Anthrax has been described since biblical times. It was the first disease proved to be caused by an identified bacterial agent, the Bacillus anthracis. In man, the disease occurs in a cutaneous form as a malignant pustule, in a pulmonary form as wool sorters' disease, and very rarely in an intestinal form. Although the incidence of anthrax is rare in many parts of the world, it still remains en...

Tomatoes are the most common crop in Italy. The production cycle requires operations in the field and factory that can cause musculoskeletal disorders due to the repetitive movements of the upper limbs of the workers employed in the sorting phase. This research aims to evaluate these risks using the OCRA (occupational repetitive actions) index method This method is based firstly on the calculat...

The role of mechanics in numerous biological processes is nowadays recognized, while in others, such as the fertilization process, it is still neglected. In the case of oocytes the description of their mechanical properties could improve the comprehension of the oocyte-spermatozoon interaction and be helpful for application in in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics. Herein the mechanical properti...

Spike sorting involves clustering spikes recorded by a micro-electrode according to the source neurons. It is a complicated task, which requires much human labor, in part due to the non-stationary nature of the data. We propose to automate the clustering process in a Bayesian framework, with the source neurons modeled as a non-stationary mixture-of-Gaussians. At a first search stage, the data a...

Kinesin-driven microtubules have been a focus to serve as molecular shuttles to replace multiple on-chip functions in micro total analysis systems (μTAS). Although transport, concentration, and detection of target molecules have been demonstrated, controllability of transport directions is still a major challenge. To define multiple moving directions for selective molecular transport, we integr...

We present a strategy for designing stable insertion sorters based on linear arrays with data-driven control. The novelty of our approach lies in each data item carrying a control tag to specify how it is to be operated upon by a receiving cell and in performing two parallel comparisons within each cell. To assure first-in/first-out handling of equal key values, some data items must be marked t...

Since the discovery of the first red fluorescent protein (RFP), named DsRed, 12 years ago, a wide pallet of red-shifted fluorescent proteins has been cloned and biotechnologically developed into monomeric fluorescent probes for optical microscopy. Several new types of monomeric RFPs that change the emission wavelength either with time, called fluorescent timers, or after a brief irradiation wit...

Cell sorting is an important screening process in microbiology, biotechnology, and clinical research. Existing methods are mainly based on single-cell analysis as in flow cytometric and microfluidic cell sorters. Here we report a label-free bulk method for sorting cells by differentiating their characteristic surface free energies (SFEs). We demonstrated the feasibility of this method by sortin...

We consider the problem of merging two sorted sequences on a comparator network that is used repeatedly, that is, if the output is not sorted, the network is applied again using the output as input. The challenging task is to construct such networks of small depth (called a period in this context). In our previous paper Faster 3-Periodic Merging Network we reduced twice the time of merging on 3...

There has been increasing interest in integrated microfluidic systems because performing biological and chemical laboratory tasks on a single chip is appealing. One straightforward approach to constructing these ‘lab on chips’ is to fabricate individual components and to assemble them for desired functionalities. As the functionalities of the microfluidic systems become increasingly complicated...