Detection of Solar Coronal Mass Ejections from Raw Images with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) are massive releases of plasma from the solar corona. When the charged material is ejected towards the Earth, it can cause geomagnetic storms and severely damage electronic equipment and power grids. Early detection of CMEs is therefore crucial for damage containment. In this paper, we study detection of CMEs from sequential images of the solar corona acquired by a satellite. A low-complexity deep neural network is trained to process the raw images, ideally directly on the satellite, in order to provide early alerts

Recent Advances on the Innate Immune Response to Coxiella burnetii.

Coxiella burnetii is an obligate intracellular Gram-negative bacterium and the causative agent of a worldwide zoonosis known as Q fever. The pathogen invades monocytes and macrophages, replicating within acidic phagolysosomes and evading host defenses through different immune evasion strategies that are mainly associated with the structure of its lipopolysaccharide. The main transmission routes are aerosols and ingestion of fomites from infected animals. The innate immune system provides the first host defense against the microorganism, and it is crucial to direct the infection towards a self-limiting respiratory disease or the chronic form. This review reports the advances in understanding the mechanisms of innate immunity acting during C. burnetii infection and the strategies that pathogen put in place to infect the host cells and to modify the expression of specific host cell genes in order to subvert cellular processes. The mechanisms through which different cell types with different genetic backgrounds are differently susceptible to C. burnetii intracellular growth are discussed. The subsets of cytokines induced following C. burnetii infection as well as the pathogen influence on an inflammasome-mediated response are also described. Finally, we discuss the use of animal experimental systems for studying the innate immune response against C. burnetii and discovering novel methods for prevention and treatment of disease in humans and livestock

Cerebral Hemodynamics Assessed by means of Trasncranial Doppler and Near - Infrared Spectroscopy in Healthy Smokers and non-Smokers

The assessment of cerebral vasomotor reactivity (VMR) is a valuable tool for the early detection of risk condition in healthy subjects and for the non-invasive bedside evaluation of patients. Typically, cerebral hemodynamics assessment is performed in correspondence of CO2 reactivity. We studied the VMR of a population of young healthy non-smokers (n=10, age 27 plusmn 4.1) and healthy smokers (n=4, age 28 plusmn 4.5) using a joint approach based on transcranial Doppler ultrasonography and near-infrared spectroscopy, to monitor cerebral blood flow velocity (CBFV) and concentrations of oxygenated (O2Hb) and reduced (CO2Hb) haemoglobin. VMR was induced by means of voluntary breath-holding (BH). We quantified VMR using the breath-holding index (BHI). Smokers BH duration was significantly lower than that of non-smokers (p < 10-4; their BHI did not significantly differ from that of non-smokers in terms of CBFV, but differed in terms of O2Hb and CO2Hb concentrations changes. Specifically, with respect to non-smokers, smokers presented a delayed VMR that took place only around 60% of the apnoea phase. This delayed response could reveal an impaired autoregulatory mechanism and could be a risk condition when the subjects need to compensate an abrupt change in the cerebral blood flo