Return migration in Italy: what do we know?

Return migration is the positive counterpart of brain drain. Human capital accumulation increases in a country if skilled agents go back home after a period spent working abroad. Effects of brain drain in Italy could be negative as highly skilled migrants decide not to come back to their native country. Our simple model shows that if preference for home consumption is balanced by career opportunities and life-style conditions, agents leave Italy and prefer to remain abroad. Data support and policy implications are provided.Return migration; brain drain.

Early traumatic experiences and the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis in people with eating disorders: A narrative review

: Exposure to trauma during childhood is a non-specific risk factor for psychiatric disorders, including eating disorders (EDs), over the life course. Moreover, an association between stressful life events and the onset/maintenance of EDs has been documented. Therefore, the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, namely the main component of the endogenous stress response system, has been proposed to be implicated in the pathophysiology of EDs. In this narrative review the current knowledge concerning the effects of early trauma exposure on the HPA axis activity and their putative role in the pathophysiology of EDs will be illustrated. Research findings corroborate the idea that childhood trauma exposure has long-lasting dysregulating effects on the activity of the HPA axis, which may contribute to the biological background of the early trauma-related risk for the development of EDs across the life span. Moreover, literature data support the existence of a "maltreated ecophenotype" in EDs characterized by specific clinic and neuroendocrine features, which may have important implications in treatment programming for such a type of patients

Eating disorders: What age at onset?

Age at onset (AAO) of eating disorders has classically been described in adolescence. We analyzed data from 806 subjects with anorexia nervosa (AN) or bulimia nervosa (BN) and performed a normal distribution admixture analysis to determine their AAO. No significant differences were found concerning the AAO functions of AN and BN subjects. Both groups had a mean AAO of about 18 years. Most of the subjects with AN (75.3%) and BN (83.3%) belonged to the early onset group. The definition of AAO for ED may be crucial for planning treatment modalities, with specific consideration of their clinical history and course

Switching Antipsychotic Medications in People with Schizophrenia: A 4-Year Naturalistic Study

Although generally effective in ameliorating the core manifestations of schizophrenia, antipsychotics (APs) may lead to only suboptimal responses or may be associated with a variety of treatment-related adverse events which require additional treatment strategies. Under such clinical circumstances, switching APs represents a rational treatment option. The present study aimed to identify the variables that predict AP switch and to quantify the frequency of this phenomenon in people with schizophrenia in real-life. A secondary analysis was conducted on the data collected at baseline and at a 4-year follow-up from a large sample of community-dwelling Italian people with schizophrenia. Demographic and clinical variables as well as information about AP treatment were recorded at two time points. Over the 4-year period, 34.9% of the 571 participants switched the AP; in particular, 8.4% of participants switched from first-generation APs (FGAs) to second-generation APs or vice versa, while 8.2% of them switched to clozapine. Logistic regression models showed that combination of APs at baseline was negatively associated with AP switch, while treatment with FGAs and the presence of extrapyramidal symptoms at baseline were associated with AP class switch. Although the aim of the present study was not to assess predictors of clinical relapse in people with schizophrenia, we might speculate that switching APs represents a surrogate indicator of treatment failure in some patients and could lead into relapse, which is a costly aspect of schizophrenia management in both economic and human terms. The sooner such a negative outcome can be predicted and managed, the sooner the treatment can be optimized to avoid it

Social difficulties as risk and maintaining factors in anorexia nervosa:A mixed-method investigation

Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a serious psychiatric disorder characterized by severe restriction of energy intake and dangerously low body weight. Other domains of functioning are affected, including social functioning. Although difficulties within this domain have started to be acknowledged by the literature, some important gaps remain to be filled. Do social difficulties predate the onset of the illness? What difficulties in particular are relevant for the development and maintenance of the illness? The aim of this study is to combine the use of quantitative and qualitative methods to answer these questions. Ninety participants with lifetime AN (88 women and 2 men) completed an online survey assessing memories of involuntary submissiveness within the family, fear of negative evaluation from others, perceived lack of social competence, feelings of social belonging, eating disorder symptoms, and work and social adjustment. Participants also answered three open questions regarding their experience of social relationships before and after the illness onset. The findings provided support for the hypothesized relationships between the study variables. Involuntary submissiveness and fear of negative evaluation predicted eating disorder symptoms and these associations were partially mediated by perceived lack of social competence. Two-thirds of the sample recalled early social difficulties before illness onset and recognized that these had played a role in the development of the illness. A larger proportion of participants stated that the eating disorder had affected their social relationships in a negative way. This study sheds some light on patients' perspective on the predisposing and maintaining role that social difficulties play in AN and identifies key psychological variables that could be targeted in treatment

Glassy PEEK‐WC vs Rubbery Pebax®1657 Polymers: Effect on the Gas Transport in CuNi‐MOF Based Mixed Matrix Membranes

Mixed matrix membranes (MMMs) are seen as promising candidates to overcome the fundamental limit of polymeric membranes, known as the so‐called Robeson upper bound, which defines the best compromise between permeability and selectivity of neat polymeric membranes. To overcome this limit, the permeability of the filler particles in the MMM must be carefully matched with that of the polymer matrix. The present work shows that it is not sufficient to match only the permeability of the polymer and the dispersed phase, but that one should consider also the individual contributions of the diffusivity and the solubility of the gas in both components. Here we compare the gas transport performance of two different MMMs, containing the metal-organic framework CuNi‐MOF in the rubbery Pebax®1657 and in the glassy poly(ether‐ether‐ketone) with cardo moiety, PEEK‐WC. The chemical and structural properties of MMMs were investigated by means of FT‐IR spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy and EDX analysis. The influence of MOF on the mechanical and thermal properties of both polymers was investigated by tensile tests and differential scanning calorimetry, respectively. The MOF loading in Pebax®1657 increased the ideal H2/N2 selectivity from 6 to 8 thanks to an increased H2 permeability. In general, the MOF had little effect on the Pebax®165 membranes because an increase in gas solubility was neutralized by an equivalent decrease in effective diffusivity. Instead, the addition of MOF to PEEK‐WC increases the ideal CO2/CH4 selectivity from 30 to ~48 thanks to an increased CO2 permeability (from 6 to 48 Barrer). The increase in CO2 permeability and CO2/CH4 selectivity is maintained under mixed gas conditions

Ultrapermeable Polymers of Intrinsic Microporosity (PIMs) Containing Spirocyclic Units with Fused Triptycenes

Polymers of intrinsic microporosity (PIMs), such as the archetypal spirobisindane-based PIM-1, are among the most promising new materials for making gas separation membranes with high permeance for potential use in high-throughput applications. Here it is shown that ultrapermeable PIMs can be prepared by fusing rigid and bulky triptycene (Trip) to the spirobisindane (SBI) unit. PIM-SBI-Trip and its copolymer with PIM-1 (PIM-1/SBI-Trip) are both ultrapermeable after methanol treatment (PCO2 > 20 000 Barrer). Old films, although less permeable, are more selective and therefore provide data that are close to the recently redefined Robeson upper bounds for the important CO2/CH4, CO2/N2, and O2/N2 gas pairs. Temperature-dependent permeation measurements and analysis of the entropic and energetic contributions of the gas transport parameters show that the enhanced performance of these polymers is governed by strong size-sieving character, mainly due to the energetic term of the diffusivity, and related to their high rigidity. Both polymers show a relatively weak pressure-dependence in mixed gas permeability experiments up to 6 bar, suggesting a potential use for CO2 capture from flue gas or for the upgrading of biogas

Gravitational wave alert generation infrastructure on your laptop

Multi-messenger astrophysics provides valuable insights into the properties of the physical Universe. These insights arise from the complementary information carried by photons, gravitational waves, neutrinos and cosmic rays about individual cosmic sources and source populations. When a gravitational wave (GW) candidate is identified by the Ligo, Virgo and Kagra (LVK) observatory network, an alert is sent to astronomers in order to search for electromagnetic or neutrino counterparts. The current LVK framework for alert generation consists of the Gravitational-Wave Candidate Event Database (GraceDB), which provides a centralized location for aggregating and retrieving information about candidate GW events, the SCiMMA Hopskotch server (a publishsubscribe messaging system) and GWCelery (a package for annotating and orchestrating alerts). The first two services are deployed in the Cloud (Amazon Web Services), while the latter runs on dedicated physical resources. In this work, we propose a deployment strategy for the alert generation framework as a whole, based on Kubernetes. We present a set of tools (in the form of Helm charts, Python packages and scripts) which conveniently allows running a parallel deployment of the complete infrastructure in a private Cloud for scientific computing (the Cloud at CNAF, INFN Tier-1 Computing Centre), which is currently used for integration tests. As an outcome of this work, we deliver to the community a specific configuration option for a sandboxed deployment on Minikube, which can be used to test the integration of other components (i.e. the lowlatency pipelines for the detection of the GW candidate) with the alert generation infrastructure in an isolated local environment