Is the development of obesogenic food environments a self-reinforcing process? Evidence from soft drink consumption

Background: Understanding how the development of obesogenic food environments and the consumption of ultra-processed foods and beverages influence each other can help policymakers to identify effective ways to curb the current obesity epidemic. This paper was designed to investigate whether, and to what extent, the consumption of soft drinks and the prevalence of obesity are linked through feedback effects. Methods: An ecological study design and a simultaneous equation model were used to investigate the existence of a vicious cycle between the consumption of soft drinks and the prevalence of obesity. The analysis was based on a longitudinal dataset covering per capita sales of soft drinks, the age-standardised prevalence rate of obesity and several demographic and socio-economic control variables in a sample of 98 countries worldwide for the period 2005–2019. Results: Using a Two-Stage Least Squares (2SLS) regression model with fixed effects, we documented a self-reinforcing process that links consumption and obesity. Changes in the spread of obesity were associated with changes in soft drink consumption: a one-unit increase in the age-adjusted prevalence rate of obesity increased consumption by about 2.39 l per person per year. Similarly, as the consumption of soft drinks rose, so did the prevalence of obesity: the age-adjusted rate of obesity increased by 0.07% for every additional litre consumed per capita. Computing the impact multipliers, we found that the outcome of a one-unit decrease in the average price of soft drinks was twofold: a) the prevalence of obesity increased by around 0.17%; and b) consumption increased by around 2.40 l per person, the sum of the increase directly caused by the price reduction (2 l) and the increase due to the interplay between consumption and obesity (0.4 l). Conclusions: This study has identified a feedback loop between unhealthy habits (i.e. the consumption of soft drinks) and health outcomes (i.e. the prevalence of obesity). This interplay amplifies the impact of any exogenous changes in the determinants of consumption and obesity. These feedback effects should be considered and exploited in planning effective strategies to tackle the burden of obesity and the global epidemic of non-​communicable diseases

Training-based Semantic Descriptors modeling for violin quality sound characterization

Violin makers and musicians describe the timbral qualities of violins using semantic terms coming from natural language. In this study we use regression techniques of machine intelligence and audio features to model in a training-based fashion a set of high-level (semantic) descriptors for the automatic annotation of musical instruments. The most relevant semantic descriptors are collected through interviews to violin makers. These descriptors are then correlated with objective features extracted from a set of violins from the historical and contemporary collections of the Museo del Violino and of the International School of Luthiery both in Cremona. As sound description can vary throughout a performance, our approach also enables the modelling of time-varying (evolutive) semantic annotation

Wool quality in Gentile di Puglia sheep breed as measure of genetic integrity

The Gentile di Pugliais a breed created in the 15th century by crossing Merino Spanish rams and "gentile" ewes reared in some areas of Southern Italy, mainly Apulia and Basilicata. The crisis of the wool industry, the poor quantity of milk, the inadequacy of Gentile di Pugliato be milked by machine and the passage from transhumant to permanent rearing caused a dramatic reduction of this population, which was largely crossed with other breeds and declined from about one million heads in the sixties to 5,000 at the present time. In order to save the ancient typical Gentile di Pugliabreed, the aim of this work was to estimate the "genetic integrity" of the remaining Gentile di Pugliapopulation by means of an analysis of wool quality measured through the diameter of the fibre and the homogeneity of the fleece. Our hypothesis was that the animals originated from outcrosses to other Merino derived breeds specialised for meat would show larger diameters of the fibres and a reduced homogeneity of the fleece. The research was carried out using Herd Book registered animals from 9 farms: 1 from Isernia, 2 from Campobasso and 6 from Foggia province. The statistical analysis on the diameter of the fibre was carried out on a dataset of 38,200 observations (200 records x 191 animals) divided in four classes (ultrafine, fine, croisè, ordinary). The high frequencies of ultrafine and fine fibre classes show that the quality of the wool is still good in the population. This consideration can be extended to all the farms involved in the study that could therefore be suitable in the conservation programs for this breed. The homogeneity of the fleece was also good in provid- ing further evidence of the genetic integrity of the population. Other analysis carried out on the quality of the wool in relation to the body size confirmed that the observed Gentile di Pugliais well representative of the ancient breed

Variational Autoencoders for chord sequence generation conditioned on Western harmonic music complexity

In recent years, the adoption of deep learning techniques has allowed to obtain major breakthroughs in the automatic music generation research field, sparking a renewed interest in generative music. A great deal of work has focused on the possibility of conditioning the generation process in order to be able to create music according to human-understandable parameters. In this paper, we propose a technique for generating chord progressions conditioned on harmonic complexity, as grounded in the Western music theory. More specifically, we consider a pre-existing dataset annotated with the related complexity values and we train two variations of Variational Autoencoders (VAE), namely a Conditional-VAE (CVAE) and a Regressor-based VAE (RVAE), in order to condition the latent space depending on the complexity. Through a listening test, we analyze the effectiveness of the proposed techniques

Mid-Late Pleistocene Neanderthal landscapes in southern Italy: Paleoecological contributions of the avian assemblage from Grotta del Cavallo, Apulia, southern Italy

We present a detailed paleoecologic analysis of avian assemblages from the Mousterian layers of the Middle Paleolithic Grotta del Cavallo site in southern Italy. Findings improve knowledge of the landscape that was exploited by Neanderthals. During the MIS 7, 6 and 3, the cave was surrounded by extensive grasslands and shrublands, locally interspersed by open woodland and rocky outcrops, whereas the coastal plain (currently underwater) hosted wetlands. Water bird taxa show an increase in population size during the cool-temperate climatic interval attributed to MIS 3, possibly linked to more humid conditions or a shorter distance between the wetland settings and the cave, compared to the previous glacial phase (MIS 6). In addition, coverage-based rarefied richness suggests higher avian diversity during MIS 3, which may reflect greater landscape heterogeneity due to the presence of wetland habitats. The tentative discovery of Branta leucopsis, together with several bird species currently found at higher altitudes, reinforces geochemically-derived palaeoclimate inferences of cooler than the present conditions. These assemblages also include the first fossil occurrence of Larus genei worldwide, the first Italian occurrence of Emberiza calandra, the oldest Italian occurrence of Podiceps nigricollis, and the occurrence of the rarely reported Sylvia cf. communis. Taphonomic analyses indicate that bone modifications are mainly due to physical syn- and post-depositional processes, and that the assemblage mainly accumulated through short-range physical transport and the feeding activities of nocturnal raptors

Experimental evaluation of a localization algorithm for multiple acoustic sources in reverberating environments

Publication in the conference proceedings of EUSIPCO, Florence, Italy, 200

The impact of alkaline treatments on elasticity in spruce tonewood

It is commonly believed that violins sound differently when finished. However, if the role of varnishes on the vibrational properties of these musical instruments is well-established, how the first components of the complete wood finish impact on the final result is still unclear. According to tradition, the priming process consists of two distinct stages, called pre-treatment and sizing. The literature reports some recipes used by old Cremonese luthiers as primers, mainly based on alkaline aqueous solutions and protein-based glues. In this manuscript, we analyze the impact of these treatments on the mechanical properties of the material. The combination of two pre-treatments and three sizes is considered on nine different plates. We compare the vibrational properties before and after the application and assess the effects of the different primers, also supported by finite element modeling. The main outcome is that the combination of particular treatments on the violin surface before varnishing leads to changes not only to the wood appearance, but also to its vibrational properties. Indeed pre-treatments, often considered negligible in terms of vibrational changes, enhance the penetration of the size into the wood structure and strengthen the impact of the latter on the final rigidity of the material along the longitudinal and radial directions

Using Mechanical Metamaterials in Guitar Top Plates: A Numerical Study

Featured Application The use of mechanical metamaterials in musical instruments could be an excellent way to engineer the wood of the instrument to obtain a particular sound. It has recently been shown that the mechanical properties of thin, rectangular wooden plates can be tuned by carving them with specific patterns of perforations, effectively realising a 2D wooden mechanical metamaterial. Such a material is of great interest for the construction of musical instruments, as it could allow a new degree of creative control for makers. Furthermore, issues with the shrinking supplies of tone-woods could be alleviated as wood samples that don not meet the desired requirements could simply be altered, instead of being discarded. In this work, we study the effect of the use of these metamaterials in the soundboards of classical guitars. By way of simulations, we evaluate their impact on the modal behaviour and on the sound pressure level of the instrument, as well as on its ability to sustain the load exerted by the strings. Our results show that the metamaterials can tune the instrument's response without compromising its structural integrity. We thus conclude that the use of wooden mechanical metamaterials in the soundboards of classical guitars is feasible and, in many ways, beneficial, not the least since it opens the door to using non-traditional woods with bespoke density and stiffness

Plasma activated water as resistance inducer against bacterial leaf spot of tomato

Plant bacterial diseases are routinely managed with scheduled treatments based on heavy metal compounds or on antibiotics; to reduce the negative environmental impact due to the use of such chemical compounds, as pollution or selection of antibiotic resistant pathogens, the integrated control management is required. In the frame of a sustainable agriculture the use of bacterial antagonists, biological agents, plant defence response elicitors or resistant host plant genotypes are the most effective approaches. In this work, cold atmospheric pressure plasma (CAP) was applied to sterile distilled water, inducing the production of a hydrogen peroxide, nitrite and nitrate, and a pH reduction. In particular, an atmospheric pressure dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) has been used to produce plasma activated water (PAW), that was firstly assayed in in vitro experiments and then in planta through application at the root apparatus of tomato plants, against Xanthomonas vesicatoria (Xv), the etiological agent of bacterial leaf spot. Moreover, the transcription abundance of five genes related to the plant defense was investigated in response to PAW treatment. PAW did not show direct antimicrobial activity against Xv in in vitro experiments, but it enhanced the tomato plants defenses. It was effective in reducing the disease severity by giving relative protections of ca. 61, 51 and 38% when applied 1 h, 24 h and 6 days before the experimental inoculation, respectively. In addition, the experiments highlighted the pal gene involvement in response to the PAW treatments and against the pathogen; its transcription levels resulted significantly high from 1 to 48 h until their decrease 192 h after PAW application