What Is New about the Exposome? Exploring Scientific Change in Contemporary Epidemiology

In this commentary, I discuss the scientific changes brought by the exposome, asking what is new about this approach and line of research. I place the exposome in a historical perspective, by analyzing the conditions under which the exposome has been conceived, developed and established in the context of contemporary epidemiological research. I argue that the exposome has been developed by transferring approaches, methods and conceptualizations from other lines of research in the life and health sciences. I thus discuss the conceptual and methodological innovations of the exposome as a result of the merging and adaptation of these elements for new uses and purposes. On this basis, I argue that the novelty of the exposome should be seen in incremental rather than revolutionary terms and, in this sense, the exposome shares significant elements with other projects and repertoires in postgenomics. I conclude by discussing the consequences of this analysis for the potential limitations and future development of exposome research

Midterm press release

project press release issued after the first year of researc

THE ROLE OF “INTEGRATED PRODUCTION” SCHEME IN THE NEW FRUIT AND VEGETABLE CMO: A TOOL FOR COMPETITIVENESS, SUSTAINABILITY OR OLIGOPSONY BY LARGE RETAIL CHAINS?

The new Common Market Organization (CMO) for the fruit and vegetable sector approved in 2007, continues to include sustainability and competitiveness of the sector among its most important goals. The key role of the new (as well as the old) CMO is still played by Producers Organizations (POs): among other things, they should help farmers to organize and to concentrate supply in order to satisfy the old and new requests by large retailers in Europe as well as in other foreign markets. On the other side POs should also help farmers to apply the best available growing, preserving and packaging technologies, in order to become more competitive but also sustainable from an environmental point of view. In order to satisfy these requests POs have been traditional supporters of new production systems like “Integrated Pest Management” (IPM) and later “Integrated Production” (IP); they have generally offered to their farmers technical assistance for its application in the fruit and vegetable sectors. The main stated objective of IP schemes is to reduce the use of pesticides, and therefore to increase the environmental sustainability of these productions. However differently from the case of organic products, in the case of IP no EU regulation or standard exists. The absence of this common standard has allowed regional authorities to introduce different definitions of IP. Moreover large retail chains, the most important buyers for these products, apply chain-specific requirements, again based on the “idea” of IP and perhaps also on regional IP scheme, to some extent, but always with differences quite important. The actual result is that farmers producing vegetables and fruits must often apply, for the same product grown on the same farm, different technologies in order to obtain different certifications (i.e. regional IP scheme and possibly few different retailers’ scheme) all of them theoretically based on the “common idea” of IP but with quite different interpretations. These different certifications schemes imply, at the farm level, a relevant increase in costs of production and commercialization, without generating any positive economic effect, on one side, and with a large degree of uncertainty in terms of effect on environmental sustainability of these production technologies. The paper starting from the case of fruit production in Emilia-Romagna region, discusses these negative implications together with the possibility for large retail chains to exercise some oligopsony power with respect to POs also using IP schemes. Few implications are drawn with respect to the potential benefits of a common IP scheme defined by EU regulation, and few considerations are made about the main characteristics that this certification should have in order to be (at least theoretically) efficient.Agricultural and Food Policy, Industrial Organization,

Analysis of facilities in OFF research in participating countries of CORE Organic

Report lists the following research facilities: research farms, experimental fields, on-farm studies, networks, animal research facilities, leaching fields and long-term experiments. Other facilities like facilities for laboratory analyses, food processing, greenhouses, climate chambers and growth cabinets are left out from this analysis, because they are seldom exclusively used for OFF research and because their use for OFF research does not require particular characteristics. On the other hand, when required, these facilities can easily be converted to OFF research

Analysis of OFF research topics in CORE Organic participating countries

This analysis of OFF research in the participating countries of CORE Organic is based on titles of projects running during the time period 2000-2007, with some variation from country to country. Lists of project titles were taken from country reports

Cotunneling signatures of Spin-Electric coupling in frustrated triangular molecular magnets

The ground state of frustrated (antiferromagnetic) triangular molecular magnets is characterized by two total-spin $S =1/2$ doublets with opposite chirality. According to a group theory analysis [M. Trif \textit{et al.}, Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{101}, 217201 (2008)] an external electric field can efficiently couple these two chiral spin states, even when the spin-orbit interaction (SOI) is absent. The strength of this coupling, $d$, is determined by an off-diagonal matrix element of the dipole operator, which can be calculated by \textit{ab-initio} methods [M. F. Islam \textit{et al.}, Phys. Rev. B \textbf{82}, 155446 (2010)]. In this work we propose that Coulomb-blockade transport experiments in the cotunneling regime can provide a direct way to determine the spin-electric coupling strength. Indeed, an electric field generates a $d$-dependent splitting of the ground state manifold, which can be detected in the inelastic cotunneling conductance. Our theoretical analysis is supported by master-equation calculations of quantum transport in the cotunneling regime. We employ a Hubbard-model approach to elucidate the relationship between the Hubbard parameters $t$ and $U$, and the spin-electric coupling constant $d$. This allows us to predict the regime in which the coupling constant $d$ can be extracted from experiment

A Comparative Study of EU and US Trade Policies for Developing Countries: The Case of Agri-Food Products

Trade relations between developed and developing countries are one of the hot topics of the ongoing World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations. The conclusion of the Cotonou Agreement between EU and African, Caribbean and Pacific countries, the introduction of the EU’s Everything But Arms initiative for the least developed countries and the United States’ African Growth and Opportunity Act for 39 African Countries, represents tangible incentives for many developing countries to continue their efforts to open their economies and build free markets. This paper analyzes the trade creating effects of EU and US trade policies as total effect, for agri-food products of developing countries in a gravity model framework. Data refer to a 10 year period: 1996-2005. The findings show larger trade creating effects of EU trade policies, especially for upper-middle income countries. Variation in trade creation, across the years, is not statistically significant, except for the low-income countries.Gross Trade Creation, Agricultural Trade Policy, Developed and Developing Countries, International Relations/Trade,