Sequential modular position and momentum measurements of a trapped ion mechanical oscillator

The non-commutativity of position and momentum observables is a hallmark feature of quantum physics. However this incompatibility does not extend to observables which are periodic in these base variables. Such modular-variable observables have been suggested as tools for fault-tolerant quantum computing and enhanced quantum sensing. Here we implement sequential measurements of modular variables in the oscillatory motion of a single trapped ion, using state-dependent displacements and a heralded non-destructive readout. We investigate the commutative nature of modular variable observables by demonstrating no-signaling-in-time between successive measurements, using a variety of input states. In the presence of quantum interference, which we enhance using squeezed input states, measurements of different periodicity show signaling-in-time. The sequential measurements allow us to extract two-time correlators for modular variables, which we use to violate a Leggett-Garg inequality. The experiments involve control and coherence of multi-component superpositions of up to 8 coherent, squeezed or Fock state wave-packets. Signaling-in-time as well as Leggett-Garg inequalities serve as efficient quantum witnesses which we probe here with a mechanical oscillator, a system which has a natural crossover from the quantum to the classical regime.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures and supplemental informatio

Caring for people with disabilities: a comparison of medical training at allopathic and osteopathic medical schools

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston UniversityOBJECTIVE: To determine the proportion of osteopathic and allopathic medical schools that offer courses and clerkships related to the care of people with disabilities. DESIGN: Faculty members from 28 osteopathic schools and 28 allopathic medical schools were asked to complete a short survey that contained objective and subjective questions about the availability of curriculum offerings related to caring for people with disabilities at their institution. RESULTS: We found no statistically significant differences between measures in the survey which might have suggested that there was a difference between the proportion of osteopathic and allopathic schools that provide coursework related to the care of people with disabilities. However, we found that 50% of osteopathic schools offer a course or clerkship that is primarily devoted to this subject, compared with 40% of allopathic schools. Additionally, 86% of osteopathic schools offer a course or clerkship that is partially related to this subject, compared to 88% of allopathic schools. DISCUSSION: Osteopathic and allopathic institutions are similarly equipped to train their students to treat patients with disabilities, as indicated by the fact that none of the measured differences reached statistical significance. The data suggest that 9-12% of medical students were required to participate in a course or clerkship that is primarily focused on care for people with disabilities, and 66- 77% of medical students will be required to participate in a course that contains material related to this subject. CONCLUSION: Although less than 100% of medical students graduate with experience related to treating people with disabilities, the fact that medical faculty realize the importance of this issue and that the majority of schools require students to participate with some experience suggests that the medical world is responding to this important issue

Synthetic cathinones related fatalities: an update

Synthetic cathinones, more commonly known as "bath salts", are synthetic drugs chemically related to cathinone, a psychostimulant found in the khat plant. They are the first most consumed products among new psychoactive substances, which cause psychostimulant and hallucinogenic effects determining a number of fatalities worldwide.  In this paper, we have systematically reviewed cases of synthetic cathinones-related fatalities analytically confirmed, which have occurred in the last few years.OBJECTIVE: Synthetic cathinones, more commonly known as “bath salts”, are synthetic drugs chemically related to cathinone, a psychostimulant found in the khat plant. They are the first most consumed products among new psychoactive substances, which cause psychostimulant and hallucinogenic effects determining a number of fatalities worldwide. In this paper, we have systematically reviewed cases of synthetic cathinones-related fatalities analytically confirmed, which have occurred in the last few years. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Relevant scientific articles were identified in Medline, Cochrane Central, Scopus, Web of Science and Institutional/ government websites up to November 2017 using the following keywords: synthetic cathinones, mephedrone, methylenedioxypyrovalerone, MDPV, methylone, ethylone, buthylone, fatal intoxication, fatalities and death. RESULTS: In total, 20 citations met the criteria for inclusion, representing several fatal cases with analytically confirmed synthetic cathinones in biological sample/s of the deceased. The death was attributed to hyperthermia, hypertension, cardiac arrest and more in general to the classic serotonin syndrome. Only rarely did the concentration of the parent drug causing fatality overcome the value of 1 mg/L in post-mortem biological fluids. CONCLUSIONS: Abuse of synthetic cathinones still represents a serious public health issue. Systematic clinical studies on both the animal and human model are lacking; therefore, the only available data are from the users who experience the possible hazardous consequences. Analytical methodologies for the identification of parent compounds and eventual metabolites both in ante-mortem and post-mortem cases need to be developed and validated. Analytical data should be shared through different communication platforms with the aim of stopping this serious health threat for drug users

Assisted suicide: article 17 of the Italian Code of Medical Ethics follows in the footsteps of the Italian Constitutional Court's landmark ruling

Less than a year ago, on September 25th 2019, the Italian Constitutional Court issued a landmark decision on assistance in dying, thus setting a long-awaited standard in terms of regulating assisted suicide1 . The ruling related to the case of Fabiano Antoniani, also known as DJ Fabo, a man in his forties who had made a pondered, steadfast decision to receive assistance in dying at a Swiss euthanasia clinic in 2017. Fabiano was left blind and tetraplegic in the aftermath of a catastrophic road accident in 2014. His death has since become the subject of heated debate in a country, such as Italy, where euthanasia, whether active (i.e., doctors actively causing the patient’s death) or passive (the self-administration by the patient of lethal drugs to end his or her life, the way Fabiano ended his), is adamantly opposed by the Catholic Church. Italy’s Constitutional Court has made it clear that euthanasia should be permitted by law in certain circumstances, including those in which a patient’s irreversible condition was “causing physical and psychological suffering that he or she considers intolerable”. The court’s ruling was centered around assisted dying and the “legal framework concerning end of life [situations]”. A request had in fact been made by a Milan court to provide a clear interpretation of the law in the trial against pro-euthanasia politician, activist and campaigner Marco Cappato, who had actively helped Antoniani with his journey to a Swiss clinic which provides assisted suicide

Editorial: XXXIII SIMGBM Congress 2019 - Antimicrobials and Host-Pathogen Interactions

This Research Topic (RT) is intended to provide a collection of selected contributions in the broad area “Antimicrobials and Host-Pathogen Interactions” from the participants of “Microbiology 2019” congress organized by the Italian Society for General Microbiology and Microbial Biotechnology (SIMGBM, www.simgbm.it), which was held in Florence, Italy, on June 19–22, 2019. The congress was attended by 224 scientists from all over the world, and contributions relevant to this RT were collected from presentations in the following congress sessions: (i) Antibiotic resistome: where do antibiotic resistance genes come from? (ii) New antimicrobial strategies in the post-antibiotic era; (iii) Intercellular communication in host-pathogen interactions; (iv) New approaches to unravel fungal-host interactions; (v) Bacterial cell surface and signaling. The unifying concept of this RT originates from the increasing awareness that antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a complex problem which should be addressed by a multifocal approach. Fundamental microbiological investigations in this direction involve understanding of the flow of AMR genes from the environment to human and animal pathogens, the development of new drugs to tackle AMR, and the discovery of new druggable targets to impairmicrobial growth and/or pathogenicity

Acoustic neutrino detection in a Adriatic multidisciplinary observatory (ANDIAMO)

The existence of cosmic accelerators able to emit charged particles up to ZeV energies has been confirmed by the observations made in the last years by experiments such as Auger and Telescope Array. The interaction of such energetic cosmic-rays with gas or low energy photons, surrounding the astrophysical sources or present in the intergalactic medium, guarantee an ultra-high-energy neutrino related emission. When these energetic neutrinos interact in a medium produce a thermo-acoustic process where the energy of generated particle cascades can be conveyed in a pressure pulse propagating into the same medium. The kilometric attenuation length as well as the well-defined shape of the expected pulse suggest a large-area-undersea-array of acoustic sensors as an ideal observatory. For this scope, we propose to exploit the existing and no more operative offshore (oil rigs) powered platforms in the Adriatic sea as the main infrastructure to build an acoustic submarine array of dedicated hydrophones covering a surface area up to 10000 km2 and a volume up to 500 km3. In this work we describe the advantages of this detector concept using a ray tracing technique as well as the scientific goals linked to the challenging purpose of observing for the first time ultra-high-energy cosmic neutrinos. This observatory will be complementary to the dedicated radio array detectors with the advantages of avoiding any possible thermo-acoustic noise from the atmospheric muons

A modelling study of discontinuous biological irrigation

Irrigation of infaunal dwellings can lead to significant alteration of solute distributions in sediments. As a result, sediment-seawater fluxes of nutrients and dissolved carbon are greatly enhanced, and the biology of benthic communities is affected. The most realistic mathematical representation of irrigation and its effect on sediment geochemistry is Aller\u27s (1980) cylinder model. One critical assumption of this model is that burrows are irrigated continually, and that burrow water solute concentrations are identical to overlying water concentrations at all times. However, the vast majority of infaunal tube- and burrow-dwelling organisms irrigate periodically, i.e. in an on/off cycle. During periodic irrigation, the solute concentration at the tube wall may vary between the limits imposed by the flux from the porewater and the concentration in the overlying water. We introduce modifications to the cylinder model which allow for periodic irrigation. We assess how periodic irrigation affects solute profiles and fluxes of two chemical constituents, silica and ammonium, for different population densities (distance between burrows) and organism sizes (burrow radii). Silica and ammonium follow first and zeroth order reaction kinetics, respectively, and illustrate the behavior of two general reaction classes. Model results show that the effects of periodic irrigation vary with the class of reaction considered. For silica, radially-averaged profiles during discontinuous irrigation varied less than 15% from those with continuous irrigation for nearly all burrow sizes, burrow distances and reaction rate constants considered. However, we observed large temporal changes (as much as a factor of 6) in the areally-averaged silica flux over the irrigation cycle. Despite this time-dependence, the time-averaged silica flux was similar to that calculated for the continuous case. For ammonia, radially-averaged solute profiles were extremely sensitive to the duration of irrigation. In this case, the differences between discontinuous and continuous irrigation were greatest when the duration of irrigation was short (e.g. 5 min), and when the inter-burrow distance was small. As with silica, there was a strong time-dependence in areally-averaged ammonia flux when irrigation was periodic. However, the time-averaged ammonia flux is identical to the flux calculated for continuous irrigation. Our results suggest that irrigation behavior can affect the local burrow environment and this imposes a time dependence on solute fluxes

Hepatotoxicity induced by greater celandine (Chelidonium majus L.): a review of the literature

The available literature assessing Chelidonium majus L. (CM) hepatotoxicity potential, and its risk to benefit assessment has been reviewed in this paper. Identification of significant scientific literature was performed via the following research databases: Cochrane Central, Google Scholar, EMBASE, Medline, Science Direct, Scopus, Web of Science, using the following keywords: "Chelidonium majus", "greater celandine", "Hepatotoxicity", "Liver" "Injury", "Toxicity" individually investigated and then again in association. CM named also greater celandine, swallow-wort, or bai-qu-cai (Chinese), has been used for a long time in traditional Chinese medicine and phytotherapy. Its extracts have been claimed to display a wide variety of biological activities: antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, spasmolytic, antineoplastic, hepatoprotective, and analgesic. Moreover, herbal medicine suggests this plant have numerous additional effects which have not yet been scientifically evaluated, such as antitussive, diuretic, and eye-regenerative. However, despite its claimed hepatoprotective effects, several hepatotoxicity cases have been reported to be probably or highly probably connected with CM exposure, after their evaluation through liver-targeted causality assessment methods. CM hepatotoxicity has been defined as a distinct form of herb-induced liver injury (HILI), due to an idiosyncratic reaction of the metabolic type. This evidence has to be considered in relationship with the absence of considerable benefits of CM therapy. Therefore, the risk to benefit ratio of the use of herbal products containing greater celandine can actually be considered as negative

An experimental and modeling study of pH and related solutes in an irrigated anoxic coastal sediment

Macrofaunal irrigation is an important process in nearshore sediments, facilitating greater exchange between sediments and seawater and imparting significant lateral heterogeneity to the porewater profiles of many constituents. Like many macrofaunal activities, irrigation is a transient behavior, i.e. tubes and burrows are flushed periodically, at frequencies that generally are species-specific. As a result, transient concentrations within the dwelling arise, potentially impacting gradients, fluxes and reaction rates in the vicinity of the dwelling. We investigated the impact of periodic burrow irrigation on the distribution of several diagenetically important porewater constituents. Laboratory experiments evaluated irrigation periodicity using artificially irrigated tubes embedded in nearshore organic-rich sediments, and microdistributions of oxygen and pH in laboratory experiments were measured with microelectrodes. To help interpret our results, we also constructed a simplified time and space-dependent transport-reaction model for oxygen, pH and sulfide in irrigated sediments. Laboratory results show substantial differences in the pH field of sediments surrounding an irrigated tube as a function of irrigation frequency. Higher pH values, indicative of an overlying water signature, were observed in the vicinity of the tube wall with increasing duration of irrigation. Conversely, oxygen concentrations did not vary significantly with the amount of irrigation, most likely a result of extremely high sediment oxygen demand. Model results are consistent with laboratory findings in predicting differences in the measured variables as a function of irrigation frequency. However, the nature and extent of the model-predicted differences are often at variance with the experimental data. Overall, experimental and modeling results both suggest irrigation periodicity can substantially influence porewater distributions and diagenetic processes in sediments. Future studies should examine the influence of irrigation periodicity on the types and rates of reactions, and the attendant biological features, in the environment encompassing the tube or burrow wall