Performances of the Italian seismic network, 1985-2002: the hidden thing

Seismic data users and people managing a sesimic network are both interested in the potentiality of the data, with the difference that the former look at stability, the second at improvements. In this work we measure the performances of the Italian Telemetered Seismic Network in 1985-2002 by defining basic significant parameters and studying their evolution during the years. Then, we deal with the geological methods used to characterise or to plan a seismic station deployment in a few cases. Last, we define the gain of the network as the percentage of located earthquakes with respect to the total recorded earthquakes. By analysing the distribution of non-located ("missed") earthquakes, we suggest possible actions to take in order to increase the gain. Results show that completeness magnitude is 2.4 in the average over the analysed period, and it can be as low as 2.2 when we consider non-located earthquakes as well. Parameters such as the distance between an earthquake and the closest station, and the RMS location decrease with time, reflecting improvements in the location quality. Methods for geologic and seismological characterisation of a possible station site also proved to be effective. Finally, we represent the number of missed earthquakes at each station, showing that nine stations control more that 50% of all missed earthquakes, and suggesting areas in Italy where the network might be easily improved.Comment: 17 pages, 1 table, 11 figures. Submitted to Annals of Geophysic

CVD nano-coating of carbon composites for space materials atomic oxygen shielding

The present work analyzes the possibility to employ carbon nanostructures as a basic material to prevent the erosion effects of atomic oxygen suffered by the carbon fiber reinforced polymeric material used in low earth orbit space environment. The application of thin protecting coatings to base materials is a widely used method for preventing the atomic oxygen induced erosion, and thus degradation. The generic purpose is to integrate carbon nanostructures onto carbon composites surface in order to develop the basic substrate of advanced nanocomposite for atomic oxygen protection. The final goal is the characterization of carbon nanostructures-reinforced carbon composites by means of on-ground atomic oxygen simulation facility, with the future objective to assess and optimize the process of carbon-multiscale advanced composites production. With such an aim, a wide investigation on the methane chemical vapor deposition (CVD) over catalyzed carbon fiber-based substrates has been carried out. The as grown nanostructures have been analyzed in terms of morphology, as well as regarding the main features of the resulting growth (yield, purity, homogeneity, coating uniformity, etc.) and the influence of the deposition route operating parameters (catalyst typology, gas flowing rate, growth time/temperature, etc.). A high degree of reproducibility in terms of the relationship between the carbon deposit type/yield and the main process variables (catalyst and protocol) has been thus obtained. Finally, atomic oxygen ground tests have been conducted in order to evaluate the coating process effectiveness. The on-ground test in atomic oxygen environment, with respect to the performances of the reference carbon composites (in terms of total mass loss and atomic oxygen rate of erosion), showed a worsening for the disordered carbon deposit, while an intriguing improvement was achieved by the high-yield carbon nano-filaments deposition

Variabilità dei principi attivi in <i>Hypericum perforatum</i> L. vegetante in Sardegna

Vista la grande importanza farmacologica che sta rivestendo l’estratto d’iperico nella cura della depressione (2-3) abbiamo ritenuto interessante indagare la specie spontanea presente in Sardegna. Le analisi sono state effettuate via HPLC

Sharing Cultural Heritage: the Clavius on the Web Project

In the last few years the amount of manuscripts digitized and made available on the Web has been constantly increasing. However, there is still a considarable lack of results concerning both the explicitation of their content and the tools developed to make it available. The objective of the Clavius on the Web project is to develop a Web platform exposing a selection of Christophorus Clavius letters along with three different levels of analysis: linguistic, lexical and semantic. The multilayered annotation of the corpus involves a XML-TEI encoding followed by a tokenization step where each token is univocally identified through a CTS urn notation and then associated to a part-of-speech and a lemma. The text is lexically and semantically annotated on the basis of a lexicon and a domain ontology, the former structuring the most relevant terms occurring in the text and the latter representing the domain entities of interest (e.g. people, places, etc.). Moreover, each entity is connected to linked and non linked resources, including DBpedia and VIAF. Finally, the results of the three layers of analysis are gathered and shown through interactive visualization and storytelling techniques. A demo version of the integrated architecture was developed

Variabilità dell'olio essenziale di <i>Helichrysum italicum</i> (Roth) G. Don

Per lo studio dell'olio essenziale di Helichrysum italicum, sono state prese in considerazione varie stazioni di E. italicum (Roth) G. Don subsp. microphyllum (Willd.) Nyman vegetante allo stato spontaneo sia nel Nord che nel Sud della Sardegna. Le analisi sono state condotte via Gas-massa e ci hanno permesso di identificare 69 costituenti per un totale compreso tra il 92.9% ed il 99.9% dei costituenti totali

Perceived Parental Functioning, Self-Esteem, and Psychological Distress in Adults Whose Parents are Separated/Divorced

Objective. The objective of this research was to identify retrospectively the alienating behaviors and the parental bonding that occurred in an Italian sample of adults whose had parents separated or divorced and their associations with self-esteem and psychological distress. Methods. Four hundred seventy adults in Chieti, Italy, completed an anonymous and confidential survey regarding their childhood exposure to parental alienating behaviors (using the Baker Strategy Questionnaire), quality of the parent-child relationship (using Parental Bonding Instruments), self-esteem (using Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale), and global psychological distress (using Global Severity Index of Symptom Checklist-90-Revised). Results. About 80% of the sample reported some exposure to parental alienating behaviors; about 65-70% of the sample has perceived non optimal parenting by mother and by father; individuals who experienced affectionless control (low care and high overprotection) reported significantly higher exposure to parental loyalty conflict behaviors. Overall rates of reported exposure to low care, and overprotection and parental loyalty conflict behaviors were statistically significantly associated with self-esteem as well as the measure of current psychological distress. Results revealed that exposure to parental loyalty conflict behaviors and self-esteem were associated with psychological distress over and above the effects of parental bonding and age. Conclusions. The pattern of findings supports the theory that children exposed to dysfunctional parenting, and with low self-esteem are at risk for their long-term psychological functioning. Implications for health policy changes and strengthening social services are discussed

A new advanced railgun system for debris impact study

The growing quantity of debris in Earth orbit poses a danger to users of the orbital environment, such as spacecraft. It also increases the risk that humans or manmade structures could be impacted when objects reenter Earth's atmosphere. During the design of a spacecraft, a requirement may be specified for the surviv-ability of the spacecraft against Meteoroid / Orbital Debris (M/OD) impacts throughout the mission; further-more, the structure of a spacecraft is designed to insure its integrity during the launch and, if it is reusable, during descent, re-entry and landing. In addition, the structure has to provide required stiffness in order to allow for exact positioning of experiments and antennas, and it has to protect the payload against the space environment. In order to decrease the probability of spacecraft failure caused by M/OD, space maneuver is needed to avoid M/OD if the M/OD has dimensions larger than 10cm, but for M/OD with dimensions less than 1cm M/OD shields are needed for spacecrafts. It is therefore necessary to determine the impact-related failure mechanisms and associated ballistic limit equations (BLEs) for typical spacecraft components and subsys-tems. The methods that are used to obtain the ballistic limit equations are numerical simulations and la-borato-ry experiments. In order to perform an high energy ballistic characterization of layered structures, a new ad-vanced electromagnetic accelerator, called railgun, has been assembled and tuned. A railgun is an electrically powered electromagnetic projectile launcher. Such device is made up of a pair of parallel conducting rails, which a sliding metallic armature is accelerated along by the electromagnetic effect (Lorentz force) of a cur-rent that flows down one rail, into the armature and then back along the other rail, thanks to a high power pulse given by a bank of capacitors. A tunable power supplier is used to set the capacitors charging voltage at the desired level: in this way the Rail Gun energy can be tuned as a function of the desired bullet velocity. This facility is able to analyze both low and high velocity impacts. A numerical simulation is also performed by using the Ansys Autodyn code in order to analyze the damage. The experimental results and numerical simulations show that the railgun-device is a good candidate to perform impact testing of materials in the space debris energy range

Degradation rate of 5-fluorouracil in metastatic colorectal cancer. A new predictive outcome biomarker?

BACKGROUND: 5-FU based chemotherapy is the most common first line regimen used for metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC). Identification of predictive markers of response to chemotherapy is a challenging approach for drug selection. The present study analyzes the predictive role of 5-FU degradation rate (5-FUDR) and genetic polymorphisms (MTHFR, TSER, DPYD) on survival. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Genetic polymorphisms of MTHFR, TSER and DPYD, and the 5-FUDR of homogenous patients with mCRC were retrospectively studied. Genetic markers and the 5-FUDR were correlated with clinical outcome. RESULTS: 133 patients affected by mCRC, treated with fluoropyrimidine-based chemotherapy from 2009 to 2014, were evaluated. Patients were classified into three metabolic classes, according to normal distribution of 5-FUDR in more than 1000 patients, as previously published: poor-metabolizer (PM) with 5-FU-DR ≤ 0,85 ng/ml/106 cells/min (8 pts); normal metabolizer with 0,85 < 5-FU-DR < 2,2 ng/ml/106 cells/min (119 pts); ultra-rapid metabolizer (UM) with 5-FU-DR ≥ 2,2 ng/ml/106 cells/min (6 pts). PM and UM groups showed a longer PFS respect to normal metabolizer group (14.5 and 11 months respectively vs 8 months; p = 0.029). A higher G3-4 toxicity rate was observed in PM and UM, respect to normal metabolizer (50% in both PM and UM vs 18%; p = 0.019). No significant associations between genes polymorphisms and outcomes or toxicities were observed. CONCLUSION: 5-FUDR seems to be significantly involved in predicting survival of patients who underwent 5-FU based CHT for mCRC. Although our findings require confirmation in large prospective studies, they reinforce the concept that individual genetic variation may allow personalized selection of chemotherapy to optimize clinical outcomes

Tribological Behavior of Nano-Onions in Krytox 143AB Evaluated

Nanoparticles have been developed over the past 10 years and have found several applications. This work presents the use of carbon nano-onions as a potential oil additive for aerospace applications. Researchers at the NASA Glenn Research Center tested lubricant lifetimes in ambient air and ultrahigh vacuum and characterized the breakdown products of the friction and wear. These carbon nanoparticles can provide adequate lubrication very similar to that of graphitic material when run in air. Soot represents one of the very first nanostructured materials, although it has rarely been considered as such. Changes in the carbon nanostructure, resulting in increased graphitic layer plane length, correlate with reactivity loss. Upon heating spherically shaped nanometer-sized carbon black in the absence of oxidant, graphene sheets form, and the initial soot particle templates the growth of a graphitic particle into what is best described as a sphere with many flat sides having a hollow interior. Because there are no edge sites, these polygonal graphitic particles, or nano-onions, are relatively resistant to oxidation. Graphite is used as a solid lubricant because of its stability at moderately high temperatures. However, the temperature at which graphite oxidizes rapidly is strongly influenced by surface area. With the size of particles typically employed in lubrication, a great amount of thermal stability is lost because of size reduction either during preparation or during lubrication of contacting parts. Therefore, we have undertaken a study of the lubricating ability of graphitic nano-onions (ref. 1)

Ball Bearings Equipped for In Situ Lubrication on Demand

In situ systems that provide fresh lubricants to ball/race contacts on demand have been developed to prolong the operational lives of ball bearings. These systems were originally intended to be incorporated into ball bearings in mechanisms that are required to operate in outer space for years, in conditions in which lubricants tend to deteriorate and/or evaporate. These systems may also be useful for similarly prolonging bearing lifetimes on Earth. Reservoirs have been among the means used previously to resupply lubricants. Lubricant- resupply reservoirs are bulky and add complexity to bearing assemblies. In addition, such a reservoir cannot be turned on or off as needed: it supplies lubricant continuously, often leading to an excess of lubricant in the bearing. A lubricator of the present type includes a porous ring cartridge attached to the inner or the outer ring of a ball bearing (see Figure 1). Oil is stored in the porous cartridge and is released by heating the cartridge: Because the thermal expansion of the oil exceeds that of the cartridge, heating causes the ejection of some oil. A metal film can be deposited on a face of the cartridge to serve as an electrical-resistance heater. The heater can be activated in response to a measured increase in torque that signals depletion of oil from the bearing/race contacts. Because the oil has low surface tension and readily wets the bearing-ring material, it spreads over the bearing ring and eventually reaches the ball/race contacts. The Marangoni effect (a surface-tension gradient associated with a temperature gradient) is utilized to enhance the desired transfer of lubricant to the ball/race contacts during heating. For a test, a ball bearing designed for use at low speed was assembled without lubricant and equipped with a porous-ring lubricator, the resistance heater of which consumed a power of less than 1 W when triggered on by a torque-measuring device. In the test, a load of 20 lb (.89 N) was applied and the bearing was turned at a rate of 200 RPM. The lubricator control was turned on at the beginning of the test, turned off for about 800 seconds, then turned on again. As shown in Figure 2, the controlled lubricator stabilized the torque in a low range, starting immediately after initial turn-on and immediately after resumption of the lubricator control