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This paper presents a multidisciplinary summary of the most recent discoveries and hypotheses concerning factors driving the human subsistence economy and landscape shaping in Sicily during the Holocene. A number of scientific papers have recently pointed out the key role played by paleogeography, resource (water, food) availability and natural disturbances (volcanic eruptions, tsunamis) in local human activities. Modern anthropology and archaeology increasingly use biological remains (e.g. soils, bones, wood, plant macroremains, pollen) to better understand how human communities managed to survive and spread. Likewise, refined reconstructions of past human demographic fluxes and socio-economic structures may enable a better understanding of landscape dynamics. Specifically, this historical perspective on the management of natural resources allows the finding of past episodes of unsustainable land use (e.g. forest destruction, overgrazing), thus providing a useful basis for future nature protection and maintaining sustainable ecosystem services.

In recent times, the interest around underwater radiated noise pollution generated by ships and marine vehicles is growing, even in the vision of the compliance of 14th Sustainable Development Goal in United Nations 2030 Agenda, “Life below water”. This, combined with the need of guarantee high comfort levels for passengers and crew, implies actions to increase absorption and dissipation of vibrational energy generated on board. One of the widely adopted solutions consist of viscoelastic materials (VEM) characterized by high levels of damping. In the last times, new strict requirements led to the development of Isocyanate free VEM, so the necessity of a provisional method to investigate in an efficient way new VEM is required. Experimental tests are essential in order to obtain performance indicators (non-standard procedure) or material physical characteristics (Oberst’s beam test, ASTM E756 – 05). In the last times finite element methods (FEM) has been increasingly used. Knowing VEM physics parameters allows numerical simulation in both the provisional and the optimization phase to be accurate and reliable. In this paper, an experimental-numerical small-scale procedure based on the cantilever beam test has been developed and used in order to characterize two different VEM materials, using different specimen thickness. In the proposed method, contrarily from the traditional methods, the loss factor estimation is based on a reverse engineering approach free from peak sharpness dependence. This allows to extend the range of materials that can be analysed, bypassing some typical limitations due to high damping VEMs.

In the original version of this Article, Giacomo Savini was incorrectly affiliated with ‘Studio Oculistico d’Azeglio, Bologna, Italy’. The correct affiliation is listed below: IRCCS G.B. Bietti Foundation, Rome, Italy The original version of this Article also contained an error in Affiliation 6, which was incorrectly given as ‘Ospedale Oftalmico Roma, Rome, Italy, Rome, Italy’. The correct affiliation is listed below: Ospedale Oftalmico Roma, Rome, Italy. Also, the Acknowledgements section in this Article was incomplete. “We are deeply grateful to the generous collaborations of our WS patients and their families. This study was supported by the Grant GR-2016-02361449 to LC and by the “Ricerca Corrente” funding to VC, both from the Italian Ministry of Health.” now reads: “We are deeply grateful to the generous collaborations of our WS patients and their families. This study was supported by the Grant GR-2016-02361449 to LC and by the “Ricerca Corrente” funding to VC, both from the Italian Ministry of Health. The contribution of IRCCS - G.B. Bietti Foundation was supported by Fondazione Roma and the Italian Ministry of Health” These errors have now been corrected in the PDF and HTML versions of the Article, and in the accompanying Supplementary Information.

The Erice 2018 Charter was unanimously approved at the conclusion of the 53rd Residential Course of the International School of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine “Adapted Physical Activity in Sport, Wellness and Fitness; the role of the Departments of Prevention and of the National Health Service in doping prevention and health promotion”, held on 15-19 May 2018 in Erice, Italy, at the “Ettore Majorana” Foundation and Centre for Scientific Culture, and promoted by the Study Group on “Movement Sciences for Health” of the Italian Society of Hygiene, Preventive Medicine and Public Health. The event was part of a larger project supported by the Ministry of Health aimed at preventing doping in the general population involved in sport and physical activities. After an intense discussion the participants focused on ten statements involving the following critical issues: responsibility, priority, message, alphabetization, networks and alliances, school promoting health, player and opportunities, competences, know-how, programming and acting. These statements provide hints to approach doping within a public health frame and summarize the role of the Departments of Prevention and NHS in promoting and coordinating preventive actions with other institutions and stakeholders. Doping represents a complex phenomenon related to cultural, social, economic and legal issues. In addition to regulatory or repressive actions, education to health and legality is proposed as the fundamental strategy to contrast doping by promoting healthy lifestyles, based on scientific knowledge and respect for legality.

Le radiazioni a radiofrequenze (100 kHz-300 GHz) sono utilizzate nelle telecomunicazioni e in molte altre applicazioni biomediche e industriali, con esposizioni ubiquitarie negli ambienti di vita e di lavoro. Gli eventuali effetti nocivi di queste esposizioni, oggetto di un'intensa attività di ricerca, sono anche caratterizzati da una elevata percezione dei rischi da parte della popolazione, con conseguente richiesta di un'esauriente informazione. Questo rapporto, indirizzato agli operatori del Servizio Sanitario Nazionale e del Sistema Nazionale delle Agenzie di Protezione Ambientale, vuole fornire una descrizione delle caratteristiche dell'esposizione a campi elettromagnetici a radiofrequenze e una presentazione delle evidenze epidemiologiche e sperimentali sui rischi per la salute derivanti da queste esposizioni. Il rapporto è focalizzato in particolare sulla relazione tra le sorgenti che destano maggiore preoccupazione (telefoni cellulari, antenne radio-televisive, stazioni radio base e impianti WLAN/WiFi) e sugli effetti a lungo termine più rilevanti per la salute dell'uomo, i tumori.

The recent uncontrolled re-entry of the Chinese Tiangong-1 space station represented a unique opportunity to test our ability to face a potential space threat in a real-case operational scenario. The Italian Space Agency (ASI) has worked side by side with the Italian Civil Protection Department and other National Operative Entities in order to prepare and be ready to put in place suitable mitigation strategies. A joint Tiangong-1 re-entry campaign was organized involving research and governmental institutions and a technical board was timely set up and met regularly at the Italian Civil Protection headquarters for analysing the possible threats (e.g. critical infrastructures on the ground, air traffic control, safety procedures etc.). A timeline for managing operations was agreed for triggering actions such as tasking different kind of sensors (e.g. optical vs radar) or evaluating the geographical distribution of the level of alert. Critical milestones were identified, e.g. when the re-entry prediction uncertainty narrowed to less than 24 hours and when the actual re-entry ground tracks could be confidently computed. The committee became permanently operational during the Tiangong-1 critical passes over Italy and ASI provided the technical information to the Civil Protection management in order to decide the activation/deactivation of local departments spread across Italy. ASI has been also coordinating with the Civil Protection for communicating with the media, which turned out to be a very sensitive task because of the widespread interest raised in the news by the re-entry of such a peculiar object. The communication was successful in conveying to the general public correct and timely information, thus preventing unjustified alarms. Lessons learned from the Tiangong-1 re-entry operational experience range from highlighting the role played by internal communication (e.g. customizing technical/scientific information to standard civil protection operational procedures) to setting up proper interfaces at international level (e.g. the European EUSST consortium among France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and UK devoted to space surveillance), and to realize to which extent the knowledge of the space threats and of some basic mitigation rules is essential in order to make crisis management effective. As such they can be fruitfully transferred to the NEO hazard, which has necessarily relied so-far on the organization of impact exercises at various level of complexity. This is of particular interest because the next generation sky surveys devoted to NEO discovery using wide field high sensitivity telescopes are likely to routinely detect meteorite-dropping bodies before they enter the atmosphere with sufficient warning time to undertake mitigation actions. Commonalities and differences between the SST and NEO segments are presented and discussed toward establishing a common ground for facing low probability threatening events coming from space at an operational level.

The early human peopling of Sicily and Western Mediterranean shores is one of the debated topic in the archaeological and anthropological literature over the twentieth century. This discussion involves not only the specific issue of the peopling of the continental island, but fundamentally the reconstruction of human migration routes and dispersals across the Mediterranean area during Early and Middle Pleistocene. Even if the common route of faunal and human movement is considered from North, and relative to the Messina strait crossing, several authors, on the base of archaeological evidences, hypothesized an early peopling and an African provenance through the Sicilian Channel. This hypothesis has been mostly rejected even if diverse palaeontological and especially archaeological findings of Modus 1 and 2 artifacts from Southern Sicily renewed the attention to this issue. However most Sicilian archaeological evidences are spotty and frequently dubitative, as they lack of stratigraphic context. Direct anthropological data are scarce and relative only to the Upper Palaeolithic and indicate a H. sapiens migration from Italian mainland. Nevertheless, palaeontological and palaeogeographic data do not exclude the possibility of a Middle Pleistocene human peopling at least. Our different research fields helped us to face the problem through diverse perspectives, on the main intent of a critical revision of all the available data from palaeontology, archaeology, palaeogeography and physical anthropology. We propose a critic discussion of the industrial evidences, the georeference of lithic and faunal retrieval sites during Early and Middle Pleistocene and a tentative palaeogeographic reconstruction of Middle Pleistocene coastal lines of Sicily on the base of the georeferred sites. Furthermore, using cranial morphometry in a wide comparative analysis between Upper Palaeolithic Sicilian, European and African samples, we indicate the probable population relationship in Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic transition periods. Our results do not exclude the possibility of several sporadic human peopling related to the Messina Strait accessibility since the Middle Pleistocene. A pulsating trend of dispersal and extinction characterized humans in Sicily at least until Mesolithic transition.

The uncontrolled re-entry of spacecraft and upper stages is quite common, occurring nearly every week. Among them, intact objects having a mass greater than five metric tons re-enter, on average, 1-2 times per year. Therefore, the re-entry of the first Chinese Space Station, Tiangong-1, was far from unusual, but attracted anyway a great worldwide attention and some concerns. For these reasons, the Italian component of the European SST (Space Surveillance and Tracking) consortium took this opportunity for carrying out a national exercise. According to Chinese official sources, the ground control of Tiangong-1 was lost in March 2016, precluding the planned de-orbiting in the South Pacific Ocean Unpopulated Area (SPOUA). Tiangong-1 consisted of a cylindrical section, 10:5m in length and 3:4m in (maximum) diameter, with two rectangular solar panels of 3m x 7m. The mass was estimated to be around 7500kg. The Italian network of sensors activated for the campaign included mono-static and bi-static radars, optical telescopes, a laser ranging station and a network of all-sky cameras, originally deployed for the observation of fireballs and bolides. In addition to providing complementary information, concerning the orbit, the attitude and the photometry of Tiangong-1, this quite heterogeneous collection of national assets provided also the occasion for testing, in an operational environment, the Italian sensor tasking preparedness and the data acquisition, exchange and processing capabilities within the European SST consortium. In this respect, it is important to remember that in 2014 the European Commission, well aware of the topic criticality, took the commitment to implement a European network of sensors for surveillance and tracking of objects in Earth's orbit by starting a dedicated SST support framework program. Italy, France, Germany, Spain and UK joined it and constituted, together with SatCent, the front desk for SST services, the EUSST Consortium. In this paper, a description of the Tiangong-1 monitoring activities and of the main observations results obtained by the Italian sensor network are reported. Attention is also devoted to the coordination aspects of several Italian entities (military, civil and research organizations) that worked together. Finally, a description of the re-entry prediction and alert procedure for the national civil protection authorities is presented.

Purpose: Neuroblastoma (NB) is the most common extra-cranial paediatric solid tumour. Incidence peaks in infancy, suggesting a role of in-utero and neonatal exposures but its aetiology is largely unknown. The aim of the present study is to evaluate the association between maternal characteristics and perinatal factors with the risk of NB, using data from the SETIL database. Methods: SETIL is a large Italian population-based case-control study established to evaluate several potential cancer risk factors in 0-10 year olds. Information about maternal characteristics, reproductive history, environmental and occupational exposures during pregnancy, as well as newborns' characteristics were obtained using a structured questionnaire. Extremely low frequency magnetic field (ELF-MF) home exposure was measured. The study included 1044 healthy controls and 153 NB cases, diagnosed between 1998 and 2001. Results: A twofold risk was associated to exposure in pregnancy to chemical products for domestic work and to hair dye. The risk associated with the latter was higher among 0-17 month old children (OR. =. 5.5, 95%CI: 1.0-29.3). Risk was increased for children whose mothers had suffered work related exposure in the preconception period to solvents (OR. =. 2.0 95%CI: 1.0-4.1) and in particular to aromatic hydrocarbons (OR. =. 9.2, 95%CI: 2.4-34.3). No association was observed with ELF-MF exposure. A higher risk was found among children with congenital malformations (OR. =. 4.9, 95%CI: 1.8-13.6) or neurofibromatosis (2 cases and 0 controls, p=. 0.016). Conclusions: Our study suggests maternal exposure to hair dyes and aromatic hydrocarbons plays a role and deserves further investigation. The association with congenital malformations might also be explained by over-diagnosis.External exposure, in particular during and before pregnancy might contribute to NB occurrence.