Terra e rendite nei secoli XII-XIII: Normandia, Inghliterra, Terrasanta.

Land and revenue in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Century: Normandy, England, the Holy Land Thanks to the documentation made available by the “Patrologia Latina” database, the author has managed to reconstruct the legal-institutional profile of the concessions ad firmam and their socio-economic contexts from the twelfth to the thirteenth centuries in Normandy, England, and the Holy Land. These agrarian contracts have usually escaped scholarly attention and are intriguing for their connection with the contractus censualis and the census reservativus, a legal institution present throughout the modern age and which played an important role in the revolutionaryn. M e d i t e r r a n e a R i c e r c h e s t o r i c h e Anno VII - Aprile 201

The geometry of antisymplectic involutions, I

We study fixed loci of antisymplectic involutions on projective hyperk\"ahler manifolds. When the involution is induced by an ample class of square 2 in the Beauville-Bogomolov-Fujiki lattice, we show that the number of connected components of the fixed locus is equal to the divisibility of the class, which is either 1 or 2.Comment: 45 page

Optimizing the sample size to estimate growth in I-214 poplar plantations at definitive tree density for bioenergetic production

ArticleIn Europe, over the last decades, the arboriculture for woody biomass production has significantly expanded, often using poplar plantations. In order to maximize prod uction, the flexibility of the cultivation algorithms becomes necessary. For this reason, it is necessary to apply monitoring tools for the evaluation and estimate of the wood productions, without significantly affect the production costs. In particular, f or the estimate of the productions, the choice of the sample size is of particular importance. The aim of this study was to verify a simplified sampling approaches in poplar plantations characterized by constant tree density. The research was conducted in a poplar plantation on the Tuscan hills (Italy). The surveys were carried out each year for 13 years, from 4 to 16 years old. Through different statistical techniques, the change in the social position of each tree over time was evaluated. The results show ed that the social position of each tree has been characterized by the first years after the plantation. Consequently, the estimate of the productions can be carried out by analysing the diameter increment of 10% of the trees, included in the diameter clas ses around the medium - sized tree at the time of the survey. This study provided a valid method for forest managers characterized by a simplified approach useful to estimate the growth and yield of hybrid poplars. This method will permit reliable biomass es timates, but also a reduction of the costs in the sampling activities in the field

The WINPack 1 a novel wearable system for heart rate and vital signs monitoring

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Electricity from Wood: A Wood Quality and Energy Efficiency Approach to Small Scale Pyro-gasification

AbstractThe global demand for renewable energy in the last years is facing innovations like the co-generation of electricity and heat from wooden industrial residues and biomass. Wood gasification is a very promising technique for conversion of wood chemical energy into thermal energy and into electricity. A new generation of small scale, moderately priced and easy to install pyro-gasification plants became available on the market, being an opportunity for the SMEs. These systems are also characterized by a remarkable operational easiness and great versatility in the type of used biomass, which can range from industrial residues (sawdust, wood chips...) to biomass of forestry and non-forestry origin. This study performed an extensive testing of a small size pyro-gasification plant capable of producing 30kW of electricity and 30kW of thermal energy, both net to enter in the network of GSE (Energy Services Manager) via the feed-in tariff and in a small district heating network or other uses. The process of pyro-gasification is analyzed in its entirety by a characterization of input biomass, pyro-gasification process monitoring, analysis of the quality of the produced syngas, characterization of residues due to the process (washing water smoke, charcoal...) and verification of the total efficiency. The electric efficiency of the system, from hardwood to syngas to electricity is quantified in being 12%

PrP Gene Polymorphism in Medieval Remains of Sicilian Sheep

Encephalopathy in sheep was at first described in Ireland in 1732 and was called scrapie. Ancient DNA in archaeogenetics represents an effective method to evaluate the ancestral pedigree of living animals and track evolutionary changes occurred between the past and the present day. Since several point mutations are today widely described in modern scrapie, no data about both sequence and frequency are still available for the prion protein (PrP) gene in ancient breeds. In order to evaluate whether the haplotypes distribution in ancient sheep differed from those of the modern population we evaluated polymorphism at four well know codons of the Prp Open Reading Frame. In the present work, we collected 37 medieval sheep bone remains found at the Calathamet (n = 11), Palazzo Bonagia (n = 12) and Palazzo Steri (n = 14) Sicilians archeological sites and dated back between 9th - 15th century. Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) at codons 136, 141, 154 and 171 of the prion protein (PrP) were investigated using cycle sequencing. Sequenom Mass ARRAYiPLEX platform confirmed the results for 5 individuals out of 37. Cycle sequencing showed at all samples the AA136LL141RR154QQ171 (hereafter ALRQ/ALRQ) genotype except at 2 individuals showing the very susceptible genotype VLRQ/VLRQ (n = 1) and the resistant (ALRR/ ALRR) (n = 1) respectively. Supported by a high incidence of susceptible genotype to prion infection we concluded that presumably scrapie was already widespread enough in the medieval Sicily. Moreover, we described conceivable scenarios that could have underlain evolutionary changes in the medieval sheep population

Development of an electrochemical aptasensor for the detection of human osteopontin

Electrochemical aptasensors, an emerging technology, enables the detection of protein biomarkers, which may be indicative of tumour activity. Osteopontin is a protein present in body fluids, being a possible biomarker since its overexpression has been related with breast cancer progression. An \RNA\ aptamer, described in the literature, with affinity for human osteopontin, was synthetized, immobilized in a microelectrode gold surface and used for development electrochemical aptasensor for human \OPN\ detection in standard solutions. Cyclic voltammetry results showed that this aptasensor allowed detecting human osteopontin with a detection limit of 8 nM, showing a satisfactory selectivity towards the target in the presence of others proteins, except for thrombin

Designing Sustainable Clothing Systems. The design for environmentally sustainable textile clothes and its Product-Service Systems

The Fashion System is at the center of the international debate as one of the most polluting and most impactful industries on the environment. In the last decade the fashion industry has changed, and is still modifying, its approach, aware of the fact that the attention to the environment can no longer be considered a trend: the entire system needs to find and adopt a methodological approach to the project and to the production of goods and services. Today all the stakeholders on the supply chain follow a path from upstream to downstream: from the treatment of pollution, to the intervention on the production processes that generate a product, to the redesign of products and/or services to reach the discussion and reorientation of social behavior. This path shows the need to intervene in design terms and that the growth in responsibility and role of design, requiring reference scenarios, knowledge and new tools. The book defines the features and scenarios of sustainable development, as well as the evolution of sustainability in research and practice of fashion design, addressing the strategies for the design and development of environmentally sustainable products. The authors describe the Life Cycle Design approach and the strategies and guidelines for integrating environmental requirements into product design for sustainable fashion. They present the so-called Systems of Sustainable Products-Services, namely the most promising scenarios and models to make design for sustainable fashion economically convenient. Finally, they provide a method and related tools to support design for sustainable fashion in the evaluation of the environmental impact of products, with particular emphasis on the LCA (Life Cycle Assessment). The text is enriched by a full-bodied review of interviews and case studies, with the dual purpose of making the design options clear and of highlighting their specificity for the different design contexts

Abel-Jacobi maps for hypersurfaces and non commutative Calabi-Yau's

It is well known that the Fano scheme of lines on a cubic 4-fold is a symplectic variety. We generalize this fact by constructing a closed p-form with p=2n-4 on the Fano scheme of lines on a (2n-2)-dimensional hypersurface Y of degree n. We provide several definitions of this form - via the Abel-Jacobi map, via Hochschild homology, and via the linkage class, and compute it explicitly for n = 4. In the special case of a Pfaffian hypersurface Y we show that the Fano scheme is birational to a certain moduli space of sheaves on a p-dimensional Calabi--Yau variety X arising naturally in the context of homological projective duality, and that the constructed form is induced by the holomorphic volume form on X. This remains true for a general non Pfaffian hypersurface but the dual Calabi-Yau becomes non commutative.Comment: 34 pages; exposition of Hochschild homology expanded; references added; introduction re-written; some imrecisions, typos and the orbit diagram in the last section correcte