Neutrons from Piezonuclear Reactions

We report the results obtained by cavitating water solutions of iron salts (iron chloride and iron nitrate) with different concentrations at different ultrasound powers. In all cases we detected a neutron radiation well higher than the background level. The neutron production is perfectly reproducible and can at some extent be controlled. These evidences for neutron emission generated by cavitation support some preliminary clues for the possibility of piezonuclear reactions (namely nuclear reactions induced by pressure and shock waves) obtained in the last ten years. We have been able for the first time to state some basic features of such a neutron emission induced by cavitation, namely: 1) a marked threshold behavior in power, energy and time; 2) its occurring without a concomitant production of gamma radiation.Comment: 8 figures; we added some more important references; we replaced some figures with more detailed ones; we added more comprehensive details which could not be desclosed before as part of private patents which have been published no

The Imd Pathway Is Involved in Antiviral Immune Responses in Drosophila

Cricket Paralysis virus (CrPV) is a member of the Dicistroviridae family of RNA viruses, which infect a broad range of insect hosts, including the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Drosophila has emerged as an effective system for studying innate immunity because of its powerful genetic techniques and the high degree of gene and pathway conservation. Intra-abdominal injection of CrPV into adult flies causes a lethal infection that provides a robust assay for the identification of mutants with altered sensitivity to viral infection. To gain insight into the interactions between viruses and the innate immune system, we injected wild type flies with CrPV and observed that antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) were not induced and hemocytes were depleted in the course of infection. To investigate the contribution of conserved immune signaling pathways to antiviral innate immune responses, CrPV was injected into isogenic mutants of the Immune Deficiency (Imd) pathway, which resembles the mammalian Tumor Necrosis Factor Receptor (TNFR) pathway. Loss-of-function mutations in several Imd pathway genes displayed increased sensitivity to CrPV infection and higher CrPV loads. Our data show that antiviral innate immune responses in flies infected with CrPV depend upon hemocytes and signaling through the Imd pathway