Green and Safe “By Design”: A Conceptual Tool to Avoid Hazardous Substances in Early Phases of Product Development

Sustainability has to be managed in order to guarantee health, social equity, resource optimization and economic activities and this awareness is grown considerably. At the same time, this consciousness leads us to consider sustainability also as a social and a business driver on the economic side and a great opportunity by an environmental point of view. Further, according to several regulations, producers are responsible of their devices in terms of environmental pollution, from production and market launch to disposal activities when they become unusable. This fact changes the role of designers, which becomes wider in a multidisciplinary context. For this reason, this paper proposes an approach that supports designers during the development of more sustainable products with the aim to reduce the amount of hazardous substances (according to European RoHS regulations) and it allows firms and academic R&D departments to reduce risks of a missing compliance. The approach is structured according to a flowchart that addresses designers to more suitable product solutions in terms of environmental impact. The methodology applied to the case studies, in fact, show that an early assessment in first design phases allows developers to have safer and more sustainable product prototypes and its application can be proposed also during design courses in an educational context.

Green and Safe “By Design”: A Conceptual Tool to Avoid Hazardous Substances in Early Phases of Product Development

Sustainability has to be managed in order to guarantee health, social equity, resource optimization and economic activities and this awareness is grown considerably. At the same time, this consciousness leads us to consider sustainability also as a social and a business driver on the economic side and a great opportunity by an environmental point of view. Further, according to several regulations, producers are responsible of their devices in terms of environmental pollution, from production and market launch to disposal activities when they become unusable. This fact changes the role of designers, which becomes wider in a multidisciplinary context. For this reason, this paper proposes an approach that supports designers during the development of more sustainable products with the aim to reduce the amount of hazardous substances (according to European RoHS regulations) and it allows firms and academic R&D departments to reduce risks of a missing compliance. The approach is structured according to a flowchart that addresses designers to more suitable product solutions in terms of environmental impact. The methodology applied to the case studies, in fact, show that an early assessment in first design phases allows developers to have safer and more sustainable product prototypes and its application can be proposed also during design courses in an educational context.

DNA damage stress: Cui prodest?

DNA is an entity shielded by mechanisms that maintain genomic stability and are essential for living cells; however, DNA is constantly subject to assaults from the environment throughout the cellular life span, making the genome susceptible to mutation and irreparable damage. Cells are prepared to mend such events through cell death as an extrema ratio to solve those threats from a multicellular perspective. However, in cells under various stress conditions, checkpoint mechanisms are activated to allow cells to have enough time to repair the damaged DNA. In yeast, entry into the cell cycle when damage is not completely repaired represents an adaptive mechanism to cope with stressful conditions. In multicellular organisms, entry into cell cycle with damaged DNA is strictly forbidden. However, in cancer development, individual cells undergo checkpoint adaptation, in which most cells die, but some survive acquiring advantageous mutations and selfishly evolve a conflictual behavior. In this review, we focus on how, in cancer development, cells rely on checkpoint adaptation to escape DNA stress and ultimately to cell death

The transition from crawling to walking: Can infants elicit an alteration of their parents' perception?

Our study was designed to address a gap in the literature on parents’ perception and motivation to protect their infants from potential risk of injury in the transition from crawling to walking. The participants were 260 Italian subjects, of whom 158 were women and 102 men, aged between 20 and 45 years. They were asked to draw two domestic objects to assess the possible alterations in the perception of environmental elements seen by the parents as a potentially dangerous cause of unintentional injury for their child. Analysis showed that the group of mothers with children aged 9 to 18 months had drawn the largest tables, while the table areas of the other two categories of women were much smaller.Concerning males, the group that drew the largest tables was the one with children, but not in the age range of 9-18 months, while there was no great difference between the other two groups. The final descriptive analysis concerned the average scores on the STAI-Y tests both for state and trait anxiety. In all groups a substantial parity was observed, except for the non-parent men, who had a lower a lower level of state anxiety. Both the fathers and the mothers of children of 9-18 months obtained lower scores, both for state and trait anxiety. Based on the findings, we demonstrate that children transitioning from crawling to walking can elicit a perceptive reactivity their mothers, which satisfies their natural need to protect their offspring

The epigenetic factor BORIS/CTCFL regulates the NOTCH3 gene expression in cancer cells.

Aberrant upregulation of NOTCH3 gene plays a critical role in cancer pathogenesis. However, the underlying mechanisms are still unknown. We tested here the hypothesis that aberrant epigenetic modifications in the NOTCH3 promoter region might account for its upregulation in cancer cells. We compared DNA and histone methylation status of NOTCH3 promoter region in human normal blood cells and T cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL) cell lines, differentially expressing NOTCH3. We found that histone methylation, rather than DNA hypomethylation, contributes towards establishing an active chromatin status of NOTCH3 promoter in NOTCH3 overexpressing cancer cells. We discovered that the chromatin regulator protein BORIS/CTCFL plays an important role in regulating NOTCH3 gene expression. We observed that BORIS is present in T-ALL cell lines as well as in cell lines derived from several solid tumors overexpressing NOTCH3. Moreover, BORIS targets NOTCH3 promoter in cancer cells and it is able to induce and to maintain a permissive/active chromatin conformation. Importantly, the association between NOTCH3 overexpression and BORIS presence was confirmed in primary T-ALL samples from patients at the onset of the disease. Overall, our results provide novel insights into the determinants of NOTCH3 overexpression in cancer cells, by revealing a key role for BORIS as the main mediator of transcriptional deregulation of NOTCH3. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Multiparty testing preorders

Variants of the must testing approach have been successfully applied in service oriented computing for analysing the compliance between (contracts exposed by) clients and servers or, more generally, between two peers. It has however been argued that multiparty scenarios call for more permissive notions of compliance because partners usually do not have full coordination capabilities. We propose two new testing preorders, which are obtained by restricting the set of potential observers. For the first preorder, called uncoordinated, we allow only sets of parallel observers that use different parts of the interface of a given service and have no possibility of intercommunication. For the second preorder, that we call individualistic, we instead rely on parallel observers that perceive as silent all the actions that are not in the interface of interest. We have that the uncoordinated preorder is coarser than the classical must testing preorder and finer than the individualistic one. We also provide a characterisation in terms of decorated traces for both preorders: the uncoordinated preorder is defined in terms of must-sets and Mazurkiewicz traces while the individualistic one is described in terms of classes of filtered traces that only contain designated visible actions and must-sets.Fil: De Nicola, Rocco. Scuola IMT Alti Studi Lucca; ItaliaFil: Melgratti, Hernan Claudio. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Investigación en Ciencias de la Computación. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Investigación en Ciencias de la Computación; Argentin

Evaluación de la resistencia mecánica de muros de mampostería de ladrillos

En este trabajo se presenta la metodología y los resultados de un ensayo especialmente diseñado para evaluar la capacidad portante de muros de mampostería. El ensayo ideado, previamente modelado con elementos finitos, consiste en tomar muestras cilíndricas de muros y reacondicionarlas para reproducir el estado de solicitaciones in situ. Los resultados de ensayo fueron comparados con los obtenidos en prototipos de muros de ladrillos. La correlación obtenida ha puesto en evidencia que se reproduce en forma aceptable la resistencia a compresión de la mampostería. Estas experiencias aportan una contribución racional a la evaluación y puesta en valor del patrimonio arquitectónico, en oportunidades amenazado por la inexistencia de metodologías de restauración y refuncionalización que permitan juzgar adecuadamente la aptitud portante de una amplia variedad de tipologías constructivas.Tópico 6: Patrimonio Urbano de los siglos XVIII al XX. Técnicas de Limpieza y de Conservación

Reconsidering the scribbling stage of drawing: A new perspective on toddlers' representational processes

Although the scribbling stage of drawing has been historically regarded as meaningless and transitional, a sort of prelude to the actual drawing phase of childhood, recent studies have begun to re-evaluate this important moment of a child's development and find meaning in what was once considered mere motor activity and nothing more. The present study analyzes scribbling in all its subphases and discovers a clear intention behind young children's gestures. From expressing the dynamic qualities of an object and the child's relationship with it, to gradually reducing itself to a simple contour of a content no more alive on the paper, but only in the child's own imagination, we trace the evolution of the line as a tool that toddlers use to communicate feelings and intentions to the world that surrounds them. We will provide a selected number of graphical examples that are representative of our theory. These drawings (13 in total) were extracted from a much wider sample derived from our studies on children's graphical-pictorial abilities, conducted on children aged 0 to 3 years in various Italian nurseries. Our results appear to indicate that scribbling evolves through a series of stages, and that early graphical activity in children is sparked and maintained by their relationship with their caregivers and the desire to communicate with them

Clasificación de elementos importantes en sistemas eléctricos de potencia según medidas de centralidad en redes y transformación linegraph

Network theory techniques have recently contributed to the analysis of electrical power systems, enabling faster computational solutions. Taking advantage of the topological information of a network, it becomes possible to characterize its elements both locally (individual network components) and globally (interactions and behavior of the components). Identifying the crucial elements within an electrical system involves classifying each component based on its interaction with the entire network, considering, possibly, various operating conditions. Current network centrality measures predominantly focus on nodes, which represent connection buses in the system, to quantify the significance of individual elements. In this study, we employ the linegraph technique to transform links into nodes. Subsequently, we calculate and categorize the links (representing lines and transformers) of different electrical networks found in the literature using three centrality measures. Moreover, our methodology allows for the aggregation or combination of the indices from each measure, leading to a unified classification based on the importance of links in the considered electrical power systems. Analyzing diverse networks reveals a consistent empirical distribution of centrality indices, resulting in similar classifications of significant elements regardless of network size.El análisis de sistemas eléctricos de potencia se ha apoyado, recientemente, en la aplicación de técnicas de la teoría de redes, con la finalidad de obtener soluciones computacionalmente más rápidas. A partir de la información topológica de una red, es posible definir características desde lo local (elementos de la red) hasta lo global (comportamiento e interacción de los elementos). La identificación de elementos importantes de un sistema eléctrico, consiste en clasificar cada uno de los elementos desde su interacción con toda la red, y, posiblemente, tomando en cuenta diversas condiciones de operación del sistema. Las medidas de centralidad en redes, que permiten asignar importancia cuantitativa a los elementos de un sistema, están definidas en su mayoría para los nodos (representan buses de conexión) de las mismas. En este trabajo, a partir de la transformación de enlaces a nodos, según la técnica linegraph, se calculan y clasifican los enlaces (representan líneas y transformadores) de diversas redes eléctricas de la literatura, de acuerdo con tres medidas de centralidad. Adicionalmente, el procedimiento presentado permite agregar o combinar los índices de cada medida, y obtener una única clasificación según su importancia para los enlaces de los sistemas eléctricos de potencia considerados. La diversidad de redes analizadas permite concluir que la distribución empírica de los índices de centralidad es similar, y origina una clasificación de elementos importantes semejantes, independiente de la dimensión de la red