Computer simulation of the phase diagram for a fluid confined in a fractal and disordered porous material

We present a grand canonical Monte Carlo simulation study of the phase diagram of a Lennard-Jones fluid adsorbed in a fractal and highly porous aerogel. The gel environment is generated from an off-lattice diffusion limited cluster-cluster aggregation process. Simulations have been performed with the multicanonical ensemble sampling technique. The biased sampling function has been obtained by histogram reweighting calculations. Comparing the confined and the bulk system liquid-vapor coexistence curves we observe a decrease of both the critical temperature and density in qualitative agreement with experiments and other Monte Carlo studies on Lennard-Jones fluids confined in random matrices of spheres. At variance with these numerical studies we do not observe upon confinement a peak on the liquid side of the coexistence curve associated with a liquid-liquid phase coexistence. In our case only a shouldering of the coexistence curve appears upon confinement. This shoulder can be associated with high density fluctuations in the liquid phase. The coexisting vapor and liquid phases in our system show a high degree of spatial disorder and inhomogeneity.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures, to be published in Phys. Rev.

The conditioning of medical gases with hot water humidifiers

During invasive mechanical ventilation due to the dryness of medical gases is necessary to provide an adequate level of conditioning. The hot water humidifiers (HWH) heat the water, thus allowing the water vapor to heat and humidify the medical gases. In the common HWH there is a contact between the medical gases and the sterile water, thus increasing the risk of patient’s colonization and infection. Recently to avoid the condensation in the inspiratory limb of the ventilator circuit, new heated ventilator circuits have been developed. In this in vitro study we evaluated the efficiency (absolute/relative humidity) of three HWH: (1) a common HWH without a heated ventilator circuit (MR 730, Fisher&Paykel, New Zeland), (2) the same HWH with a heated ventilator circuit (Mallinckrodt Dar, Italy) and (3) a new HWH (DAR HC 2000, Mallinkckrodt Dar, Italy) with a heated ventilator circuit in which the water vapor reaches the medical gases through a gorotex membrane, avoiding any direct contact between the water and gases. At a temperature of 35°C and 37°C the HWH and heated tube were evaluated. The absolute humidity (AH) and relative humidity (RH) were measured by a psychometric method. The minute ventilation, tidal volume respiratory rate and oxygen fraction were: 5.8 ± 0.1 l/min, 740 ± 258 ml, 7.5 ± 2.6 bpm and 100%, respectively. Ventilator P2 Use of a bougie during percutaneous tracheostom

Liquid-liquid coexistence in the phase diagram of a fluid confined in fractal porous materials

Multicanonical ensemble sampling simulations have been performed to calculate the phase diagram of a Lennard-Jones fluid embedded in a fractal random matrix generated through diffusion limited cluster aggregation. The study of the system at increasing size and constant porosity shows that the results are independent from the matrix realization but not from the size effects. A gas-liquid transition shifted with respect to bulk is found. On growing the size of the system on the high density side of the gas-liquid coexistence curve it appears a second coexistence region between two liquid phases. These two phases are characterized by a different behaviour of the local density inside the interconnected porous structure at the same temperature and chemical potential.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures. To be published in Europhys. Letter

MR Imaging Findings in 2 Cases of Late Infantile GM1 Gangliosidosis

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Immunohistochemical Distribution of Serotonin Transporter (SERT) in the Optic Lobe of the Honeybee, Apis mellifera

Visual information is processed in the optic lobes, which consist of three retinotopic neuropils. These are the lamina, the medulla and the lobula. Biogenic amines play a crucial role in the control of insect responsiveness, and serotonin is clearly related to aggressiveness in invertebrates. Previous studies suggest that serotonin modulates aggression-related behaviours, possibly via alterations in optic lobe activity. The aim of this investigation was to immunohistochemically localize the distribution of serotonin transporter (SERT) in the optic lobe of moderate, docile and aggressive worker honeybees. SERT-immunoreactive fibres showed a wide distribution in the lamina, medulla and lobula; interestingly, the highest percentage of SERT immunoreactivity was observed across all the visual neuropils of the docile group. Although future research is needed to determine the relationship between the distribution of serotonin fibres in the honeybee brain and aggressive behaviours, our immunohistochemical study provides an anatomical basis supporting the role of serotonin in aggressive behaviour in the honeybee

Harvesting the promise of AOPs: An assessment and recommendations

The Adverse Outcome Pathway (AOP) concept is a knowledge assembly and communication tool to facilitate the transparent translation of mechanistic information into outcomes meaningful to the regulatory assessment of chemicals. The AOP framework and associated knowledgebases (KBs) have received significant attention and use in the regulatory toxicology community. However, it is increasingly apparent that the potential stakeholder community for the AOP concept and AOP KBs is broader than scientists and regulators directly involved in chemical safety assessment. In this paper we identify and describe those stakeholders who currently—or in the future—could benefit from the application of the AOP framework and knowledge to specific problems. We also summarize the challenges faced in implementing pathway-based approaches such as the AOP framework in biological sciences, and provide a series of recommendations to meet critical needs to ensure further progression of the framework as a useful, sustainable and dependable tool supporting assessments of both human health and the environment. Although the AOP concept has the potential to significantly impact the organization and interpretation of biological information in a variety of disciplines/applications, this promise can only be fully realized through the active engagement of, and input from multiple stakeholders, requiring multi-pronged substantive long-term planning an d strategies

A patient with limb girdle muscular dystrophy carries a TRIM32 deletion, detected by a novel CGH array, in compound heterozygosis with a nonsense mutation

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Regulation during the second year: Executive function and emotion regulation links to joint attention, temperament, and social vulnerability in a Latin American sample

© 2019 Gago Galvagno, De Grandis, Clerici, Mustaca, Miller and Elgier. Although a growing body of work has established developing regulatory abilities during the second year of life, more work is needed to better understand factors that influence this emerging control. The purpose of the present study was to examine regulation capacities in executive functions (i.e., EF or cognitive control) and emotion regulation (i.e., ER or control focused on modulating negative and sustaining positive emotions) in a Latin American sample, with a focus on how joint attention, social vulnerability, and temperament contribute to performance. Sixty Latin American dyads of mothers and children aged 18 to 24 months completed several EF tasks, a Still-Face Paradigm (SFP) to examine ER (Weinberg et al., 2008), and the Early Social Communication Scale to measure joint attention (Mundy et al., 2003). Parents completed the Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire Very Short Form to measure temperament (ECBQ-VS, Putnam et al., 2010) and the Social Economic Level Scale (SES) from INDEC (2000). Results revealed the typical responses expected for toddlers of this age in these EF tasks and in the SFP. Also, we found associations between EF and ER and between non-verbal communication related to monitoring infants\u27 attention to objects (i.e., responding to joint attention) and initiation of pointing (e.g., pointing and showing of an object while the child alternates his gaze to an adult) with EF. Regarding social factors, family differences and type of housing contribute to regulation. For temperament, effortful control was associated with both regulatory capacities. Finally, only age predicted EF. These results suggest that many patterns regarding the development of these abilities are duplicated in the first months of life in a Latin American sample while further highlighting the importance of considering how the environment and the individual characteristics of infants may associate to these regulatory abilities, which is particularly relevant to developing public policies to promote their optimal development

The laminar organization of the motor cortex in monodactylous mammals: a comparative assessment based on horse, chimpanzee, and macaque

The architecture of the neocortex classically consists of six layers, based on cytological criteria and on the layout of intra/interlaminar connections. Yet, the comparison of cortical cytoarchitectonic features across different species proves overwhelmingly difficult, due to the lack of a reliable model to analyze the connection patterns of neuronal ensembles forming the different layers. We first defined a set of suitable morphometric cell features, obtained in digitized Nissl-stained sections of the motor cortex of the horse, chimpanzee, and crab-eating macaque. We then modeled them using a quite general non-parametric data representation model, showing that the assessment of neuronal cell complexity (i.e., how a given cell differs from its neighbors) can be performed using a suitable measure of statistical dispersion such as the mean absolute deviation\u2014mean absolute deviation (MAD). Along with the non-parametric combination and permutation methodology, application of MAD allowed not only to estimate, but also to compare and rank the motor cortical complexity across different species. As to the instances presented in this paper, we show that the pyramidal layers of the motor cortex of the horse are far more irregular than those of primates. This feature could be related to the different organizations of the motor system in monodactylous mammals