Managing crowded museums: Visitors flow measurement, analysis, modeling, and optimization

We present an all-around study of the visitors flow in crowded museums: a combination of Lagrangian field measurements and statistical analyses enable us to create stochastic digital-twins of the guest dynamics, unlocking comfort- and safety-driven optimizations. Our case study is the Galleria Borghese museum in Rome (Italy), in which we performed a real-life data acquisition campaign.

Insight Onto the Utility of Magnetoencephalography and Electroencephalography for Studying Brain Disorders

MagnetoEncephaloGraphy (MEG) and ElectroEncephaloGraphy (EEG) are the most common non-invasive brain imaging techniques for monitoring the electrical brain activity with millisecond resolution. Due to their high, millisecond, temporal resolution, these techniques are also the most suitable for studying the dynamic interplay of between brain regions during information processing. In clinical settings, MEG and EEG are valuable methods for the pre-surgical evaluation of patients with pharmaco-resistant epilepsy.

An in-vivo validation of ESI methods with focal sources

Electrical source imaging (ESI) aims at reconstructing the electrical brain activity from measurements of the electric field on the scalp. Even though the localization of single focal sources should be relatively straightforward, different methods provide diverse solutions due to the different underlying assumptions. Furthermore, their input parameter(s) further affects the solution provided by each method, making localization even more challenging.

Altered brain criticality in Schizophrenia: New insights from MEG

Schizophrenia has a complex etiology and symptomatology that is difficult to untangle. After decades of research, important advancements towards a central biomarker are still lacking. One of the missing pieces is a better understanding of how non-linear neural dynamics are altered in this patient population. In this study, the resting-state neuromagnetic signals of schizophrenia patients and healthy controls were analyzed in the framework of criticality.

Neural oscillations track natural but not artificial fast speech: Novel insights from speech-brain coupling using MEG

Neural oscillations contribute to speech parsing via cortical tracking of hierarchical linguistic structures, including syllable rate. While the properties of neural entrainment have been largely probed with speech stimuli at either normal or artificially accelerated rates, the important case of natural fast speech has been largely overlooked. Using magnetoencephalography, we found that listening to naturally-produced speech was associated with cortico-acoustic coupling, both at normal (~6 syllables/s) and fast (~9 syllables/s) rates, with a corresponding shift in peak entrainment frequency.

Loss-of-function variants in exon 4 of TAB2 cause a recognizable multisystem disorder with cardiovascular, facial, cutaneous, and musculoskeletal involvement

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.

The FORUM End-to-End Simulator project: architecture and results

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.

Soil Moisture Estimation Using Atmospherically Corrected C-Band InSAR Data

A methodology to generate calibrated maps of soil moisture from C-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images processed by SAR interferometry (InSAR) technique is presented. The proposed methodology uses atmospheric phase delay (APD) maps obtained from a time series of Sentinel-1 interferograms, to disentangle the APD and soil moisture contributions to Sentinel-1 interferograms. We show how the high spatial resolution and short temporal baseline of Sentinel-1 image can help to estimate soil moisture using a daisy chain InSAR processing.

Gamma-Convergence Analysis of a Generalized XY Model: Fractional Vortices and String Defects

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.

Smoothed particle hydrodynamics method from a large eddy simulation perspective

The Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method, often used for the modelling of the Navier- Stokes equations by a meshless Lagrangian approach, is revisited from the point of view of Large Eddy Simulation (LES). To this aim, the LES filtering procedure is recast in a Lagrangian framework by defining a filter that moves with the positions of the fluid particles at the filtered velocity.