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Trained immunity is characterized by histone modifications and metabolic changes in innate immune cells following exposure to inflammatory signals, leading to heightened responsiveness to secondary stimuli. Although our understanding of the molecular regulation of trained immunity has increased, the role of adaptive immune cells herein remains largely unknown. Here, we show that T cells modulate trained immunity via cluster of differentiation 40-tissue necrosis factor receptor-associated factor 6 (CD40-TRAF6) signaling. CD40-TRAF6 inhibition modulates functional, transcriptomic, and metabolic reprogramming and modifies histone 3 lysine 4 trimethylation associated with trained immunity. Besides in vitro studies, we reveal that single-nucleotide polymorphisms in the proximity of CD40 are linked to trained immunity responses in vivo and that combining CD40-TRAF6 inhibition with cytotoxic T lymphocyte antigen 4-immunoglobulin (CTLA4-Ig)-mediated co-stimulatory blockade induces long-term graft acceptance in a murine heart transplantation model. Combined, our results reveal that trained immunity is modulated by CD40-TRAF6 signaling between myeloid and adaptive immune cells and that this can be leveraged for therapeutic purposes., Competing Interests: Declaration of interests J.O., L.A.B.J., M.G.N., and W.J.M.M. declare that they are scientific founders of Trained Therapeutics Discovery., (Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Resumen Este estudio tiene como objetivo determinar las actitudes, creencias y aspectos culturales que motivan a los familiares de las personas fallecidas a donar sus órganos, a través de los cuales el marketing social puede desarrollar acciones que promuevan cambios de comportamiento. Se realizó un estudio de investigación descriptivo exploratorio a través del método de recopilación de información cualitativa con entrevistas en profundidad utilizando un cuestionario semiestructurado, procesado por el software NVivo 11. Descubrimos que las razones por las cuales los miembros de la familia donaron órganos fueron principalmente manifestaciones durante la vida del donante, el deseo de las familias de poder ayudar a otras personas (altruismo) y creencias religiosas.

Fog computing, an extension of the Cloud Computing paradigm where routers themselves may provide the virtualisation infrastructure, aims at achieving fluidity when distributing in-network functions, in addition to allowing fast and scalable processing, and exchange of information. In this paper we present a fog computing architecture based on a "content island" which interconnects sets of "things" to exchange and process data among themselves or with other content islands. We then present a use case that focuses on a smartphone-based forward collision warning application for a connected vehicle scenario. This application makes use of the optical sensor of smartphones to estimate the distance between the device itself and other vehicles in its field of view. The vehicle travelling directly ahead is identified relying on the information from the GPS, camera, and inter-island communication. Warnings are generated at both content islands, if the driver does not maintain a predefined safe distance towards the vehicle ahead. Experiments performed with the application show that with the developed method, we are able to estimate the distance between vehicles, and the inter-island communication has a very low overhead, resulting in improved performance. On comparing our proposed solution based on edge/fog computing with a cloud-based api, it was observed that our solution outperformed the cloud-based api, thus making us optimistic of the utility of the proposed architecture.

As the number of potential applications for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) keeps rising steadily, the chances that these devices get close to each other during their flights also increases, causing concerns regarding potential collisions. This paper proposed the Mission Based Collision Avoidance Protocol (MBCAP), a novel UAV collision avoidance protocol applicable to all types of multicopters flying autonomously. It relies on wireless communications in order to detect nearby UAVs, and to negotiate the procedure to avoid any potential collision. Experimental and simulation results demonstrated the validity and effectiveness of the proposed solution, which typically introduces a small overhead in the range of 15 to 42 s for each risky situation successfully handled.

In this paper, we present a forward collision warning application for smartphones that uses license plate recognition and vehicular communication to generate warnings for notifying the drivers of the vehicle behind and the one ahead, of a probable collision when the vehicle behind does not maintain an established safe distance between itself and the vehicle ahead. The application was tested in both static and mobile scenarios, from which we confirmed the working of our application, even though its performance is affected by the hardware limitations of the smartphones.

Noise pollution is an emerging and challenging problem of all large metropolitan areas, affecting the health of citizens in multiple ways. Therefore, obtaining a detailed and real-time map of noise in cities becomes of the utmost importance for authorities to take preventive measures. Until now, these measurements were limited to occasional sampling made by specialized companies, that mainly focus on major roads. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach to this problem based on crowdsensing. Our proposed architecture empowers participating citizens by allowing them to seamlessly, and based on their context, sample the noise in their surrounding environment. This allows us to provide a global and detailed view of noise levels around the city, including places traditionally not monitored due to poor accessibility, even while using their vehicles. In the paper, we detail how the different relevant issues in our architecture, i.e., smartphone calibration, measurement adequacy, server design, and client⁻server interaction, were solved, and we have validated them in real scenarios to illustrate the potential of the solution achieved.

In a previous study, the detailed low-molecular weight polyphenolic profile of the different plant parts (leaves, stem, bark and wood) of Uncaria tomentosa was reported, the leaves being the plant part with the highest phenolic content and presenting the most heterogenous proanthocyanidin composition. Further, cytotoxicity of leaves extracts in two cancer cell lines was also found to be higher than in the remaining parts of the plant. In the present study, fractioning of U. tomentosa leaves polyphenolic extracts was performed using Diaion ® HP-20 resin and a detailed characterization and quantification of fractions ( n = 5) was achieved using advanced analytical techniques such as Ultra-Performance Liquid Chromatography coupled with Electrospray Ionization and Triple Quadrupole (TQD) Tandem Mass Spectrometry (UPLC/TQ-ESI-MS) and 13 C-NMR. Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity (ORAC) and cytotoxicity on gastric adenocarcinoma AGS and colon adenocarcinoma SW20 cell lines were also determined in the different fractions. Results showed selective distribution of 32 non-flavonoid and flavonoid phenolics among the different fractions. ORAC varied between 3.2 and 11.8 μmol TE/mg in the different fractions, whereas IC 50 of cytotoxicity on gastric adenocarcinoma AGS and colon adenocarcinoma SW20 cell lines best values were between 71.4 and 75.6 µg/mL. Fractions rich in proanthocyanidins also showed the highest bioactivity. In fact, significant positive correlation was found between total proanthocyanidins (TP) quantified by UPLC-DAD and ORAC ( R ² = 0.970), whereas significant negative correlation was found between TP and cytotoxicity towards AGS ( R ² = 0.820) and SW620 ( R ² = 0.843) adenocarcinoma cell lines. Among proanthocyanidins, propelargonidin dimers were of particular interest, showing significant correlation with cytotoxic selectivity on both gastric AGS ( R ² = 0.848) and colon SW620 ( R ² = 0.883) adenocarcinoma cell lines. These results show further evidence of the bioactivity of U. tomentosa proanthocyanidin extracts and their potential health effects., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Nowadays, smartphones have become ubiquitous and one of the main communication resources for human beings. Their widespread adoption was due to the huge technological progress and to the development of multiple useful applications. Their characteristics have also experienced a substantial improvement as they now integrate multiple sensors able to convert the smartphone into a flexible and multi-purpose sensing unit. The combined use of multiple smartphones endowed with several types of sensors gives the possibility to monitor a certain area with fine spatial and temporal granularity, a procedure typically known as crowdsensing. In this paper, we propose using smartphones as environmental noise-sensing units. For this purpose, we focus our study on the sound capture and processing procedure, analyzing the impact of different noise calculation algorithms, as well as in determining their accuracy when compared to a professional noise measurement unit. We analyze different candidate algorithms using different types of smartphones, and we study the most adequate time period and sampling strategy to optimize the data-gathering process. In addition, we perform an experimental study comparing our approach with the results obtained using a professional device. Experimental results show that, if the smartphone application is well tuned, it is possible to measure noise levels with a accuracy degree comparable to professional devices for the entire dynamic range typically supported by microphones embedded in smartphones, i.e., 35-95 dB.