Emerging infectious disease issues in blood safety.

Improvements in donor screening and testing and viral inactivation of plasma derivatives together have resulted in substantial declines in transfusion-transmitted infections over the last two decades. Most recently, nucleic acid testing techniques have been developed to screen blood and plasma donations for evidence of very recent viral infections that could be missed by conventional serologic tests. Nonetheless, the blood supply remains vulnerable to new and reemerging infections. In recent years, numerous infectious agents found worldwide have been identified as potential threats to the blood supply. Several newly discovered hepatitis viruses and agents of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies present unique challenges in assessing possible risks they may pose to the safety of blood and plasma products

High-Energy Neutrino Astronomy

Kilometer-scale neutrino detectors such as IceCube are discovery instruments covering nuclear and particle physics, cosmology and astronomy. Examples of their multidisciplinary missions include the search for the particle nature of dark matter and for additional small dimensions of space. In the end, their conceptual design is very much anchored to the observational fact that Nature accelerates protons and photons to energies in excess of $10^{20}$ and $10^{13}$ eV, respectively. The cosmic ray connection sets the scale of cosmic neutrino fluxes. In this context, we discuss the first results of the completed AMANDA detector and the reach of its extension, IceCube. Similar experiments are under construction in the Mediterranean. Neutrino astronomy is also expanding in new directions with efforts to detect air showers, acoustic and radio signals initiated by super-EeV neutrinos.Comment: 9 pages, Latex2e, uses ws-procs975x65standard.sty (included), 4 postscript figures. To appear in Proceedings of Thinking, Observing, and Mining the Universe, Sorrento, Italy, September 200

NEMO-SN1 (Western Ionian Sea, off Eastern Sicily): Example of architecture of a cabled observatory

NEMO-SN1, located in the central Mediterranean Sea, Western Ionian Sea, off Eastern Sicily Island (Southern Italy) at 2100 m water depth, 25 km from the harbour of the city of Catania, is a prototype of a cabled deep-sea multiparameter observatory and the first operating with real-time data transmission in Europe since 2005. NEMO-SN1 is also the first-established node of EMSO (European Multidisciplinary Seafloor Observatory, http://emso-eu.org), one of the incoming European large-scale research infrastructure included since 2006 in the Roadmap of the ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures, http://cordis.europa.eu/esfri/roadmap.htm), which will specifically address long-term monitoring of environmental processes related to Marine Ecosystems, Climate Change and Geo-hazards. NEMO-SN1 has been deployed and developed over the last decade thanks to Italian resources and to the EC project ESONET-NoE (European Seas Observatory NETwork - Network of Excellence, 2007-2011) that funded the LIDO-DM (Listening to the Deep Ocean - Demonstration Mission) and a technological interoperability test (http://www.esonet-emso.org/esonet-noe/). NEMO-SN1 is performing geophysical and environmental long-term monitoring by acquiring seismological, geomagnetic, gravimetric, accelerometric, physico-oceanographic, hydro-acoustic, bioacoustic measurements specifically related to earthquakes and tsunamis generation and ambient noise characterisation in term of marine mammal sounds, environmental and anthropogenic sources. A further main feature of NEMO-SN1 is to be an important test-site for the construction of KM3NeT (Kilometre-Cube Underwater Neutrino Telescope, http://www.km3net.org/), another large-scale research infrastructure included in the ESFRI Roadmap constituted by a large volume neutrino telescope. The description of the observatory and the most recent data acquired will be presented and framed in the general objectives of EMSO.PublishedTokio, 5-8 April 20114.4. Scenari e mitigazione del rischio ambientale4.6. Oceanografia operativa per la valutazione dei rischi in aree marinerestricte

West Nile Virus Infections Projected from Blood Donor Screening Data, United States, 2003

Routine donor nucleic acid amplification testing is a valuable surveillance screening tool

S4 Flavor Symmetry and Fermion Masses: Towards a Grand Unified theory of Flavor

Pursuing a bottom-up approach to explore which flavor symmetry could serve as an explanation of the observed fermion masses and mixings, we discuss an extension of the standard model (SM) where the flavor structure for both quarks and leptons is determined by a spontaneously broken S4 and the requirement that its particle content is embeddable simultaneously into the conventional SO(10) grand unified theory (GUT) and a continuous flavor symmetry G_f like SO(3)_f or SU(3)_f. We explicitly provide the Yukawa and the Higgs sector of the model and show its viability in two numerical examples which arise as small deviations from rank one matrices. In the first case, the corresponding mass matrix is democratic and in the second one only its 2-3 block is non-vanishing. We demonstrate that the Higgs potential allows for the appropriate vacuum expectation value (VEV) configurations in both cases, if CP is conserved. For the first case, the chosen Yukawa couplings can be made natural by invoking an auxiliary Z2 symmetry. The numerical study we perform shows that the best-fit values for the lepton mixing angles theta_12 and theta_23 can be accommodated for normal neutrino mass hierarchy. The results for the quark mixing angles turn out to be too small. Furthermore the CP-violating phase delta can only be reproduced correctly in one of the examples. The small mixing angle values are likely to be brought into the experimentally allowed ranges by including radiative corrections. Interestingly, due to the S4 symmetry the mass matrix of the right-handed neutrinos is proportional to the unit matrix.Comment: 27 pages, published version with minor change

High sensitivity GEM experiment on double beta decay of 76-Ge

The GEM project is designed for the next generation 2 beta decay experiments with 76-Ge. One ton of ''naked'' HP Ge detectors (natural at the first GEM-I phase and enriched in 76-Ge to 86% at the second GEM-II stage) are operating in super-high purity liquid nitrogen contained in the Cu vacuum cryostat (sphere with diameter 5 m). The latest is placed in the water shield. Monte Carlo simulation evidently shows that sensitivity of the experiment (in terms of the T1/2 limit for neutrinoless 2 beta decay) is 10^27 yr with natural HP Ge crystals and 10^28 yr with enriched ones. These bounds corresponds to the restrictions on the neutrino mass less than 0.05 eV and 0.015 eV with natural and enriched detectors, respectively. Besides, the GEM-I set up could advance the current best limits on the existence of neutralinos - as dark matter candidates - by three order of magnitudes, and at the same time would be able to identify unambiguously the dark matter signal by detection of its seasonal modulation.Comment: LaTeX, 20 pages, 4 figure

NEMO-SN1 Abyssal Cabled Observatory in the Western Ionian Sea

The “NEutrino Mediterranean Observatory - Submarine Network 1” (NEMO-SN1) seafloor observatory is located in the central Mediterranean Sea, Western Ionian Sea, off Eastern Sicily (Southern Italy) at 2100 m water depth, 25 km from the harbour of the city of Catania. It is a prototype of a cabled deep-sea multiparameter observatory and the first one operating with real-time data transmission in Europe since 2005. NEMO-SN1 is also the first-established node of the “European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and water column Observatory” (EMSO, http://www.emso-eu.org), one of the incoming European large-scale research infrastructures included in the Roadmap of the “European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures” (ESFRI, http://cordis.europa.eu/esfri/roadmap.htm) since 2006. EMSO will specifically address long-term monitoring of environmental processes related to Marine Ecosystems, Climate Change and Geo-hazards. NEMO-SN1 has been deployed and developed over the last decade thanks to Italian funding and to the EC project “European Seas Observatory NETwork - Network of Excellence” (ESONET-NoE, 2007-2011) that funded the “Listening to the Deep Ocean - Demonstration Mission” (LIDO-DM) and a technological interoperability test (http://www.esonet-emso.org/). NEMOSN1 is performing geophysical and environmental long-term monitoring by acquiring seismological, geomagnetic, gravimetric, accelerometric, physico-oceanographic, hydroacoustic, bio-acoustic measurements. Scientific objectives include studying seismic signals, tsunami generation and warnings, its hydroacoustic precursors, and ambient noise characterisation in terms of marine mammal sounds, environmental and anthropogenic sources. NEMO-SN1 is also an important test-site for the construction of the “Kilometre-Cube Underwater Neutrino Telescope” (KM3NeT, http://www.km3net.org/), another large-scale research infrastructure included in the ESFRI Roadmap based on a large volume neutrino telescope. The description of the observatory and its most recent implementations is presented. On 9th June, 2012 NEMO-SN1 was successfully deployed and is working in real-time.Published358 - 3741.8. Osservazioni di geofisica ambientaleJCR Journalrestricte

Lepton Number Violation in TeV Scale See-Saw Extensions of the Standard Model

The low-energy neutrino physics constraints on the TeV scale type I see-saw scenarios of neutrino mass generation are revisited. It is shown that lepton charge (L) violation, associated to the production and decays of heavy Majorana neutrinos N_{j} having masses in the range of M_j \sim (100 \div 1000) GeV and present in such scenarios, is hardly to be observed at ongoing and future particle accelerator experiments, LHC included, because of very strong constraints on the parameters and couplings responsible for the corresponding |\Delta L| = 2 processes. If the heavy Majorana neutrinos N_j are observed and they are associated only with the type I mechanism, they will behave effectively like pseudo-Dirac fermions. Conversely, the observation of effects proving the Majorana nature of N_j would imply that these heavy neutrinos have additional relatively strong couplings to the Standard Model particles or that light neutrino masses compatible with the observations are generated by a mechanism other than see-saw (e.g., radiatively at one or two loop level) in which the heavy Majorana neutrinos N_j are nevertheless involved.Comment: Contribution to the Proceedings of DISCRETE 2010- Symposium on Prospects in the Physics of Discrete Symmetries, 8 page