Meditation practices have been claimed to have a positive effect on the regulation of mood and emotions for quite some time by practitioners, and in recent times there has been a sustained effort to provide a more precise description of the influence of meditation on the human brain. Longitudinal studies have reported morphological changes in cortical thickness and volume in selected brain regions due to meditation practice, which is interpreted as an evidence its effectiveness beyond the subjective self reporting.

The energy radiated (without the 1.5PN tail contribution which requires a different treatment) by a binary system of compact objects moving in a hyperboliclike orbit is computed in the frequency domain through the second post-Newtonian level as an expansion in the large-eccentricity parameter up to next-to-next-to-leading order, completing the time domain corresponding information (fully known in closed form at the second post-Newtonian of accuracy).

FORUM (Far-infrared Outgoing Radiation Understanding and Monitoring) will flight as the 9th ESA's Earth Explorer mission, and an End-to-End Simulator (E2ES) has been developed as a support tool for the mission selection process and the subsequent development phases. The current status of the FORUM E2ES project is presented, together with the characterization of the capabilities of a full physics retrieval code applied to FORUM data.

Purpose: This study aimed to describe a multisystemic disorder featuring cardiovascular, facial, musculoskeletal, and cutaneous anomalies caused by heterozygous loss-of-function variants in TAB2. Methods: Affected individuals were analyzed by next-generation technologies and genomic array. The presumed loss-of-function effect of identified variants was assessed by luciferase assay in cells transiently expressing TAB2 deleterious alleles. In available patients' fibroblasts, variant pathogenicity was further explored by immunoblot and osteoblast differentiation assays.

We propose and analyze a generalized two dimensional XY model, whose interaction potential has n weighted wells, describing corresponding symmetries of the system. As the lattice spacing vanishes, we derive by -convergence the discrete-to-continuum limit of this model. In the energy regime we deal with, the asymptotic ground states exhibit fractional vortices, connected by string defects. The -limit takes into account both contributions, through a renormalized energy, depending on the configuration of fractional vortices, and a surface energy, proportional to the length of the strings.

The observations acquired during the full mission of the Michelson Interferometer for Passive Atmospheric Sounding (MIPAS) instrument, aboard the European Space Agency Environmental Satellite (Envisat), have been analysed with version 8.22 of the Optimised Retrieval Model (ORM), originally developed as the scientific prototype of the ESA level-2 processor for MIPAS observations.

A novel model is here introduced for theSOC change indexdefinedas the normalized difference between the actual Soil Organic Carbon and thevalue assumed at an initial reference year. It is tailored on the RothC carbonmodel dynamics and assumes as baseline the value of the SOC equilibriumunder constant environmental conditions. A sensitivity analysis is performedto evaluate the response of the model to changes of temperature, Net PrimaryProduction (NPP), and land use soil class (forest, grassland, arable).

Clostridium difficile is a spore-forming gram-positive bacterium, recognized as the primary cause of antibiotic-associated nosocomial diarrhoea. Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) has emerged as a major health-associated infection with increased incidence and hospitalization over the years with high mortality rates. Contamination and infection occur after ingestion of vegetative spores, which germinate in the gastro-intestinal tract.