Bitcoin: new order or libertarian utopia? An answer from the past: Scotland 1727-1845 [winner - popular prize]

This research debunks the myth of Bitcoin as a new financial order by using a historical example and it shows that without an independent authority, allegedly free-markets financial systems run free-wheel into monopolies

Biocontrol Ability and Action Mechanism of Starmerella bacillaris (Synonym Candida zemplinina) Isolated from Wine Musts against Gray Mold Disease Agent Botrytis cinerea on Grape and Their Effects on Alcoholic Fermentation

Gray mold is one of the most important diseases of grapevine in temperate climates. This plant pathogen affects plant growth and reduces wine quality. The use of yeasts as biocontrol agents to apply in the vineyard have been investigated in recent years as an alternative to agrochemicals. In this work, fermenting musts obtained from overripe grape berries, therefore more susceptible to infection by fungal pathogens such as Botrytis cinerea, were considered for the selection of yeasts carrying antifungal activity. Thirty-six isolates were identified as Starmerella bacillaris, a species recently proven to be of enological interest. Among them 14 different strains were studied and antifungal activity against B. cinerea was demonstrated, for the first time, to be present in S. bacillaris species. The production of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), tested in vitro, was found to be the main responsible of S. bacillaris antifungal effects. All the strains were able to reduce B. cinerea decay on wounded grape berries artificially inoculated with gray mold. The colonization level of wound was very high reaching, after 5 days, a concentration of 10(6) cells per ml of grape juice obtained after berry crushing. At this cell concentration S. bacillaris strains were used to ferment synthetic and natural musts. The sequential yeast inoculation, performed by adding S. cerevisiae 48 h after S. bacillaris, was needed to complete sugar consumption and determined a significant increase in glicerol content and a reduction of ethanol and acetic acid concentrations. The high wound colonization ability, found in this work, together with the propensity to colonize grape berry and the interesting enological traits possessed by the selected S. bacillaris strains allow the use of this yeast as biocontrol agent on vine and grape berries with possible positive effects on must fermentation, although the presence of S. cerevisiae is needed to complete the fermentation process. This work introduces new possibilities in wine yeast selection programs in order to identify innovative wine yeasts that are simultaneously antifungal agents in vineyards and alternative wine starters for grape must fermentation and open new perspective to a more integrated strategy for increasing wine quality

A Cloud-Native Web Application for Assisted Metadata Generation and Retrieval: THESPIAN-NER

Within the context of the Competence Centre for the Conservation of Cultural Heritage (4CH) project, the design and deployment of a platform-as-a-service cloud infrastructure for the first European competence centre of cultural heritage (CH) has begun, and some web services have been integrated into the platform. The first integrated service is the INFN-CHNet web application for FAIR storage of scientific analysis on CH: THESPIAN-Mask. It is based on CIDOC-CRM-compatible ontology and CRMhs, describing the scientific metadata. To ease the process of metadata generation and data injection, another web service has been developed: THESPIAN-NER. It is a tool based on a deep neural network for named entity recognition (NER), enabling users to upload their Italian-written report files and obtain labelled entities. Those entities are used as keywords either to serve as (semi)automatically custom queries for the database, or to fill (part of) the metadata form as a descriptor for the file to be uploaded. The services have been made freely available in the 4CH PaaS cloud platform

Explorations of the viability of ARM and Xeon Phi for physics processing

We report on our investigations into the viability of the ARM processor and the Intel Xeon Phi co-processor for scientific computing. We describe our experience porting software to these processors and running benchmarks using real physics applications to explore the potential of these processors for production physics processing.Comment: Submitted to proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP13), Amsterda

Costruisci il Sistema Solare in Scala sulla tua città: un laboratorio divulgativo della serie INAF Online Lab

Il laboratorio Costruisci il Sistema Solare in scala sulla tua città è uno degli INAF Online Lab, il progetto sviluppato dal Gruppo DD INAF e ospitato su EduINAF, la rivista online dedicata alla Didattica e Divulgazione dell’INAF. L’idea degli INAF Online Lab, laboratori divulgativi ludici da svolgere completamente online, è nata nell’epoca dell’emergenza COVID19 e della successiva trasformazione in eventi online dei Festival della Scienza e dei laboratori didattici normalmente ospitati in queste manifestazioni. In particolare, Costruisci il Sistema Solare in scala sulla tua città è l’evoluzione di un progetto didattico precedentemente progettato e realizzato con le scuole, trasformato in INAF Online Lab grazie all’uso del software Google Earth. In Costruisci il Sistema Solare in scala sulla tua città, gruppi di ragazzi tra gli 8 e i 13 anni partecipano a un’attività guidata online in cui costruiscono un Sistema Solare virtuale in scala tra le vie della propria città per comprendere le reali dimensioni dei pianeti, le loro distanze reciproche e con il Sole. In questo documento descriviamo nel dettaglio il laboratorio e i suoi possibili ulteriori sviluppi

Emerging Approaches of Transcatheter Valve Repair/Insertion

Aortic stenosis (AS) and mitral regurgitation (MR) account for the majority of valvular diseases and their prevalence is increasing according to increased life expectancy. Surgical treatment is the gold standard, although operative risk may be high in some patients due to comorbidities and age. A large part of the patients at high surgical risk who could beneficiate of treatment are not referred to surgery. Therefore, there is a need of alternative and less invasive procedures

Polarization preserving ultra fast optical shutter for quantum information processing

We present the realization of a ultra fast shutter for optical fields, which allows to preserve a generic polarization state, based on a self-stabilized interferometer. It exhibits high (or low) transmittivity when turned on (or inactive), while the fidelity of the polarization state is high. The shutter is realized through two beam displacing prisms and a longitudinal Pockels cell. This can represent a useful tool for controlling light-atom interfaces in quantum information processing.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figure

FGF-trapping hampers cancer stem-like cells in uveal melanoma

Background: Cancer stem-like cells (CSCs) are a subpopulation of tumor cells responsible for tumor initiation, metastasis, chemoresistance, and relapse. Recently, CSCs have been identified in Uveal Melanoma (UM), which represents the most common primary tumor of the eye. UM is highly resistant to systemic chemotherapy and effective therapies aimed at improving overall survival of patients are eagerly required. Methods: Herein, taking advantage from a pan Fibroblast Growth Factor (FGF)-trap molecule, we singled out and analyzed a UM-CSC subset with marked stem-like properties. A hierarchical clustering of gene expression data publicly available on The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) was performed to identify patients' clusters. Results: By disrupting the FGF/FGF receptor (FGFR)-mediated signaling, we unmasked an FGF-sensitive UM population characterized by increased expression of numerous stemness-related transcription factors, enhanced aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH) activity, and tumor-sphere formation capacity. Moreover, FGF inhibition deeply affected UM-CSC survival in vivo in a chorioallantoic membrane (CAM) tumor graft assay, resulting in the reduction of tumor growth. At clinical level, hierarchical clustering of TCGA gene expression data revealed a strong correlation between FGFs/FGFRs and stemness-related genes, allowing the identification of three distinct clusters characterized by different clinical outcomes. Conclusions: Our findings support the evidence that the FGF/FGFR axis represents a master regulator of cancer stemness in primary UM tumors and point to anti-FGF treatments as a novel therapeutic strategy to hit the CSC component in UM

Percutaneous mitral valve repair with the MitraClip system: acute results from a real world setting

This study sought to evaluate the feasibility and early outcomes of a percutaneous edge-to-edge repair approach for mitral valve regurgitation with the MitraClip((R)) system (Evalve, Inc., Menlo Park, CA, USA).Patients were selected for the procedure based on the consensus of a multidisciplinary team. The primary efficacy endpoint was acute device success defined as clip placement with reduction of mitral regurgitation to < 2+. The primary acute safety endpoint was 30-day freedom from major adverse events, defined as the composite of death, myocardial infarction, non-elective cardiac surgery for adverse events, renal failure, transfusion of > 2 units of blood, ventilation for > 48 h, deep wound infection, septicaemia, and new onset of atrial fibrillation. Thirty-one patients (median age 71, male 81%) were treated between August 2008 and July 2009. Eighteen patients (58%) presented with functional disease and 13 patients (42%) presented with organic degenerative disease. A clip was successfully implanted in 19 patients (61%) and two clips in 12 patients (39%). The median device implantation time was 80 min. At 30 days, there was an intra-procedural cardiac tamponade and a non-cardiac death, resulting in a primary safety endpoint of 93.6% [95% confidence interval (CI) 77.2-98.9]. Acute device success was observed in 96.8% of patients (95% CI 81.5-99.8). Compared with baseline, left ventricular diameters, diastolic left ventricular volume, diastolic annular septal-lateral dimension, and mitral valve area significantly diminished at 30 days.Our initial results with the MitraClip device in a very small number of patients indicate that percutaneous edge-to-edge mitral valve repair is feasible and may be accomplished with favourable short-term safety and efficacy results