Oxidative Stress and Low-Grade Inflammation in Polycystic Ovary Syndrome: Controversies and New Insights

The pathophysiology of Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) is quite complex and different mechanisms could contribute to hyperandrogenism and anovulation, which are the main features of the syndrome. Obesity and insulin-resistance are claimed as the principal factors contributing to the clinical presentation; in normal weight PCOS either, increased visceral adipose tissue has been described. However, their role is still debated, as debated are the biochemical markers linked to obesity per se. Oxidative stress (OS) and low-grade inflammation (LGI) have recently been a matter of researcher attention; they can influence each other in a reciprocal vicious cycle. In this review, we summarize the main mechanism of radical generation and the link with LGI. Furthermore, we discuss papers in favor or against the role of obesity as the first pathogenetic factor, and show how OS itself, on the contrary, can induce obesity and insulin resistance; in particular, the role of GH-IGF-1 axis is highlighted. Finally, the possible consequences on vitamin D synthesis and activation on the immune system are briefly discussed. This review intends to underline the key role of oxidative stress and low-grade inflammation in the physiopathology of PCOS, they can cause or worsen obesity, insulin-resistance, vitamin D deficiency, and immune dyscrasia, suggesting an inverse interaction to what is usually considered.     

On regular drawn symbolic picture languages

Drawn symbolic pictures are an extension of drawn pictures obtained by associating a symbol from an alphabet to each point of the picture. In the paper we will address some new interesting issues derived from the introduction of the symbols and we will identify the conditions, which ensure the preservation of properties holding for drawn pictures in the setting of the proposed extension.     

Proinflammatory Interleukin-33 Induces Dichotomic Effects on Cell Proliferation in Normal Gastric Epithelium and Gastric Cancer

Interleukin (IL)-33 is a member of the interleukin (IL)-1 family of cytokines linked to the development of inflammatory conditions and cancer in the gastrointestinal tract. This study is designed to investigate whether IL-33 has a direct effect on human gastric epithelial cells (GES-1), the human gastric adenocarcinoma cell line (AGS), and the gastric carcinoma cell line (NCI-N87) by assessing its role in the regulation of cell proliferation, migration, cell cycle, and apoptosis. Cell cycle regulation was also determined in ex vivo gastric cancer samples obtained during endoscopy and surgical procedures. Cell lines and tissue samples underwent stimulation with rhIL-33. Proliferation was assessed by XTT and CFSE assays, migration by wound healing assay, and apoptosis by caspase 3/7 activity assay and annexin V assay. Cell cycle was analyzed by means of propidium iodine assay, and gene expression regulation was assessed by RT-PCR profiling. We found that IL-33 has an antiproliferative and proapoptotic effect on cancer cell lines, and it can stimulate proliferation and reduce apoptosis in normal epithelial cell lines. These effects were also confirmed by the analysis of cell cycle gene expression, which showed a reduced expression of pro-proliferative genes in cancer cells, particularly in genes involved in G0/G1 and G2/M checkpoints. These results were confirmed by gene expression analysis on bioptic and surgical specimens. The aforementioned results indicate that IL-33 may be involved in cell proliferation in an environment- and cell-type-dependent manner.     

Note: Simultaneous electrical and optical detection of expanding dense partially ionized vapour clouds

The scheme and construction of an electro-optical probe able to collect charge and detect optical emission from expanding dense partially ionized vapour clouds are reported. The instrument can be applied to phenomena such as dust impact ionization and solid target laser ablation. First, results of measurements of expanding plasma cloud formed upon ablating W target are presented. Use of the instrument in different experimental facilities, including tokamak, is discussed.     

Achieving accurate and context‐sensitive timing for code optimization

Key computational kernels must run near their peak efficiency for most high‐performance computing (HPC) applications. Getting this level of efficiency has always required extensive tuning of the kernel on a particular platform of interest. The success or failure of an optimization is usually measured by invoking a timer. Understanding how to build reliable and context‐sensitive timers is one of the most neglected areas in HPC, and this results in a host of HPC software that looks good when reported in the papers, but delivers only a fraction of the reported performance when used by actual HPC applications. In this paper, we motivate the importance of timer design and then discuss the techniques and methodologies we have developed in order to accurately time HPC kernel routines for our well‐known empirical tuning framework, ATLAS. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Minimization of a Detail-Preserving Regularization Functional for Impulse Noise Removal

Recently, a powerful two-phase method for restoring images corrupted with high level impulse noise has been developed. The main drawback of the method is the computational efficiency of the second phase which requires the minimization of a non-smooth objective functional. However, it was pointed out in (Chan et al. in Proc. ICIP 2005, pp. 125–128) that the non-smooth data-fitting term in the functional can be deleted since the restoration in the second phase is applied to noisy pixels only. In this paper, we study the analytic properties of the resulting new functional ℱ. We show that ℱ, which is defined in terms of edge-preserving potential functions φ _α , inherits many nice properties from φ _α , including the first and second order Lipschitz continuity, strong convexity, and positive definiteness of its Hessian. Moreover, we use these results to establish the convergence of optimization methods applied to ℱ. In particular, we prove the global convergence of some conjugate gradient-type methods and of a recently proposed low complexity quasi-Newton algorithm. Numerical experiments are given to illustrate the convergence and efficiency of the two methods.

Real-Time Path Generation and Obstacle Avoidance for Multirotors: A Novel Approach

Multirotors, among all aerial vehicles, are fundamental instruments in many situations, i.e. video recording of sport events, leisure, environmental monitoring before or after a disaster. In particular, in the context of environmental monitoring, the possibility of following a predetermined path while avoiding obstacles is extremely relevant. In this work, we propose a novel method for path definition in presence of obstacles, which describes a curve as the intersection of two surfaces. The planner, based on that path definition along with a Cascaded control architecture and utilizing a nonlinear control technique for both control loops (position and attitude), creates a framework to manipulate the multicopters’ behaviors. The method is demonstrated to be able to generate a safe path taking into account obstacles perceived in real-time and avoids collisions. These algorithms are embedded in a software package to control the flight of a fully autonomous AscTec Firefly hexacopter with two cameras and onboard processing capabilities.     

Reforming of olive mill wastewater through a Pd-membrane reactor

This work investigates the exploitation of olive mill wastewater (OMW) for producing hydrogen in a membrane reformer.