Tularaemia is an infectious bacterial disease that is life-threatening for rodents, rabbits and hares, but which can also infect humans and dogs. While contact with contaminated blood or meat makes hunters a high-risk group, the frequency of infections among hunting dogs has not been much studied. Researchers from Vetmeduni Vienna have now confirmed a relevant prevalence of infections in Austrian hunting dogs following a serological study in which seven percent of the animals tested positive. This could lead to more intense debate as to whether the often asymptomatic animals represent an additional risk of infection for people. Tularaemia, also known as rabbit fever, is an infectious disease that is usually lethal for wild animals such as rabbits, hares and rodents. As a zoonotic disease, however, it also represents a serious health risk for people. Tularaemia is caused by various subtypes of the pathogenic bacteria Francisella tularensis, which can be transmitted by biting and stinging insects or directly through contaminated hay, infected blood and other fluids. The raw meat of diseased animals is also associated with a high risk of transmission of the pathogens, which can infect dogs as well as other animals.

Si chiama P.I.G.R.O. (Pneumatic Interactive Gait Rehabilitation Orthosis) ed è un esoscheletro leggero, senza stazione fissa, che consente a pazienti colpiti da ictus o lesioni cerebrali di camminare in modo autonomo.

Il progetto, sviluppato da Nimble Robotics, spin-off del Politecnico di Torino costituita nel 2017 per realizzare e commercializzare dispositivi medici innovativi, nasce 10 anni fa presso il Dipartimento di Ingegneria Meccanica e Aerospaziale del Politecnico di Torino, in collaborazione con il Dipartimento di Psicologia dell’Università di Torino e con il centro di riabilitazione Puzzle di Torino. La sfida consisteva nello sviluppo di un dispositivo con caratteristiche tecnologiche uniche e all’avanguardia rispetto ai prodotti in commercio per il trattamento riabilitativo di patologie neurologiche derivate da lesione o degenerazione del sistema nervoso centrale. È infatti scientificamente riconosciuto che, grazie alla plasticità cerebrale, il cervello è in grado di modificare se stesso per recuperare/compensare le funzioni perdute: le esperienze sensomotorie, unite alla focalizzazione dell’attenzione e all’immaginazione motoria, possono riorganizzare la struttura e le funzioni delle parti danneggiate del cervello dopo una lesione.

Food pyramids that indicate the relative proportions of foods included in the two diets studied.Credit: Volker Otten

Overweight women after menopause who eat a Paleolithic diet can maintain weight loss in the long term. The levels of risk factors of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases also decrease. This according to a study at Umeå University in Sweden. “The results are remarkable. Despite giving the women free reigns to an unlimited intake, the weight loss was stable after two years. A more significant fact than weight loss was the evident improvement in levels of fat in the blood, and signs of reduced inflammation,” says Caroline Blomquist, doctoral student at the Department of Public Health and Clinical Medicine at Umeå University.  In her doctoral dissertation, Caroline Blomquist has spent two years following a group of 70 postmenopausal women with a body mass index exceeding 27, that is, overweight women after menopause. Half of the women held a diet according to Nordic Nutrition Recommendations whilst the other half followed a Paleolithic diet. Neither groups had any specific restrictions in the amount they were allowed to consume, the restrictions solely revolved around the composition of the diet. The follow ups took place after six months and again after two years.

 Magnetismo attivato dalla luce nelle nanoparticelle di un materiale semiconduttore

La scoperta del team di ricerca internazionale guidato da Sergio Brovelli del dipartimento di Scienza dei materiali dell’Università Bicocca apre alla possibilità di realizzare materiali ad alte prestazioni per la realizzazione di computer ottici.

Usare la luce, al posto dei consueti metodi di scrittura elettrici e magnetici, permetterà di potenziare i computer ottici e le memorie di dati. L’inserimento di pochi atomi di argento – elemento di per sé non magnetico – induce un forte comportamento magnetico nelle nanoparticelle di un materiale semiconduttore quando queste vengono illuminate. Il magnetismo attivato dalla luce, persistente nel tempo e rilevabile otticamente, può diventare l’elemento di base dei dispositivi di immagazzinamento dei dati di nuova generazione. Lo rivela lo studio “Excitonic pathway to photoinduced magnetism in colloidal nanocrystals with nonmagnetic dopants” (DOI:10.1038/s41565-017-0024-8), pubblicato sulla rivista Nature Nanotechnology. La ricerca è stata realizzata dal team guidato da Sergio Brovelli docente di Fisica sperimentale presso il dipartimento di Scienza dei Materiali dell’Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, in collaborazione con il gruppo del professor Jiatao Zhang dell’Istituto di Tecnologia di Pechino in Cina, la professoressa Margherita Zavelani Rossi del Politecnico di Milano e il dottor Scott A. Crooker del laboratorio nazionale di Campi magnetici elevati (HMFNL) di Los Alamos (USA).

 Soluzioni fotoniche innovative sia tecnologiche che architetturali per lo sviluppo della futura rete di comunicazione di tipo metropolitano, a basso costo e ridotto consumo energetico, capaci diassicurare un rate di trasmissione di oltre 100 Tb/s per collegamento e una capacità di commutazione di oltre 1 Pb/s per nodo. Sono l’ambizioso obiettivo del progetto PASSION (Photonic technologies for progrAmmable transmission and switching modular systems based on
Scalable Spectrum/space aggregation for future agIle high capacity metrO Networks) avviato dal Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria del Politecnico di Milano, con il supporto di Fondazione Politecnico di Milano, insieme ad altri 12 partner (CTTC, Telefonica e VLC Photonics – Spagna, TUE e Effect Photonics – Olanda, Vertilas – Germania, VTT – Finlandia, Opsys Technologies – Israele, SM Optics – Italia, EPIC – Francia, NICT – Giappone, ETRI – Corea del Sud). Un progetto triennale finanziato dal programma Horizon 2020 della Commissione Europea sotto l’egida della Photonic Private Partnership (PPP) Photonics21, con un budget complessivo di 8,5 milioni di euro. Negli scorsi 10 anni si è assistito ad un continuo sviluppo della rete in fibra ottica per applicazioni nell’ambito metropolitano. Oggi, tuttavia, sperimentiamo “un collo di bottiglia” nella trasmissione e nell’indirizzamento dell’enorme quantità di dati dovuta al drastico aumento degli utenti, alla dimensione dei contenuti e alla convergenza con altre reti come quella mobile e datacom.

Uno studio coordinato dall’Irgb-Cnr ha dimostrato l’efficacia sperimentale di un nuovo approccio terapeutico per il trattamento di disturbi cardiovascolari, che mima il comportamento delle particelle inquinanti quando attaccano il sistema cardiocircolatorio. La ricerca, condotta nell’ambito del progetto europeo ‘Cupido’, è pubblicata su Science Translational Medicine

Ricercatori dell’Istituto di ricerca genetica e biomedica (Irgb) del Consiglio nazionale delle ricerche di Milano in collaborazione con i colleghi dell’Istituto di scienza e tecnologia dei materiali ceramici (Istec) del Cnr di Faenza hanno messo a punto un approccio terapeutico innovativo e non invasivo per il trattamento dei disturbi cardiovascolari, ad oggi la prima causa di morte nel mondo. Il metodo, descritto su Science Translational Medicine, è basato sull’inalazione di nanoparticelle ‘caricate’ con farmaci capaci di arrivare rapidamente al cuore. La ricerca è stata condotta nell’ambito di ‘Cupido’, progetto europeo di cui il Cnr è coordinatore, che ha lo scopo di individuare nuove soluzioni terapeutiche basate sulle nanotecnologie in ambito cardiovascolare.

New research, published today in Nature Scientific Reports, not only implies a link between catastrophic volcanic eruptions and landslides, but also suggests that landslides are the trigger.  At the heart of Tenerife and standing almost 4 km high, Teide is one of the largest volcanoes on Earth. Over a period of several hundred thousand years, the previous incarnations of Teide have undergone a repeated cycle of very large eruptions, collapse, and regrowth. Previous research by scientists at the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) revealed that past eruptions may have been linked to huge multi-stage submarine landslides, based on similar ages and composition of landslide and volcanic deposits.
By studying these landslide deposits further, NOC scientists noticed that material from explosive volcanic eruptions was only found in the uppermost layers of each landslide deposit. This demonstrates that the initial stages of each landslide occurred underwater and before each eruption, whilst in each case the later stages of terrestrial landsliding occurred after the eruption. These results suggest that the initial stages of the landslides may have triggered each of the eruptions. 

The human brain uses the signals that come from the senses to adjust its behavior: for example, we hurry to turn off the stove if we feel the smell of burned from the roast that we are baking. In people suffering from neurological or psychiatric illnesses such as stroke, multiple sclerosis, schizophrenia, these mechanisms are compromised and the processing of incoming sensory signals is altered due to communication distortions in neuronal networks. A way to restore normal functioning was studied by researchers from the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the National Research Council (Istc-Cnr), which have developed a new non-invasive and personalized electrical stimulation technique, called transcranial Individual neuroDynamics Stimulation (tIDS), which can modify the excitability of the target region, with greater efficacy than today's methods. The study, made with the contribution of the Medical Statistics Service of the Fatebenefratelli-Isle Tiberina Foundation, was published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Around 400 million people world-wide suffer in some form or other from a grass pollen allergy (rhinitis) – with the usual symptoms such as a runny nose, cough and severe breathing problems. In collaboration with the Viennese firm Biomay AG, MedUni Vienna researchers at the Institute of Pathophysiology and Allergy Research have now shown in a Phase II-b study with 180 patients in 11 European centres, that four injections of the synthetically manufactured vaccine BM32 in the first year and a top-up in the second year of treatment relieve the sufferers' symptoms by at least 25%. Immunotherapy with BM32 is based on an innovative recombinant peptide-carrier technology, which requires far fewer injections and has fewer side-effects than other immunotherapies for allergy sufferers. This technology was developed at the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Allergy Research at MedUni Vienna, under the direction of Rudolf Valenta, in collaboration with Viennese partner company Biomay AG (CEO: Rainer Henning). This company specialises in discovering and developing innovative allergy therapeutics.

Extraction of a wood sample for the analysis of Black pine annual growth ring in the national park of Aigüestortes and Estany de Sant Maurici (image: Emilia Gutiérrez /J.Julio Camarero)

A new study shows the chemical register of climate change and global episodes such as volcanic eruptions in high-mountain centennial forests in the Iberian Peninsula (Spain).

In September 1730, a large eruption in the Timanfaya volcano (Canary Islands, Spain) completely changed the morphology of Lanzarote. Atmospheric changes that caused volcanic eruptions centuries ago, such as the one in Timanfaya or the Tambora volcano (Indonesia) –which hid the sunlight for months-, had an impact on high-mountain centennial forests in the Iberian Peninsula, as stated in an article published in the journal Science of the Total Environment in which the lecturer Emilia Gutiérrez, from the Faculty of Biology of the University of Barcelona, has taken part. The chemical traces from the released gases into the atmosphere by these volcanic eruptions can be now identified in the oldest coniferous Pyrenean forests, according to the study. In particular, eruptions such the Timanfaya’s in Lanzarote ─one of the strongest in the country due its duration until 1736 and the amount of thrown material─ and Tambora’s ─one of the biggest volcanic episodes, which led to a “year without summer” in 1816─ released big amounts of iron that altered the chemical composition of the annual Pyrenean tree rings. According to this article, the study of the records of tree growth rings (dendrochronology) could help to see the frequency and intensity of the volcanic phenomena in modern times.