Results from the PolarquEEEst missions Abbrescia, M.; Avanzini, C.; Balbi, G. ...
Journal of physics. Conference series,
06/2020, Letnik:
1561, Številka:
1
Journal Article
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The PolarquEEEst scientific programme consists in a series of measurements of the cosmic ray flux up to the highest latitudes. It started in Summer 2018, when three telescopes made out of ...scintillators readout by SiPMs were built and installed in Italy, Norway and on a sailboat leaving from North Island, to circumnavigate the Svalbard archipelago and land in Tromsø. They collected data on a latitude range from 44° N up to 82° N, with a dense sampling of the Northernmost interval. The PolarquEEEst mission continued afterwards with a series of measurements in Italy, Southward reaching Lampedusa, and in Germany. In May 2019 the PolarquEEEst collaboration accomplished another important result, installing a cosmic ray observatory for the detection of secondary cosmic muons at Ny Alesund, at 79° N, made of three independent identical detectors positioned a few hundred meters from each other, and synchronized in order to operate together as a network. The configuration used will allow high precision measurements never performed before at these latitudes on a long term, also interesting for their connection with environmental phenomena. The network will also complement the existing stations for the detection of cosmic neutrons at the Svalbard archipelago, enlarging by far the physics scope that is possible to pursue in this field at this peculiar location. Here the various missions are presented, and some preliminary results from the measurements performed are shown.
Tamoxifen improves outcome in women with breast cancer and reduces the incidence of estrogen receptor-positive (ER+) breast tumors in prevention trials. Tamoxifen use is associated with an increased ...risk of potentially serious adverse events, principally endometrial cancer and venous thromboembolic events and, therefore, detailed knowledge of the effects of tamoxifen is important. With more cases of breast cancer being found as the follow-up time increases, it is now possible to perform more detailed analysis of the Italian Randomized Trial of Tamoxifen. Women with hysterectomy (N = 5408) were randomly assigned to receive 20 mg tamoxifen per day (N = 2700) or placebo (N = 2708). After a median of 81.2 months of follow-up, 79 case subjects (34 in the tamoxifen arm and 45 in the placebo arm) were diagnosed with breast cancer. We were able to identify a group of women at increased risk of ER+ breast cancers (high-risk group) on the basis of baseline as well as reproductive and hormonal characteristics (height, age at menarche, parity, age at first birth, and oophorectomy). Tamoxifen administered to women in the high-risk group showed statistically significantly reduced incidence of breast cancer (tamoxifen, 3 and placebo, 15; P = .003), but no such effect was seen in the low-risk group (tamoxifen, 31 and placebo, 30; P = .89). The positive effect of tamoxifen on breast cancer among high-risk women is most marked for ER+ tumors (tamoxifen, 1 and placebo, 11; P = .002). Chemoprevention of breast cancer with tamoxifen appears to be effective in women at high risk of ER+ tumors but not among women at low risk, who may well be protected naturally by late age at menarche or early first pregnancy, or artificially by removal of the ovaries. Tamoxifen could be offered as a preventive agent to women identified at high-risk of breast cancer because of hormone-related risk factors. Such a strategy would greatly reduce the numbers of women who would need to take tamoxifen to obtain the same absolute reduction in breast cancer. These findings are exploratory and need to be confirmed in other randomized trials.
The higher luminosity that is expected for the LHC after future upgrades will require better performance by the data acquisition system, especially in terms of throughput. In particular, during the ...first shutdown of the LHC collider in 2013/14, the ATLAS Pixel Detector will be equipped with a fourth layer – the Insertable B-Layer or IBL – located at a radius smaller than the present three layers. Consequently, a new front end ASIC (FE-I4) was designed as well as a new off-detector chain. The latter is composed mainly of two 9U-VME cards called the Back-Of-Crate (BOC) and Read-Out Driver (ROD). The ROD is used for data and event formatting and for configuration and control of the overall read-out electronics. After some prototyping samples were completed, a pre-production batch of 5 ROD cards was delivered with the final layout. Actual production of another 15 ROD cards is ongoing in Fall 2013, and commissioning is scheduled in 2014. Altogether 14 cards are necessary for the 14 staves of the IBL detector, one additional card is required by the Diamond Beam Monitor (DBM), and additional spare ROD cards will be produced for a total of 20 boards. This paper describes some integration tests that were performed and our plan to test the production of the ROD cards. Slices of the IBL read-out chain have been instrumented, and ROD performance is verified on a test bench mimicking a small-sized final setup. This contribution will report also one view on the possible adoption of the IBL ROD for ATLAS Pixel Detector Layer 2 (firstly) and, possibly, in the future, for Layer 1.
Recently the ATLAS Pixel Detector at CERN has been upgraded by inserting an additional layer of pixels, the Insertable B-Layer (IBL). In addition, the off-detector readout electronics of the other ...layers that composed the Pixel Detector (the B-Layer, the Layer 1, the Layer 2 and the Disks) were updated using the IBL readout boards. The system has been updated, one layer at a time, giving priority to the next critical layer as the luminosity and level-1 trigger frequency increased. Hence, after IBL, the first critical layer was the Layer 2, then the Layer 1 and finally the B-Layer and the Disks. Eventually, after the technical stop in 2018 the entire ATLAS Pixel Detector will share the same off-detector readout electronics.
In parallel with the commissioning of the upgrade of the current ATLAS Pixel Detector we have designed and fabricated a new readout electronic board to address the requirements of the LHC Phase-2 upgrade. Two batches of prototypes of a Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) Gen. 2 boards have been designed and fabricated, the second being a patched version of the first. The first batch was composed of two boards, called Pixel ReadOut Driver (Pixel_ROD) and the second batch was made of five cards called π-LUP. All the boards feature many of the input–output ports and interfaces to address the requirements of the future front-end electronics being developed for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Phase-2 upgrade. Thus, the current VERSABUS Module Eurocard (VME) bus will be replaced with the PCIe bus to accommodate the huge increase of throughput (data to be transferred to the DAQ). In this new scenario, the GigaBit Transceiver (GBT) and Aurora protocols are compatible with our boards and the GBTx and RD53A chips will be the first components to be interfaced with. Some laboratory results and measurements are presented here.
•Off-detector readout boards define a huge challenge for the LHC Phase-2 upgrade.•COTS are ever more replacing custom electronics in off-detector readout systems.•Firmware for latest generation FPGAs is a big issue to design and maintain.•PCI-express bus is a proposal for the LHC readout upgrade.
Objective: Aim of this study was the assessment of the prevalence of eating disorders, and of eating disorder symptoms, in obese patients with type 2 diabetes, compared to non-diabetic subjects. ...Design: Three samples of individuals were studied: a series of 156 (76 male, 80 female) overweight and obese type 2 diabetic patients, aged 30-65 y, with a body mass index (BMI)>28 kg/m2 (DM); a series of 192 (20 male, 172 female) obese (BMI>30 kg/m2) non-diabetic patients aged 30-65 y seeking treatment for weight loss (OC); and a non-clinical sample of 48 (22 male, 26 female) obese (BMI>30 kg/m2) subjects aged 30-65 y selected from the lists of two general practices (OP). Eating behavior was assessed using the Eating Disorder Examination (EDE 12.0D). Results: The prevalence of Binge Eating Disorder was lower than 5% in all the three samples. Median EDE scores in females were significantly higher in OC (3.0) and OP (3.4) than in DM (1.7), while diabetic patients showed higher scores on Restraint than both non-diabetic samples. Among diabetic patients, a significant correlation of EDE scores with HbA1c was observed. Conclusions: Type 2 diabetes is unlikely to induce relevant eating disturbances in obese patients, apart from an increase in restraint. Abnormalities of eating attitudes and behavior are associated with an impairment of metabolic control.
Background Initial findings of the Italian Randomized Tamoxifen Prevention Trial found no reduction in risk of breast cancer with tamoxifen use, whereas the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and ...Bowel Project Breast Cancer Prevention Trial showed that tamoxifen treatment reduces risk of estrogen receptor–positive breast cancer. Here we present an extended follow-up of the Italian trial. Methods From October 1, 1992, to December 31, 1997, 5408 otherwise healthy women who had undergone hysterectomy were randomly assigned in a double-blind manner to tamoxifen (20 mg daily) or placebo for 5 years. Rates of breast cancer and other events in the two groups were compared by the use of risk ratios (RRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs). Results After 11 years of follow-up, 136 women (74 placebo, 62 tamoxifen) developed breast cancer (RR = 0.84, 95% CI = 0.60 to 1.17; annual rates were 2.48 and 2.07 per 1000 women-years, respectively). The rates of breast cancer in the two study groups were similar among women who had had bilateral oophorectomy and among women at low risk for hormone receptor–positive (HR+) disease but were much lower in the tamoxifen group among women at high risk (placebo, 6.26 per 1000 women-years, tamoxifen, 1.50 per 1000 women-years; RR = 0.24, 95% CI = 0.10 to 0.59). During the treatment period, women in the tamoxifen group reported more hot flashes (RR = 1.78, 95% CI = 1.57 to 2.00), vaginal discharge (RR = 3.44, 95% CI = 2.90 to 4.09), and urinary disturbances (RR = 1.52, 95% CI = 1.23 to 1.89) but fewer headaches (RR = 0.68, 95% CI = 0.50 to 0.94) than women in the placebo group. Hypertriglyceridemia (RR = 4.33, 95% CI = 1.96 to 9.53), thromboembolic events (RR = 1.63, 95% CI = 1.02 to 2.62), and cardiac arrhythmia or atrial fibrillation (RR = 1.73, 95% CI = 1.01 to 2.98) were also more frequent in the tamoxifen group than in the placebo group. Conclusions Appropriate selection of women at high risk for HR+ disease may improve the risk–benefit ratio of tamoxifen intervention.
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