Orangulas: effect of scheduled visual enrichment on behavioral and endocrine aspects of a captive orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus)

Captivity may have adverse effects on captive great apes, as they spend much more of their time engaged in foraging and other activities in the wild. Enrichment interventions have the potential to alleviate the adverse effects of captivity by introducing novel stimuli. In orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus), interactive digital enrichment has proven effective at engaging users out of their own free will, in exchange for nothing but the experience. This article reports the results of scheduled visual enrichment in the form of “orangulas”—one-hour long videos of footage consisting mainly of open spaces in different environments, with which the pongid participant could engage at free will. The efficacy of the orangulas were measured with both behavioural and endocrine measurements, concluding that scheduled visual enrichment has the potential to improve the welfare of captive orangutans by providing novel stimuli in the context of largely stable environments

Machine Learning Algorithm for the Scansion of Old Saxon Poetry

Several scholars designed tools to perform the automatic scansion of poetry in many languages, but none of these tools deal with Old Saxon or Old English. This project aims to be a first attempt to create a tool for these languages. We implemented a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) model to perform the automatic scansion of Old Saxon and Old English poems. Since this model uses supervised learning, we manually annotated the Heliand manuscript, and we used the resulting corpus as labeled dataset to train the model. The evaluation of the performance of the algorithm reached a 97% for the accuracy and a 99% of weighted average for precision, recall and F1 Score. In addition, we tested the model with some verses from the Old Saxon Genesis and some from The Battle of Brunanburh, and we observed that the model predicted almost all Old Saxon metrical patterns correctly misclassified the majority of the Old English input verses

Training Teachers as Health Promoters

In the context of the global changes that affect families and communities, including the current COVID-19 pandemic, today's young people face new threats to their health and most of them lack adequate nutrition, healthcare services and education. As children and adolescents spend a significant amount of their time at school (or remotely connected with teachers, as occurred in these last months of health emergency), educators have the great opportunity to positively contribute to their global growth, fostering physical, mental and social wellbeing, which has also a significant impact on students' academic achievements. Nowadays, training teachers as "health promoters" allows educational system to deal more effectively with health needs of the students, helping them in the prevention of risky behaviours (cigarette smoking, binge drinking, drug use etc). According to the recommendations provided by the World Health Organization and UNESCO, we highlight the need for pre-service and in-service teacher training on the major topics concerning young people health, as well as COVID-19 safety issues. Moreover, teachers should be trained on the most participatory and pro-active methodologies to effectively convey health-related contents in school setting, in order to trigger a personal interiorization of the knowledge acquired by the students, and to engage them in practical actions about healthy lifestyles (i.e. balanced nutrition and physical exercise, no smoking, no alcohol, no drugs). Teacher training on health topics enables educators to develop a new professional identity based on a health-centered vision, in the perspective of reducing social/health inequalities that still concern most disadvantaged children. Medical professionals and pedagogists could be appointed as available consultants respectively for training teachers on health contents and about the most effective didactic strategies useful for displaying educational interventions in school setting aimed at preventing unhealthy habits among young people. Health education should be included in scholastic curricula within scientific disciplines or treated as separate subject in extracurricular activities under direct responsibility of school staff

Clinical signs, telemedicine and online consultations in head and neck diseases during the SARS CoV-2 pandemic: an Italian experience

SUMMARY Objective. The aim of this paper is to describe the application of a telemedicine (TM) syn-chronous model designed to deliver care during the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic to patients with head and neck disease. Methods. The first step was to identify the classes of patients eligible for tele-examination. Mild, flu-like symptomatology represents the characteristics of the typical patient who is a candidate for tele-examination. The standard requirements for TM include a computer associated with a digital camera, alternatively a smartphone or tablet. The TM platform is based on the Lifesize™ software, which can be freely downloaded. Results. The overall number of teleconsultations was 178, of which 163 (91.5%) were man-aged at home, while 15 (8.5%) were invited for in-presence examination. The number of patients coming from general practitioners was 98 (55.1%), from spoke units 52 (29.2%), patients needing prompt stabilisation and transfer to the hub centre were 20 (11.2%,) while 8 (4.5%) were immediately fast-tracked in the spoke unit after multi-professional tele-con-sultation. Conclusions. Telemedicine improves organisational models, and provides a scalable solu-tion to overcome problems of overcrowding, resources and time. Should these develop-ments continue, we could face to a gradual transition to a more digital and efficient health-care system

Trends of Phase I Clinical Trials in the Latest Ten Years across Five European Countries

Phase 1 clinical trials represent a critical phase of drug development because new candidate therapeutic agents are tested for the first time on humans. Therefore, international guidelines and local laws have been released to mitigate and control possible risks for human health in agreement with the declaration of Helsinki and the international Good Clinical Practice principles. Despite numerous scientific works characterizing the registered clinical trials on ClinicalTrials.gov, the main features and trends of registered phase 1 clinical trials in Europe have not been investigated. This study is aimed at assessing the features and the temporal trend of distribution of phase 1 clinical studies, carried out in the five largest European countries over a ten-year period (2012-2021), and to evaluate the impact of the Italian regulatory framework on the activation of such studies

The role of outdoor and indoor air quality in the spread of SARS-CoV-2: Overview and recommendations by the research group on COVID-19 and particulate matter (RESCOP commission)

There are important questions surrounding the potential contribution of outdoor and indoor air quality in the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and perpetuation of COVID-19 epidemic waves. Environmental health may be a critical component of COVID-19 prevention. The public health community and health agencies should consider the evolving evidence in their recommendations and statements, and work to issue occupational guidelines. Evidence coming from the current epidemiological and experimental research is expected to add knowledge about virus diffusion, COVID-19 severity in most polluted areas, inter-personal distance requirements and need for wearing face masks in indoor or outdoor environments. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for maintaining particulate matter concentrations at low levels for multiple health-related reasons, which may also include the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Indoor environments represent even a more crucial challenge to cope with, as it is easier for the SARS-COV2 to spread, remain vital and infect other subjects in closed spaces in the presence of already infected asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic people. The potential merits of preventive measures, such as CO2 monitoring associated with natural or controlled mechanical ventilation and air purification, for schools, indoor public places (restaurants, offices, hotels, museums, theatres/cinemas etc.) and transportations need to be carefully considered. Hospital settings and nursing/retirement homes as well as emergency rooms, infectious diseases divisions and ambulances represent higher risk indoor environments and may require additional monitoring and specific decontamination strategies based on mechanical ventilation or air purificatio

Environmental Issues and Neurological Manifestations Associated with COVID-19 Pandemic: New Aspects of the Disease?

Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) emerged in China in December 2019 and rapidly caused a global health pandemic. Current evidence seems to suggest a possible link with ecosystem disequilibrium and even air pollution. The primary manifestations affect respiratory and circulatory systems, but neurological features are also being reported through case reports and case series. We summarize neurological symptoms and complications associated with COVID-19. We have searched for original articles published in PubMed/Medline, PubMed Central and Google Scholar using the following keywords: "COVID-19", "Coronavirus", "pandemic", "SARS-COV-2", "neurology", "neurological", "complications" and "manifestations". We found around 1000 publications addressing the issue of neurological conditions associated with COVID-19 infection. Amongst those, headache and dizziness are the most common reported symptoms followed by encephalopathy and delirium, while the most frequent complications are cerebrovascular accidents, Guillain-Barré syndrome, acute transverse myelitis, and acute encephalitis. Specific symptoms affecting the peripheral nervous system such as hyposmia and dysgeusia are the most common manifestations recorded in the selected studies. Interestingly, it was noted that these kinds of neurological symptoms might precede the typical features, such as fever and cough, in COVID patients. Neurological symptoms and complications associated with COVID-19 should be considered as a part of the clinical features of this novel global pandemic

Evaluation of Radon Exposure Risk and Lung Cancer Incidence/Mortality in South-Eastern Italy

Introduction: Radon and its decay products may cause substantial health damage after long-term exposure. The aim of the study was to perform a spatial analysis of radon concentration in the Salento peninsula, province of Lecce (South-eastern Italy) in order to better characterize possible risk for human health, with specific focus on lung cancer.Methods: Based on previous radon monitoring campaigns carried out in 2006 on behalf of the Local Health Authority (ASL Lecce) involving 419 schools and through the application of kriging estimation method, a radon risk map was obtained for the province of Lecce, in order to determine if areas with higher radon concentrations were overlapping with those characterized by the highest pulmonary cancer incidence and mortality rates.Results: According to our data, areas at higher radon concentrations seem to overlap with those characterized by the highest pulmonary cancer mortality and incidence rates, thus indicating that human exposure to radon could possibly enhance other individual or environmental pro-carcinogenic risk factors (i.e. cigarette smoking, air pollution and other exposures).Conclusions: The radon risk should be further assessed in the evaluation of the causes resulting in higher mortality and incidence rates for pulmonary cancer in Salento area vs Italian average national data. For these reasons, ASL Lecce in cooperation with ARPA Puglia and CNR-IFC has included the monitoring of individual indoor radon concentrations in the protocol of PROTOS case-control Study, aimed at investigating the role of different personal and environmental risk factors for lung cancer in Salento

Forecasting Covid-19 dynamics in Brazil : a data driven approach

The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, a new data driven approach for predicting the Covid-19 pandemic dynamics is introduced. The second contribution consists in reporting and discussing the results that were obtained with this approach for the Brazilian states, with predictions starting as of 4 May 2020. As a preliminary study, we first used an Long Short Term Memory for Data Training-SAE (LSTM-SAE) network model. Although this first approach led to somewhat disappointing results, it served as a good baseline for testing other ANN types. Subsequently, in order to identify relevant countries and regions to be used for training ANN models, we conduct a clustering of the world’s regions where the pandemic is at an advanced stage. This clustering is based on manually engineered features representing a country’s response to the early spread of the pandemic, and the different clusters obtained are used to select the relevant countries for training the models. The final models retained are Modified Auto-Encoder networks, that are trained on these clusters and learn to predict future data for Brazilian states. These predictions are used to estimate important statistics about the disease, such as peaks and number of confirmed cases. Finally, curve fitting is carried out to find the distribution that best fits the outputs of the MAE, and to refine the estimates of the peaks of the pandemic. Predicted numbers reach a total of more than one million infected Brazilians, distributed among the different states, with São Paulo leading with about 150 thousand confirmed cases predicted. The results indicate that the pandemic is still growing in Brazil, with most states peaks of infection estimated in the second half of May 2020. The estimated end of the pandemics (97% of cases reaching an outcome) spread between June and the end of August 2020, depending on the states