Fostering environmentally friendly transport choices lies at the core of the strategies aimed at implementing a sustainable transport system. The discussion on the possible strategies and policies to ...reach this goal has attracted the attention of both scholars and policy makers. Limited attention appears to have been devoted to the mobility time at tourist destinations by considering environmentally friendly transport options and private motorized ones. This paper fills this gap by performing a beta regression analysis to assess which variables influence the mobility behaviour of tourists at the destination. The main finding of this paper shows that mobility at home, the use of a friendly transport mode to reach the destination and the choice of a static holiday in sea, sun and sand destinations are the most relevant variables that positively influence environmentally friendly mobility. Moreover, improved infrastructures and more appropriate mobility policies and strategies may determine more sustainable transport choices of visitors and residents.
•Mobility behaviour at tourist destinations is different with respect to everyday life.•Visitors tend to have a more sustainable travel behaviour when walking is considered.•Appropriate transport policies are crucial for sustainable mobility at destination.
In this article, the attention is focused on a specific battery testing methodology for high-power hybrid electric working vehicle applications. Due to the high power demand, a deep knowledge of the ...battery behaviour is necessary and requires specific testing procedures, different from the standard activities available in the literature for the automotive field. In this article, the attention focused on the power demand that an energy storage system must satisfy to achieve a certain performance, considering this testing approach closer to the real application. A numerical model of a full electric telescopic handler developed in previous works was used to test a LiFePO4 cell in a hardware-in-the-loop bench test configuration. The output voltage-current characteristic was compared with the same output generated by the numerical model of the considered battery. The same model was then tested according to a handling working cycle proposed by the authors for a telescopic handler derived from the experience of the research group in the field of this type of vehicles. This mission profile was then used to evaluate the performance of the proposed battery pack configuration in a real working scenario and at different SoC levels.
The measurement of sodium intake may be important for the management of hypertension. Dietary surveys and 24-h urinary collection are often unreliable and/or impractical. We hypothesized that urinary ...sodium excretion can be accurately estimated through multiple spot urine samples from different days. All enrolled subjects were children of the coauthors of the study. Fifty-two 24-h urinary collections (4 per subject) for measuring sodium excretion and the 297 related urinary samples (1 per voiding) were collected for calculating the urinary sodium/urinary creatinine ratio in 13 children. The mean of 4 measured sodium excretions served as the individual “gold standard”. Twenty-four urinary collections were used to generate the equation predicting the mean measured sodium excretion from the mean of 4 urinary sodium/urinary creatinine = 0.016 × urinary sodium (mmol/L) / urinary creatinine (mmol/L) ratio + 3.3); the remaining 28 urinary collections and 153 urinary samples were used for the external validation. All subjects underwent an additional validation procedure involving 12 urinary samples randomly collected on different days 6 months apart. The performance of sodium excretion calculated from a total of over 22,000 possible means of 4 out of all the available urinary samples, randomly taken on different days, was analyzed as to precision (by means of the coefficient of variation) and as to accuracy (by means of the P30). The coefficients of variations of measured vs. calculated sodium excretion were 25.3% vs. 25.8%, and the P30 of calculated sodium excretion was 100%. The excellent performance of calculated sodium excretion was confirmed both by external validation and by samples collected 6 months apart with mean P30s, all between 86 and 100%.
Conclusion
: In the described experimental conditions, urinary sodium excretion was estimated with equal precision and more accurately (and practically) by the mean of 4 urinary sodium/urinary creatinine ratios from random samples from different days than by a single urinary collection. In real life, with several errors systematically affecting urinary collection, the superiority of calculated sodium excretion is likely to be even greater.
What is Known:
• The measurement of sodium intake with the current standards of care (dietary survey or 24-h urinary collection) is laborious and can be inaccurate.
What is New:
• The study provides evidence that sodium intake can be estimated equally precisely, more accurately and more practically with the urinary sodium-to-urinary creatinine ratio from 4 urine samples taken on different days than with a single urinary collection.
Seasonality is a phenomenon that affects the vast majority of tourist destinations. The negative aspects of seasonality have been widely discussed from economic, social and environmental points of ...view. On the contrary, the unreliability of tourism demand forecasts is rarely listed among the negative effects of seasonality. This is despite the importance of the quality of forecasts for the planning of economic activities. This article evaluates the impact of different patterns of seasonality on tourism demand forecasting in the light of different volume of tourism flows. With this aim in mind, the monthly tourist overnight stays in four European countries – namely Austria, Finland, Portugal and Netherlands – are analysed for the period January 1990–December 2014. Data show both one-peak and two-peak seasonality. Results highlight that the stronger seasonality is, the less reliable forecasts are.
From the late 1990s, the European air transport deregulation has led to the increasing use of the plane to reach tourist destinations. This article investigates the impact of tourists’ changed ...traveling habits on Italy’s seasonal tourism demand pattern. The role of transportation on seasonality, indeed, has been almost neglected in empirical research. We analyze international monthly arrivals by transport modes from 1997 to 2018, and we use the Gini index as a measure of seasonality. The Gini’s decomposition allows us to evaluate the effects of the growth in the use of each transport mode (cars, planes, ships, trains) on seasonality. A beta regression model confirms that an increment in the proportion of tourist arrivals by airplane determines a reduction in Italy’s overall seasonality of international tourism demand. These results might be a starting point for policy makers in developing strategies to counteract seasonality.
Abstract
In order to investigate safety and immunogenicity of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine third dose in people living with HIV (PLWH), we analyze anti-RBD, microneutralization assay and IFN-γ production in ...216 PLWH on ART with advanced disease (CD4 count <200 cell/mm
3
and/or previous AIDS) receiving the third dose of a mRNA vaccine (BNT162b2 or mRNA-1273) after a median of 142 days from the second dose. Median age is 54 years, median CD4 nadir 45 cell/mm
3
(20–122), 93% HIV-RNA < 50 c/mL. In 68% of PLWH at least one side-effect, generally mild, is recorded. Humoral response after the third dose was strong and higher than that achieved with the second dose (>2 log
2
difference), especially when a heterologous combination with mRNA-1273 as third shot is used. In contrast, cell-mediated immunity remain stable. Our data support usefulness of third dose in PLWH currently receiving suppressive ART who presented with severe immune dysregulation.
In severe COVID-19, which is characterized by blood clots and neutrophil-platelet aggregates in the circulating blood and different tissues, an increased incidence of cardiovascular complications and ...venous thrombotic events has been reported. The inflammatory storm that characterizes severe infections may act as a driver capable of profoundly disrupting the complex interplay between platelets, endothelium, and leukocytes, thus contributing to the definition of COVID-19-associated coagulopathy. In this frame, P-selectin represents a key molecule expressed on endothelial cells and on activated platelets, and contributes to endothelial activation, leucocyte recruitment, rolling, and tissue migration. Briefly, we describe the current state of knowledge about P-selectin involvement in COVID-19 pathogenesis, its possible use as a severity marker and as a target for host-directed therapeutic intervention.
We investigate single-fluid magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) with anisotropic viscosity, often referred to as Braginskii MHD, with a particular eye to solar coronal applications. First, we examine the full ...Braginskii viscous tensor in the single-fluid limit. We pay particular attention to how the Braginskii tensor behaves as the magnetic field strength vanishes. The solar corona contains a magnetic field with a complex and evolving topology, so the viscosity must revert to its isotropic form when the field strength is zero, e.g. at null points. We highlight that the standard form in which the Braginskii tensor is written is not suitable for inclusion in simulations as singularities in the individual terms can develop. Instead, an altered form, where the parallel and perpendicular tensors are combined, provides the required asymptotic behaviour in the weak-field limit. We implement this combined form of the tensor into the Lare3D code, which is widely used for coronal simulations. Since our main focus is the viscous heating of the solar corona, we drop the drift terms of the Braginskii tensor. In a stressed null point simulation, we discover that small-scale structures, which develop very close to the null, lead to anisotropic viscous heating at the null itself (that is, heating due to the anisotropic terms in the viscosity tensor). The null point simulation we present has a much higher resolution than many other simulations containing null points, so this excess heating is a practical concern in coronal simulations. To remedy this unwanted heating at the null point, we develop a model for the viscosity tensor that captures the most important physics of viscosity in the corona: parallel viscosity for strong fields and isotropic viscosity at null points. We derive a continuum model of viscosity where momentum transport, described by this viscosity model, has the magnetic field as its preferred orientation. When the field strength is zero, there is no preferred direction for momentum transport and viscosity reverts to the standard isotropic form. The most general viscous stress tensor of a (single-fluid) plasma satisfying these conditions is found. It is shown that the Braginskii model, without the drift terms, is a specialization of the general model. Performing the stressed null point simulation with this simplified model of viscosity reveals very similar heating profiles to those of the full Braginskii model. The new model, however, does not produce anisotropic heating at the null point, as required. Since the vast majority of coronal simulations use only isotropic viscosity, we perform the stressed null point simulation with isotropic viscosity and compare the heating profiles to those of the anisotropic models. It is shown that the fully isotropic viscosity can overestimate the viscous heating by an order of magnitude.
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