In this paper, the assessment of the radon exhalation rate of the Modica stone building material, untreated and accelerated aged through salt crystallization test, is reported as a case study. Noteworthy, this construction material was largely employed for the construction of historical monuments of interest in the field of cultural heritage, especially in the historic city center of the Modica town, Sicily, Southern Italy, included in the UNESCO World Heritage list known as “Late Baroque Towns of the Val di Noto”. In detail, the Closed Chamber Method (CCM) with the Durridge Rad7 equipment for short-lived radon progeny alpha spectroscopy was employed to evaluate the radon exhalation rate of the investigated natural stone, and the Markkanen room model was used to calculate the potential indoor radon concentration based on the assessed rate value. Notably, the findings of this study can be employed to direct future research concerning the development of a systematic strategy for the radon content assessment in building materials, that turns out to be crucial for decision-makers, since it could be possible to identify vulnerable buildings requiring the use of well-defined protection measures.
The ongoing biodiversity disappearance on islands worldwide is alarming. Without an accurate biodiversity assessment, it is impossible to stop the loss of the world's islands irreplaceable natural heritage. To assess biodiversity in terrestrial habitats, beetle monitoring is pivotal. Volcanic islands in Archipelagos can be considered oceanic islands at different ontogenetic phases, which are very useful for studying the dynamics of colonization and extinction in different beetle species. This research updates the current knowledge of the beetle species living on Vulcano Island (Aeolian Archipelago). The results of the study summarizes bibliographic data in conjunction with the specimens recently collected. The specimens collected during the research belong to 267 species, 119 of which are new records on Vulcano Island. Together with the unpublished data from private collections, a total of 138 species are reported for the first time on Vulcano Island. Among these, 76 species and 14 genera are new records in the Aeolian Archipelago, with six families of beetles never previously reported on Vulcano. These include Ciidae (also a new record from the Archipelago), Ptiliidae, Scraptiidae, Leiodidae, Eucinetidae, and Dytiscidae. The Lyctinae (Bostrichidae) are recorded for the first time in the Aeolian Archipelago. Uloma culinaris (Linnaeus, 1758) is the first Tenebrionidae of the tribe Ulomini recorded in the Aeolian Archipelago. Members of the Dermestidae of the Thorictinae and Attageninae subfamilies, were recorded for the first time on Vulcano Island. The number of beetle species known on Vulcano Island thus rises to 551, matching that of Lipari, which has the highest number of species for a single island in the Archipelago. The total number of beetle species in the Aeolian Archipelago is currently 940. Five endemic and subendemic species are new records for Vulcano: the Italian endemic Pseudomeira obscura (A. Solari and F. Solari, 1907), the Italian subendemic Enoplium doderoi Luigioni, 1926, the Sicilian endemics Dichillus subtilis Kraatz, 1862 and Pachybrachis siculus Weise, 1891, the northeastern Sicilian endemic Caulostrophus zancleanus Pesarini et Baviera, 2006. The Latridiidae species Dienerella elegans (Aub & eacute;, 1850) and the Bostrichidae Lyctus brunneus (Stephens, 1830) were reported for the first time from Sicily. The Neotropical Nitidulidae Phenolia picta (MacLeay, 1825) is recorded for the second time from Italy and is the first Nitidulinae recorded on Vulcano. One of the commonly collected species, rapidly spreading in the Mediterranean, is the imported Ozognathus cornutus (LeConte, 1859), confirmed on Vulcano Island. This extremely polyphagous species was reared, for the first time, from carpophores collected from various species of trees. Three Sicilian endemic species need to be excluded from the fauna of Vulcano: Otiorhynchus (Arammichnus) ocellifer Reitter, 1912, Anoxia (A.) scutellaris sicula Motschulsky, 1860, and Protaetia (Potosia) hypocrita (Ragusa, 1905).
Recently, some evaluations of the workers' and students' abilities brought back to consider the negative (or reverse) Flynn effect. The reverse Flynn effect is an empirically confirmed decrease in the Intelligence Quotient since the 1990s. It has been proven to be related to environmental conditions only. Here, we consider this effect as an environmental consequence of the social and education conditions, considering it a possible resource, meaning the opportunity to reconsider the education pathway and the workers' training. To do so, in this paper, we develop a thermodynamic analysis of the information fluxes that enter the brain and the related stabilisation of the inflow of information itself. Moreover, we develop a thermo-economic analysis of the consequences of the reverse Flynn effect, pointing out the need to focus educational policies on the continuous stimulus of the use of reasoning and problem-solving-based education, to develop the processing capacity and foster the creative capabilities of young people, who build the backbone of the future workforce.
In this study, we explore Deisboeck and Z. Wang's conjecture from 2007, which establishes a quantitative relationship between the spatial expansion of tumours and the volume constraints as well as functional variations of the surrounding host tissue. By integrating the physical properties of cells into this mechanistic framework, we provide a robust thermodynamic interpretation based on cellular internal energy. Our findings decisively characterise the conditions that facilitate coexistence between tumours and host organs at first, while also identifying the factors that eventually drive the competitive transformation of tumour cells through spatial dissemination-specifically, local invasion into healthy tissue followed by distant metastasis. We underscore the critical necessity of vascularisation from an energetic perspective and highlight the existence of an 'entropy threshold' for cancer invasion, which mirrors a phase transition in physics, as revealed through the application of the second law of thermodynamics.
. Two fragments of the terracotta revetment plaques of the Western Greek sanctuary of Maras & agrave; (Locri) stored up in the National Archaeological Museum of Reggio Calabria (Italy) were studied. One of them has chromatic and granulometric anomalies if compared with similar artefacts while the other has a strong chromatic variability. Polarized light microscopy and X ray powders diffractometry were used for petrographic and crystallographic characterization. The ceramic body of find MRC 7013 contains an unusually high quantity of rocky grains and the groundmass shows the green colours of clay minerals (glauconite, celadonite or berthierine) that is stable only at low temperatures. In fragment MRC 7043 three main areas differentiated by colour were identified. The study confirmed crystallographic differences between the samples due to great temperature's differences during the firing process.
In order to investigate the possible extension of a cave of great archaeological interest, integrated geophysical measurements have been undertaken. Electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) and ground-penetrating radar (GPR) have been used. The cave, called “Grotta delle Veneri” (Cave of the Venus), is located in the archaeological site of Parabita (Apulia, southern Italy). It is one of the most important archaeological constructions of the Salento peninsula since its discovery confirmed the presence of the Neanderthal man in the Mediterranean Basin. The results are surprising and show different areas with the presence of cavities in the vicinity of the same cave.
During of the archaeological excavation campaign of June 2018,in the course of the construction works of the Naples - Bari High-Speed Rail Line (route to the Napoli- Cancello section) in Acerra (NA) a silo and a combustion pit were found inside an abandoned village of the Eneolithic age with abundant carpological remains. In the same area, but dating back to the Middle Bronze Age II, some fragments were found of osteological burnt animal bones, coming from the sieving of the filling of a pit of the Bronze Age; among them a unicum, consisting of a fragment of burned costal plaque, belonging to a Testudo hermanni, to which charred remains were stuck, composed of some caryopses of medium spelled (Triticum dicoccum), fragmentary caryopses of barley (Hordeum vulgare) and lumps of agglutinated organic substance. This discovery made it possible to reconstruct the fragment of a pot with residues of a cereal-based soup. Furthermore, dating to the Early Bronze Age II, two fragments of whole-meal bread rich in bran and cereal seeds were also found.
In this paper the rheological and heat equations are derived in an anisotropic viscoanelastic media using the method of internal variables in the absence of external forces. Compared with an isotropic viscoanelastic media, where both the deformation and heat propagation are equal in all directions, this is only possible along certain privileged directions in the anisotropic viscoanelastic case. We have derived the tensor equations describing real behaviour according to privileged directions or main axes which depend on phenomenological and state coefficients. The results are of potential interest in material sciences, in material engineering, and in the analysis of biological tissues.
The natural radioactivity content of the Ignimbrite campana stone, as well as its radon exhalation and mineralogical composition, were assessed and reported as a case study in the present paper. In particular, the High Purity Germanium (HPGe) gamma spectrometry and the Closed Chamber Method (CCM) with the Durridge Rad7 setup were employed to quantify the specific activities of 226Ra, 232Th and 40K, and the radon exhalation rate, respectively. In addition, several indexes were calculated to evaluate the radiological health risk related to radiation exposure from the analyzed natural stone, i.e. the absorbed gamma dose rate (D), the annual effective dose equivalent (AEDE), the activity concentration index (I), and the alpha index (I_alpha). Finally, X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) and Micro-Raman Scattering (MRS) investigations were performed to correlate the chemical composition and mineralogical characteristics of the investigated natural stone with its natural radioactivity content and radon exhalation rate.
In 2011 Perlmutter, Schmidt, and Reiss discovered that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. This finding is contrary to the expectation that gravity should slow this expansion. This discovery raises fundamental questions about dark energy, which constitutes about three-fourths of the Universe's mass-energy and is responsible for driving this acceleration. In this paper, we propose a thermodynamic perspective based on a possible cosmological Joule-Thomson effect, supported by the significant entropy content of the Universe, primarily from black-body radiation. The evolution of entropy in an open system involves exchanges with the environment and is characterised by two components: entropy flow and internal entropy production. Understanding irreversible processes is essential to grasping these dynamics, as they link order and disorder. This approach shifts our understanding of thermodynamics, revealing that the creation of order is associated with non-equilibrium conditions, while disorder often corresponds to stable equilibrium. This perspective calls for a revaluation of how systems in Nature are analysed, emphasising the intricate relationship between order, disorder and the definition of time.
In this review, we discuss the interrelation of advanced interdisciplinary concepts such as time, motion, and change in the context of modern physics and their connection to the idea of action. We mainly address such aspects that permit us to expose the specificity of these concepts. Specifically, we examine the modern paradigm about time and action and its relation to the notions of space, energy, and entropy in the context of classical, quantum, and relativistic physics. We have touched briefly on the logical character of dimensional analysis in the appropriate contexts. The review also includes synthesising past and present research and a methodology survey. Finally, we we briefly discuss some consequences to the science of complexity that these circumstances may cause for building explanatory and predictive theories.
This paper reports an investigation aimed at evaluating the radioactivity and metals content of beach sands from the Sicily region, Southern Italy. The specific activity of natural (226Ra, 232Th and 40K) and anthropogenic (137Cs) radionuclides was assessed through High Purity Germanium (HPGe) gamma-ray spectrometry. Radiological hazard indices, i.e., absorbed gamma dose rate (D), annual effective dose equivalent outdoor (AEDEout) and excess lifetime cancer risk (ELCR), were thus calculated in order to estimate any possible radiological risk for the population that uses to spend summer holidays on this renowned tourist destination. Furthermore, Inductively-Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS) measurements were conducted for the quantitative elemental analysis of the investigated sands, in order to determine any possible chemical pollution by metals. To this aim, different indices such as geo-accumulation index (Igeo), contamination factor (CF) and pollution load index (PLI) were calculated with the aim to assess the level of toxicity imposed on the ecosystem by the detected metals. It is noteworthy that the used approach could be applied, in principle, not only for the assessment of the radiological and chemical risk due to the occurrence of potentially harmful elements in a wide range of samples of special environmental interest, but also as guideline for investigations focused on the monitoring of the environmental quality.
In this short note, we survey several results concerning the structure of certain graphs, introduced by the fourth-named author, that can be associated to groups and gyro-groups, which are algebraic structures satisfying a twisted form of associativity. Furthermore, we include an original result, showing that the so-called G-gyro-graph associated to a gyro-group G endowed with a subset S subset of G is connected if and only if S is a left generating set of G. Moreover some properties and examples of both G-graphs and G-gyro-graphs are presented.
A 14-moments model for a dense granular gas is developed in the context of Grad's theory. The gas consists of spheres subjected to inelastic collisions. This condition implies that the energy is not conserved, but a part of it is transformed into heat and this determines a dissipation of temperature. Furthermore, dense gases are characterized by two phenomena in inelastic collisions: the transfer and the transport of particle properties. The balance laws for mass, momentum, energy, stress tensor, heat flux and the fourth scalar moment are derived. The fluxes and the source terms are computed for each balance equation following the procedures elaborated by J. T. Jenkins and M. W. Richman [Arch. Rational Mech. Anal. 87, 355 - 377 (1985)]. The results are compared with the dilute elastic and inelastic gases. This new set of field equations can be useful in different applications.
This paper compiles an updated checklist of Sicilian (including the circum-Sicilian islets) species of Coccinellidae based on historical bibliographical data along with new Sicilian material collected by the author and other entomologists in the last few decades. A total of 90 species are reported, including new data for many species often rare in Sicily. Nephus (Bipunctatus) bicinctus (Mulsant & Godart 1872); Scymnus (Pullus) impexus Mulsant, 1850, Scymnus (Scymnus) femoralis (Gyllenhal, 1827), Hyperaspis algirica Crotch, 1874, Sospita vigintiduopunctata Linnaeus, 1758, were recorded for the first time from Sicily.
Since ancient times, knowledge of weather conditions has been essential for human survival and for planning activities. In this context, atmospheric forecast models play a key role in weather studies, contributing significantly to understand and predict short-and long-term weather changes. In the field of atmospheric modelling, weather forecast models can be classified into Global Models (GMs) and Limited Area Models (LAMs) in relation to their both domain coverage and spatial resolution. Especially in the last few years, the application of LAMs with high spatial resolution has become more and more important, as they can perform high-efficiency predictions for the increasingly frequent severe weather phenomena. In particular, the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model operates in the field of Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP); it was developed as a result of a collaboration between National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) and Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL). Furthermore, the WRF-Chem model, which can be considered as the chemical extension of the WRF model, is widely employed for modelling atmospheric pollutants. In this framework, the present contribution is focused, at first, on the optimization steps performed on the WRF model applied to Sicily, a region characterized by a complex orography and peculiar geophysical conditions. In addition, due to the presence of different active volcanoes in Sicily, the WRF-Chem model is also used for forecasting volcanic ash as well as desert dust intrusion. Furthermore, the hardware and software structures of the customized WRF and WRF-Chem models developed at Messina University and the adopted management procedures will be described. In particular, the software routines to follow for the forecast chain and the procedures to be adopted in case of faults will be described step by step. Finally, in order to show the prediction capability of the customized WRF and WRF-Chem models, two case studies will be presented and discussed.
A BSTRACT . Microspheres labelled with radioactive nuclides are widely used for TransArterial RadioEmbolization (TARE) in the treatment of patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and/or hepatic metastases. Nowadays, three commercially available devices can be used: 90 Y-loaded glass (Theraspheres (R), Boston Scientific, Marlborough, MA, USA) and resin microspheres (Sir-Spheres (R), SIRTex medical, Woburn, MA, USA), or 166 Ho- microspheres (QuiremSpheresTM, Quirem Medical, Deventer, The Netherlands). With reference to 90 Y-loaded glass and resin microspheres, recent studies (S. A. Graves et al., J. Nucl. Med. 23, 1131-1135 (2022); S. Gnesin et al., J. Nucl. Med. 64, 825-828 (2023)) highlighted the difference between the measured activity of commercial vials and the nominal one declared by the vendors. As discussed by L. Auditore et al. (J. Nucl. Med. 64, 14711477 (2023)), this discrepancy can be attributed to the procedure used to measure the activity of the vials at the vendor sites and to neglect the emission of Internal Bremsstrahlung (IB) photons among the radioactive decay particles emitted by 90 Y. The aim of this study was to investigate, by means of Monte Carlo simulations, the causes of such discrepancies, focusing on the geometrical factors affecting the activity measurement. In this study an activity calibrator was reproduced in Monte Carlo simulation environment and the measurement of the activity of a vial containing YCl3 or 90 Y-labelled microspheres was simulated. With reference to the glass microspheres, the relative difference between the signal produced by the two solutions, YCl3 and 90 Y-labelled microspheres, is 23.5%. This discrepancy reduces to - 1 . 7% if the 90 Y-labelled microspheres are simulated as uniformly distributed in the vial. Moreover, results indicate that the geometry of the vial affects the results reducing the discrepancy from 23.5% to 16.6%. Similar results were obtained for 90 Y-resin microspheres for which the discrepancy with respect to the reference solution reduces from - 15% to - 8 . 6% when considering the microspheres homogeneously dispersed in the vial. Since the activity of a device employed for therapy has to be accurately known, this study highlights the need of updating the procedure of measuring the activity of such particulate solutions by using ad hoc calibration factors to consider the real vial geometry and distribution of the radioactive solute in the vial.
The aim of this paper is to describe the phenomenon of oscillators’ synchronization through a didactic experiment that involves a system constituted by a set of weakly coupled oscillating metronomes. A metronome is a device that allows to vary and select the oscillation parameters and to investigate synchronization processes. To carry out the experiment, metronomes were set over a common platform disposed on cylinders arranged transversally and that were free to roll on a fixed plane. In this paper we shall describe a teaching unit addressed to students of an academic course in Physics, Mathematics or Engineering.
. In this paper we consider a lattice with a fundamental cell composed of two triangles and two trapezoids in the presence of some obstacles and we determine the probability p that a random segment with uniform and random distribution of constant length intersects a side of the lattice. By this note we solve a Stochastic Geometry's open problem as well and we start to connect this field to some aspects related Artificial Intelligence issues.
. Our aim in this work is to present, at least in part, the impressive interweaving of ideas, techniques and concepts that have been developed around the Poincar & eacute; conjecture, from its formulation at the beginning of the last century to the solution given by Grisha Perelman at the beginning of the new millennium, bringing to completion the program based on the study of the Ricci flow, outlined and developed by Richard Hamilton since the 1980s. Despite the limitations and possibilities of a review article, we wanted to present at least some of the crucial notions and ideas in a mathematically rigorous way, starting from the formulation of the conjecture itself, relying only on basic notions of linear algebra, geometry, and differential calculus in the Euclidean spaces, which are assumed to be familiar to the reader. The result will probably be a "challenging" read, not necessarily "recreational", but which, at least in the intentions of the authors, should reward the reader with a rather faithful picture of these formidable intellectual, individual, and collective processes that make up one of the most beautiful and profound pages in the history of mathematics.
