A portable laser system for high precision atom interferometry experiments

We present a modular rack-mounted laser system for the cooling and manipulation of neutral rubidium atoms which has been developed for a portable gravimeter based on atom interferometry that will be capable of performing high precision gravity measurements directly at sites of geophysical interest. This laser system is constructed in a compact and mobile design so that it can be transported to different locations, yet it still offers improvements over many conventional laboratory-based laser systems. Our system is contained in a standard 19" rack and emits light at five different frequencies simultaneously on up to 12 fibre ports at a total output power of 800 mW. These frequencies can be changed and switched between ports in less than a microsecond. The setup includes two phase-locked diode lasers with a phase noise spectral density of less than 1 \mu rad/sqrt(Hz) in the frequency range in which our gravimeter is most sensitive to noise. We characterize this laser system and evaluate the performance limits it imposes on an interferometer.Comment: 8 pages, 11 figures; The final publication is available at http://www.springerlink.co

D-mannose: a promising support for acute urinary tract infections in women. A pilot study

Urinary tract infections still represent a significant bother for women and result in high costs to the health system. D-mannose is a simple sugar; it seems able to hinder bacteria adhesion to the urothelium. The present study aimed to determine whether D-mannose alone is effective in treating acute urinary tract infections in women and its possible utility in the management of recurrences

Implementing BDI Continual Temporal Planning for Robotic Agents

Making autonomous agents effective in real-life applications requires the ability to decide at run-time and a high degree of adaptability to unpredictable and uncontrollable events. Reacting to events is still a fundamental ability for an agent, but it has to be boosted up with proactive behaviors that allow the agent to explore alternatives and decide at run-time for optimal solutions. This calls for a continuous planning as part of the deliberation process that makes an agent able to reconsider plans on the base of temporal constraints and changes of the environment. Online planning literature offers several approaches used to select the next action on the base of a partial exploration of the solution space. In this paper, we propose a BDI continuous temporal planning framework, where interleave planning and execution loop is used to integrate online planning with the BDI control-loop. The framework has been implemented with the ROS2 robotic framework and planning algorithms offered by JavaFF

Applying social norms to implicit negotiation among Non-Player Characters in serious games

Abstract-Believable Non Player Characters (NPCs), i.e. artificial characters simulating rational entities, are a great addition to videogames, no matter if used for entertainment or serious reasons. Especially NPCs that represent people in realistic settings need to show plausible behaviors; to this end, one of main issues to be tackled is coordination with other participants, either other NPCs or human players, when performing everyday tasks such as crossing doors, queuing at an office, picking the first free object up from a set, and so on. Much of this coordination happens silently and is driven by social norms that may vary according to culture and context. In this paper, we propose an approach to represent social norms in autonomous agents and enable implicit coordination driven by observations of others' behavior. Our approach does not use central coordinators or a coordination protocol, but rather let each agent take its own decision so to support more realistic interactions with human players. A software architecture and initial experimental results are presented and discussed

Technology and Process Design for Phenols Recovery from Industrial Chicory (Chicorium intybus) Leftovers

Vegetal leftovers from the agro–food industry represent a huge source of primary and secondary metabolites, vitamin, mineral salts and soluble as well as insoluble fibers. Economic reports on the growth in the polyphenol market have driven us to focus our investigation on chicory (Chicorium intybus L.), which is one of the most popular horticultural plants in the world and a rich source of phenolic compounds. Ultrasound-assisted extraction (UAE), microwave-assisted extraction (MAE) and their simultaneous combination, using either ethanol/water or water alone (also sub-critical), have been investigated with the aim of designing a green and efficient extraction process. Higher total-polyphenol yields as well as dramatic reductions in extraction times and solvent consumption have been obtained under these conditions. ANOVA test for analyses of variance followed by the Tukey honestly significant difference (HSD) post-hoc test of multiple comparisons was used in the statistical analysis. MAE experiments performed with sub-critical water, and MW/US experiments with an ethanol solution have shown polyphenol recovery values of up to ~3 g of gallic acid equivalents (GAE) per kg of fresh material in only 15 min, while conventional extraction required 240 min to obtain the same result