Old Age and Aerobic Microorganisms of Patients Affected by Clostridium difficile Infection are Associated Primarily with the Intestinal Presence of Clostridium difficile

Clostridium difficile infection in human occurs when the organism is present and germinating in the bowel. Old age of patients\u2019 and particular microorganisms in stools are identified as risk factors for the disease onset. We aimed to investigate if risk factors for C. difficile infections in a large Italian hospital were connected to C. difficile intestinal presence or to germination. Toxin B positivity was linked with age over 65 years (P=0.03), medical hospitalization (P=0.015) and growth of Enterobacteriaceae (P=0.029) and Enterococcus (P=0.05) from the same stools. The presence of tcdB was even more strictly linked with old age (P=0.005), medicine hospitalization (P=0.012) and growth of Enterobacteriaceae (P=0.003) and Enterococcus (P=0.04). Our results indicated that the presence of C. difficile in stools, irrespective of being spore or vegetative form, is reliably associated with old age of subjects and fecal presence of viable Enterobacteriaceae and Enterococcus

Ballast flight under high-speed trains: Wind tunnel full-scale experimental tests

The flying ballast phenomenon has become an important problem, in the last years, because of the development of high speed trains and the consequent increase of the speed up to 350. km/h. The problem is very complex since it is related to both railway infrastructure and train characteristics and since it involves mechanical and aerodynamic effects. The results of an experimental study carried out on the Italian high-speed railway and on a 1:1 real stretch of the railways in wind tunnel are presented in the paper. The study was aimed to analyze the effects of the height of the ballast level, the stone shape in the upper layer of the ballast and the compaction of the ballast bed on the problem. To this purpose a specific wind tunnel test rig was designed to reproduce in the wind tunnel a flow with the same average characteristics of the one measured on the real line, especially in the region close to the ballast and sleepers. Finally, starting from the results of these tests, possible countermeasures to ballast lifting on-set are proposed

Automatic organofacies identification by means of Machine Learning on Raman spectra

Funding Information: IFP Energies nouvelles (France) is warmly acknowledgment for kindly providing access to samples, laboratory facilities and unpublished database. Dr. Amalia Spina and Prof. Simonetta Cirilli from the University of Perugia are warmly acknowledged for the high-quality kerogen isolate extraction. This research was funded by: MIUR grants to Roma Tre PhD School in Earth Sciences (XXXIV doctoral cycle, 2018–2021) and IFP Energies nouvelles PhD program. Publisher Copyright: © 2023 The AuthorsPeer reviewedPublisher PD

Copper, Uranium and REE Mineralisation in an Exhumed Oil Reservoir, Southwest Orkney, Scotland

Funding Information: J.G.T.A. is supported by the Natural Environment Research Council (grant NE/T003677/1). Publisher Copyright: © 2023 by the authors.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Codes and standards on computational wind engineering for structural design: State of art and recent trends

This paper first provides a wide overview about the design codes and standards covering the use of Computational Wind Engineering / Computational Fluid Dynamics (CWE/CFD) for wind-sensitive structures and built environment. Second, the paper sets out the basic assumptions and underlying concepts of the new Annex T "Simulations by Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD/CWE)" of the revised version "Guide for the assessment of wind actions and effects on structures" issued by the Advisory Committee on Technical Recommendations for Constructions of the Italian National Research Council in February 2019 and drafted by the members of the Special Interest Group on Computational Wind Engineering of the Italian Association for Wind Engineering (ANIV-CWE). The same group is currently advising UNI CT021/SC1 in supporting the drafting of the new Annex K - "Derivation of design parameters from wind tunnel tests and numerical simulations" of the revised Eurocode 1: Actions on structures - Part 1-4: General actions - Wind actions. Finally, the paper outlines the subjects most open to development at the technical and applicative level

The complex hodological architecture of the macaque dorsal intraparietal areas as emerging from neural tracers and dw-mri tractography

In macaque monkeys, dorsal intraparietal areas are involved in several daily visuomotor actions. However, their border and sources of cortical afferents remain loosely defined. Combining retrograde histologic tracing and MRI diffusion-based tractography, we found a complex hodology of the dorsal bank of the intraparietal sulcus (db-IPS), which can be subdivided into a rostral intraparietal area PEip, projecting to the spinal cord, and a caudal medial intraparietal area MIP lacking such projections. Both include an anterior and a posterior sector, emerging from their ipsilateral, gradient-like connectivity profiles. As tractography estimations, we used the cross-sectional area of the white matter bundles connecting each area with other parietal and frontal regions, after selecting regions of interest (ROIs) corresponding to the injection sites of neural tracers. For most connections, we found a significant correlation between the proportions of cells projecting to all sectors of PEip and MIP along the continuum of the db-IPS and tractography. The latter also revealed “false positive” but plausible connections awaiting histologic validation

Raman spectral shifts in naturally faulted rocks

Acknowledgements. We thank Colin Taylor at UoA for help in sample preparation.This study was supported by the School of Geosciences at the University of Aberdeen and in part by the NERC Centre for Doctoral Training in Oil & Gas (Grant Number: NE/R01051x/1).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Raman Spectroscopy : an effective thermal marker in low temperature carbonaceous fold-thrust belts

Special Publication title- Fold and Thrust Belts: Structural Style, Evolution and Exploration Acknowledgments Z. Crawford and A. Marpino were funded through the University of Aberdeen, School of Geosciences for MGeol and MSc project work. Bond, Butler and Watkins were supported through the Fold-Thrust Research Group, sponsored by Oil Search, Santos and Interoil.Peer reviewedPostprintPostprintPostprintPostprintPostprintPostprintPostprintPostprin

The complex hodological architecture of the macaque dorsal intraparietal areas as emerging from neural tracers and DW-MRI tractography

In macaque monkeys, dorsal intraparietal areas are involved in several daily visuo-motor actions. However, their border and sources of cortical afferents remain loosely defined. Combining retrograde histological tracing and MRI diffusion-based tractography we found a complex hodology of the dorsal bank of the IPS, which can be subdivided into a rostral area PEip, projecting to the spinal cord, and a caudal area MIP lacking such projections. Both include a rostral and a caudal sector, emerging from their ipsilateral, gradient-like connectivity profiles. As tractography estimations, we used the cross-sectional volume of the white matter bundles connecting each area with other parietal and frontal regions, after selecting ROIs corresponding to the injection sites of neural tracers. For most connections, we found a significant correlation between the proportions of cells projecting to all sectors of PEip and MIP along the continuum of the dorsal bank of the IPS and tractography. The latter also revealed “false positive” but plausible streamlines awaiting histological validation