Technology transfer, institutions and development

The trade and capital flows across the national borders of developing countries have recently accelerated and produced the conditions for faster transmission of knowledge. While the economic literature has mainly focused on how international technology transfer affects standard economic performance, less attention has been paid to a broader development perspective. This paper fills this gap by addressing two main issues. It investigates whether the technology transfer conveyed by international trade flows has positively influenced the development paths of developing countries. It also focuses on whether country-specific structural features and institutional quality support the positive impulse of technology transfer on development.Technology Transfer, International Trade, Human Development, Institutions

On a class of polynomial triangular macro-elements

AbstractIn this paper we present a new class of polynomial triangular macro-elements of arbitrary degree which are an extension of the classical Clough-Tocher cubic scheme. Their most important property is that the degree plays the role of a tension parameter, since these macro elements tend to the plane interpolating the vertices data. Graphical examples showing their use in scattered data interpolation are reported

The effect of X-ray dust-scattering on a bright burst from the magnetar 1E 1547.0-5408

A bright burst, followed by an X-ray tail lasting ~10 ks, was detected during an XMM-Newton observation of the magnetar 1E 1547.0-5408 carried out on 2009 February 3. The burst, also observed by SWIFT/BAT, had a spectrum well fit by the sum of two blackbodies with temperatures of ~4 keV and 10 keV and a fluence in the 0.3-150 keV energy range of ~1e-5 erg/cm2. The X-ray tail had a fluence of ~4e-8 erg/cm2. Thanks to the knowledge of the distances and relative optical depths of three dust clouds between us and 1E 1547.0-5408, we show that most of the X-rays in the tail can be explained by dust scattering of the burst emission, except for the first ~20-30 s. We point out that other X-ray tails observed after strong magnetar bursts may contain a non-negligible contribution due to dust scattering.Comment: 8 pages, 2 tables and 10 figures; accepted to publication in MNRA

Antimicrobial activity of some plant essential oils against Listeria monocytogenes

The antimicrobial activity of 32 plant essential oils commonly used in food industry was examined against four strains of Listeria monocytogenes and one strain of Listeria innocua . Two different procedures were carried out to test the essential oils, a paper disc diffusion method and an inhibition curve. In the former procedure an absolute ethanolic solution (1:5 v/v) of each oil was tested on the plates inoculated with a bacterial concentration of 106 CFU/ml. Five of the 32 essential oils (cinnamon, clove, origanum, pimento, and thyme) showed antibacterial activity. Some of the five oils were also tested at lower concentration (1:50 v/v). The inhibition curve to study antilisteric efficacies of the five oils in a saline solution system was examined. Pimento oil showed marked and rapid activity (generally within 1 h of exposure), whereas clove, origanum, and thyme oils showed a more slow activity. The antilisteric activity of the tested oils seems to be strain dependent. A L. monocytogenes strain was also tested in a food matrix (minced pork meat) against thyme essential oil. Minced pork meat with thyme oil reduced the L. monocytogenes population by ca. 100-fold over the first week of storage

Training Program at Medical School of Chieti, Italy

We describe the changes in medical training program offered at the G. D’Annunzio University Medical School in Chieti-Pescara, Italy, which took place over the last decade. The new curriculum differs from the previous one in several important aspects, including limited number of students admitted to school depending on the estimated needs for physicians, obligatory class attendance, student attendance in preclinical laboratories, formative credits as a measure of student activity, and elective subjects. Furthermore, all medical graduates are allowed to take the State exam to obtain the license to practice, which was not the case previously. As a result of these major changes, a higher number of students graduates in due time. The changes made in the medical education curriculum in Italy have enabled Italian medical graduates to work in European Community Hospitals, because their medical degree is recognized in other EU countries. The main motif that drives the Medical School in Chieti-Pescara is the achievement of high quality in medical education and biomedical research by creating as strong a relationship between education and research as possible

Training Program at Medical School of Chieti, Italy

We describe the changes in medical training program offered at the G. D’Annunzio University Medical School in Chieti-Pescara, Italy, which took place over the last decade. The new curriculum differs from the previous one in several important aspects, including limited number of students admitted to school depending on the estimated needs for physicians, obligatory class attendance, student attendance in preclinical laboratories, formative credits as a measure of student activity, and elective subjects. Furthermore, all medical graduates are allowed to take the State exam to obtain the license to practice, which was not the case previously. As a result of these major changes, a higher number of students graduates in due time. The changes made in the medical education curriculum in Italy have enabled Italian medical graduates to work in European Community Hospitals, because their medical degree is recognized in other EU countries. The main motif that drives the Medical School in Chieti-Pescara is the achievement of high quality in medical education and biomedical research by creating as strong a relationship between education and research as possible

Whole-brain vasculature reconstruction at the single capillary level

The distinct organization of the brain’s vascular network ensures that it is adequately supplied with oxygen and nutrients. However, despite this fundamental role, a detailed reconstruction of the brain-wide vasculature at the capillary level remains elusive, due to insufficient image quality using the best available techniques. Here, we demonstrate a novel approach that improves vascular demarcation by combining CLARITY with a vascular staining approach that can fill the entire blood vessel lumen and imaging with light-sheet fluorescence microscopy. This method significantly improves image contrast, particularly in depth, thereby allowing reliable application of automatic segmentation algorithms, which play an increasingly important role in high-throughput imaging of the terabyte-sized datasets now routinely produced. Furthermore, our novel method is compatible with endogenous fluorescence, thus allowing simultaneous investigations of vasculature and genetically targeted neurons. We believe our new method will be valuable for future brain-wide investigations of the capillary network

MicroRNAs in melanoma development and resistance to target therapy

microRNAs constitute a complex class of pleiotropic post-transcriptional regulators of gene expression involved in the control of several physiologic and pathologic processes. Their mechanism of action is primarily based on the imperfect matching of a seed region located at the 5' end of a 21-23 nt sequence with a partially complementary sequence located in the 3' untranslated region of target mRNAs. This leads to inhibition of mRNA translation and eventually to its degradation. Individual miRNAs are capable of binding to several mRNAs and several miRNAs are capable of influencing the function of the same mRNAs. In recent years networks of miRNAs are emerging as capable of controlling key signaling pathways responsible for the growth and propagation of cancer cells. Furthermore several examples have been provided which highlight the involvement of miRNAs in the development of resistance to targeted drug therapies. In this review we provide an updated overview of the role of miRNAs in the development of melanoma and the identification of the main downstream pathways controlled by these miRNAs. Furthermore we discuss a group of miRNAs capable to influence through their respective up- or down-modulation the development of resistance to BRAF and MEK inhibitors

P003. NSAIDs for symptomatic treatment of headache

Background and aims Clinical observations suggest that the use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) for symptomatic treatment of headache is not in line with recommendations by international guidelines [1]. The aim of the study was to evaluate NSAIDs use for episodic headache at the Headache Centre of the Chieti University in the period: January 2000-February 2013

Exploring resting-state functional connectivity invariants across the lifespan in healthy people by means of a recently proposed graph theoretical model

In this paper we investigate the changes in the functional connectivity intensity, and some related properties, in healthy people, across the life span and at resting state. For the explicit computation of the functional connectivity we exploit a recently proposed model, that bases not only on the correlations data provided by the acquisition equipment, but also on different parameters, such as the anatomical distances between nodes and their degrees. The leading purpose of the paper is to show that the proposed approach is able to recover the main aspects of resting state condition known from the available literature, as well as to suggest new insights, perspectives and speculations from a neurobiological point of view. Our study involves 133 subjects, both males and females of different ages, with no evidence of neurological diseases or systemic disorders. First, we show how the model applies to the sample, where the subjects are grouped into 28 different groups (14 of males and 14 of females), according to their age. This leads to the construction of two graphs (one for males and one for females), that can be realistically interpreted as representative of the neural network during the resting state. Second, following the idea that the brain network is better understood by focusing on specific nodes having a kind of centrality, we refine the two output graphs by introducing a new metric that favours the selection of nodes having higher degrees. As a third step, we extensively comment and discuss the obtained results. In particular, it is remarkable that, despite a great overlapping exists between the outcomes concerning males and females, some intriguing differences appear. This motivates a deeper local investigation, which represents the fourth part of the paper, carried out through a thorough statistical analysis. As a result, we are enabled to support that, for two special age groups, a few links contribute in differentiating the behaviour of males and females. In addition, we performed an average-based comparison between the proposed model and the traditional statistical correlation-based approach, then discussing and commenting the main outlined discrepancies