Search

Scenarios with new physics particles feebly interacting with the Standard Model sector provide compelling candidates for dark matter searches. Geared with a set of new experiments for the detection of neutrinos and long-lived particles the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has joined the hunt for these elusive states. On the theoretical side, this emerging physics program requires reliable estimates of the associated particle fluxes, in particular those arising from heavy hadron decays. In this work, we provide state-of-the-art QCD predictions for heavy hadron production including radiative corrections at next-to-leading order and using parton distribution functions including small-x resummation at next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy. We match our predictions to parton showers to provide a realistic description of hadronisation effects. We demonstrate the utility of our predictions by presenting the energy spectrum of neutrinos from charm hadron decays. Furthermore, we employ our predictions to estimate, for the first time, FASER’s sensitivity to electrophilic ALPs, which are predominantly generated in beauty hadron decays.

Background: High ambient air temperatures in Africa pose significant health and behavioral challenges in populations with limited access to cooling adaptations. The built environment can exacerbate heat exposure, making passive home cooling adaptations a potential method for protecting occupants against indoor heat exposure. Methods: We are conducting a 2-year community-based stratified cluster randomized controlled trial (cRCT) implementing sunlight-reflecting roof coatings, known as “cool roofs,” as a climate change adaptation intervention for passive indoor home cooling. Our primary research objective is to investigate the effects of cool roofs on health, indoor climate, economic, and behavioral outcomes in rural Burkina Faso. This cRCT is nested in the Nouna Health and Demographic Surveillance System (HDSS), a population-based dynamic cohort study of all people living in a geographically contiguous area covering 59 villages, 14305 households and 28610 individuals. We recruited 1200 participants, one woman and one man, each in 600 households in 25 villages in the Nouna HDSS. We stratified our sample by (i) village and (ii) two prevalent roof types in this area of Burkina Faso: mud brick and tin. We randomized the same number of people (12) and homes (6) in each stratum 1:1 to receiving vs. not receiving the cool roof. We are collecting outcome data on one primary endpoint - heart rate, (a measure of heat stress) and 22 secondary outcomes encompassing indoor climate parameters, blood pressure, body temperature, heat-related outcomes, blood glucose, sleep, cognition, mental health, health facility utilization, economic and productivity outcomes, mosquito count, life satisfaction, gender-based violence, and food consumption. We followed all participants for 2 years, conducting monthly home visits to collect objective and subjective outcomes. Approximately 12% of participants (n = 152) used smartwatches to continuously measure endpoints including heart rate, sleep an

Background: High ambient air temperatures in Africa pose significant health and behavioral challenges in populations with limited access to cooling adaptations. The built environment can exacerbate heat exposure, making passive home cooling adaptations a potential method for protecting occupants against indoor heat exposure. Methods: We are conducting a 2-year community-based stratified cluster randomized controlled trial (cRCT) implementing sunlight-reflecting roof coatings, known as “cool roofs,” as a climate change adaptation intervention for passive indoor home cooling. Our primary research objective is to investigate the effects of cool roofs on health, indoor climate, economic, and behavioral outcomes in rural Burkina Faso. This cRCT is nested in the Nouna Health and Demographic Surveillance System (HDSS), a population-based dynamic cohort study of all people living in a geographically contiguous area covering 59 villages, 14305 households and 28610 individuals. We recruited 1200 participants, one woman and one man, each in 600 households in 25 villages in the Nouna HDSS. We stratified our sample by (i) village and (ii) two prevalent roof types in this area of Burkina Faso: mud brick and tin. We randomized the same number of people (12) and homes (6) in each stratum 1:1 to receiving vs. not receiving the cool roof. We are collecting outcome data on one primary endpoint - heart rate, (a measure of heat stress) and 22 secondary outcomes encompassing indoor climate parameters, blood pressure, body temperature, heat-related outcomes, blood glucose, sleep, cognition, mental health, health facility utilization, economic and productivity outcomes, mosquito count, life satisfaction, gender-based violence, and food consumption. We followed all participants for 2 years, conducting monthly home visits to collect objective and subjective outcomes. Approximately 12% of participants (n = 152) used smartwatches to continuously measure endpoints including heart rate, sleep an

The seminal dual coding theory by Paivio (1971) posited that non- verbal and verbal stimuli differ in their representational format, whereby the former activates a dual code while the latter only one. These differences in code have implications for tasks such as visual search. The current eye-tracking visual search study aims to re- evaluate this theoretical framework while examining the role played by semantic processing that has never been looked at before. We followed the original design by Paivio and Begg (1974), with participants searching for a target, cued either by a word or a picture, in an array of either words or pictures. The target could be either semantically related or unrelated to the other distractors. Corroborating original results, response times for correct trials were faster in pictorial arrays and substantially slower when a cued picture had to be found in a word array. Semantically unrelated targets were looked at faster for longer, leading to shorter search responses than semantically related targets. Critically, these effects driven by semantic relatedness were amplified when codes had to be converted (e.g., picture-to-word). Our findings refine our understanding of the role semantic processing plays in the representational format of words and pictures and the implications it carries for visual search.

Background: High ambient air temperatures in Africa pose significant health and behavioral challenges in populations with limited access to cooling adaptations. The built environment can exacerbate heat exposure, making passive home cooling adaptations a potential method for protecting occupants against indoor heat exposure. Methods: We are conducting a 2-year community-based stratified cluster randomized controlled trial (cRCT) implementing sunlight-reflecting roof coatings, known as “cool roofs,” as a climate change adaptation intervention for passive indoor home cooling. Our primary research objective is to investigate the effects of cool roofs on health, indoor climate, economic, and behavioral outcomes in rural Burkina Faso. This cRCT is nested in the Nouna Health and Demographic Surveillance System (HDSS), a population-based dynamic cohort study of all people living in a geographically contiguous area covering 59 villages, 14305 households and 28610 individuals. We recruited 1200 participants, one woman and one man, each in 600 households in 25 villages in the Nouna HDSS. We stratified our sample by (i) village and (ii) two prevalent roof types in this area of Burkina Faso: mud brick and tin. We randomized the same number of people (12) and homes (6) in each stratum 1:1 to receiving vs. not receiving the cool roof. We are collecting outcome data on one primary endpoint - heart rate, (a measure of heat stress) and 22 secondary outcomes encompassing indoor climate parameters, blood pressure, body temperature, heat-related outcomes, blood glucose, sleep, cognition, mental health, health facility utilization, economic and productivity outcomes, mosquito count, life satisfaction, gender-based violence, and food consumption. We followed all participants for 2 years, conducting monthly home visits to collect objective and subjective outcomes. Approximately 12% of participants (n = 152) used smartwatches to continuously measure endpoints including heart rate, sleep an

This paper proposes rigid-body modelling and identification procedures for long-reach dual-arm manipulators in a cable-suspended pendulum configuration. The proposed model relies on a virtually constrained open kinematic chain and lends itself to be simulated through the most commonly used robotic simulators without explicitly account for the cables constraints and flexibility. Moreover, a dynamic parameters identification procedure is devised to improve the simulation model fidelity and reduce the sim-to-real gap for controllers deployment. We show the capability of our model to handle different cable configurations and suspension mechanisms by customising it for two representative cable-suspended dual-arm manipulation systems: the LiCAS arms suspended by a drone and the CRANEbot system, featuring two Pilz arms suspended by a crane. The identified dynamic models are validated by comparing their evolution with data acquired from the real systems showing a high (between 91.3% to 99.4%) correlation of the response signals. In a comparison performed with baseline pendulum models, our model increases the simulation accuracy from 64.4% to 85.9%. The simulation environment and the related controllers are released as open-source code.

Background: High ambient air temperatures in Africa pose significant health and behavioral challenges in populations with limited access to cooling adaptations. The built environment can exacerbate heat exposure, making passive home cooling adaptations a potential method for protecting occupants against indoor heat exposure. Methods: We are conducting a 2-year community-based stratified cluster randomized controlled trial (cRCT) implementing sunlight-reflecting roof coatings, known as “cool roofs,” as a climate change adaptation intervention for passive indoor home cooling. Our primary research objective is to investigate the effects of cool roofs on health, indoor climate, economic, and behavioral outcomes in rural Burkina Faso. This cRCT is nested in the Nouna Health and Demographic Surveillance System (HDSS), a population-based dynamic cohort study of all people living in a geographically contiguous area covering 59 villages, 14305 households and 28610 individuals. We recruited 1200 participants, one woman and one man, each in 600 households in 25 villages in the Nouna HDSS. We stratified our sample by (i) village and (ii) two prevalent roof types in this area of Burkina Faso: mud brick and tin. We randomized the same number of people (12) and homes (6) in each stratum 1:1 to receiving vs. not receiving the cool roof. We are collecting outcome data on one primary endpoint - heart rate, (a measure of heat stress) and 22 secondary outcomes encompassing indoor climate parameters, blood pressure, body temperature, heat-related outcomes, blood glucose, sleep, cognition, mental health, health facility utilization, economic and productivity outcomes, mosquito count, life satisfaction, gender-based violence, and food consumption. We followed all participants for 2 years, conducting monthly home visits to collect objective and subjective outcomes. Approximately 12% of participants (n = 152) used smartwatches to continuously measure endpoints including heart rate, sleep an

We consider neutral- and charged-current Drell Yan lepton-pair production at hadron colliders, and include dominant classes of electroweak and mixed QCD-electroweak corrections to all orders in perturbation theory. The accurate description of these physical effects is vital for a precise determination of fundamental Standard Model parameters, such as the $W$-boson mass and the electroweak mixing angle, as well as for a solid assessment of the associated theoretical uncertainties. Our state-of-the-art resummation reaches next-to-leading-logarithmic accuracy in both the electroweak and the mixed QCD-electroweak perturbative expansions, including constant terms at first order beyond Born level in both couplings, i.e. at order $\alpha$ and $\alpha_s \alpha$. These effects are incorporated on top of QCD predictions at next-to-next-to-next-to-leading-logarithmic accuracy, which include constant terms at third order in the strong coupling. Our results retain, for the first time at this accuracy, full dependence on the kinematics of the final-state leptons, thereby enabling a realistic comparison with experimental analyses at the differential level in presence of fiducial cuts. We present a phenomenological analysis of the impact of electroweak corrections in relevant observables at the LHC. We find visible shape distortions in resummation-dominated kinematical regions with respect to pure-QCD predictions, highlighting the importance of a complete description, not limited to QCD, for precision Drell Yan physics., Comment: 23 pages, 13 figures

BACKGROUND: Radiology reports are typically written in a free-text format, making clinical information difficult to extract and use. Recently the adoption of structured reporting (SR) has been recommended by various medical societies thanks to the advantages it offers, e.g. standardization, completeness and information retrieval. We propose a pipeline to extract information from free-text radiology reports, that fits with the items of the reference SR registry proposed by a national society of interventional and medical radiology, focusing on CT staging of patients with lymphoma. METHODS: Our work aims to leverage the potential of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Transformer-based models to deal with automatic SR registry filling. With the availability of 174 radiology reports, we investigate a rule-free generative Question Answering approach based on a domain-specific version of T5 (IT5). Two strategies (batch-truncation and ex-post combination) are implemented to comply with the model's context length limitations. Performance is evaluated in terms of strict accuracy, F1, and format accuracy, and compared with the widely used GPT-3.5 Large Language Model. A 5-point Likert scale questionnaire is used to collect human-expert feedback on the similarity between medical annotations and generated answers. RESULTS: The combination of fine-tuning and batch splitting allows IT5 to achieve notable results; it performs on par with GPT-3.5 albeit its size being a thousand times smaller in terms of parameters. Human-based assessment scores show a high correlation (Spearman's correlation coefficients>0.88, p-values<0.001) with AI performance metrics (F1) and confirm the superior ability of LLMs (i.e., GPT-3.5, 175B of parameters) in generating plausible human-like statements.

Applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in critical contexts, such as medicine, requires the implementation of safety measures to reduce risks of harm in case of prediction errors. Spotting ML failures is of paramount importance when ML predictions are used to drive clinical decisions. ML predictive reliability measures the degree of trust of a ML prediction on a new instance, thus allowing decision-makers to accept or reject it based on its reliability. To assess reliability, we propose a method that implements two principles. First, our approach evaluates whether an instance to be classified is coming from the same distribution of the training set. To do this, we leverage Autoencoders (AEs) ability to reconstruct the training set with low error. An instance is considered Out-of-Distribution (OOD) if the AE reconstructs it with a high error. Second, it is evaluated whether the ML classifier has good performances on samples similar to the newly classified instance by using a proxy model. We show that this approach is able to assess reliability both in a simulated scenario and on a model trained to predict disease progression of Multiple Sclerosis patients. We also developed a Python package, named relAI, to embed reliability measures into ML pipelines. We propose a simple approach that can be used in the deployment phase of any ML model to suggest whether to trust predictions or not. Our method holds the promise to provide effective support to clinicians by spotting potential ML failures during deployment., Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures

We consider the class of inclusive hadron collider processes in which one or more energetic jets are produced, possibly accompanied by colourless particles. We provide a general formulation of a slicing scheme for this class of processes, by identifying the various contributions that need to be computed up to next-to-leading order (NLO) in QCD perturbation theory. We focus on two novel observables, the one-jet resolution variable ∆Et and the n-jet resolution variable kTness , and explicitly compute all the ingredients needed to carry out NLO computations using these variables. We contrast the behaviour of these variables when the slicing parameter becomes small. In the case of kTness we also present results for the hadroproduction of multiple jets.

We present the first calculation for the hadroproduction of a W boson in association with a massive bottom (b) quark-antiquark pair at next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in QCD perturbation theory. We exploit the hierarchy between the b-quark mass and the characteristic energy scale of the process to obtain a reliable analytic expression for the two-loop virtual amplitude with three massive legs, starting from the corresponding result available for massless b quarks. The use of massive b quarks avoids the ambiguities associated with the correct flavor assignment in massless calculations, paving the way to a more realistic comparison with experimental data. We present phenomenological results considering proton-proton collisions at center-of-mass energy s=13.6 TeV for inclusive Wbb ̄ production and within a fiducial region relevant for the associated production of a W boson and a Higgs boson decaying into a bb ̄ pair, for which Wbb ̄ production represents one of the most relevant backgrounds. We find that the NNLO corrections are substantial and that their inclusion is mandatory to obtain reliable predictions.

Background and aims: Proprotein Convertase Subtilisin/Kexin type 9 inhibitors (PCSK9i) are recommended in patients at high and very-high cardiovascular (CV) risk, with documented atherosclerotic CV disease (ASCVD), and for very-high risk patients with familial hypercholesterolaemia not achieving LDL-cholesterol (LDL-C) goal while receiving maximally tolerated dose of lipid-lowering therapy (LLT). However, single country real-life data, reporting the use of PCSK9i in clinical practice, are limited. Therefore, we designed AT-TARGET-IT, an Italian, multicenter, observational registry on the use of PCSK9i in clinical practice. Methods: All data were recorded at the time of the first prescription and at the latest observation preceding inclusion in the study. Results: 798 patients were enrolled. The median reduction in LDL-C levels was 64.9%. After stratification for CV risk, 63.8% achieved LDL-C target; of them, 83.3% took LLTs at PCSK9i initiation and 16.7% did not. 760 patients (95.2%) showed high adherence to therapy, 13 (1.6%) partial adherence, and 25 (3.1%) poor adherence. At 6 months, 99.7% of patients enrolled in the study remained on therapy; there were 519 and 423 patients in the study with a follow-up of at least 12 and 18 months, respectively. Persistence in these groups was 98.1% and 97.5%, respectively. Overall, 3.5% of patients discontinued therapy. No differences in efficacy, adherence, and persistence were found between alirocumab and evolocumab. Conclusions: PCSK9i are safe and effective in clinical practice, leading to very high adherence and persistence to therapy, and achievement of recommended LDL-C target in most patients, especially when used as combination therapy.

We consider the class of inclusive hadron collider processes in which several energetic jets are produced, possibly accompanied by colorless particles [such as Higgs boson(s), vector boson(s) with their leptonic decays, and so forth]. We propose a new variable that smoothly captures the N+1 to N-jet transition. This variable, that we dub kTness, represents an effective transverse momentum controlling the singularities of the N+1-jet cross section when the additional jet is unresolved. The kTness variable offers novel opportunities to perform higher-order calculations in quantum chromodynamics by using nonlocal subtraction schemes. We study the singular behavior of the N+1-jet cross section as kTness→0 and, as a phenomenological application, we use the ensuing results to evaluate next-to-leading-order corrections to H+jet and Z+2-jet production at the LHC. We show that kTness performs extremely well as a resolution variable and appears to be very stable with respect to hadronization and multiple-parton interactions.

We consider the class of inclusive hadron collider processes in which one or more energetic jets are produced, possibly accompanied by colourless particles. We provide a general formulation of a slicing scheme for this class of processes, by identifying the various contributions that need to be computed up to next-to-leading order (NLO) in QCD perturbation theory. We focus on two novel observables, the one-jet resolution variable $\Delta E_t$ and the $n$-jet resolution variable $k_{T}^{\mathrm{ness}}$, and explicitly compute all the ingredients needed to carry out NLO computations using these variables. We contrast the behaviour of these variables when the slicing parameter becomes small. In the case of $k_{T}^{\mathrm{ness}}$ we also present results for the hadroproduction of multiple jets., Comment: 47 pages, 3 figures

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: Organosulfur compounds are intentionally added to natural gas as malodorants with the intent of short-term nasal inhalation to aid in leak detection. Regulatory exposure limits have not been established for all commonly used natural gas odorants, and recent community-level exposure events and growing evidence of indoor natural gas leakage have raised concerns associated with natural gas odorant exposures. We conducted a scoping review of peer-reviewed scientific publications on human exposures and animal toxicological studies of natural gas odorants to assess toxicological profiles, exposure potential, health effects and regulatory guidelines associated with commonly used natural gas odorants. RECENT FINDINGS: We identified only 22 studies which met inclusion criteria for full review. Overall, there is limited evidence of both transient nonspecific health symptoms and clinically diagnosed causative neurotoxic effects associated with prolonged odorant exposures. Across seven community-level exposure events and two occupational case reports, consistent symptom patterns included: headache, ocular irritation, nose and throat irritation, respiratory complaints such as shortness of breath and asthma attacks, and skin irritation and rash. Of these, respiratory inflammation and asthma exacerbations are the most debilitating, whereas the high prevalence of ocular and dermatologic symptoms suggest a non-inhalation route of exposure. The limited evidence available raises the possibility that organosulfur odorants may pose health risks at exposures much lower than presently understood, though additional dose-response studies are needed to disentangle specific toxicologic effects from nonspecific responses to noxious organosulfur odors. Numerous recommendations are provided including more transparent and prescriptive natural gas odorant use practices.

Scenarios with new physics particles feebly interacting with the Standard Model sector provide compelling candidates for dark matter searches. Geared with a set of new experiments for the detection of neutrinos and long-lived particles the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has joined the hunt for these elusive states. On the theoretical side, this emerging physics program requires reliable estimates of the associated particle fluxes, in particular those arising from heavy hadron decays. In this work, we provide state-of-the-art QCD predictions for heavy hadron production including radiative corrections at next-to-leading order and using parton distribution functions including small-$x$ resummation at next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy. We match our predictions to parton showers to provide a realistic description of hadronisation effects. We demonstrate the utility of our predictions by presenting the energy spectrum of neutrinos from charm hadron decays. Furthermore, we employ our predictions to estimate, for the first time, FASER's sensitivity to electrophilic ALPs, which are predominantly generated in beauty hadron decays., Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures. Version published in EPJC

The production of a top-antitop quark pair in association with a $W$ boson ($t\bar tW$) is one of the heaviest signatures currently probed at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Since the first observation reported in 2015 the corresponding rates have been found to be consistently higher than the Standard Model predictions, which are based on next-to-leading order~(NLO) calculations in the QCD and electroweak (EW) interactions. We present the first next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) QCD computation of $t\bar tW$ production at hadron colliders. The calculation is exact, except for the finite part of the two-loop virtual corrections, which is estimated using two different approaches that lead to consistent results within their uncertainties. We combine the newly computed NNLO QCD corrections with the complete NLO QCD+EW results, thus obtaining the most advanced perturbative prediction available to date for the \ttW inclusive cross section. The tension with the latest ATLAS and CMS results remains at the $1\sigma-2\sigma$ level., Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, 1 table. Minor changes, version published on PRL

At CERN, radiation surveys of equipment and beam lines are important for safety and analysis throughout the accelerator complex. Radiation measurements are highly dependent on the distance between the sensor and the radiation source. If this distance can be accurately established, the measurements can be used to better understand the radiation levels of the components and can be used for calibration purposes. When surveys are undertaken by the Train Inspection Monorail (TIM) robot, the sensor is at a constant distance from the rail, which means that it is at a known distance and height from the centre of the beam line. However, the distance of the sensor to the closest surface of the beam line varies according to what kind of equipment is installed on the beam line at this point. Ideally, a robotic survey would be completed with online adaption of the sensor position according to the equipment present in the LHC. This new approach establishes a scan of the surface with a 2D LiDAR while moving along the tunnel axis in order to obtain a 3D scan of the environment. This 3D scan will be used to generate online trajectories that will allow the robot to accurately follow the beam line and thus measure the radiation levels., Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public., Human-Robot Interaction

Gli studiosi di questioni organizzative - da sempre interessati al tema del lavoro, della sua evoluzione e del suo rapporto con la tecnologia - si interrogano da qualche tempo sul significato di una etichetta quale è Smart Working (SW), espressione che indica modalità di svolgimento della prestazione lavorativa volte ad allentare i vincoli tradizionali di tempo e luogo e indirizzate a logiche di discrezionalità e di responsabilizzazione verso obiettivi lavorativi, in un contesto nel quale le potenzialità della tecnologia svolgono un significativo ruolo abilitante. La prassi aziendale - a sua volta alla costante ricerca di soluzioni appropriate ai cambiamenti che le dinamiche di mercato e la competizione richiedono - ha iniziato da poco più di un decennio a sperimentare questa modalità con progetti pilota, che di norma coinvolgevano numeri limitati di lavoratori e che, quando consolidati, continuavano a riguardare una parte esigua della popolazione aziendale per pochi giorni di effettiva utilizzabilità. Sino al 2019, i dati Eurostat indicavano infatti in meno del 4% del totale dei lavoratori dipendenti coloro che in Italia lavoravano da remoto, percentuale inferiore di quasi un punto e mezzo rispetto alla media europea. Valori modesti. È a partire dal mese di febbraio del 2020 con l’allarme per la diffusione del Covid-19, che l’attenzione verso lo SW ha assunto un’intensità senza precedenti, tanto che l’ultima settimana di quel mese ha segnato un momento di svolta nella storia dello SW in Italia, inaugurando la fase “massiccia” di questo modo di lavorare. Lo SW - così come la letteratura internazionale, a partire dal Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development-CIPD che ne aveva descritto la natura oltre un decennio fa, ce lo propone - si segnala come qualcosa di nuovo e di diverso. Complice l’evoluzione del contesto tecnologico ed i suoi più recenti sviluppi sia mobile che wireless, il cui ruolo abilitante è tutt’altro che neutro, questa modalità di

The introduction of computerized medical records in hospitals has reduced burdensome activities like manual writing and information fetching. However, the data contained in medical records are still far underutilized, primarily because extracting data from unstructured textual medical records takes time and effort. Information Extraction, a subfield of Natural Language Processing, can help clinical practitioners overcome this limitation by using automated text-mining pipelines. In this work, we created the first Italian neuropsychiatric Named Entity Recognition dataset, PsyNIT, and used it to develop a Transformers-based model. Moreover, we collected and leveraged three external independent datasets to implement an effective multicenter model, with overall F1-score 84.77%, Precision 83.16%, Recall 86.44%. The lessons learned are: (i) the crucial role of a consistent annotation process and (ii) a fine-tuning strategy that combines classical methods with a "low-resource" approach. This allowed us to establish methodological guidelines that pave the way for Natural Language Processing studies in less-resourced languages., Comment: 2 figures, 6 tables, Supplementary Notes included

The rapid economic growth accompanied by health concerns and other global environmental problems in cities and regions has boosted the popularity of the ‘urban metabolism’ topic among academics and policymakers. Currently, 56.2% of the world's population lives in cities, accounting for 80% of the global GDP. It is projected that the current trend for world economic growth complemented by population growth and migration will continue affecting the resource production and consumption in cities and the impact this has on other urban areas. Here, we developed a new model approach that combines emergy input-output tables with ecological network analysis to investigate urban metabolism generally, and applied it to Vienna, Austria. This novel approach allows researchers to study the hierarchy of sectors and functional relationships along all possible metabolic paths of ecological and socio-economic flows exchanging in an urban economy and between the urban economy and its environment. Then, using system-level analyses (flow and contribution analyses) we determined the status of the system components. Finally, the critical components responsible for the status (distribution structure of each industry) and emergy consumption of the other sectors were identified using pairwise control and utility analyses. The results showed that the “agriculture, forestry and fishing” and “mining and quarrying” sectors had the lowest ability to receive financial inputs from the other sectors, reflecting a shortage of agricultural and mining products to meet consumers' demand. Moreover, “agriculture, forestry and fishing” had the highest energy dependence on the other sectors, indicating the lack of self-sufficiency in energy use and the inability of this sector to deliver energy effectively to consuming sectors. This also implies the importance of this sector in achieving the energy efficiency improvement and economic development goals for consumer cities. This work contributes to the existi

Transverse-momentum cuts on undistinguished particles in two-body final states induce an enhanced sensitivity to low momentum scales. This undesirable feature, which ultimately leads to an instability of the fixed-order series, poses additional challenges to non-local subtraction schemes. In this letter, we address this issue for general colour-singlet processes within the qT-subtraction formalism, focusing on neutral-current Drell–Yan production. We present a simple procedure to reduce the dependence on the slicing parameter from linear to quadratic, by accounting for the linear power corrections through an appropriate recoil prescription. We observe a dramatical improvement of the numerical convergence and a reduction of the systematic uncertainties. We also discuss how a linear dependence in qT can be avoided for Drell–Yan production by using staggered cuts, which, to the best of our understanding, could be used in experimental analyses. We show that our approach can be successfully applied also to on-shell ZZ production. We finally study diphoton production and verify that our approach is insufficient to capture the linear power corrections introduced by the isolation procedure. The recoil prescription is available in version 2.1 of MATRIX.

We consider ZZ production in hadronic collisions and present state-of-the-art predictions in QCD perturbation theory matched to parton showers. Next-to-next-to-leading order corrections to the quark-initiated channel are combined with parton showers using the MiNNLOPS method, while next-to-leading order corrections to the loop-induced gluon fusion channel are matched using the Powheg method. Their combination, dubbed nNNLO+PS, constitutes the best theoretical description of ZZ events to date. Spin correlations, interferences and off-shell effects are included by calculating the full process pp → l+l−l(′)+l(′)−. We show the crucial impact of higher-order corrections for both quark- and gluon-initiated processes as well as the relevance of the parton shower in certain kinematical regimes. Our predictions are in very good agreement with recent LHC data.

We consider the associated production of a vector or Higgs boson with a jet in hadronic collisions. When the transverse momentum qT of the boson-jet system is much smaller than its invariant mass Q, the QCD perturbative expansion is affected by large logarithmic terms that must be resummed to all orders. We discuss the all-order resummation structure of the logarithmically enhanced contributions up to next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy. Resummation is performed at the differential level with respect to the kinematical variables of the boson-jet system. Soft-parton radiation produces azimuthal correlations that are fully accounted for in our framework. We present explicit analytical results for the resummation coefficients up to next-to-leading order and next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy, that include the exact dependence on the jet radius.

Engaging children and adolescents in ADHD care is critical for future independent disease management. However, there is a lack of evidence guiding health professionals and parents on how best to engage their children and adolescents in ADHD care. We recruited 41 diverse parents of children and adolescents with ADHD and 11 adolescents with ADHD from an urban, safety-net hospital to participate in in-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews and then analyzed this data using thematic analysis. Childrens level of illness insight about ADHD and self-esteem emerged as two major contributors to engagement of children and adolescents in ADHD care, and their intersection created four styles of engagement: proactive (high insight, high self-esteem), anxious (high insight, low self-esteem), apathetic (low insight, high self-esteem), and resistant (low insight, low self-esteem). This framework can help health professionals engage children and adolescents in care for ADHD and guide development of interventions to improve engagement in care.

We summarize the current status and near future prospects for next-to-next-to-leading order calculations matched to parton shower based on the MiNNLO$_{\rm PS}$ method. We give a theoretical overview, illustrate selected results for $ZZ\to 4\ell$ and top-pair production processes at the LHC, and provide an outlook of the future challenges., Comment: Contribution to Snowmass 2022

We consider the class of inclusive hadron collider processes in which several energetic jets are produced, possibly accompanied by colourless particles (such as Higgs boson(s), vector boson(s) with their leptonic decays, and so forth). We propose a new variable that smoothly captures the $N+1$ to $N$-jet transition. This variable, that we dub $k_T^{\rm ness}$, represents an effective transverse momentum controlling the singularities of the $N+1$-jet cross section when the additional jet is unresolved. The $k_T^{\rm ness}$ variable offers novel opportunities to perform higher-order calculations in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) by using non-local subtraction schemes. We study the singular behavior of the $N+1$-jet cross section as $k_T^{\rm ness}\to 0$ and, as a phenomenological application, we use the ensuing results to evaluate next-to-leading order corrections to $H$+jet and $Z$+2 jet production at the LHC. We show that $k_T^{\rm ness}$ performs extremely well as a resolution variable and appears to be very stable with respect to hadronization and multiple-parton interactions., Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures

We summarize the current status and near future prospects for next-to-next-to-leading order calculations matched to parton shower based on the MiNNLO$_{\rm PS}$ method. We give a theoretical overview, illustrate selected results for $ZZ\to 4\ell$ and top-pair production processes at the LHC, and provide an outlook of the future challenges., Comment: Contribution to Snowmass 2022

We present the first calculation for the hadroproduction of a $W$ boson in association with a massive bottom ($b$) quark-antiquark pair at next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in QCD perturbation theory. We exploit the hierarchy between the $b$ quark mass and the characteristic energy scale of the process to obtain a reliable analytic expression for the two-loop virtual amplitude with three massive legs, starting from the corresponding result available for massless bottom quarks. The use of massive $b$ quarks avoids the ambiguities associated with the correct flavour assignment in massless calculations, paving the way to a more realistic comparison with experimental data. We present phenomenological results considering proton-proton collisions at centre-of-mass energy $\sqrt{s}=13.6$ TeV for inclusive $Wb \bar b$ production and within a fiducial region relevant for the associated production of a $W$ boson and a Higgs boson decaying into a $b \bar b$ pair, for which $Wb \bar b$ production represents one of the most relevant backgrounds. We find that the NNLO corrections are substantial and that their inclusion is mandatory to obtain reliable predictions., Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables

Recent progress in calculating lepton density functions inside the proton and simulating lepton showers laid the foundations for precision studies of resonant leptoquark production at hadron colliders. Direct quark-lepton fusion into a leptoquark is a novel production channel at the LHC that has the potential to probe a unique parameter space for large masses and couplings. In this work, we build the first Monte Carlo event generator for a full-fledged simulation of this process at NLO for production, followed by a subsequent decay using the POWHEG method and matching to the parton showers utilizing HERWIG. The code can handle all scalar leptoquark models with renormalisable quark-lepton interactions. We then comprehensively study the differential distributions, including higher-order effects, and asses the corresponding theoretical uncertainties. We also quantify the impact of the improved predictions on the projected (HL-)LHC sensitivities and initiate the first exploration of the potential at the FCC-hh. Our work paves the way toward performing LHC searches using this channel., Comment: 33 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables

This paper develops the Final Master Thesis of the Master in Industrial Engineering of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. Although it is developed during the fourth semester of the Master during the Erasmus+ program at the University of Naples Federico II, particularly in the laboratory MarteLab at CESMA Centre. Robotics entered our lives decades ago to facilitate processes and activities in various fields. As time goes by, robots are becoming more and more sophisticated and consequently capable of carrying out more complex activities. The vast majority are focused on performing repetitive and tedious tasks, such as industrial robots. When a robot is intended to perform more complex tasks it is necessary to put measures in place so that if it fails, to help it get going again. There are times when it is not possible for this help to be on site, and this is where teleoperation comes into play. In this project, the design and implementation of a teleoperation system of a Robot bartender, which performs the cocktail that the customer requests. The project is divided into several tasks and components: the first is the Operator Site, where everything related to Unity3D has been implemented, its interface, the connection with the HTC Vive Pro set and more. On the other hand, there is the Robot Site, where the Robotic arm is located and everything necessary to obtain the necessary information. Finally, the connection of the whole system is done through ROS, which is the core of the present thesis. To check if the implemented teleoperation system is suitable to the users, it has been tested through a simple experiment that consists of picking up a falling glass to put it in the correct position and allow the robotic arm to continue with its task. Subsequently, users have answered two usability and mental workload questionnaires, with significantly positive results

We summarize the current status and near future prospects for next-to-next-to-leading order calculations matched to parton shower based on the MiNNLO$_{\rm PS}$ method. We give a theoretical overview, illustrate selected results for $ZZ\to 4\ell$ and top-pair production processes at the LHC, and provide an outlook of the future challenges., Comment: Contribution to Snowmass 2022

The rapid economic growth accompanied by health concerns and other global environmental problems in cities and regions has boosted the popularity of the ‘urban metabolism’ topic among academics and policymakers. Currently, 56.2% of the world's population lives in cities, accounting for 80% of the global GDP. It is projected that the current trend for world economic growth complemented by population growth and migration will continue affecting the resource production and consumption in cities and the impact this has on other urban areas. Here, we developed a new model approach that combines emergy input-output tables with ecological network analysis to investigate urban metabolism generally, and applied it to Vienna, Austria. This novel approach allows researchers to study the hierarchy of sectors and functional relationships along all possible metabolic paths of ecological and socio-economic flows exchanging in an urban economy and between the urban economy and its environment. Then, using system-level analyses (flow and contribution analyses) we determined the status of the system components. Finally, the critical components responsible for the status (distribution structure of each industry) and emergy consumption of the other sectors were identified using pairwise control and utility analyses. The results showed that the “agriculture, forestry and fishing” and “mining and quarrying” sectors had the lowest ability to receive financial inputs from the other sectors, reflecting a shortage of agricultural and mining products to meet consumers' demand. Moreover, “agriculture, forestry and fishing” had the highest energy dependence on the other sectors, indicating the lack of self-sufficiency in energy use and the inability of this sector to deliver energy effectively to consuming sectors. This also implies the importance of this sector in achieving the energy efficiency improvement and economic development goals for consumer cities. This work contributes to the existi

The social and ecological impacts of urbanization require integrated management of cities and their resource metabolism for long-term sustainability and economic prosperity. Traditionally, network models are used to study internal metabolic processes in cities, complementing the traditional “black box” urban models to account for the input of material and energy resources and the output of final products and wastes. This study introduces a multi-criteria assessment framework by integrating a unique hybrid-unit input-output model with the emergy accounting method to estimate the environmental support provided to urban socio-economic systems, applied here to the case of Vienna, Austria. By focusing on the internal organisation and functioning of urban socio-economic systems, the proposed framework strengthens the understanding of ecological and socio-economic flows exchanged among industries and the environment. The results suggest that resources can be saved by applying supply-side and demand-side interventions and improving share of renewables. The multi-criteria assessment framework developed in this study allows to investigate the urban metabolism of cities and regional contexts through the identification of sustainable pathways rooted in material circularity and resource efficiency, supporting the design of policies in line with the “integrated wealth assessment” and “circular economy” principles.

The social and ecological impacts of urbanization require integrated management of cities and their resource metabolism for long-term sustainability and economic prosperity. Traditionally, network models are used to study internal metabolic processes in cities, complementing the traditional “black box” urban models to account for the input of material and energy resources and the output of final products and wastes. This study introduces a multi-criteria assessment framework by integrating a unique hybrid-unit input-output model with the emergy accounting method to estimate the environmental support provided to urban socio-economic systems, applied here to the case of Vienna, Austria. By focusing on the internal organisation and functioning of urban socio-economic systems, the proposed framework strengthens the understanding of ecological and socio-economic flows exchanged among industries and the environment. The results suggest that resources can be saved by applying supply-side and demand-side interventions and improving share of renewables. The multi-criteria assessment framework developed in this study allows to investigate the urban metabolism of cities and regional contexts through the identification of sustainable pathways rooted in material circularity and resource efficiency, supporting the design of policies in line with the “integrated wealth assessment” and “circular economy” principles.

The social and ecological impacts of urbanization require integrated management of cities and their resource metabolism for long-term sustainability and economic prosperity. Traditionally, network models are used to study internal metabolic processes in cities, complementing the traditional “black box” urban models to account for the input of material and energy resources and the output of final products and wastes. This study introduces a multi-criteria assessment framework by integrating a unique hybrid-unit input-output model with the emergy accounting method to estimate the environmental support provided to urban socio-economic systems, applied here to the case of Vienna, Austria. By focusing on the internal organisation and functioning of urban socio-economic systems, the proposed framework strengthens the understanding of ecological and socio-economic flows exchanged among industries and the environment. The results suggest that resources can be saved by applying supply-side and demand-side interventions and improving share of renewables. The multi-criteria assessment framework developed in this study allows to investigate the urban metabolism of cities and regional contexts through the identification of sustainable pathways rooted in material circularity and resource efficiency, supporting the design of policies in line with the “integrated wealth assessment” and “circular economy” principles.

The rapid economic growth accompanied by health concerns and other global environmental problems in cities and regions has boosted the popularity of the ‘urban metabolism’ topic among academics and policymakers. Currently, 56.2% of the world's population lives in cities, accounting for 80% of the global GDP. It is projected that the current trend for world economic growth complemented by population growth and migration will continue affecting the resource production and consumption in cities and the impact this has on other urban areas. Here, we developed a new model approach that combines emergy input-output tables with ecological network analysis to investigate urban metabolism generally, and applied it to Vienna, Austria. This novel approach allows researchers to study the hierarchy of sectors and functional relationships along all possible metabolic paths of ecological and socio-economic flows exchanging in an urban economy and between the urban economy and its environment. Then, using system-level analyses (flow and contribution analyses) we determined the status of the system components. Finally, the critical components responsible for the status (distribution structure of each industry) and emergy consumption of the other sectors were identified using pairwise control and utility analyses. The results showed that the “agriculture, forestry and fishing” and “mining and quarrying” sectors had the lowest ability to receive financial inputs from the other sectors, reflecting a shortage of agricultural and mining products to meet consumers' demand. Moreover, “agriculture, forestry and fishing” had the highest energy dependence on the other sectors, indicating the lack of self-sufficiency in energy use and the inability of this sector to deliver energy effectively to consuming sectors. This also implies the importance of this sector in achieving the energy efficiency improvement and economic development goals for consumer cities. This work contributes to the existi

This study focused on the recovery of antioxidant compounds from lemon and tomato by-products for use as natural additives in the development of active food packaging formulated using three different polymeric matrices that included low-density polyethylene (LDPE), polylactic acid (PLA), and G-polymer (GP). The films were characterized according to chemical-physical, thermal analyses, and their barrier and mechanical properties. Migration assays were performed to evaluate the release of active compounds from polymeric matrices, which were quantified in the food simulant by high-performance liquid chromatography with a diode array detector and then confirmed via liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry. The antioxidant capacities of the films were determined to evaluate their applicability for use as antioxidant-active packaging. The incorporation of extracts into polymers resulted in different structural changes and enhanced properties according to the nature of the polymeric matrix based on the interactions of the –OH groups of polyphenols and the chemical groups of the polymers. The lemon (LE) and tomato (TE) extracts lead to a substantial improvement in water barrier properties of PLA and GP-based films. The active PLA and GP films released high amounts of polyphenolic compounds (up to 65% for GP containing LE); mainly hesperidin and eriocitrin for LE films, and chrologenic acid for TE films. PLA loaded with lemon extract at 4% was selected as the most suitable for use as antioxidant packaging to extend the shelf-life of foods with high fat content

In the era of digital healthcare, the huge volumes of textual information generated every day in hospitals constitute an essential but underused asset that could be exploited with task-specific, fine-tuned biomedical language representation models, improving patient care and management. For such specialized domains, previous research has shown that fine-tuning models stemming from broad-coverage checkpoints can largely benefit additional training rounds over large-scale in-domain resources. However, these resources are often unreachable for less-resourced languages like Italian, preventing local medical institutions to employ in-domain adaptation. In order to reduce this gap, our work investigates two accessible approaches to derive biomedical language models in languages other than English, taking Italian as a concrete use-case: one based on neural machine translation of English resources, favoring quantity over quality; the other based on a high-grade, narrow-scoped corpus natively written in Italian, thus preferring quality over quantity. Our study shows that data quantity is a harder constraint than data quality for biomedical adaptation, but the concatenation of high-quality data can improve model performance even when dealing with relatively size-limited corpora. The models published from our investigations have the potential to unlock important research opportunities for Italian hospitals and academia. Finally, the set of lessons learned from the study constitutes valuable insights towards a solution to build biomedical language models that are generalizable to other less-resourced languages and different domain settings., Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, 6 tables. Published in Journal of Biomedical Informatics

We present the first calculation for the hadroproduction of a $W$ boson in association with a massive bottom ($b$) quark-antiquark pair at next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in QCD perturbation theory. We exploit the hierarchy between the $b$ quark mass and the characteristic energy scale of the process to obtain a reliable analytic expression for the two-loop virtual amplitude with three massive legs, starting from the corresponding result available for massless bottom quarks. The use of massive $b$ quarks avoids the ambiguities associated with the correct flavour assignment in massless calculations, paving the way to a more realistic comparison with experimental data. We present phenomenological results considering proton-proton collisions at centre-of-mass energy $\sqrt{s}=13.6$ TeV for inclusive $Wb \bar b$ production and within a fiducial region relevant for the associated production of a $W$ boson and a Higgs boson decaying into a $b \bar b$ pair, for which $Wb \bar b$ production represents one of the most relevant backgrounds. We find that the NNLO corrections are substantial and that their inclusion is mandatory to obtain reliable predictions., Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables. Final version published in PRD

The increasing resistance of fungi to antibiotics is a severe challenge in public health, and newly effective drugs are required. Promising potential medications are lipopeptides, linear antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) conjugated to a lipid tail, usually at the N-terminus. In this paper, we investigated the in vitro and in vivo antifungal activity of three short myristoylated and nonmyristoylated peptides derived from a mutant of the AMP Chionodracine. We determined their interaction with anionic and zwitterionic membrane-mimicking vesicles and their structure during this interaction. We then investigated their cytotoxic and hemolytic activity against mammalian cells. Lipidated peptides showed a broad spectrum of activity against a relevant panel of pathogen fungi belonging to Candida spp., including the multidrug-resistant C. auris. The antifungal activity was also observed vs. biofilms of C. albicans, C. tropicalis, and C. auris. Finally, a pilot efficacy study was conducted on the in vivo model consisting of Galleria mellonella larvae. Treatment with the most-promising myristoylated peptide was effective in counteracting the infection from C. auris and C. albicans and the death of the larvae. Therefore, this myristoylated peptide is a potential candidate to develop antifungal agents against human fungal pathogens.

We consider the class of inclusive hadron collider processes in which several energetic jets are produced, possibly accompanied by colorless particles [such as Higgs boson(s), vector boson(s) with their leptonic decays, and so forth]. We propose a new variable that smoothly captures the $N+1$ to $N$-jet transition. This variable, that we dub $k_{ness}^{T}$, represents an effective transverse momentum controlling the singularities of the $N+1$-jet cross section when the additional jet is unresolved. The $k_{ness}^{T}$ variable offers novel opportunities to perform higher-order calculations in quantum chromodynamics by using nonlocal subtraction schemes. We study the singular behavior of the $N+1$-jet cross section as $k_{ness}^{T}→0$ and, as a phenomenological application, we use the ensuing results to evaluate next-to-leading-order corrections to $H+jet$ and $Z+2$-jet production at the LHC. We show that $k_{ness}^{T}$ performs extremely well as a resolution variable and appears to be very stable with respect to hadronization and multiple-parton interactions.

Transverse-momentum cuts on undistinguished particles in two-body final states induce an enhanced sensitivity to low momentum scales. This undesirable feature, which ultimately leads to an instability of the fixed-order series, poses additional challenges to non-local subtraction schemes. In this letter, we address this issue for general colour-singlet processes within the -subtraction formalism, focusing on neutral-current Drell–Yan production. We present a simple procedure to reduce the dependence on the slicing parameter from linear to quadratic, by accounting for the linear power corrections through an appropriate recoil prescription. We observe a dramatical improvement of the numerical convergence and a reduction of the systematic uncertainties. We also discuss how a linear dependence in can be avoided for Drell–Yan production by using staggered cuts, which, to the best of our understanding, could be used in experimental analyses. We show that our approach can be successfully applied also to on-shell ZZ production. We finally study diphoton production and verify that our approach is insufficient to capture the linear power corrections introduced by the isolation procedure. The recoil prescription is available in version 2.1 of Matrix.

We consider the associated production of a vector or Higgs boson with a jet in hadronic collisions. When the transverse momentum qT of the boson-jet system is much smaller than its invariant mass Q, the QCD perturbative expansion is affected by large logarithmic terms that must be resummed to all orders. We discuss the all-order resummation structure of the logarithmically enhanced contributions up to next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy. Resummation is performed at the differential level with respect to the kinematical variables of the boson-jet system. Soft-parton radiation produces azimuthal correlations that are fully accounted for in our framework. We present explicit analytical results for the resummation coefficients up to next-to-leading order and next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy, that include the exact dependence on the jet radius.