Simultaneous Detection of H and D NMR Signals in a micro-Tesla Field

We present NMR spectra of remote-magnetized deuterated water, detected in an unshielded environment by means of a differential atomic magnetometer. The measurements are performed in a $\mu$T field, while pulsed techniques are applied -following the sample displacement- in a 100~$\mu$T field, to tip both D and H nuclei by controllable amounts. The broadband nature of the detection system enables simultaneous detection of the two signals and accurate evaluation of their decay times. The outcomes of the experiment demonstrate the potential of ultra-low-field NMR spectroscopy in important applications where the correlation between proton and deuteron spin-spin relaxation rates as a function of external parameters contains significant information.Comment: 7 pages (letter, 4 pages) plus supplemental material as an appendix. This document is the unedited author's version of a Submitted Work that was subsequently accepted for publication in Journal of Phys. Chem. Lett., copyright American Chemical Society after peer review. To access the final edited and published work see: pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.jpclett.7b0285

PIPE-chipSAD: A Pipeline for the Analysis of High Density Arrays of Bacterial Transcriptomes

PIPE-chipSAD is a pipeline for bacterial transcriptome studies based on high-density microarray experiments. The main algorithm chipSAD, integrates the analysis of the hybridization signal with the genomic position of probes and identifies portions of the genome transcribing for mRNAs. The pipeline includes a procedure, align-chipSAD, to build a multiple alignment of transcripts originating in the same locus in multiple experiments and provides a method to compare mRNA expression across different conditions. Finally, the pipeline includes anno-chipSAD a method to annotate the detected transcripts in comparison to the genome annotation. Overall, our pipeline allows transcriptional profile analysis of both coding and non-coding portions of the chromosome in a single framework. Importantly, due to its versatile characteristics, it will be of wide applicability to analyse, not only microarray signals, but also data from other high throughput technologies such as RNA-sequencing. The current PIPE-chipSAD implementation is written in Python programming language and is freely available at https://github.com/silviamicroarray/chipSAD

Improving agricultural drone localization using georeferenced low-complexity maps

To properly locate and operate autonomous vehicles for in-field tasks, the knowledge of their instantaneous position needs to be combined with an accurate spatial description of their environment. In agricultural fields, when operating inside the crops, GPS data are not reliable nor always available, therefore high-precision maps are difficult to be obtained and exploited for in-field operations. Recently, low-complexity, georeferenced 3D maps have been proposed to reduce their computationally demand without losing relevant crop shape information. In this paper, we propose an innovative approach based on the ellipsoid method that allows us to fuse the data collected by ultrasonic sensors and the information provided by the simplified map to improve the location estimation of an unmanned ground vehicle within crops. Then, this improved estimation of the vehicle location can be integrated with orientation data, merging it with those provided by other sensors as GPS and IMU, using classical filtering schemes

3D Distance Filter for the Autonomous Navigation of UAVs in Agricultural Scenarios

In precision agriculture, remote sensing is an essential phase in assessing crop status and variability when considering both the spatial and the temporal dimensions. To this aim, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is growing in popularity, allowing for the autonomous performance of a variety of in-field tasks which are not limited to scouting or monitoring. To enable autonomous navigation, however, a crucial capability lies in accurately locating the vehicle within the surrounding environment. This task becomes challenging in agricultural scenarios where the crops and/or the adopted trellis systems can negatively affect GPS signal reception and localisation reliability. A viable solution to this problem can be the exploitation of high-accuracy 3D maps, which provide important data regarding crop morphology, as an additional input of the UAVs’ localisation system. However, the management of such big data may be difficult in real-time applications. In this paper, an innovative 3D sensor fusion approach is proposed, which combines the data provided by onboard proprioceptive (i.e., GPS and IMU) and exteroceptive (i.e., ultrasound) sensors with the information provided by a georeferenced 3D low-complexity map. In particular, the parallel-cuts ellipsoid method is used to merge the data from the distance sensors and the 3D map. Then, the improved estimation of the UAV location is fused with the data provided by the GPS and IMU sensors, using a Kalman-based filtering scheme. The simulation results prove the efficacy of the proposed navigation approach when applied to a quadrotor that autonomously navigates between vine rows

Exploring Machine Learning for Untargeted Metabolomics Using Molecular Fingerprints

Background Metabolomics, the study of substrates and products of cellular metabolism, offers valuable insights into an organism's state under specific conditions and has the potential to revolutionise preventive healthcare and pharmaceutical research. However, analysing large metabolomics datasets remains challenging, with available methods relying on limited and incompletely annotated metabolic pathways. Methods This study, inspired by well-established methods in drug discovery, employs machine learning on metabolite fingerprints to explore the relationship of their structure with responses in experimental conditions beyond known pathways, shedding light on metabolic processes. It evaluates fingerprinting effectiveness in representing metabolites, addressing challenges like class imbalance, data sparsity, high dimensionality, duplicate structural encoding, and interpretable features. Feature importance analysis is then applied to reveal key chemical configurations affecting classification, identifying related metabolite groups. Results The approach is tested on two datasets: one on Ataxia Telangiectasia and another on endothelial cells under low oxygen. Machine learning on molecular fingerprints predicts metabolite responses effectively, and feature importance analysis aligns with known metabolic pathways, unveiling new affected metabolite groups for further study. Conclusion In conclusion, the presented approach leverages the strengths of drug discovery to address critical issues in metabolomics research and aims to bridge the gap between these two disciplines. This work lays the foundation for future research in this direction, possibly exploring alternative structural encodings and machine learning models

Periacetabular Tumour Resection under Anterosuperior Iliac Spine Allows Better Alloprosthetic Reconstruction than Above: Bone Contact Matters

Periacetabular resections are more affected by late complications than other pelvic resections. Reconstruction using bone allograft is considered a suitable solution. However, it is still not clear how the bone-allograft contact surface impacts on mechanical and functional outcome

Protein kinase B/AKT isoform 2 drives migration of human mesenchymal stem cells.

This study was designed to investigate the migratory behavior of adult human mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) and the underlying mechanism. Cell migration was assessed by transwell, wound healing and time-lapse in vivo motility assays. Pharmacological inhibitors were used to determine the potential mechanism responsible for cell migration and invasion. The tests that were implemented revealed that MSC were fairly migratory. Protein kinase B (AKT) was strongly activated at the basal level. Through our analyses we demonstrated that pharmacological inactivation of AKT2 but not AKT1 significantly decreased cell migration and invasion. Although preliminary, collectively our results indicate that AKT2 activation plays a critical role in enabling MSC migration

SpaceQA: Answering Questions about the Design of Space Missions and Space Craft Concepts

We present SpaceQA, to the best of our knowledge the first open-domain QA system in Space mission design. SpaceQA is part of an initiative by the European Space Agency (ESA) to facilitate the access, sharing and reuse of information about Space mission design within the agency and with the public. We adopt a state-of-the-art architecture consisting of a dense retriever and a neural reader and opt for an approach based on transfer learning rather than fine-tuning due to the lack of domain-specific annotated data. Our evaluation on a test set produced by ESA is largely consistent with the results originally reported by the evaluated retrievers and confirms the need of fine tuning for reading comprehension. As of writing this paper, ESA is piloting SpaceQA internally.Comment: In proceedings of the 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2022

The Marcus Caelius Project: a transmedial approach to support cultural communication and educational activities at the Civical Archaeological Museum of Bologna

[EN] The project “Marcus Caelius – the Value of Memory” is a 8 minute short animation movie located in the Roman Bologna at the Augustan Age. It originated with the Civical Archaeological Museum of Bologna in collaboration with Cineca VisIT-Lab. The project emploies a well known historical fact (the Battle of Teutoburg) to enable a philological approach within an emotional/narrative process. New philologically accurate reconstructions (i.e archaeological finds hedged in the Museum’s collection) are integrated with 3D historical sets caming form previous Cineca projects. Mixed movie-making techniques, such as Blender rendering, Chroma key and Machinima animation, implemented an ad hoc production pipeline in order to define times and costs which could be supported by a small production.[ES] El proyecto de "Marcus Caelius, el valor de la memoria" es una breve película de animación de 8 minutos ambientada en la Bolonia romana (Bononia) durante el periodo del emperador Augusto, que surge de una iniciativa del Museo Arqueológico de Bolonia, en colaboración con Cineca. Este proyecto, basado en un famoso hecho histórico (la batalla de Teutoburgo), quiere proponer un enfoque filológico dentro de un proceso emocional/narrativo, definiendo una pipeline de producción apropiada (que incluye renderizado de Blender, Chroma key y animación Machinima) para definir tiempo y costes que puedan ser cubiertos por un pequeña producción. Nuevas reconstrucciones filológicamente adecuadas (restos arqueológicos en la Colección del Museo), se integran dentro de sets en 3D que proceden deproyectos anteriores de Cineca.The research leading to these results is partly funded by the EU Community's FP7 ICT under the V-MusT.net Project (Grant Agreement 270404). The publication reflects only the author’s views and the Community is not liable for any use that may be made of the information contained therein. Neither the V-MusT.net consortium as a whole, nor a certain participant of the V-MusT.net consortium, warrant that the information contained in this document is capable of use, nor that use of the information is free from risk, and accepts no liability for loss or damage suffered by any person using this information.Bentini, L.; De Luca, D.; Donati, C.; Giovetti, P.; Guidazzoli, A.; Guidi, F.; Marchesi, M.... (2012). The Marcus Caelius Project: a transmedial approach to support cultural communication and educational activities at the Civical Archaeological Museum of Bologna. Virtual Archaeology Review. 3(7):82-85. https://doi.org/10.4995/var.2012.4393OJS828537ANTINUCCI, F. (2010): Comunicare nel museo. Con DVD. Percorsi Laterza. Laterza.BORGATTI, C. et al. (2004): "Databases and virtual environments: a good match for communicating complex cultural sites". in ACM SIGGRAPH 2004 Educators program (New York, NY, USA, 2004), SIGGRAPH '04, ACM. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1186107.1186143DELLI PONTI, Francesca et al. (2011): "A Blender open pipeline for a 3D animated historical short film", in Proceeding of the 12th International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage - Short and Project Papers, VAST 2011.JUNG, Y. et al. (2011): "X3DOM AS CARRIER OF THE VIRTUAL HERITAGE", International Workshop 3D-ARCH, 4, 2011, Trento.O'REILLY, T. (2003): "The Architecture of Participation", [online] http:// www.oreillynet.com/lpt/wlg/3017 [Consult: 14-04-2012]