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Microtubule-associated 1B (MAP1B) proteins are expressed at the nervous system level where they control cytoskeleton activity and regulate neurotransmitter release. Here, we report about the identification of a planarian MAP1B factor ( DjMap1B ) that is enriched in cephalic ganglia and longitudinal nerve cords but not in neoblasts, the plentiful population of adult stem cells present in planarians, thanks to which these animals can continuously cell turnover and regenerate any lost body parts. DjMap1B knockdown induces morphological anomalies in the nervous system and affects neoblast commitment. Our data put forward a correlation between a MAP1B factor and stem cells and suggest a function of the nervous system in non-cell autonomous control of planarian stem cells.

A dynamic filtering system that can choose in real time between two different noise filters depending on the dynamics of the measured environment is presented. Unlike other adaptive filters approaches, this system does not require prior knowledge of the environment beyond noise characteristics. We implemented this system into a Brillouin optical time-domain analysis (BOTDA) sensing scheme using a closed-circuit control system for dynamic tracking of the Brillouin Frequency Shift (BFS) along the sensing fiber using a Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controller. Through experiments and numerical simulations, we compare this method to the filtering capabilities of P and PI controllers chosen as optimal in a previous work for closed-circuit BOTDA (CC-BOTDA). Results show that the adaptive noise filter provides a dynamic response comparable to the other controllers, while increasing noise suppression by a factor between 30% and beyond 100%, showing how an adaptive system can improve suppression with only knowledge of the measurement noise.

Fiber optic sensors represent one of the most promising technologies for the monitoring of various engineering structures. A major challenge in the field is to analyze and predict the strain transfer to the fiber core reliably. Many authors developed analytical models of a coated optical fiber, assuming null strain at the ends of the bonding length. However, this configuration only partially reflects real experimental setups in which the cable structure can be more complex and the strains do not drastically reduce to zero. In this study, a novel strain transfer model for surface-bonded sensing cables with multilayered structure was developed. The analytical model was validated both experimentally and numerically, considering two surface-mounted cable prototypes with three different bonding lengths and five load cases. The results demonstrated the capability of the model to predict the strain profile and, differently from the available strain transfer models, that the strain values at the extremities of the bonded fiber length are not null.

Spontaneous Brillouin scattering is widely used to probe the mechanical and thermal state of matter, yet it has been assumed to be intrinsically stable. Jin and colleagues overturn this view by showing that spontaneous Brillouin light carries its own thermally driven noise floor. Their framework predicts—and experiments confirm—a universal upper bound of SNR = 1 under ideal detection conditions which can become even more restrictive than the conventional shot-noise limit in practical Brillouin systems. This discovery introduces a new fundamental limit to Brillouin-based sensing, microscopy and metrology.

Currently, laparoscopic adrenalectomy is worldwide considered the gold standard technique. Both transperitoneal and retroperitoneal approaches have proved their efficacy with excellent outcomes. Since the introduction of da Vinci System (Intuitive Surgical, Sunnyvale, CA), robotic surgery has made many steps forward gaining progressively more diffusion in the field of general and endocrine surgery. The robotic technique offers advantages to overcome some laparoscopic shortcomings (rigid instruments, loss of 3D vision, unstable camera). Indeed, the robotic system is provided of stereoscopic 3D-magnified vision, additional degree of freedom, tremor-filtering technology and a stable camera. Recently, several case series have demonstrated the feasibility and the safety of robot-assisted adrenalectomy in high-volume centers with outcomes comparable to laparoscopic adrenalectomy. Notwithstanding, the technical advantages of the robotic system have not yet demonstrated significant improvements in terms of outcomes to undermine laparoscopic adrenalectomy. Moreover, robotic adrenalectomy harbor inherits drawbacks, such as longer operative time and elevated costs, that limit its use. In particular, the high cost associated with the use of the robotic system is primarily related to the purchase and the maintenance of the unit, the high instruments cost and the longer operative time. Notably, these aspects make robotic adrenalectomy up to 2.3 times more costly than laparoscopic adrenalectomy. This literature review summarizes the current available studies and provides an overview about the robotic scenario including applicability, technical details and surgical outcomes.

El siguiente trabajo tiene como objetivo trazar una problematización de la noción de Antropoceno desde una clave agroalimentaria. En esa búsqueda, apoyado en la perspectiva general que ofrece la Ecología Política del Sur, el artículo adscribe a la formulación crítica de Plantacionoceno a partir del cual estructura una serie de entradas para construir una mirada tanto diacrónica como sincrónica que permita comprender las implicancias profundas de los regímenes alimentarios en tanto forma ecológico-política de primer orden. Para ese objetivo se rastrea, primeramente, desde aportes fundamentalmente antropológicos, rasgos clave de la interrelación entre comunidad y territorio con el alimento como nodo en formas no y pre capitalistas. En ese mapeo se contrastan antecedentes de producción de habitabilidad frente a las narrativas que sitúan a la especie humana como un agente genérico eco-socio-destructivo. En segundo orden, se describe desde un registro socio-histórico, las características principales del régimen de Plantación, en tanto tecnología erosiva de la habitabilidad basada en metabolismos comunales. Se remarca la especificidad espacio-temporal de esta forma de relación inter y trans-especie, y sus efectos inmediatos en términos ambientales, demográficos, alimentarios y onto-políticos. Un siguiente bloque aborda la noción de Plantacionoceno como crítica a la noción de Antropoceno, a partir de aportes provenientes de discusiones del campo de la antropología, la sociología y la ecología política. Desde una profunda crítica colonial, se avanza en vislumbrar las implicancias de largo aliento del régimen de Plantación en tanto base de una grave afectación onto-política que ha desmembrado las tramas entre sujeto-comunidad-territorio como base de la reproducción de la vida, y de forma ampliada a desafiliado a la humanidad de la Tierra con consecuencias extremas. El apartado posterior conecta esas raíces coloniales con los efectos contemporáneos del régimen agroalimentario del capital. Apuntalado en especial por estudios e informes alimentarios, sanitarios y ambientales, se describe un estado de situación de los territorios y cuerpos afectados por modos de producir, distribuir y consumir mercancías alimentarias bajo un sistema global orientado al lucro antes que a la reproducción de la vida. Por último, se concluye con una serie de reflexiones acerca de la centralidad de incorporar la clave del Plantacionoceno a los abordajes de la crisis ecológica y civilizatoria como a la construcción de alternativas en tanto revela la centralidad de la alienación alimentaria como perturbación ecológico-política que debe adquirir relevancia primordial frente a las urgencias que afronta la especie.   The following research was conducted by an author located in the Global South, specifically in Argentina, at the southern tip of Latin America. From this geographical perspective, and rooted in the Latin American critical intellectual tradition, this work invites us to understand the continent's colonial past as a material and political print with effects on the present at different spatial scales. The aim is to further contribute to the current scholarship that identifies the Conquest of America as a turningl point in the trajectory of the planet and the human and non-human populations that inhabit it. In the last couple of decades, the Anthropocene concept has established itself as a key term to describe the profound and speedy mutations taking place within the bio-geo-chemical flows of the Earth. It has been employed to explain the role of human activity in the disruptions that endanger habitability as the species had known it. The notion has been problematized by different critical perspectives for attributing the activities that have affected the biosphere and its cycles to a generic and global agent (the anthropos), thus giving way to fertile dialogues among diverse scientific disciplines. Within that framework, this paper seeks to offer an ecological-political problematization of the Anthropocene notion with respect to the modes of food production, distribution and consumption by drawing on the Plantationocene concept. It argues that food’s mediation of the humanity-Earth relationship is central to the configuration, development and biological and political-cultural modulations of human lineage across millennia. This paper recovers—by relying on the general perspective offered by the Political Ecology of the South as a critical epistemology—the formulation of the Plantationocene to structure a series of sections tracing a diachronic and synchronic view that allow us to understand the deep implications of food regimes as ways of organizing the ecological and political relations of human societies. To that end, I first select and review key features of the interrelation between subject, community, and territory with food as the core in the context of non-capitalist societal formations. With contributions from the anthropological field, this mapping compares past experiences of habitability production via communal mechanisms and cultivation of socio-bio-diversity vis-à-vis narratives that present the human species as a generic eco-socio-destructive agent. I carry out a complex, non-linear reading of the modes of social organization and its corresponding ways of food provision, taking stock of the contingencies, bifurcations, jumps and cycles in the evolutionary-adaptative processes of lineage. Likewise, the paper identifies, from an anthropological-political perspective, the relations of cooperation existing within human communities and with the non-human webs of life toward food production and understands them as primary forms of the political. Second, through a socio-historical lens that draws from colonial studies, environmental history, the anthropology of food, among others, I describe the main features of the Plantation regime as an ecological-political technology that erodes and destroys habitability based in communal metabolisms. I provide a brief overview —from the Madeira Island in Northeast Brazil to the Antilles—, to illustrate the spatio-temporal specificity of this inter- and intra- species mode of relation as a great civilizational rift. With data on the flows and exploitation of enslaved labor, the politics surrounding bodies and food territories, the financial rationality, the monoculture logic and environmental degradation, I stress the immediate and unprecedented impacts of colonial sugar plantations as platforms for the development of capital’s food regimes. Drawing from contributions from anthropology, sociology and political ecology, the next section addresses the Plantationocene notion as a critique of the Anthropocene. A profound colonial critique sheds light on the long-term implications of the Plantation regime as a fundamental basis for the serious onto-political impacts that have led to the dismemberment of the subject-community-territory webs at the basis of the reproduction of life. As these frameworks pose, the Great Plantation has configured on an expanded scale a representative mode of disaffiliation of humanity with respect to the Earth, leaving effective, long-term traces and marks at the intersubjective level. Reflections around the Plantationocene are meant to open a more complex—and at the same time specific—interpretation of the origins, agencies and responsibilities, socio-economic relations and ontological registers situated at the basic structures of the ecological crisis affecting the Earth and the human and non-human communities that inhabit it. This is followed by a section connecting these colonial roots in the Great Plantation with the contemporary effects of capital’s agrifood regime. Using scientific studies and reports on global food, sanitary, environmental and socio-economic balances by international bodies, I describe the current situation of territories and bodies affected by the modes of production, distribution, and consumption of food products. Stressing the decisive significance of a system of food supply organized for profit, and not for the reproduction of life, I cover the themes of deforestation, water consumption and contamination; large-scale use of pesticides; unhealthy diet, and hunger; labor exploitation and mega-accumulation of profit to draw a general picture of this system. I briefly underscore the central role of the capitalist agrifood regime well into the 21 st century as a primary axis of climate, ecological and collective health disruptions of extreme nature. Lastly, the above journey allows us to weave a series of reflections on the centrality of incorporating the Plantationocene as a category of critique both for approaching the planetary ecological crisis and for imagining and producing realistic alternatives. On that basis, this work provides theoretical-analytical grounds to grasp the major implications of food alienation understood as a great ecological-political disruption and seeks to enhance the relevance given to agrifood webs as essential political nuclei in the urgencies faced by our species. It concludes that, amid the erosion, destruction and subordination of the political forms of the commons, new ways to underpin the re-communalization of food as a way to rejoin the flows and rhythms between humanity and the Earth need to be found, both at the micro and macro level. In re-weaving a new planetary habitability, the central role of food in human politicity —learned from time immemorial to cultivate and reproduce life—can no longer be overlooked.

Shape sensing with optical fiber sensors is an emerging technology with broad applications across various fields. This study evaluates the metrological performance of shape sensing cables in the presence of fiber core failures, a critical issue in scenarios where cable replacement is impractical due to technological and economic constraints. The impact of core failure is quantified by comparing the uncertainty in key parameters, such as curvature and bending angle, between pristine and damaged cables through Monte Carlo simulations. Results indicate that while core failure degrades performance, shape reconstruction remains achievable. However, the reconstruction becomes sensitive to bending direction due to the loss of core symmetry. Additionally, simulations of how measurement noise propagates into uncertainty in the 3D shape reconstruction are carried out. Analysis of specific shapes, including a circle and a right-handed helix, shows that increasing the number of sensing cores significantly mitigates the adverse effects of core failure. The most notable improvement occurs when the number of cores is increased from four to five. These findings show how shape reconstruction is still possible even in the presence of core damage, and how this changes the behavior of the sensing process.

Optical fiber sensors (OFSs) represent an efficient sensing solution in various structural health monitoring (SHM) applications. However, a well-defined methodology is still missing to quantify their damage detection performance, preventing their certification and full deployment in SHM. In a recent study, the authors proposed an experimental methodology to qualify distributed OFSs using the concept of probability of detection (POD). Nevertheless, POD curves require considerable testing, which is often not feasible. This study takes a step forward, presenting a model-assisted POD (MAPOD) approach for the first time applied to distributed OFSs (DOFSs). The new MAPOD framework applied to DOFSs is validated through previous experimental results, considering the mode I delamination monitoring of a double-cantilever beam (DCB) specimen under quasi-static loading conditions. The results show how strain transfer, loading conditions, human factors, interrogator resolution, and noise can alter the damage detection capabilities of DOFSs. This MAPOD approach represents a tool to study the effects of varying environmental and operational conditions on SHM systems based on DOFSs and for the design optimization of the monitoring system.

Fiber-optic shape sensing enables real-time monitoring of structural deformation across a wide range of applications. For large-scale structures, Brillouin-based distributed sensing, typically implemented through Brillouin Optical Time Domain Analysis (BOTDA), offers an extended range for quasi-static measurements, albeit its limited spatial resolution degrades reconstruction accuracy. This study addresses this fundamental limitation through the introduction of a novel error compensation algorithm, particularly suited for a Brillouin-based shape sensing system, yet agnostic with respect to the sensing technology. The method leverages both the initial and final points of the sensing path, performing both forward and backward reconstructions and fusing the two trajectories by testing several polynomial and exponential weighting strategies. The algorithm is experimentally validated on a 28.91 m four-core shape sensing fiber cable (length = L), interrogated through BOTDA operating at 50 cm spatial resolution, and reconstructed through the Frenet–Serret frame formulation. Calibration procedures include radial-offset tuning and segment alignment via a hotspot reference. A non-trivial S-shaped geometry is adopted as a case study, specifically addressing curvature discontinuities arising from mixed straight and curved segments. Reconstruction accuracy is quantified through a Euclidean-distance-based Figure of Merit (FOMs). The cubic weighting strategy demonstrates improvements exceeding 86% in all FOMs compared to classical methods without compensation. Specifically, it achieves an RMSE of 0.145 m (0.50% of L), a MAE of 0.109 m (0.38% of L), and a maximum error of 0.341 m (1.18% of L). Remarkably, these percentage errors are of the same order of magnitude as those reported in the literature for Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) and Optical Frequency Domain Reflectometry (OFDR) systems, indicating that the proposed compensation strategy enables BOTDA-based shape sensing to achieve comparable reconstruction accuracy despite its lower spatial resolution.

Biological evolution has generated a vast array of natural compounds produced by organisms across all domains. Among these, secondary metabolites, selected to enhance an organism’s competitiveness in its natural environment, make them a reservoir for discovering new compounds with cytotoxic activity, potentially useful as novel anticancer agents. Slime secretions, the first barrier between epithelial surfaces and the surrounding environment, frequently contain cytotoxic molecules to limit the growth of parasitic organisms. Planarians, freshwater Triclads, continuously secrete a viscous mucus with multiple physiological functions. The chemical composition of planarian mucus has been only partially elucidated, and there are no studies reporting its cytotoxic or cytostatic effects. In this study, we developed a protocol for collecting mucus from Dugesia japonica specimens and we demonstrated that it inhibits the growth of cancer cells by activating cytostatic and ROS-dependent cytotoxic mechanisms inducing lipid droplet accumulation and mitochondrial membrane reorganization. Although further research is needed to identify the specific chemicals responsible for the anticancer activity of planarian mucus, this work opens up numerous research avenues aimed at better understanding the mechanisms of action of this product for potential therapeutic applications.