER (PI15–00255 to M.L-T. and PI08–1449 to D.A-V.), Complemento II-CM network (B2017/BMD3673 to M.L-T), the intramural research program of the Xunta de Galicia (Programa de Consolidación e Estructuración de Unidades de Investigación Competitivas, grant ED341b 2017/19 to D.A-V.), the Asociación Española de Familiares y Afectados de Lipodistrofias (AELIP) (to D.A-V., to F.C. and to P.N.

Exploring manycore architectures for next-generation HPC systems through the MANGO approach

[EN] The Horizon 2020 MANGO project aims at exploring deeply heterogeneous accelerators for use in High-Performance Computing systems running multiple applications with different Quality of Service (QoS) levels. The main goal of the project is to exploit customization to adapt computing resources to reach the desired QoS. For this purpose, it explores different but interrelated mechanisms across the architecture and system software. In particular, in this paper we focus on the runtime resource management, the thermal management, and support provided for parallel programming, as well as introducing three applications on which the project foreground will be validated.This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 671668.Flich Cardo, J.; Agosta, G.; Ampletzer, P.; Atienza-Alonso, D.; Brandolese, C.; Cappe, E.; Cilardo, A.... (2018). Exploring manycore architectures for next-generation HPC systems through the MANGO approach. Microprocessors and Microsystems. 61:154-170. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.micpro.2018.05.011S1541706

Современное состояние электрификации России

В статье показано, что современное развитие электрификации РФ в сопоставлении с государствами, входящими в G8, очевидно недостающее. При этом есть большой потенциал электросбережения в секторах экономики. Потребление электроэнергии населением существенно находится в зависимости от значения их денежных доходов и темпов роста тарифов на электричество