Background: Probiotics may prevent the allergic response development due to their antiinflammatory and immunomodulatory effects. The aim of this study is to determine if the prophylactic treatment with a mixture of Bifidobacterium animalis subsp. Lactis BB12 and Enterococcus faecium L3 would reduce symptoms and need for drug use in children with allergic rhinitis (AR). Methods: The study included 250 children aged from 6 to 17 years, affected by AR. Patients were randomly assigned to the intervention group (150) or to the placebo group (100).

A reaction-diffusion system governing the prey-predator interaction with Allee effect on the predators, already introduced by the authors in a previous work is reconsidered with the aim of showing destabilization mechanisms of the biologically meaning equilibrium and detecting some aspects for the eventual oscillatory pattern formation. Extensive numerical simulations, depicting such complex dynamics, are shown. In order to complete the stability analysis of the coexistence equilibrium, a nonlinear stability result is shown.

The present work is inspired by the recent developments in laboratory experiments made on chips, where the culturing of multiple cell species was possible. The model is based on coupled reaction-diffusion-transport equations with chemotaxis and takes into account the interactions among cell populations and the possibility of drug administration for drug testing effects.

Background: Systems Medicine is a novel approach to medicine, i.e. an interdisciplinary field that considers the human body as a system, composed of multiple parts and of complex relationships at multiple levels, and further integrated into an environment. Exploring Systems Medicine implies understanding and combining concepts coming from diametral different fields, including medicine, biology, statistics, modelling and simulation, and data science. Such heterogeneity leads to semantic issues, which may slow down implementation and fruitful interaction between these highly diverse fields.

We use computer simulations to study the morphology and rheological properties of a bidimensional emulsion resulting from a mixture of a passive isotropic fluid and an active contractile polar gel, in the presence of a surfactant that favours the emulsification of the two phases. By varying the intensity of the contractile activity and of an externally imposed shear flow, we find three possible morphologies. For low shear rates, a simple lamellar state is obtained.

The Fokker--Planck approximation for an elementary linear, two-dimensional kinetic model endowed with a mass-preserving integral collision process is numerically studied, along with its diffusive limit. In order to set up a well-balanced discretization relying on an $S$-matrix, exact steady states of the continuous equation are derived. The ability of the scheme to keep these stationary solutions invariant produces the discretization of the local differential operator which mimics the collision process.

Mathematical models for subsoil decontamination by biological techniques

Numerical resolution of two-stream kinetic models in a strong aggregative setting is considered. To illustrate our approach, we consider a one-dimensional kinetic model for chemotaxis in hydrodynamic scaling and the high field limit of the Vlasov-Poisson-Fokker-Planck system. A difficulty is that, in this aggregative setting, weak solutions of the limiting model blow up in finite time, and therefore the scheme should be able to handle Dirac measures.

Here some issues are studied, related to the numerical solution of Richards' equation in a one dimensional spatial domain by a technique based on the Transversal Method of Lines (TMoL). The core idea of TMoL approach is to semi-discretize the time derivative of Richards' equation: afterward a system of second order differential equations in the space variable is derived as an initial value problem. The computational framework of this method requires both Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions at the top of the column. The practical motivation for choosing such a condition is argued.

In this article, a methodology to retrieve the precipitable water vapor (PWV) from a differential interferometric time series is presented. We used external data provided by atmospheric weather models (e.g., ERA-Interim reanalysis) to constrain the initial state and by Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) to phase ambiguities elimination introduced by phase unwrapping algorithm. An iterative least-square is then used to solve the optimization problem.