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WO 3 /BiVO 4 films obtained by electrochemical deposition of BiVO 4 over mesoporous WO 3 were applied to the photoelectrochemical degradation of selected emerging contaminants (ketoprofen and levofloxacine) in aqueous solutions. The WO 3 /BiVO 4 films in this work are characterized by a mesoporous morphology with a maximum photoconversion efficiency >40% extending beyond 500 nm in Na 2 SO 4 electrolytes. Oxygen was found to be the dominant water oxidation product (ca. 90% faradaic yield) and no evidence for the photogeneration of OH radicals was obtained. Nevertheless, both 10 ppm levofloxacine and ketoprofen could be degraded at WO 3 /BiVO 4 junctions upon a few hours of illumination under visible light. However, while levofloxacine degradation intermediates were progressively consumed by further oxidation at the WO 3 /BiVO 4 interface, ketoprofen oxidation byproducts, being stable aromatic species, were found to be persistent in aqueous solution even after 15 hours of solar simulated illumination. This indicates that, due to the lower oxidizing power of photogenerated holes in BiVO 4 and a different water oxidation mechanism, the employment of WO 3 /BiVO 4 in photoelectrochemical environmental remediation processes is much less universal than that possible with wider band gap semiconductors such as TiO 2 and WO 3 .

We studied episodic memory and future thinking for self-relevant and other-relevant events at different levels of retrieval support, theory of mind, and delay discounting in ASD children and adolescents (ASDs). Compared to typically developing controls, ASDs produced fewer internal (episodic) but a similar number of external (semantic) details while remembering past events, imagining future events, and imagining future events happening to others, indicating a general impairment of event construction. This deficit was driven by group differences under high retrieval support, and therefore unlikely to depend on self-initiated retrieval/construction deficits. ASDs' event construction impairment related to the severity of ASD symptoms, and to theory of mind deficits. ASDs, however, showed normal delay discounting, highlighting preserved forms of future-based decision-making in ASD.

The fast and accurate computation of the electric forces that drive the motion of charged particles at the nanometer scale represents a computational challenge. For this kind of system, where the discrete nature of the charges cannot be neglected, boundary element methods (BEM) represent a better approach than finite differences/finite elements methods. In this article, we compare two different BEM approaches to a canonical electrostatic problem in a three-dimensional space with inhomogeneous dielectrics, emphasizing their suitability for particle-based simulations: the iterative method proposed by Hoyles et al. and the Induced Charge Computation introduced by Boda et al.

This study reports the psychological symptomatology assessed in 50 rheumatoid arthritis patients (RA) and 50 with primary fibromyalgic syndrome (PFS). Depression and illness behavior were investigated by two self-report scales in their validated Italian translations: the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression (CES-D) and Illness Behavior Questionnaire developed by Pilowsky and Spence (IBQ). Our results suggest that the average RA patients were not depressed to a clinically significant level at the time of the investigation. The mean scores of CES-D by RA patients do not differ from those found in Italian patients affected by other organic diseases. On the contrary, mean score in the CES-D depression scale obtained from PFS patients was significantly higher than the cut-off point. In analyzing the pattern of illness behavior the significant difference between RA and PFS patients in scale of denial of problems is relevant. This means the RA patients have a tendency to deny life stresses and to attribute all problems to the effects of their illness. Such a result is in line with a classic psychosomatic point of view, that defines RA patients as alexitimic ones, that is, with poor capacity to recognize and express emotions. Our data support both the hypothesis that depressive symptoms are more common among PFS patients than RA patients, and that psychological factors may play a significant role in most patients with PFS.