Abstract Statement of problem The efficiency of adding nanoparticles to silicone protection has proven to prevent color degradation. However, reports of other physical property changes in facial ...silicone are scarce. Purpose The purpose of this in vitro study was to evaluate the influence of adding nanoparticles on the hardness, tear strength, and permanent deformation of a facial silicone. Material and methods Specimens were made for each test, with 140 for the hardness test, 140 for the permanent deformation test, but 280 for the rupture test. This higher number was due to the fact that the first 140 specimens were ruptured and unusable after the initial reading. ZnO, BaSO4 , and TiO2 nanoparticles at concentrations of 1% and 2% of silicone were used, as well as specimens without nanoparticles that consisted of only oil paint and of only silicone. Outcomes were measured before and after 1008 hours of accelerated aging. Data were analyzed by nested analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Tukey honest significant differences test (α=.05). Results Results showed that the presence of nanoparticles influenced the properties of the assessed groups. The nanoparticles decreased hardness values. The highest values of tear strength were observed for the groups with addition of BaSO4 . The 1% ZnO group without oil paint showed the lowest values of permanent deformation. Conclusions Based on the findings of this in vitro study, the use of ZnO nanoparticles is recommended, since they did not negatively affect the properties of the materials evaluated.
Since the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak started, children have been considered marginally involved compared to adults, with a quite significant percentage of asymptomatic carriers. ...Very recently, an overwhelming inflammatory activation, which shares clinical similarities with Kawasaki disease (KD), has been described in children exposed to COVID-19. We report three KD-like cases that occurred during the pandemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in a highly affected area of Northern Italy. The clinical presentation was characterized by the presence of unremitting fever, diarrhea and elevated inflammatory markers. Case #1 and Case #2 occurred one week apart and shared other clinical features: laboratory tests confirmed COVID-19 exposure and high inflammatory activation with myocardial involvement. Case #3 followed a more typical pattern for KD. Interestingly, this patient showed lower levels of procalcitonin, C-reactive protein, D-dimers, and ferritin compared to the other two cases, whereas platelet count was higher. We hypothesize that SARS-CoV-2 might act in children as a trigger, either inducing a classical KD phenotype or causing a systemic inflammatory response leading to a severe KD-like phenotype, eventually characterized by myocardial impairment. We think that bringing these cases and their differences to the attention of the rheumatology community during the COVID-19 pandemic will be beneficial in order to highlight the importance of early diagnosis and to increase awareness of this new phenomenon.
In ionospheric modeling, the differential code biases (DCBs) are a non-negligible error source, which are routinely estimated by the different analysis centers of the International GNSS Service (IGS) ...as a by-product of their global ionospheric analysis. These are, however, estimated only for the IGS station receivers and for all the satellites of the different GNSS constellations. A technique is proposed for estimating the receiver and satellites DCBs in a global or regional network by first estimating the DCB of one receiver set as reference. This receiver DCB is then used as a ‘known’ parameter to constrain the global ionospheric solution, where the receiver and satellite DCBs are estimated for the entire network. This is in contrast to the constraint used by the IGS, which assumes that the involved satellites DCBs have a zero mean. The ‘known’ receiver DCB is obtained by simulating signals that are free of the ionospheric, tropospheric and other group delays using a hardware signal simulator. When applying the proposed technique for Global Positioning System legacy signals, mean offsets in the order of 3 ns for satellites and receivers were found to exist between the estimated DCBs and the IGS published DCBs. It was shown that these estimated DCBs are fairly stable in time, especially for the legacy signals. When the proposed technique is applied for the DCBs estimation using the newer Galileo signals, an agreement at the level of 1–2 ns was found between the estimated DCBs and the manufacturer’s measured DCBs, as published by the European Space Agency, for the three still operational Galileo in-orbit validation satellites.
A compton spectrometer to monitor the ELI-NP gamma beam energy Borgheresi, R.; Adriani, O.; Albergo, S. ...
Nuclear instruments & methods in physics research. Section A, Accelerators, spectrometers, detectors and associated equipment,
08/2019, Letnik:
936
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The ELI-NP facility (Extreme Light Infrastructure-Nuclear Physics) will deliver an intense and almost monochromatic gamma beam for frontier research in nuclear physics. Peculiar devices and ...techniques have been developed to measure and monitor the beam parameters during the commissioning and the operational phase. In this work we will present the Compton Spectrometer, designed to reconstruct the γ beam energy spectrum, by measuring the energy and the position of Compton scattered electrons. The energy and the angle of the scattered electron are measured by a High Purity Germanium detector and a double sided silicon strip detector. The associated photon is detected in coincidence with the electron by barium fluoride (BaF2) crystals for trigger purpose. In this work we report the status of the characterization carried out on the detectors composing the spectrometer.
•Compton spectrometer, designed to reconstruct the ELI-NP γ beam energy spectrum.•Energy of the scattered e− measured with a High Purity Germanium detector.•Scattered angle determined by a double sided silicon strip detector.•Scattered photon detected in coincidence by BaF2 crystals for trigger purpose.•Tests carried out on the components of the spectrometer are presented.
The CLARO-CMOS is a prototype ASIC that allows fast photon counting with 5 ns peaking time, a recovery time to baseline smaller than 25 ns, and a power consumption of less than 1 mW per channel. This ...chip is capable of single-photon counting with multi-anode photomultipliers and finds applications also in the read-out of silicon photomultipliers and microchannel plates. The prototype is realized in AMS 0.35 micron CMOS technology. In the LHCb RICH environment, assuming 10 years of operation at the nominal luminosity expected after the upgrade in Long Shutdown 2 (LS2), the ASIC must withstand a total fluence of about 610 super(12) 1 MeV n sub(eq)/cm super(2)neq/cm2 and a total ionizing dose of 400 krad. A systematic evaluation of the radiation effects on the CLARO-CMOS performance is therefore crucial to ensure long term stability of the electronics front-end. The results of multi-step irradiation tests with neutrons and X-rays up to the fluence of 10 super(14) cm super(-2) and a dose of 4 Mrad, respectively, are presented, including measurement of single event effects during irradiation and chip performance evaluation before and after each irradiation step.
The use of dried blood spots (DBS) for HIV-1 viral load quantification can greatly improve access to viral monitoring for HIV-infected patients receiving treatment in resource-limited settings.
To ...evaluate and validate HIV viral load measurement from DBS in sub-Saharan Africa, with a reliable, all-automated, standard commercial assay such as the Abbott m2000.
A total of 277 DBS were collected in different health centres in Malawi and Mozambique and analysed for viral load determination using the Abbott m2000 assay with the corresponding plasma samples as gold standard. Samples were extracted using the m2000SP automatic extractor and then processed as the plasma samples using the specific 1.0 mL HIV-RNA DBS protocol.
Among samples with detectable HIV-RNA the correlation between viral load obtained from the paired 131 plasma and DBS samples was high (r=0.946). Overall, viral load values between DBS and plasma differed by less than 0.5 log unit in 90.1% of cases and by less than 1 log unit in 100% of cases. Using a threshold of 1 000 copies/mL (defining virological failure in resource-limited settings), sensitivity was 94.2% and specificity 98.6%, and both positive and negative predictive values were high (98.5% and 94.5%, respectively).
DBS extracted and processed using the Abbott automated system can be reliably used in resource-limited setting to diagnose virological failure.
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