Folk medicine used to heal malaria in Calabria (southern Italy)

In Italy, malaria was an endemic disease that was eradicated by the mid-20th century. This paper evaluates the prophylactic and therapeutic remedies used by folk medicine to cure malaria in Calabria (southern Italy)

Complex influence propagation based on trust-aware dynamic linear threshold models

Abstract To properly capture the complexity of influence propagation phenomena in real-world contexts, such as those related to viral marketing and misinformation spread, information diffusion models should fulfill a number of requirements. These include accounting for several dynamic aspects in the propagation (e.g., latency, time horizon), dealing with multiple cascades of information that might occur competitively, accounting for the contingencies that lead a user to change her/his adoption of one or alternative information items, and leveraging trust/distrust in the users' relationships and its effect of influence on the users' decisions. To the best of our knowledge, no diffusion model unifying all of the above requirements has been developed so far. In this work, we address such a challenge and propose a novel class of diffusion models, inspired by the classic linear threshold model, which are designed to deal with trust-aware, non-competitive as well as competitive time-varying propagation scenarios. Our theoretical inspection of the proposed models unveils important findings on the relations with existing linear threshold models for which properties are known about whether monotonicity and submodularity hold for the corresponding activation function. We also propose strategies for the selection of the initial spreaders of the propagation process, for both non-competitive and competitive influence propagation tasks, whose goal is to mimic contexts of misinformation spread. Our extensive experimental evaluation, which was conducted on publicly available networks and included comparison with competing methods, provides evidence on the meaningfulness and uniqueness of our models

Ethnicity and Biodemographic Structure in the Arbëreshe of the Province of Cosenza, Southern Italy, in the XIX Century

Cultural and environmental factors interact in determining the genetic structure of human populations. Bio-demographic investigations of ethnic minorities are able to disentangle the influences that these two components have on the evolution of the genetic structure of a population. The ethnic minority of the Arbëreshe of the province of Cosenza (Calabria, southern Italy) is analyzed in this paper and its bio-demographic structure in the early 1800s is compared with that of neighboring Italian populations. The data derive from surnames recorded in the birth registers of the 19 Arbëreshe municipalities of the province of Cosenza and in 5 non-Arbëreshe municipalities of the same province. Isonymy and repeated pairs of surnames are used to analyze the bio-demographic structure of these populations, while analysis of isonymic relationships is used to investigate the variability between populations. Higher values of marital isonymy and subdivision into subpopulations characterize the Arbëreshe populations with respect to their non-Arbëreshe neighbors. However, the high range of variability of these parameters suggests a strong influence of geographic location on the marriage pattern of each community. At the same time, cultural differences linked to group identity had a strong impact in limiting marriage exchanges between the different ethnic groups living in the province of Cosenza in the early 1800s. In fact, the analysis of isonymic relationships demonstrates that geographic location shaped kinship patterns among the Arbëreshe communities, but it also shows that the non-Arbëreshe neighbors formed a clearly separate reproductive cluster

Apis mellifera ligustica, Spinola 1806 as bioindicator for detecting environmental contamination: a preliminary study of heavy metal pollution in Trieste, Italy

Honeybees have become important tools for the ecotoxicological assessment of soil, water and air metal contamination due to their extraordinary capacity to bioaccumulate toxic metals from the environment. The level of heavy metal pollution in the Trieste city was monitored using foraging bees of Apis mellifera ligustica from hives owned by beekeepers in two sites strategically located in the suburban industrial area and urban ones chosen as control. The metal concentration in foraging bees was determined by inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry. The chemical analysis has identified and quantified 11 trace elements accumulated in two different rank orders: Zn> Cu > Sr > Bi > Ni > Cr > Pb = Co > V > Cd > As in foraging bees from the suburban site and Zn > Cu > Sr > Cr > Ni > Bi > Co = V > Pb > As > Cd in bees from urban site. Data revealed concentrations of Cr and Cu significantly higher and concentration of Cd significantly lower in bees from urban sites. The spatial difference and magnitude order in heavy metal accumulation along the urban-suburban gradient are mainly related to the different anthropogenic activity within sampled sites and represent a risk for the human health of people living in the city. We discussed and compared results with the range of values reported in literature

investigation of new additives to reduce the fume emission of bitumen during asphalt concrete processing

Pavement materials play an important role in overall pavement sustainability including material acquisition processing, and transportation. The main objective of the present study is to evaluate the effectiveness of new additives, to reduce bitumen's fume emission expelled into the atmosphere, during the processing of asphalt concrete. The new additives act by trapping bitumen's volatile substances avoiding their release at high temperatures. In this paper, we have been tested the performance of 2 types of mesoporous silica-based additives (AntiSmog 1 and AntiSmog 2). The idea of using these additives to reduce the emission of fumes in bitumen has been submitted as a patent. To quantify and characterize the emitted fumes, thermogravimetry (TGA) and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) technique have been used. Dynamic Shear Rheology (DSR) has been used to check the rheological properties and the possible sedimentation issues that could occur after the addition of the additive

Bioinspired Metal‐Organic Frameworks in Mixed Matrix Membranes for Efficient Static/Dynamic Removal of Mercury from Water

The mercury removal efficiency of a novel metal-organic framework (MOF) derived from the amino acid S-methyl-L-cysteine is presented and the process is characterized by single-crystal X-ray crystallography. A feasibility study is further presented on the performance of this MOF and also that of another MOF derived from the amino acid L-methionine when used as the sorbent in mixed matrix membranes (MMMs). These MOF-based MMMs exhibit high efficiency and selectivity in both static and dynamic regimes in the removal of Hg2+ from aqueous environments, due to the high density of thioalkyl groups decorating MOF channels. Both MMMs are capable to reduce different concentration of the pollutant to acceptable limits for drinking water (<2 parts per billion). In addition, a novel device, consisting of the recirculation and adsorption of contaminated solutions through the MOF-MMMs, is designed and successfully explored in the selective capture of Hg2+. Thus, filtration of Hg2+ solutions with multiple passes through the permeation cell shows a gradual decrease of the pollutant concentration. These results suggest that MOF-based MMMs can be implemented in water remediation, helping to reduce either contaminants from accidental unauthorized or deliberate metal industrial dumping and to ensure access for clean and potable freshwater

Preface of the 31st Italian Symposium on Advanced Database Systems

This volume contains the proceedings of the 31st Italian Symposium on Advanced Database Systems (SEBD - Sistemi Evoluti per Basi di Dati), held in Galzinagno Terme (Padua, Italy) from 2 to 5 July 2023.</p