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Two species of freshwater Parastacidae (Cherax quadricarinatus and Cherax destructor) are used for breeding in several country and to date also in Italy in one aquaculture plant located near Catania (Sicily). Although they are Australian, they seem to have some of the peculiar properties that make it important, strategic and highly appreciated species for aquaculture facilities in Italy. In fact, they mature early, have multiple reproductive cycles in a year, females can lay over a thousand eggs in a single brood and seem to tolerate wide ranges of temperature (Haubrock et al., 2021). Several authors have studied the Cherax genus from different points of view: diseases, moulting phases and the immune responses under stress conditions (Mac Loughlin et al., 2016; Sacristán et al., 2016; Foysal et al., 2020). To date, even if it is known the economic value of these species, the nutritional properties for human were not yet evaluated. The economic expenses behind the maintenance of an aquaculture facilities must certainly be justified by: i) maintenance of species that can guarantee a competitive product on the market; ii) their good nutritional levels as well as for the organoleptic characteristics. Our study, conducted as part of a project “POFEAMP 02/INA/17’ (02/INA/17, PO-FEAMP 2014-2020”, represents for the first time a preliminary evaluation of some macronutrient parameters important to know the nutritional properties of these animals. For this reason, some parameters, as the level of total protein, cholesterol, triglyceride, glucose and lactate dehydrogenase in two Cherax species, Cherax quadricarinatus and Cherax destructor were evaluated in haemolymph and in muscle tissue. These results can be useful both for evaluating the good health of these animals kept in aquaculture facilities and for evaluating better their nutritional properties. In the future, these Cherax species could increase their consumption and allow their greater presence in dietary habits.

We analyze Feynman's work on the response of an amplifier performed at Los Alamos and described in a technical report of 1946, as well as lectured on at the Cornell University in 1946-47 during his course on Mathematical Methods. The motivation for such a work was Feynman's involvement in the Manhattan Project, for which the necessity emerged of feeding the output pulses of counters into amplifiers or several other circuits, with the risk of introducing distortion at each step. In order to deal with such a problem, Feynman designed a theoretical "reference amplifier", thus enabling a characterization of the distortion by means of a benchmark relationship between phase and amplification for each frequency, and providing a standard tool for comparing the operation of real devices. A general theory was elaborated, from which he was able to deduce the basic features of an amplifier just from its response to a pulse or to a sine wave of definite frequency. Moreover, in order to apply such a theory to practical problems, a couple of remarkable examples were worked out, both for high-frequency cutoff amplifiers and for low-frequency ones. A special consideration deserves a mysteriously exceptional amplifier with best stability behavior introduced by Feynman, for which different physical interpretations are here envisaged. Feynman's earlier work then later flowed in the Hughes lectures on Mathematical Methods in Physics and Engineering of 1970-71, where he also remarked on causality properties of an amplifier, that is on certain relations between frequency and phase shift that a real amplifier has to satisfy in order not to allow output signals to appear before input ones. Quite interestingly, dispersion relations to be satisfied by the response function were introduced., 19 pages, 6 figures

We formulate a didactic proposal for introducing some fundamental concepts of quantum physics to advanced high school students, and to their teachers. The inspiration comes from some of the fundamental papers about the subject by Albert Einstein, in which many of these concepts, for example light quanta, wave-particle duality, and probability, were introduced for the first time, in a characteristically illuminating way. The proposal can be supplemented by a discussion of elementary tools of statistical physics, which are needed at some point. Preliminary results, both with students and teachers, are very promising.

We discuss a previously unpublished description of electromagnetism outlined by Richard P. Feynman in the 1960s in five handwritten pages, recently uncovered among his papers, and partly developed in later lectures. Though similar to the existing approaches deriving electromagnetism from special relativity, the present one extends a long way towards the derivation of Maxwell's equations with minimal physical assumptions. In particular, without postulating Coulomb's law, homogeneous Maxwell's equations are written down by following a route different from the standard one, i.e. first introducing electromagnetic potentials in order to write down a relativistic invariant action, which is just the inverse approach to the usual one. Also, Feynman's derivation of the Lorentz force exclusively follows from its linearity in the charge velocity and from relativistic invariance. Going further, i.e. adding the inhomogeneous Maxwell's equations, requires some more physical input, and can be done by just following conventional lines, hence this task was not pursued here. Despite its incompleteness, this way of proceeding is of great historical and epistemological significance. We also comment about its possible relevance to didactics, as an interesting supplement to usual treatments., Comment: 17 pages, no figures

Water monitoring technologies are widely used for contaminant detection in a wide variety of water ecology applications such as water treatment plants and water distribution systems. A tremendous amount of research has been conducted over the past decades to develop robust and efficient techniques of contaminant detection with minimum operating cost and energy. Recent developments in spectroscopic techniques and biosensor approach have improved the detection sensitivities, quantitatively and qualitatively. The availability of in-situ measurements and multiple detection analyses has expanded water monitoring applications in various advanced techniques including successful development in hand-held sensing devices, which improves portability in real-time basis for the detection of contaminants, such as microorganisms, pesticides, heavy metal ions, and inorganic and organic components.

A cost-effective immunosensor for the detection and isolation of dental pulp stem cells (DPSCs) based on a quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) has been developed. The recognition mechanism relies on anti-CD34 antibodies, DPSC-specific monoclonal antibodies that are anchored on the surface of the quartz crystals. Due to its high specificity, real time detection, and low cost, the proposed technology has a promising potential in the field of cell biology, for the simultaneous detection and sorting of stem cells from heterogeneous cell samples. The QCM surface was properly tailored through a biotinylated self-assembled monolayer (SAM). The biotin–avidin interaction was used to immobilize the biotinylated anti-CD34 antibody on the gold-coated quartz crystal. After antibody immobilization, a cellular pellet, with a mixed cell population, was analyzed; the results indicated that the developed QCM immunosensor is highly specific, being able to detect and sort only CD34+ cells. Our study suggests that the proposed technology can detect and efficiently sort any kind of cell from samples with high complexity, being simple, selective, and providing for more convenient and time-saving operations.

J Thorac Cardiovasc Surg 2005;129:1440-1442 Contini, Carlo Di Lorenzo, Antonio Bivona and Gerardo Liberti Gabriele Di Giammarco, Michele Di Mauro, Marco Pano, Sergio Cirmeni, MarcoGiant metastatic myxoid liposarcoma of the mediastinum: A case report http://jtcs.ctsnetjournals.org/cgi/content/full/129/6/1440 located on the World Wide Web at: The online version of this article, along with updated information and services, is

Translation into English from Italian. Fra Mauro's mappamundi, drawn around 1450 in the monastery of San Michele on Murano in the lagoon of Venice, is among the most relevant compendia of knowledge of the Earth and the Cosmos of the fifteenth century. By examining literary, visual, textual and archival evidences, some long considered lost, this book places the map within the larger context of Venetian culture in the fifteenth century. It provides a detailed analysis of both its main sources (auctores veteres such as Pliny, Solinus, Ptolemy, and novi, like Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Marco Polo and Niccolo de' Conti) as well as of the composite networks of contemporary knowledge (scholasticism, humanism, monastic culture, as well as more technical skills such as marine cartography and mercantile practices), investigating the way they combine in the epistemological unity of the imago mundi. More a work on intellectual history than cartography, the book constructs a complex set of frameworks within which to situate Fra Mauro's monumental effort. These range from the cultural history of the reception of the world map from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries to the analysis of the material conditions under which map-makers such as Fra Mauro worked; from the history of ideas, especially of natural philosophy to the links between world representations and travel literature. It also addresses the Venetian reception of Ptolemy's Geography, the interactions between Venetian art, theology and cosmography and the complexities of the Venetian vernacular. The books develops a multi-tiered approach, in which different elements of the rich cultural context in which this world map was created, interact with each other, each casting a new light on the encyclopaedic work being analyzed. Foreword 5 Acknowledgements 15 Introduction 19 I: Encompassing the fifteenth-century world and re-creating the Imago Mundi 33 Chapter I: Fra Mauro's life and work: A critical survey of sources with emphasis on his Mappa Mundi and its reception to 1600 33 Chapter II: The cosmos of a mid-fifteenth century munk 75 Chapter III: Theology, cosmography, art: The earthly paradise in Fra Mauro's Mappa Mundi 131 Chapter IV: Readers and readings of Ptolemy's Geography in Venice in the mid-fifteenth century 159 Chapter V: Travel accounts and cartography: Fra Mauro, Marco Polo and Niccolò de' Conti 185 Chapter VI: The cultural matrices and narrative structure of Fra Mauro's Mappa Mundi 227 II: Patronage. Marketplaces. The history of cartography 279 Chapter I: At the origin of the map market in fifteenth-century Venice, Florence and Barcelona 279 Chapter II: The Confluence of politics and scholarship: The Mappa Mundi within the dawning of the history of cartography Epilogue Documentary appendices I: Chapters I-VI II: Chapters I-II Sources 397 Bibliography 406 Index codicum 435 Index nominum et operum 438 Published version of EUI PhD thesis, 2005

We study multi-soliton solutions of the four-dimensional SU(N) Skyrme model by combining the hedgehog ansatz for SU(N) based on the harmonic maps of $S^{2}$ into $CP^{N-1}$ and a geometrical trick which allows to analyze explicitly finite-volume effects without breaking the relevant symmetries of the ansatz. The geometric setup allows to introduce a parameter which is related to the 't Hooft coupling of a suitable large $N$ limit, in which $N\rightarrow\infty$ and the curvature of the background metric approaches zero, in such a way that their product is constant. The relevance of such a parameter to the physics of the system is pointed out. In particular, we discuss how the discrete symmetries of the configurations depend on it., 29 pages, 7 figures, minor changes, matches published version