A case of intestinal anisakiasis caused by Anisakis sp. larva type I in a woman from Italy who consumed raw marinated anchovies, is reported. The diagnosis was based on the morphological features characteristic of anisakid larval stages, which were readily recognized in a large granuloma removed after emergency surgical treatment.

The effect of surfactants on the flow characteristics during rapid drop formation in a microchannel is investigated using high-speed imaging, micro-particle image velocimetry and numerical simulations; the latter are performed using a three- dimensional multiphase solver that accounts for the transport of soluble surfactants in the bulk and at the interface. Drops are generated in a flow-focusing microchannel, using silicone oil ($4.6$ mPa s) as the continuous phase and a 52 % w/w glycerol solution as the dispersed phase. A non-ionic surfactant (Triton X-100) is dissolved in the dispersed phase at concentrations below and above the critical micelle concentration. Good agreement is found between experimental and numerical data for the drop size, drop formation time and circulation patterns. The results reveal strong circulation patterns in the forming drop in the absence of surfactants, whose intensity decreases with increasing surfactant concentration. The surfactant concentration profiles in the bulk and at the interface are shown for all stages of drop formation. The surfactant interfacial concentration is large at the front and the back of the forming drop, while the neck region is almost surfactant free. Marangoni stresses develop away from the neck, contributing to changes in the velocity profile inside the drop.

We document a novel strategic motive for family business groups to utilize their internal capital markets (ICMs) during financial crises. We find that crisis-period group ICM activity is targeted toward exerting product market dominance over standalone rivals. Groups make significant post-crisis gains in market share that are concentrated among affiliates (and industry segments within affiliates) operating in highly competitive product markets, where capturing such gains is difficult in normal times. These patterns are observed only in emerging markets, suggesting that ICMs enable groups to exploit crises to realize long-term competitive advantages only when rivals face chronic financing frictions.

The digital twin concept has developed as a method for extracting value from data, and is being developed as a new technique for the design and asset management of high-value engineering systems such as aircraft, energy generating plant, and wind turbines. In terms of implementation, many proprietary digital twin software solutions have been marketed in this domain. In contrast, this paper describes a recently released open-source software framework for digital twins, which provides a browser-based operational platform using Python and Flask. The new platform is intended to maximize connectivity between users and data obtained from the physical twin. This paper describes how this type of digital twin operational platform (DTOP) can be used to connect the physical twin and other Internet-of-Things devices to both users and cloud computing services. The current release of the software—DTOP-Cristallo—uses the example of a three-storey structure as the engineering asset to be managed. Within DTOP-Cristallo, specific engineering software tools have been developed for use in the digital twin, and these are used to demonstrate the concept. At this stage, the framework presented is a prototype. However, the potential for open-source digital twin software using network connectivity is a very large area for future research and development.

The time-of-flight technique coupled with semiconductor detectors is a powerful instrument to provide real-time characterization of ions accelerated because of laser–matter interactions. Nevertheless, the presence of strong electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) generated during the interactions can severely hinder its employment. For this reason, the diagnostic system must be designed to have high EMP shielding. Here we present a new advanced prototype of detector, developed at ENEA-Centro Ricerche Frascati (Italy), with a large-area (15 mm × 15 mm) polycrystalline diamond sensor having 150 μm thickness. The tailored detector design and testing ensure high sensitivity and, thanks to the fast temporal response, high-energy resolution of the reconstructed ion spectrum. The detector was offline calibrated and then successfully tested during an experimental campaign carried out at the PHELIX laser facility ( ${E}_L\sim$ 100 J, ${\tau}_L = 750$ fs, ${I}_L\sim \left(1{-}2.5\right)\times {10}^{19}$ W/cm2) at GSI (Germany). The high rejection to EMP fields was demonstrated and suitable calibrated spectra of the accelerated protons were obtained.

Porous materials have many applications for laser–matter interaction experiments related to inertial confinement fusion. Obtaining new knowledge about the properties of the laser-produced plasma of porous media is a challenging task. In this work, we report, for the first time to the best of our knowledge, the time-dependent measurement of the reflected light of a terawatt laser pulse from the laser-produced plasma of low-Z foam material of overcritical density. The experiments have been performed with the ABC laser, with targets constituted by foam of overcritical density and by solid media of the same chemical composition. We implemented in the MULTI-FM code a model for the light reflection to reproduce and interpret the experimental results. Using the simulations together with the experimental results, we indicate a criterion for estimating the homogenization time of the laser-produced plasma, whose measurement is challenging with direct diagnostic techniques and still not achieved.

Influenza vaccine effectiveness (VE) wanes over the course of a temperate climate winter season but little data are available from tropical countries with year-round influenza virus activity. In Singapore, a retrospective cohort study of adults vaccinated from 2013 to 2017 was conducted. Influenza vaccine failure was defined as hospital admission with polymerase chain reaction-confirmed influenza infection 2–49 weeks after vaccination. Relative VE was calculated by splitting the follow-up period into 8-week episodes (Lexis expansion) and the odds of influenza infection in the first 8-week period after vaccination (weeks 2–9) compared with subsequent 8-week periods using multivariable logistic regression adjusting for patient factors and influenza virus activity. Records of 19 298 influenza vaccinations were analysed with 617 (3.2%) influenza infections. Relative VE was stable for the first 26 weeks post-vaccination, but then declined for all three influenza types/subtypes to 69% at weeks 42–49 (95% confidence interval (CI) 52–92%, P = 0.011). VE declined fastest in older adults, in individuals with chronic pulmonary disease and in those who had been previously vaccinated within the last 2 years. Vaccine failure was significantly associated with a change in recommended vaccine strains between vaccination and observation period (adjusted odds ratio 1.26, 95% CI 1.06–1.50, P = 0.010).

Cyber Operational Risk: Cyber risk is routinely cited as one of the most important sources of operational risks facing organisations today, in various publications and surveys. Further, in recent years, cyber risk has entered the public conscience through highly publicised events involving affected UK organisations such as TalkTalk, Morrisons and the NHS. Regulators and legislators are increasing their focus on this topic, with General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) a notable example of this. Risk actuaries and other risk management professionals at insurance companies therefore need to have a robust assessment of the potential losses stemming from cyber risk that their organisations may face. They should be able to do this as part of an overall risk management framework and be able to demonstrate this to stakeholders such as regulators and shareholders. Given that cyber risks are still very much new territory for insurers and there is no commonly accepted practice, this paper describes a proposed framework in which to perform such an assessment. As part of this, we leverage two existing frameworks – the Chief Risk Officer (“CRO”) Forum cyber incident taxonomy, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (“NIST”) framework – to describe the taxonomy of a cyber incident, and the relevant cyber security and risk mitigation items for the incident in question, respectively.Summary of Results: Three detailed scenarios have been investigated by the working party:

• ∙ Employee leaks data at a general (non-life) insurer: Internal attack through social engineering, causing large compensation costs and regulatory fines, driving a 1 in 200 loss of £210.5m (c. 2% of annual revenue).

• ∙ Cyber extortion at a life insurer: External attack through social engineering, causing large business interruption and reputational damage, driving a 1 in 200 loss of £179.5m (c. 6% of annual revenue).

• ∙ Motor insurer telematics device hack: External attack through software vulnerabilities, causing large remediation / device replacement costs, driving a 1 in 200 loss of £70.0m (c. 18% of annual revenue).

• ∙ While the presented scenarios are deemed material at this point in time, the threat landscape moves fast and could render specific narratives and calibrations obsolete within a short-time frame.

• ∙ There is a lack of historical data to base certain scenarios on and therefore a high level of subjectivity is used to calibrate them.

• ∙ No attempt has been made to make an allowance for seasonality of renewals (a cyber event coinciding with peak renewal season could exacerbate cost impacts)

• ∙ No consideration has been given to the impact of the event on the share price of the company.

• ∙ Correlation with other risk types has not been explicitly considered.

Feeding greatly affects milk yield and composition. The research is highlighting the potential of genetic polymorphism at some loci to affect milk yield and quality traits. These loci can be up/down regulated depending on the production environment; therefore, we hypothesized that milk yield and composition could differ when cows with different genotype at SCD, DGAT1 and ABCG2 loci are reared in different feeding systems. The polymorphisms of SCD, DGAT1 and ABCG2 genes were investigated in Modicana breed. In all, three polymorphic sites, responsible for the genetic variation of quantitative trait loci and therefore defined quantitative trait nucleotides, were genotyped: the transition g.10329C>T in 5th exon determines a substitution p.A293V in the SCD, the dinucleotide mutation g.10433-10434AA>GC in 8th exon responsible for p.K232A substitution in the DGAT1 and the transition g.62569A>C in the 14th exon responsible for p.Y581S substitution in the ABCG2 gene. In the sample of 165 Modicana cows, SCD and DGAT1 genes resulted polymorphic; the alleles g.10329T and g.10433-10434GC were the most frequent in SCD and DGAT1 (0.73 and 0.91) respectively, whereas ABCG2 locus was monomorphic for allele A (p.581Y). Sequencing analysis was carried out on 14 samples with different genotypes to confirm the results of the PCR-RFLP protocols. Based on the genotypes at SCD locus, 47 Modicana cows were selected for the nutritional trial: 24 cows in a semi-intensive farm, with 2 h/day grazing on natural pasture, and 23 cows in an extensive farm, with 8 h/day grazing on natural pasture. Monthly, milk yield and composition were evaluated and individual milk samples were analyzed for fatty acids composition by gas chromatography. No differences in milk yield, fat, protein, lactose, casein and urea were associated to SCD genotype. Feeding systems affected milk yield and composition. No significant genotype×feeding system interaction was observed for milk yield and composition. Fatty acids composition was significantly affected only by the feeding system. Significant interactions were found between SCD genotype and feeding system for six fatty acids: 4:0, 6:0, 8:0, 10:0, 12:0 and t11 18:1. We concluded that the feeding system was the factor that mostly affected milk production and composition; moreover, our results do not confirm what reported in literature as regard the effect of the SCD polymorphism on milk fatty acid composition. The high amount of pasture seemed to have resized the SCD polymorphism effects because of the different fatty acids composition of the diet.

Spectral densities of plasma fluctuations are calculated for the thermal case using classical molecular dynamics (MD) assuming Coulomb interactions and a short-range cutoff radius. The aim of the calculation is to verify limits and performances of such calculations in the light of possible generalizations, e.g. collisional or non-ideal plasmas. Results are presented for ideal, collisionless, fully ionized thermal plasmas. Comparison with the analytical theory reveals a generally satisfactory agreement with possibility for improvement when more strict numerical parameters are used albeit with a strong increase in computational cost. The largest deviations have been observed in the vicinity of the weakly damped eigenmodes. The agreement is strong in other parts of the spectrum, where Landau damping is prominent, and overcomes the effects stemming from the excess collisionality and coupling as well as from the exclusion of short-range collisions.

High-precision response of the surrogate model is desired in the process of optimisation. An excessive number of sampling points will increase the cost of the calculation. The appropriate number of sampling points cannot only guarantee the accuracy of the surrogate model but also save the calculation cost. The purpose of this research is to demonstrate the eventuality of using an adaptive surrogate model for optimisation problems. The adaptive surrogate model is built on an adaptive sampling approach and an extended radial basis function (ERBF). The adaptive sampling is an approach that new sampling points are placed in the blank area and all the sampling points are uniformly distributed in the design region using Multi-Island GA. The precision of the ERBF surrogate model is checked using standard error measure to determine whether the surrogate model should be updated or not. This adaptive surrogate model is used to optimise a cruise missile head shape. Aerodynamic and stealthy performance of the cruise missile head shape are considered in this research. Different global objective function and different weight factor are used to research the aerodynamic and stealthy performance in this optimisation process. The results show that the drag is reduced with a slender head shape and the radar-cross section (RCS) value is reduced with a short head shape.

This article documents the development of a community-based drug intervention for low- to mild-risk drug users who surrendered as part of the Philippine government's anti-drug campaign. It highlights the importance of developing evidence-informed drug recovery interventions that are appropriate to the Asian culture and to developing economies. Interviews and consultations with users and community stakeholders reveal the need for an intervention that would improve the drug recovery skills and life skills of users. Evidence-based interventions were adapted using McKleroy and colleagues’ (2006) Map of Adaptation Process (MAP) framework. The resulting intervention reflected the country's collectivist culture, relational values, propensity for indirect and non-verbal communication, and interdependent self-construal. The use of small groups, interactive and creative methodologies, and the incorporation of music and prayer also recognised the importance of these in the Philippine culture.