From risk-based health surveillance to health promotion: an evidence-based experience in a health care setting.

Health surveillance’s aim consists in different aspects: (i) to ensure worker’s health, (ii) to comply regulation, (iii) to detect health changes at their onset, (iv) to reduce cost, (v) to provide a fitness for job judgement, (vi) to provide a medical baseline and (vii) to be part of a preventive programme. Some of these aspects are perceived as benefits from the different stakeholders. Employers indicated as benefits worker’s satisfaction improvement, cost reduction, relationship improvement, early detection of health changes5. The study showed some other benefits: an improvement in worker’s satisfaction, an improvement in the relationship between stakeholders (even though based on qualitative data only), an early detection of health changes in few cases and a sickness absence reduction after influenza vaccination programme

A new hexapeptide from the leader peptide of rMnSOD enters cells through the oestrogen receptor to deliver therapeutic molecules

A 24-amino acid leader peptide of a new human recombinant manganese superoxide dismutase can enter cells and carry molecules. Here, we demonstrated that six of the 24 amino acids penetrate cells through a particular gate represented by a specific amino acid sequence of the oestrogen receptor (ER). We analysed the internalization of the synthetic hexapeptide and the cytotoxic activity of the hexapeptide conjugated to cisplatin on a cell line panel. In most cell lines, the hexapeptide delivered an amount of cisplatin that was 2 to 8 times greater than that released by cisplatin when the drug was used alone. This increased delivery increases the therapeutic index of cisplatin and reduces side effects caused by a high dosage or long-term treatment times. We may consider this hexapeptide a new molecular carrier to deliver molecules with therapeutic activity into ER+ cells for diagnostic purposes and clinical or immune therapy

The strong gravitational lens finding challenge

Large-scale imaging surveys will increase the number of galaxy-scale strong lensing candidates by maybe three orders of magnitudes beyond the number known today. Finding these rare objects will require picking them out of at least tens of millions of images, and deriving scientific results from them will require quantifying the efficiency and bias of any search method. To achieve these objectives automated methods must be developed. Because gravitational lenses are rare objects, reducing false positives will be particularly important. We present a description and results of an open gravitational lens finding challenge. Participants were asked to classify 100 000 candidate objects as to whether they were gravitational lenses or not with the goal of developing better automated methods for finding lenses in large data sets. A variety of methods were used including visual inspection, arc and ring finders, support vector machines (SVM) and convolutional neural networks (CNN). We find that many of the methods will be easily fast enough to analyse the anticipated data flow. In test data, several methods are able to identify upwards of half the lenses after applying some thresholds on the lens characteristics such as lensed image brightness, size or contrast with the lens galaxy without making a single false-positive identification. This is significantly better than direct inspection by humans was able to do. Having multi-band, ground based data is found to be better for this purpose than single-band space based data with lower noise and higher resolution, suggesting that multi-colour data is crucial. Multi-band space based data will be superior to ground based data. The most difficult challenge for a lens finder is differentiating between rare, irregular and ring-like face-on galaxies and true gravitational lenses. The degree to which the efficiency and biases of lens finders can be quantified largely depends on the realism of the simulated data on which the finders are trained

Euclid preparation. XXVI. The Euclid Morphology Challenge: Towards structural parameters for billions of galaxies

The various Euclid imaging surveys will become a reference for studies of galaxy morphology by delivering imaging over an unprecedented area of 15 000 square degrees with high spatial resolution. In order to understand the capabilities of measuring morphologies from Euclid-detected galaxies and to help implement measurements in the pipeline of the Organisational Unit MER of the Euclid Science Ground Segment, we have conducted the Euclid Morphology Challenge, which we present in two papers. While the companion paper focusses on the analysis of photometry, this paper assesses the accuracy of the parametric galaxy morphology measurements in imaging predicted from within the Euclid Wide Survey. We evaluate the performance of five state-of-the-art surface-brightness-fitting codes, , , , and , on a sample of about 1.5 million simulated galaxies (350 000 above 5σ) resembling reduced observations with the Euclid VIS and NIR instruments. The simulations include analytic Sérsic profiles with one and two components, as well as more realistic galaxies generated with neural networks. We find that, despite some code-specific differences, all methods tend to achieve reliable structural measurements (< 10% scatter on ideal Sérsic simulations) down to an apparent magnitude of about I$_{E}$ = 23 in one component and I$_{E}$ = 21 in two components, which correspond to a signal-to-noise ratio of approximately 1 and 5, respectively. We also show that when tested on non-analytic profiles, the results are typically degraded by a factor of 3, driven by systematics. We conclude that the official Euclid Data Releases will deliver robust structural parameters for at least 400 million galaxies in the Euclid Wide Survey by the end of the mission. We find that a key factor for explaining the different behaviour of the codes at the faint end is the set of adopted priors for the various structural parameters

Euclid preparation: XIII. Forecasts for galaxy morphology with the Euclid Survey using deep generative models

We present a machine learning framework to simulate realistic galaxies for the Euclid Survey, producing more complex and realistic galaxies than the analytical simulations currently used in Euclid. The proposed method combines a control on galaxy shape parameters offered by analytic models with realistic surface brightness distributions learned from real Hubble Space Telescope observations by deep generative models. We simulate a galaxy field of 0.4 deg2 as it will be seen by the Euclid visible imager VIS, and we show that galaxy structural parameters are recovered to an accuracy similar to that for pure analytic Sérsic profiles. Based on these simulations, we estimate that the Euclid Wide Survey (EWS) will be able to resolve the internal morphological structure of galaxies down to a surface brightness of 22.5 mag arcsec-2, and the Euclid Deep Survey (EDS) down to 24.9 mag arcsec-2. This corresponds to approximately 250 million galaxies at the end of the mission and a 50% complete sample for stellar masses above 1010.6 M (resp. 109.6 M) at a redshift z ∼ 0.5 for the EWS (resp. EDS). The approach presented in this work can contribute to improving the preparation of future high-precision cosmological imaging surveys by allowing simulations to incorporate more realistic galaxies

Heating, current drive and energetic particle studies on JET in preparation of ITER operation

This paper summarizes the recent work on JET in the three areas of heating, current drive and energetic particles. The achievements have extended the possibilities of JET, have a direct connection to ITER operation and provide new and interesting physics. Toroidal rotation profiles of plasmas heated far off axis with little or no refuelling or momentum input are hollow with only small differences on whether the power deposition is located on the low field side or on the high field side. With LH current drive the magnetic shear was varied from slightly positive to negative. The improved coupling (through the use of plasma shaping and CD4) allowed up to 3.4 MW of PLH in internal transport barrier (ITB) plasmas with more than 15 MW of combined NBI and ICRF heating. The q-profile with negative magnetic shear and the ITB could be maintained for the duration of the high heating pulse (8 s). Fast ions have been produced in JET with ICRF to simulate alpha particles: by using third harmonic 4He heating, beam injected 4He at 120 kV were accelerated to energies above 2 MeV, taking advantage of the unique capability of JET to use NBI with 4He and to confine MeV class ions. ICRF heating was used to replicate the dynamics of alpha heating and the control of an equivalent Q = 10 `burn' was simulated

Current drive at plasma densities required for thermonuclear reactors

Progress in thermonuclear fusion energy research based on deuterium plasmas magnetically confined in toroidal tokamak devices requires the development of efficient current drive methods. Previous experiments have shown that plasma current can be driven effectively by externally launched radio frequency power coupled to lower hybrid plasma waves. However, at the high plasma densities required for fusion power plants, the coupled radio frequency power does not penetrate into the plasma core, possibly because of strong wave interactions with the plasma edge. Here we show experiments performed on FTU (Frascati Tokamak Upgrade) based on theoretical predictions that nonlinear interactions diminish when the peripheral plasma electron temperature is high, allowing significant wave penetration at high density. The results show that the coupled radio frequency power can penetrate into high-density plasmas due to weaker plasma edge effects, thus extending the effective range of lower hybrid current drive towards the domain relevant for fusion reactors

Corrigendum: Current drive at plasma densities required for thermonuclear reactors

Nature Communications 1: Article number: 55 (2010); Published: 10 August 2010; Updated:19 September 2013. In Fig. 3 of this Article, the colours of the blue and green curves were accidentally interchanged while the manuscript was being revised. In addition, the x axis labels on Fig. 4 should have read 'Frequency (MHz)'