Female fertility and environmental pollution

A realistic picture of our world shows that it is heavily polluted everywhere. Coastal regions and oceans are polluted by farm fertilizer, manure runoff, sewage and industrial discharges, and large isles of waste plastic are floating around, impacting sea life. Terrestrial ecosystems are contaminated by heavy metals and organic chemicals that can be taken up by and accumulate in crop plants, and water tables are heavily contaminated by untreated industrial discharges. As deadly particulates can drift far, poor air quality has become a significant global problem and one that is not exclusive to major industrialized cities. The consequences are a dramatic impairment of our ecosystem and biodiversity and increases in degenerative or man-made diseases. In this respect, it has been demonstrated that environmental pollution impairs fertility in all mammalian species. The worst consequences are observed for females since the number of germ cells present in the ovary is fixed during fetal life, and the cells are not renewable. This means that any pollutant affecting hormonal homeostasis and/or the reproductive apparatus inevitably harms reproductive performance. This decline will have important social and economic consequences that can no longer be overlooked

On Unconditionally Secure Distributed Oblivious Transfer.

This paper is about the Oblivious Transfer in the distributed model proposed by M. Naor and B. Pinkas. In this setting a Sender has n secrets and a Receiver is interested in one of them. During a set up phase, the Sender gives information about the secrets to m Servers. Afterwards, in a recovering phase, the Receiver can compute the secret she wishes by interacting with any k of them. More precisely, from the answers received she computes the secret in which she is interested but she gets no information on the others and, at the same time, any coalition of k − 1 Servers can neither compute any secret nor figure out which one the Receiver has recovered. We present an analysis and new results holding for this model: lower bounds on the resources required to implement such a scheme (i.e., randomness, memory storage, communication complexity); some impossibility results for one-round distributed oblivi- ous transfer protocols; two polynomial-based constructions implementing 1-out-of-n dis- tributed oblivious transfer, which generalize and strengthen the two constructions for 1-out-of-2 given by Naor and Pinkas; as well as new one-round and two-round distributed oblivious transfer protocols, both for threshold and general access structures on the set of Servers, which are optimal with respect to some of the given bounds. Most of these constructions are basically combinatorial in nature

Equivalence of switching linear systems by bisimulation

A general notion of hybrid bisimulation is proposed for the class of switching linear systems. Connections between the notions of bisimulation-based equivalence, state-space equivalence, algebraic and input–output equivalence are investigated. An algebraic characterization of hybrid bisimulation and an algorithmic procedure converging in a finite number of steps to the maximal hybrid bisimulation are derived. Hybrid state space reduction is performed by hybrid bisimulation between the hybrid system and itself. By specializing the results obtained on bisimulation, also characterizations of simulation and abstraction are derived. Connections between observability, bisimulation-based reduction and simulation-based abstraction are studied.\ud \u

First identification of a chemotactic receptor in an invertebrate species: Structural and functional characterization of Ciona intestinalis C3a receptor

In mammals, the bioactive fragment C3a, released from C3 during complement activation, is a potent mediator of inflammatory reactions and exerts its functional activity through the specific binding to cell surface G protein-coupled seven-transmembrane receptors. Recently, we demonstrated a Ciona intestinalis C3a (CiC3a)-mediated chemotaxis of hemocytes in the deuterostome invertebrate Ciona intestinalis and suggested an important role for this molecule in inflammatory processes. In the present work, we have cloned and characterized the receptor molecule involved in the CiC3a-mediated chemotaxis and studied its expression profile. The sequence, encoding a 95,394 Da seven-transmembrane domain protein, shows the highest sequence homology with mammalian C3aRs. Northern blot analysis revealed that the CiC3aR is expressed abundantly in the heart and neural complex and to a lesser extent in the ovaries, hemocytes, and larvae. Three polyclonal Abs raised in rabbits against peptides corresponding to CiC3aR regions of the first and second extracellular loop and of the third intracellular loop react specifically in Western blotting with a single band of 98–102 kDa in hemocyte protein extracts. Immunostaining performed on circulating hemocytes with the three specific Abs revealed that CiC3aR is constitutively expressed only in hyaline and granular amoebocytes. In chemotaxis experiments, the Abs against the first and second extracellular loop inhibited directional migration of hemocytes toward the synthetic peptide reproducing the CiC3a C-terminal sequence, thus providing the compelling evidence that C. intestinalis expresses a functional C3aR homologous to the mammalian receptor. These findings further elucidate the evolutionary origin of the vertebrate complement-mediated proinflammatory process

One-step replica symmetry breaking solution of the quadrupolar glass model

We consider the quadrupolar glass model with infinite-range random interaction. Introducing a simple one-step replica symmetry breaking ansatz we investigate the para-glass continuous (discontinuous) transition which occurs below (above) a critical value of the quadrupole dimension m*. By using a mean-field approximation we study the stability of the one-step replica symmetry breaking solution and show that for m>m* there are two transitions. The thermodynamic transition is discontinuous but there is no latent heat. At a higher temperature we find the dynamical or glass transition temperature and the corresponding discontinuous jump of the order parameter.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure

Evidence against a glass transition in the 10-state short range Potts glass

We present the results of Monte Carlo simulations of two different 10-state Potts glasses with random nearest neighbor interactions on a simple cubic lattice. In the first model the interactions come from a \pm J distribution and in the second model from a Gaussian one, and in both cases the first two moments of the distribution are chosen to be equal to J_0=-1 and Delta J=1. At low temperatures the spin autocorrelation function for the \pm J model relaxes in several steps whereas the one for the Gaussian model shows only one. In both systems the relaxation time increases like an Arrhenius law. Unlike the infinite range model, there are only very weak finite size effects and there is no evidence that a dynamical or a static transition exists at a finite temperature.Comment: 9 pages of Latex, 4 figure

Magnetic transfer function entropy and the 2009 Mw = 6.3 L'Aquila earthquake (Central Italy)

Abstract. With the aim of obtaining a deeper knowledge of the physical phenomena associated with the 2009 L'Aquila (Central Italy) seismic sequence, culminating with a Mw = 6.3 earthquake on 6 April 2009, and possibly of identifying some kind of earthquake-related magnetic or geoelectric anomaly, we analyse the geomagnetic field components measured at the magnetic observatory of L'Aquila and their variations in time. In particular, trends of magnetic transfer functions in the years 2006–2010 are inspected. They are calculated from the horizontal to vertical magnetic component ratio in the frequency domain, and are very sensitive to deep and lateral geoelectric characteristics of the measurement site. Entropy analysis, carried out from the transfer functions with the so called transfer function entropy, points out clear temporal burst regimes of a few distinct harmonics preceding the main shock of the seismic sequence. A possible explanation is that they could be related to deep fluid migrations and/or to variations in the micro-/meso-fracturing that affected significantly the conductivity (ordered/disordered) distribution in a large lithospheric volume under the seismogenic layer below L'Aquila area. This interpretation is also supported by the analysis of hypocentres depths before the main shock occurrence

The Glassy Potts Model

We introduce a Potts model with quenched, frustrated disorder, that enjoys of a gauge symmetry that forbids spontaneous magnetization, and allows the glassy phase to extend from $T_c$ down to T=0. We study numerical the 4 dimensional model with $q=4$ states. We show the existence of a glassy phase, and we characterize it by studying the probability distributions of an order parameter, the binder cumulant and the divergence of the overlap susceptibility. We show that the dynamical behavior of the system is characterized by aging.Comment: 4 pages including 4 (color) ps figures (all on page 4

Growth inhibition of human ovarian carcinoma by a novel AvidinOX-anchored biotinylated camptothecin derivative

Oxidized form of avidin, named AvidinOX, provides stable fixation of biotinylated molecules in tissues thus representing a breakthrough in topical treatment of cancer. AvidinOX proved to be a stable receptor for radiolabeled biotin, biotinylated antibodies and cells. In order to expand applicability of the AvidinOX-based delivery platform, in the present study we investigated the possibility to hold biotinylated chemotherapeutics in AvidinOX-treated sites. A novel biotinylated gimatecan-derived camptothecin, coded ST8161AA1, was injected at suboptimal doses into human tumors xenografted in mice alone or pre-complexed to AvidinOX. Significantly higher growth inhibition was observed when the drug was anchored to AvidinOX suggesting the potential utility of this delivery modality for the local treatment of inoperable tumors