Arctic Submarine Laboratory

On occasion of the COVID-19 pandemic, in Italy, during the outbreak period, 140 professionals, including paediatricians (the majority), general health practitioners, infectious diseases specialists, epidemiologists, neuropsychiatrists, neurologists, psychologists, pharmaceutical representatives, magistrates, predominantly Italian but also from other countries in Europe and beyond, created a chatline to share their own experiences. The chat, created on WhatsApp and called ‘Pediavirus’, has proven to be very helpful to share knowledge on experiences, already-codified and off label therapies, innovative medical proposals by participating doctors, psychological help to those involved first hand (and to their patients), international guidelines, epidemiological tables and daily stats on number of infected/requiring intensive care/deceased; yet, despite the dramatic moment, irony has never gone missing. The chat has gradually and autonomously gained its own structure and schedule. Paediatricians acted as a sort of local envoys because they were distributed in all the health centres of Campania and in most of the Italian regions from where they could provide comments, rumours and news ahead of the daily official press briefing by the government. We analysed about 100 000 messages written in the chat over about 2 months, that is, since the outbreak of the epidemic in Italy up until today with …

We present a fully integrated autonomous multi- robot aerial system for finding and collecting moving and static objects with unknown locations. This task addresses multiple relevant problems in search and rescue (SAR) robotics such as multi-agent aerial exploration, object detection and tracking, and aerial gripping. Usually, the community tackles these problems individually but the integration into a working system generates extra complexity which is rarely addressed. We show that this task can be solved reliably using only simple components. Our decentralized system uses accurate global state estimation, reactive collision avoidance, and sweep planning for multi-agent exploration. Objects are detected, tracked, and picked up using blob detection, inverse 3D-projection, Kalman filtering, visual-servoing, and a magnetic gripper. We evaluate the individual components of our system on the real platform. The full system has been deployed successfully in various public demonstrations, field tests, and the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge 2017 (MBZIRC). Among the contestants we showed reliable performances and reached second place out of 17 in the individual challenge.

This study was conducted during January-April 2010 with the collaboration of 7 clinical microbiology laboratories evenly distributed across the Ligurian area to identify the most frequent Gram negative species and to evaluate their antibiotic susceptibility patterns Overall, 110 consecutive multi-resistant non duplicate Gram negative isolates,were collected and sent to the coordinating laboratory (Sezione di Microbiologia del DISC, University of Genoa, Italy) together with susceptibility data obtained by routine methods. In addition, strains resistant to carbapenems were characterized by PCR. A total of 110 Gram negative multi-resistance strains were found, including 74 and 36 isolated from healthcare or nosocomial settings and community acquired infections, respectively. The most represented pathogens were: A. baumannii (38, 34.5%), E. coli (30, 27.2%), P. aeruginosa (29, 26.3%), K. pneumoniae (9, 8.2%) and P. mirabilis (4, 3.6%). A. baumannii were more frequently collected from healthcare settings or nosocomial samples, while the other strains were generally equally isolated from in- and out-patients. Amikacin was the most active molecule against E. coli and P. mirabilis (96,7% and 100% of susceptible stains respectively). Colistin was the only active molecule agains A. baumanii and P. aeruginosa (100% of susceptible strains). Against K. pneumoniae tigecycline and colistin were the most active molecules (100% of susceptible strains). Imipenem was the most active compound against E. coli and P. mirabilis (100% of susceptible strains). A large number (97.4%) of A. baumannii was resistant to imipenem. K. pneumoniae and P. aeruginosa showed rates of resistance of 88% and 34.4% respectively. A. baumannii, K. pneumoniae and P. aeruginosa isolates resistant to Imipenem, carried OXA-23, KPC and VIM carbapenemases.These data shown a significant spread of multidrug-resistant Gram negative bacteria in hospitals and in communities.The production of carbapenemase in A. baumannii, K. pneumoniae and P. aeruginosa is now an important phenomenon in our region.

In September 1931 Sir Hubert Wilkins and Harald Sverdrup made the first attempt to explore the Arctic Ocean by submarine in Wilkins's Nautilus. The Nautilus was the ex-Navy submarine O-12 modified with topside runners to slide against the underside of the sea ice. Seventeen years later the US Navy developed the sonar system necessary for safely piloting a diesel-battery submarine underneath the ice pack and began exploration of ice covered areas.In 1957, with the nuclear-powered Nautilus, the US Navy began exploration far into the Arctic Ocean. Problems were found concerning determination of ship's position, ice avoidance manoeuvres, and surfacing up through ice. Sonar and inertial navigation equipments and operating techniques were developed to solve these problems. Submarines have since sailed to all parts of the Arctic Ocean during all seasons — more than twenty explorations since 1957. The history, problems and interrelationships of the many explorations are described.Dr Lyon's paper was presented at a colloquium on the conquest of the North Pole held in Paris, 7–1 1 November 1983, and organized by the Centre d'Etudes Arctiques by whose permission it is here published. (Throughout the paper miles means nautical miles.)