Debye Series for Light Scattering by a Spheroid

The Debye series is developed for electromagnetic scattering by a spheroid in order to decompose the far-zone fields into various physical processes. The geometrical rainbow angle and supernumerary spacing parameter are determined from the Debye intensity by fitting the results to an Airy function and comparing them to their assumed values in ray optics and Airy theory, respectively. Eccentricity-related scattering phenomena including the rainbow\u27s angular shift, the disappearance of the rainbow, and the rainbow-enhanced glory are quantitatively demonstrated and analyzed. (c) 2010 Optical Society of Americ

Analysis of gut microbiota in rheumatoid arthritis patients. Disease-related dysbiosis and modifications induced by etanercept

A certain number of studies were carried out to address the question of how dysbiosis could affect the onset and development of rheumatoid arthritis (RA), but little is known about the reciprocal influence between microbiota composition and immunosuppressive drugs, and how this interaction may have an impact on the clinical outcome. The aim of this study was to characterize the intestinal microbiota in a groups of RA patients treatment-naïve, under methotrexate, and/or etanercept (ETN). Correlations between the gut microbiota composition and validated immunological and clinical parameters of disease activity were also evaluated. In the current study, a 16S analysis was employed to explore the gut microbiota of 42 patients affected by RA and 10 healthy controls. Disease activity score on 28 joints (DAS-28), erythrocyte sedimentation rate, C-reactive protein, rheumatoid factor, anti-cyclic citrullinated peptides, and dietary and smoking habits were assessed. The composition of the gut microbiota in RA patients free of therapy is characterized by several abnormalities compared to healthy controls. Gut dysbiosis in RA patients is associated with different serological and clinical parameters; in particular, the phylum of Euryarchaeota was directly correlated to DAS and emerged as an independent risk factor. Patients under treatment with ETN present a partial restoration of a beneficial microbiota. The results of our study confirm that gut dysbiosis is a hallmark of the disease, and shows, for the first time, that the anti-tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α) ETN is able to modify microbial communities, at least partially restoring a beneficial microbiota

Managing emergency situations in VANET through heterogeneous technologies cooperation

Nowadays, the research on vehicular computing enhanced a very huge amount of services and protocols, aimed to vehicles security and comfort. The investigation of the IEEE802.11p, Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE) and Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) standards gave to the scientific world the chance to integrate new services, protocols, algorithms and devices inside vehicles. This opportunity attracted the attention of private/public organizations, which spent lot of resources and money to promote vehicular technologies. In this paper, the attention is focused on the design of a new approach for vehicular environments able to gather information during mobile node trips, for advising dangerous or emergency situations by exploiting on-board sensors. It is assumed that each vehicle has an integrated on-board unit composed of several sensors and Global Position System (GPS) device, able to spread alerting messages around the network, regarding warning and dangerous situations/conditions. On-board units, based on the standard communication protocols, share the collected information with the surrounding road-side units, while the sensing platform is able to recognize the environment that vehicles are passing through (obstacles, accidents, emergencies, dangerous situations, etc.). Finally, through the use of the GPS receiver, the exact location of the caught event is determined and spread along the network. In this way, if an accident occurs, the arriving cars will, probably, avoid delay and danger situations

Myocardial infarction and mortality following joint surgery in patients with rheumatoid arthritis: a retrospective cohort study

Summary of patient level comparing those with rheumatoid arthritis to those without rheumatoid arthritis. (DOCX 14 kb

Extraction of shear viscosity in stationary states of relativistic particle systems

Starting from a classical picture of shear viscosity we construct a stationary velocity gradient in a microscopic parton cascade. Employing the Navier-Stokes ansatz we extract the shear viscosity coefficient $\eta$. For elastic isotropic scatterings we find an excellent agreement with the analytic values. This confirms the applicability of this method. Furthermore for both elastic and inelastic scatterings with pQCD based cross sections we extract the shear viscosity coefficient $\eta$ for a pure gluonic system and find a good agreement with already published calculations.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figure

Network Friendly P2P-TV: The Napa-Wine Approach

DEMO Sessio

A New Distributed Predictive Congestion Aware Re-Routing Algorithm for CO2 Emissions Reduction

In the last years, vehicular networking has grown up in terms of interest and transmission capability, due to the possibility of exploiting the distributed communication paradigm in a mobile scenario, where moving nodes are represented by vehicles. The different existing standards for vehicular ad-hoc networks, such as dedicate short range communication (DSRC), wireless access for vehicular environment (WAVE)/IEEE802.11p, have given to the research community the possibility of developing new medium access control (MAC) and routing schemes, in order to enhance the quality and the comfort of mobile users who are driving their vehicles. In this paper, we focus our attention on the optimization of traffic flowing in a vehicular environment with vehicle-2-roadside capability. As shown later, the proposed idea exploits the information that is gathered by road-side units to redirect traffic flows (in terms of vehicles) to less congested roads, with an overall system optimization, also in terms of carbon dioxide emissions reduction. An analytical model, as well as a set of pseudo-code instructions, have been introduced in the paper. A deep campaign of simulations has been carried out to give more effectiveness to our proposal