Cyclodextrin-based nanosponges as drug carriers

Cyclodextrin-based nanosponges, which are proposed as a new nanosized delivery system, are innovative cross-linked cyclodextrin polymers nanostructured within a three-dimensional network. This type of cyclodextrin polymer can form porous insoluble nanoparticles with a crystalline or amorphous structure and spherical shape or swelling properties. The polarity and dimension of the polymer mesh can be easily tuned by varying the type of cross-linker and degree of cross-linking. Nanosponge functionalisation for site-specific targeting can be achieved by conjugating various ligands on their surface. They are a safe and biodegradable material with negligible toxicity on cell cultures and are well-tolerated after injection in mice. Cyclodextrin-based nanosponges can form complexes with different types of lipophilic or hydrophilic molecules. The release of the entrapped molecules can be varied by modifying the structure to achieve prolonged release kinetics or a faster release. The nanosponges could be used to improve the aqueous solubility of poorly water-soluble molecules, protect degradable substances, obtain sustained delivery systems or design innovative drug carriers for nanomedicine

Neural Posterior Estimation with guaranteed exact coverage: the ringdown of GW150914

We analyze the ringdown phase of the first detected black-hole merger, GW150914, using a simulation-based inference pipeline based on masked autoregressive flows. We obtain approximate marginal posterior distributions for the ringdown parameters, namely the mass, spin, and the amplitude and phases of the dominant mode and its first overtone. Thanks to the locally amortized nature of our method, we are able to calibrate our posteriors with injected simulations, producing posterior regions with guaranteed (i.e. exact) frequentist coverage of the true values. For GW150914, our calibrated posteriors provide only mild evidence (~ 2 sigma) for the presence of an overtone, even if the ringdown is assumed to start at the peak of the amplitude.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figure

O gosto musical do Neymar: pagode, funk, sertanejo e o imaginário do popular bem sucedido

A intensa midiatização em torno do craque Neymar nos últimos anos tem produzido uma grande mitificação do atleta como uma espécie de jogador-ideal, tomado como símbolo de diversas car- acterísticas positivas da nacionalidade. Neste texto, vamos refletir sobre sua recorrente associação com artistas do mundo da música e sua vinculação simbólica a certos pensamentos que aproximam sua narrativa mitificada de herói nacional com a ideia de ascensão social pelo talento, narrativa cara ao individualismo capitalista. É o gosto musical do Neymar que pode nos revelar nuances e con- tradições de uma narrativa de bem estar financeiro e individual oriunda do que poderíamos chamar de “cultura popular”, atravessada pela ideia de esforço, talento e ascensão.

Febrile Illness Associated with Rickettsia conorii Infection in Dogs from Sicily

We report serologic and molecular evidence of acute, febrile illness associated with Rickettsia conorii in 3 male Yorkshire terriers from Sicily (Italy)

Preparation of Microspheres and Monolithic Microporous Carbons from the Pyrolysis of Template-Free Hyper-Crosslinked Oligosaccharides Polymer

Carbon-based materials with different morphologies have special properties suitable for application in adsorption, catalysis, energy storage, and so on. Carbon spheres and carbon monoliths are also nanostructured materials showing promising results. However, the preparation of these materials often require the use of a template, which aggravates their costs, making the operations for their removal complex. In this work, hollow carbon microspheres and carbon monolith were successfully prepared via carbonization of hyper-crosslinked polymer based on either cyclodextrins or amylose, in a template-free way. The carbons obtained are of the microporous type, showing a surface area up to 610 m2/g, and a narrow pore distribution, typically between 5 and 15 Å

Autonomic Faulty Node Replacement in UAV-Assisted Wireless Sensor Networks: a Test-bed

Several use-cases of the Internet of Things (IoT) rely on the development of large-scale Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in harsh environments characterized by limited Internet connectivity and battery-powered operations. In such scenarios, the failure of a single node due to energy depletion or hardware issues may cause network partitions and disrupt partially or completely the system operations until the intervention of a human operator. In this paper, we investigate the usage of Unmanned Aerial Networks (UAVs) to enable sensory data collection and support resilient communications in presence of faulty sensor nodes. More specifically, we study the possibility of replacing the ground devices with UAVs which are able to temporarily restore the multi-hop communication towards the WSN sink. To this aim, we extended the Uhura framework, a platform for robotic networking, with novel features for automatic network partition detection and UAV-sink coordination. Then, we created a small test-bed composed of a Bluetooth Mesh WSN and one drone, and characterized the performance of the UAV-assisted WSN system in terms of packet delivery ratio of the end-to-end data flows

Dependable Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration with minimal area & time overheads on Xilinx FPGAS

Thanks to their flexibility, FPGAs are nowadays widely used to implement digital systems' prototypes and, more frequently, their final releases. Reconfiguration traditionally required an external controller to upload contents in the FPGA. Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration (DPR) opens new horizons in FPGAs' applications, providing many new utilization paradigms, as it enables an FPGA to reconfigure itself: no external controller is required since it can be included in the FPGA. However, DPR also introduces reliability issues related to errors in the partial reconfiguration bitstreams. FPGA manufacturers currently provide solutions that are not efficient. In this paper new DfD (Design for Dependability) techniques are proposed. Exploiting information density of configuration data, they improve the performance while providing the same reliability characteristics as the previous one