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High-efficiency, high-contrast gold and nickel multistep Fresnel zone plates were fabricated using electron beam lithography. Maximum efficiency of 55% was achieved for the nickel plate at 7 keV. The lenses also have low background signal and unwanted diffraction orders are effectively reduced. They could be of use in techniques such as microscopy, micro-fluorescence and micro-diffraction.

Forecasting geomagnetic indices represents a key point to develop warning systems for the mitigation of possible effects of severe geomagnetic storms on critical ground infrastructures. Here we focus on SYM-H index, a proxy of the axially symmetric magnetic field disturbance at low and middle latitudes on the Earth's surface. To forecast SYM-H, we built two artificial neural network (ANN) models and trained both of them on two different sets of input parameters including interplanetary magnetic field components and magnitude and differing for the presence or not of previous SYM-H values. These ANN models differ in architecture being based on two conceptually different neural networks: the long short-term memory (LSTM) and the convolutional neural network (CNN). Both networks are trained, validated, and tested on a total of 42 geomagnetic storms among the most intense that occurred between 1998 and 2018. Performance comparison of the two ANN models shows that (1) both are able to well forecast SYM-H index 1 h in advance, with an accuracy of more than 95% in terms of the coefficient of determination R²; (2) the model based on LSTM is slightly more accurate than that based on CNN when including SYM-H index at previous steps among the inputs; and (3) the model based on CNN has interesting potentialities being more accurate than that based on LSTM when not including SYM-H index among the inputs. Predictions made including SYM-H index among the inputs provide a root mean squared error on average 42% lower than that of predictions made without SYM-H. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

DUAL TARGETING OF HODGKIN'S LYMPHOMA BY ANTI-CD30 CAR-T CELLS CO-TRANSDUCED WITH AN ANTI-PDL1 COSTIMULATORY RECEPTOR TO OVERCOME THE IMMUNOSUPPRESSIVE MICROENVIRONMENT To overcome this issue, we propose (Figure 1A) to engineer T cells to coexpress 2nd-generation anti-CD30 CAR (CD28-based) and anti-PDL1 costimulatory chimeric receptor (CCR, 4.1BB-based) devoid of signaling domain. Clinical trials of CD30 CAR-T cells in relapsed/refractory ( I r i / I r i ) cHL showed inferior results compared to CD19 CAR-T cells in non-Hodgkin lymphomas. [Extracted from the article]

Fast reactor designs are currently being revisited aiming at having a consolidated safety dossier. In that frame, studying any perturbation of nominal operating condition is mandatory. Among different initiators, particular attention is being paid to reactivity insertion due to core assembly bowing and deformation and induced lattice readjustments as a consequence of events such as earthquakes. In this study, a deterministic calculation scheme based on the mesh projection method has been used in order to evaluate the reactivity changes occurring in a deformed sodium fast reactor core. With the microscopic cross sections calculated by ECCO, fu ll three-dimensional core calculations are being conducted with ERANOS (DIF3D), VARIANT, and SNATCH to solve neutron transport equations in either diffusion, nodal variational, or Sn transport approximations. A simple analytical model based on perturbation theory has been developed to identify the main phenomena leading to changes in the core reactivity. Reactivity changes induced by small deformations can be estimated as a summation of reactivity perturbations of individual subassemblies. The results obtained with this method have been checked by comparing them to those obtained with Monte Carlo simulations. A good agreement is being found allowing the use of this method in realistic problems with significant computer resource reduction. The different contributions to the reactivity changes confirm the results of the analytical model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Plastic surgery is more and more developing. Facial blocks are adapted to surgical procedures performed in this setting. They are easy to perform and may prolong postoperative analgesia. Facial blocks may be used in ambulatory surgery as a single technique or combined with general anaesthesia or intravenous sedation. After a reminding of facial nerve anatomy, facial and cervical blocks are described with their indications. Guidelines for performance and monitoring are also indicated. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Traffic agencies are increasingly using automatic toll collection technologies to collect fees on toll roads. Associated with such technologies are toll tags on vehicles that identify the vehicle and its account for charging the appropriate toll, and roadside readers (or overhead readers) that read the toll tags. A by-product of such technologies is the data collected on traffic measures such as travel times from the point when the vehicle is first tagged to the point it leaves the system. That is, the toll reader becomes a traffic sensor that measures travel times of some tagged vehicles and volumes of such vehicles that go from intermediate origins to intermediate destinations. Two problems have been studied on the optimal locations of such automatic vehicle identification (AVI) readers on traffic network using criteria: (i) to maximise the total vehicle-miles monitored, and (ii) to minimise the variance of predicted travel times. Optimisation models are formulated through which it is shown that these problems are NP-hard. Subsequently, greedy heuristics are proposed. Exact optimal solutions, using CPLEX, and approximate solutions, using the heuristics are compared for several small hypothetical networks for a case study dealing with a real application as well as in Harris County, Texas, USA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a brief review of the story of the optical nonlinear response of liquid crystals from the Giant Optical Nonlinearity to the recently observed Colossal Optical Nonlinearity. We also report our latest results concerning the possibility of controlling this amazing nonlinearity by means of an external electric field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Given a graph G with a label (color) assigned to each edge (not necessarily properly) we look for an hamiltonian cycle of G with the minimum number of different colors. The problem has several applications in telecommunication networks, electric networks, multimodal transportation networks, among others, where one aims to ensure connectivity or other properties by means of limited number of different connections. We analyze the complexity of the problem on special graph classes and propose, for the general case, heuristic resolution algorithms. Performances of the algorithms are experimentally evaluated on a set of instances and compared with the exact solution value provided by a solver. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this paper, we report our most recent results about the huge optical nonlinearity of methyl red (MR)-doped 5CB thin cells. The basic concepts of the surface-induced nonlinear effect interpretation are recalled and possible methods to obtain a better control of the samples response are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We report a study of optical phase conjugation in thin nematic cells by using low intensity of the incident beams and without any external applied field. The reported effect exploits the colossal optical nonlinearity recently observed in thin nematic liquid crystals films doped with a small amount of methyl red. The high conjugated reflectivity values obtained with the analysed samples, allows successful correction of severely aberrated wavefronts of very weak light beams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]