Facial allotransplantation replaces missing facial structures with anatomically identical tissues, providing desired functional, esthetic, and psychosocial benefits far superior to those of ...conventional methods. On the basis of very encouraging initial results, it is likely that more procedures will be performed in the near future. Typical candidates have extremely complex vascular anatomy due to severe injury and/or multiple prior reconstructive attempts; thus, each procedure is uniquely determined by the defects and vascular anatomy of the candidate. We detail CT angiography vascular mapping, noting the clinical relevance of the imaging, the angiosome concept and noninvasive delineation of the key vessels, and current controversies related to the vascular anastomoses.
Abstract
Background
The COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdown measures posed an unprecedented challenge to the crucial role of grandparenting in family-oriented cultures, such as Italy. Reduced ...contact with grandchildren during this period potentially threatened grandparents’ mental health and well-being.
Methods
We analysed data from the LOckdown and lifeSTyles in Lombardia cross-sectional study conducted in November 2020. The study included a representative sample of 4400 older adults from Lombardy, Italy, of which 1289 provided childcare to their grandchildren.
Results
A decrease in self-reported grandparenting was associated with an increased likelihood of experiencing depressive symptoms among grandparents (OR 1.50, 95% CI 1.01–2.24). Conversely, an increase in grandparenting was linked to poorer sleep quality (OR 11.67, 95% CI 5.88–23.17) and reduced sleep quantity (OR 2.53, 95% CI 1.45–4.41).
Conclusions
Despite the barriers posed by the pandemic, grandparenting played a beneficial role in maintaining the mental health and well-being of older adults. However, it is crucial to recognise specific vulnerabilities, such as gender, feelings of hopelessness and overcrowding, which can have detrimental effects during and beyond emergency situations. Careful attention to these factors is essential for developing targeted support systems and interventions aimed at safeguarding the mental health of older adults and enhancing their resilience in crises.
WaveDAQ: An highly integrated trigger and data acquisition system Galli, L.; Baldini, A.M.; Cei, F. ...
Nuclear instruments & methods in physics research. Section A, Accelerators, spectrometers, detectors and associated equipment,
08/2019, Volume:
936
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The WaveDAQ is a full custom, compact and highly integrated trigger and data acquisition system. Despite the decisive urge from the MEG II experiment at PSI aiming at a sensitivity of 6×10−14 on the ...μ→eγ decay, it is a general purpose device suited for small and medium-sized applications in the range from 16 to about 10000 channels. It exploits the performance of the DRS4 waveform digitiser with a sampling speed programmable from 1 to 5 GSPS; each input channel can supply HV to arrays of SiPMs and provides a front-end amplification with gains chain in the range from 0.5 up to 100 and GHz bandwidth. Input signals are, in parallel to the DRS4, digitised at 80 MSPS and used in an FPGA-based trigger; fast discriminators associated to each input channel are also used for online reconstruction. This paper presents the WaveDAQ design principles and the results obtained by a demonstrator in the MEG II pre-engineering run in fall 2017 with a homogeneous LXe detector and a plastic scintillation detector both readout by SiPMs and in the tests associated to the ΔE-TOF prototype of the FOOT detector.
Lack of O2 and high concentrations of iron (Fe) and manganese (Mn) commonly occur in waterlogged soils. The development of a barrier to impede radial O2 loss (ROL) is a key trait improving internal ...O2 transport and waterlogging tolerance in plants. We evaluated the ability of the barrier to ROL to impede the entry of excess Fe into the roots of the waterlogging-tolerant grass Urochloa humidicola. Plants were grown in aerated or stagnant deoxygenated nutrient solution with 5 µM or 900 µM Fe. Quantitative X-ray microanalysis was used to determine cell-specific Fe concentrations at two positions behind the root apex in relation to ROL and the formation of apoplastic barriers. At a mature zone of the root, Fe was 'excluded' at the exodermis where a suberized lamella was evident, a feature also associated with a strong barrier to ROL. In contrast, the potassium (K) concentration was similar in all root cells, indicating that K uptake was not affected by apoplastic barriers. The hypothesis that the formation of a tight barrier to ROL impedes the apoplastic entry of toxic concentrations of Fe into the mature zones of roots was supported by the significantly higher accumulation of Fe on the outer side of the exodermis.
The new drift chamber of the MEG II experiment Chiappini, M.; Baldini, A.M.; Cavoto, G. ...
Nuclear instruments & methods in physics research. Section A, Accelerators, spectrometers, detectors and associated equipment,
08/2019, Volume:
936
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This article presents the MEG II Cylindrical Drift CHamber (CDCH), a key detector for the phase 2 of MEG, which aims at reaching a sensitivity level of the order of 6×10−14 for the charged Lepton ...Flavour Violating μ+→e+γ decay (Calibbi and Signorelli, 2018; Cei and Nicolò, 2014). CDCH is designed to overcome the limitations of the MEG e+ tracker (Baldini et al., 2013) and guarantee the proper operation at high rates with long-term detector stability. CDCH is a low-mass unique volume detector with high granularity: 9 layers of 192 drift cells, few mm wide, defined by ≈12000 wires in a stereo configuration for longitudinal hit localization. The total radiation length is 1.5×10−3X0, thus minimizing the Multiple Coulomb Scattering (MCS) contribution and allowing for a single-hit resolution of 110μm (Baldini et al., 2016) and a momentum resolution of 130 keV/c. CDCH integration into the MEG II experimental apparatus (Baldini et al., 2018) will start in this year.
•The new Cylindrical Drift CHamber (CDCH) is a key detector for the phase 2 of MEG.•CDCH has a single cylindrical volume filled with a low-mass He:Isobutane gas mixture.•High granularity is ensured by 1728 drift cells (few mm wide) divided in 9 layers.•Material budget minimized to 1.5×10−3X0 per track turn to reduce MCS.•CDCH is in the final mechanical and HV test phase before the shipping to PSI.
The design and experimental demonstration of a 16-channel frequency-domain multiplexing (FDM) read-out for transition-edge sensor bolometers is presented. This MUX electronics is intended to read out ...the 326 spiderweb bolometers of the LSPE/SWIPE balloon-borne experiment, which aims at the detection of the B mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background at large angular scales. The cryogenic part of our 16-channel FDM read-out chain features LC resonators composed of custom Nb superconducting inductors and surface mount device ceramic capacitors mounted on boards next to the detector wafers, at 300 mK, while the superconducting quantum interference device board is at 1.6 K. The warm section is based on a modular solution, with mezzanine plug-ins for digital-to-analog converters, analog-to-digital converters and a system-on-chip (based on the Altera Cyclone V field programmable gate array). The warm electronics handles the generation of the FDM tones, the de-multiplexing and the digital signal analysis including, e.g. cosmic ray glitches removal. Here, we recall its specifications, we address noise considerations, and finally we present the latest results obtained using flight models of our custom-designed boards.
Recent developments of transition-edge sensors (TESs), based on extensive experience in ground-based experiments, have been making the sensor techniques mature enough for their application on future ...satellite cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization experiments. LiteBIRD is in the most advanced phase among such future satellites, targeting its launch in Japanese Fiscal Year 2027 (2027FY) with JAXA’s H3 rocket. It will accommodate more than 4000 TESs in focal planes of reflective low-frequency and refractive medium-and-high-frequency telescopes in order to detect a signature imprinted on the CMB by the primordial gravitational waves predicted in cosmic inflation. The total wide frequency coverage between 34 and 448 GHz enables us to extract such weak spiral polarization patterns through the precise subtraction of our Galaxy’s foreground emission by using spectral differences among CMB and foreground signals. Telescopes are cooled down to 5 K for suppressing thermal noise and contain polarization modulators with transmissive half-wave plates at individual apertures for separating sky polarization signals from artificial polarization and for mitigating from instrumental 1/
f
noise. Passive cooling by using V-grooves supports active cooling with mechanical coolers as well as adiabatic demagnetization refrigerators. Sky observations from the second Sun–Earth Lagrangian point, L2, are planned for 3 years. An international collaboration between Japan, the USA, Canada, and Europe is sharing various roles. In May 2019, the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, JAXA, selected LiteBIRD as the strategic large mission No. 2.
Improved muon decay simulation with McMule and Geant4 Gurgone, A.; Papa, A.; Schwendimann, P. ...
Nuclear instruments & methods in physics research. Section A, Accelerators, spectrometers, detectors and associated equipment,
February 2023, 2023-02-00, Volume:
1047
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The physics programme of the MEG II experiment can be extended with the search for new invisible particles produced in rare muon decays. The hunt for such elusive signals requires accurate ...simulations to characterise the detector response and estimate the experimental sensitivity. This work presents an improved simulation of muon decay in MEG II, based on McMule and Geant4.
A general consensus has not yet been reached regarding the role of disorganization symptoms in real-world functioning in schizophrenia.
We used structural equations modeling (SEM) to analyze the ...direct and indirect associations between disorganization and real-world functioning assessed through the Specific Levels of Functioning Scale (SLOF) in 880 subjects with schizophrenia.
We found that: 1) conceptual disorganization was directly and strongly connected with SLOF daily activities; difficulty in abstract thinking was associated with moderate strength to all SLOF domains, and poor attention was connected with SLOF work skills; 2) grandiosity was only related with poor work skills, and delusions were associated with poor functioning in all SLOF domains; interpersonal relationships were weakly indirectly influenced by hallucinatory behavior, delusions and unusual thought contents through the mediation of social cognition (SC); 3) among the negative symptoms, avolition had only direct links with SLOF work skills and SLOF activities; anhedonia had direct links with SLOF work skills and SLOF interpersonal and indirect link with SLOF work skills through functional capacity (FC); asociality with SLOF interpersonal; blunted affect had direct links with SLOF activities and indirect links with SLOF interpersonal relationships mediated by SC. Lastly, alogia had only indirect links mediated by SC, FC, and neurocognition (NC).
Overall conceptual disorganization is the symptom that contributed more (both directly and indirectly) to the activities of community living in real-world. Thus, it should be considered as a treatment target in intervention programs for patients with schizophrenia.
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