689 research outputs found
The time has come to look for metabolic dysfunction-associated fatty liver disease in adult patients with type 1 Gaucher disease
MAFLD is highly prevalent in Gaucher type 1 adult patients as well as in the general population and may worsen liver disease progression. Hepatic complications should be followed up. A healthy lifestyle and therapies of cardiometabolic risk factors should be recommended in Gaucher disease patients
Ocular Refraction at Birth and Its Development During the First Year of Life in a Large Cohort of Babies in a Single Center in Northern Italy
The purpose of this study was to investigate refraction at birth and during the first year of life in a large cohort of babies born in a single center in Northern Italy. We also aimed to analyze refractive errors in relation to the gestational age at birth. An observational ophthalmological assessment was performed within 24 h of birth on 12,427 newborns. Refraction was examined using streak retinoscopy after the administration of tropicamide (1%). Values in the range of between +0.50 †D †+4.00 were defined as physiological refraction at birth. Newborns with refraction values outside of the physiological range were followed up during the first year of life. Comparative analyses were conducted in a subgroup of babies with known gestational ages. The following distribution of refraction at birth was recorded: 88.03% of the babies had physiological refraction, 5.03% had moderate hyperopia, 2.14% had severe hyperopia, 3.4%, had emmetropia, 0.45%, had myopia, 0.94% had astigmatism, and 0.01% had anisometropia. By the end of the first year of life, we observed reductions in hyperopia and astigmatism, and stabilization of myopia. Preterm babies had a four-fold higher risk of congenital myopia and a three-fold higher risk of congenital emmetropia as compared to term babies. Refraction profiles obtained at birth changed during the first year of life, leading to a normalization of the refraction values. Gestational age at birth affected the incidence of refractive errors and amblyopia
Evolving Diversity II: Participation of students with an immigrant background in European Higher Education
EQUNET is a 3-year project researching the state of equity in Higher Education in Europe. The project aims to create an evidence-based policy advocacy network, so as to promote its conclusions as a way to promote better-informed policy making on equity issues in Europe. This is the second of three reports, and is dedicated to improving the picture of equity in access to Higher Education in Europe for persons of immigrant origin. The report provides a theoretical framework for discussion of the topic, a statistical cross-country analysis of access-figures, as well as detailed country-studies for Germany, Norway and the United Kingdom. It is the result of a year of research conducted by a multi-disciplinary team of researchers originating from across Europe. (DIPF/Orig.
Relaunching the Open Education Policy Registry
Post on OER World Map Blog providing an update on the development of the OE Policy Registry
Openness in Teachers' Digital Competence Frameworks: Looking for the Open Educator
There has been a wide variety of definitions of digital competence, from early narrow and technology-focused explanations to more recent attempts , such as the one by Ferrari (2013), who describes it as a complex concept encompassing a wide set of skills, attitudes and knowledge when performing tasks with Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Furthermore, there have been various different attempts to describe teachersâ digital competence, as the literature review by McGarr and McDonagh (2019) demonstrates. These authors evidence that models either depict teachersâ digital competence in diverse taxonomies of areas and dimensions, or as a hierarchical and progressive evolution from low to high levels of awareness and ability. They observe that openness does not have a presence in most of the taxonomic models and thus they propose openness as a dimension of their four-part model, under the label of attitudes. In this current work, we analyse international and national teachersâ digital competence frameworks and review whether openness has been included in them, and, if so, how it is described. In the case of frameworks that offer a model of increasing performance, we observe the levels at which open-related concepts appear. An initial review of the frameworks by the European Commission, UNESCO, ISTE (US) and INTEF (Spain) indicates that âopennessâ typically does not constitute a dimension in itself and tends to appear at intermediate and high levels of teachersâ digital competence, except from the UNESCO framework, where access to OER (Open Educational Resources) is present already at the lowest level. In this paper we reflect on the need for international and national frameworks of teacher professional development to boost openness: in particular, for open educational practices to be included at lower levels of teachersâ pre-service and in-service professional education. We argue that becoming an open educator requires both the development of the dispositions associated with reflective practice and the confidence to challenge neo-liberal educational assumptions in order to embrace participatory, equitable and open educational practices from the early stages of the development of teachersâ digital competence
An HST search for planets in the lower Main Sequence of the globular cluster NGC 6397
Searches for planetary transits carried out in open and globular clusters
have yielded to date only a handful of weak, unconfirmed candidates. These
results have been interpreted either as being insignificant, or as evidence
that the cluster chemical or dynamical environment inhibits the planetary
formation or survival. Most campaigns were limited by small sample statistics
or systematics from ground-based photometry. In this work we performed a search
for transiting planets and variables in a deep stellar field of NGC 6397 imaged
by HST-ACS for 126 orbits. We analyzed 5,078 light curves, including a pure
sample of 2,215 cluster-member M0-M9 dwarfs. The light curves have been
corrected for systematic trends and inspected with several tools. No
high-significance planetary candidate is detected. We compared this null
detection with the most recent results from Kepler, showing that no conclusive
evidence of lower planet incidence can be drawn. However, a very small
photometric jitter is measured for early-M cluster members (<~2 mmag on 98% of
them), which may be worth targeting in the near future with more optimized
campaigns. Twelve variable stars are reported for the first time.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, 1 table; accepted for publication in A&A on
February 16, 2012. Typos corrected. One figure and a short final note adde
The M4 Core Project with HST --- I. Overview and First-Epoch
We present an overview of the ongoing Hubble Space Telescope large program
GO-12911. The program is focused on the core of M4, the nearest Galactic
globular cluster, and the observations are designed to constrain the number of
binaries with massive companions (black holes, neutron stars, or white dwarfs)
by measuring the ``wobble'' of the luminous (main-sequence) companion around
the center of mass of the pair, with an astrometric precision of ~50
micro-arcseconds. The high spatial resolution and stable medium-band PSFs of
WFC3/UVIS will make these measurements possible. In this work we describe: (i)
the motivation behind this study, (ii) our observing strategy, (iii) the many
other investigations enabled by this unique data set, and which of those our
team is conducting, and (iv) a preliminary reduction of the first-epoch
data-set collected on October 10, 2012.Comment: 25 pages, 14 figures (9 at low resolution), 3 tables. Published in:
Astronomische Nachrichten, Volume 334, Issue 10, pages 1062-1085, December
2013. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asna.201311911/abstrac
Colon cancer in a 12-year-old girl with hypertriglyceridemia
Colorectal cancer is usually considered a disease of the elderly; however, in a small fraction of patients (2%-3% of all affected individuals), colorectal malignancies may develop earlier. The reasons whereby some individuals develop colorectal cancer at a young age are poorly understood. In a 12-year-old girl, a malignancy was diagnosed in the ascending colon. There was no familial history of Lynch syndrome or familial adenomatous polyposis. The metabolic profile of the patient revealed hypertriglyceridemia and low high-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels at nine years, then diagnosed as familial hypertriglyceridemia due to a constitutional mutation in the APOA5 gene (c.427delC). Moreover, variants possibly increasing the risk of cancer were detected in MSH6 (c.3438+11_3438+14delCTTA, intron 5) and APC (I1307K). The patient showed a rather unusual dietary pattern, since her basic alimentation from weaning consisted almost exclusively of meat homogenates and, subsequently, roasted meat or cutlets. Other foods, including fish, vegetables, sweets, and pasta, were refused. In this case, genetic and environmental factors could have acted in a particularly accelerated manner. Indeed, the genetic background of the patient (familial hypertriglyceridemia and polymorphisms predisposing to colorectal cancer) may have favored a dietary-driven colorectal carcinogenesis, resulting in an extremely early onset development of malignancy
Detection of solar-like oscillations in relics of the Milky Way: asteroseismology of K giants in M4 using data from the NASA K2 mission
Asteroseismic constraints on K giants make it possible to infer radii, masses
and ages of tens of thousands of field stars. Tests against independent
estimates of these properties are however scarce, especially in the metal-poor
regime. Here, we report the detection of solar-like oscillations in 8 stars
belonging to the red-giant branch and red-horizontal branch of the globular
cluster M4. The detections were made in photometric observations from the K2
Mission during its Campaign 2. Making use of independent constraints on the
distance, we estimate masses of the 8 stars by utilising different combinations
of seismic and non-seismic inputs. When introducing a correction to the Delta
nu scaling relation as suggested by stellar models, for RGB stars we find
excellent agreement with the expected masses from isochrone fitting, and with a
distance modulus derived using independent methods. The offset with respect to
independent masses is lower, or comparable with, the uncertainties on the
average RGB mass (4-10%, depending on the combination of constraints used). Our
results lend confidence to asteroseismic masses in the metal poor regime. We
note that a larger sample will be needed to allow more stringent tests to be
made of systematic uncertainties in all the observables (both seismic and
non-seismic), and to explore the properties of RHB stars, and of different
populations in the cluster.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA
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