Effects of 1.3-1.6 ß-glucans on aging in vivo and ex-vivo

The short-lived annual fish Nothobranchius furzeri (Nfu) has an extremely short life span and accelerated expression of age markers. This animal model recapitulates the major features of mammalian brain aging, such as gliosis and lipofuscin. Nfu is a convenient model for investigating the effects of interventions on longevity and age-related pathologies in Vertebrates. In this study, I observed the effects of 1.3-1.6 ß-glucans (BGs) in aging. BGs, natural food ingredients derived from t...

La stoa free-standing nel mondo greco tra età arcaica ed età ellenistica. Lessico, architettura, funzioni

Modeling nanoplasmonics from an atomistic point of view: from theory to applications

The theoretical modeling of plasmonics is challenging due to the complex interplay between electromagnetic waves, the electronic properties of the material, and the geometrical arrangement of the substrate. In the last decades, the comprehension of plasmons related phenomena arising in noble metal nanostructures and in graphene has benefited from the development of several theoretical methods, which can be divided into two main categories: continuum and ab initi...

Topics in composite models and dark matter phenomenology

We investigate models of composite dark matter in which the dark matter candidate arises naturally as an accidentally stable bound state of a confining dynamics and with observable signatures in a wide variety of experiments. In the first part of the thesis we introduce and explore a new class of models with dark fermions in the adjoint repre- sentation of the confining gauge group. The low energy dynamics and the cosmological history are peculiar and provide a dark matter candidate with prop...

ProNGF is a cell-type specific mitogen for adult hippocampal and for induced neural stem cells

The role of proNGF, the precursor of Nerve Growth Factor (NGF), on the biology of adult neural stem cells (aNSCs) is still unclear. Here I analyzed adult hippo-campal neurogenesis in AD11 transgenic mice, in which the constitutive expression of anti-NGF antibody leads to an imbalance of proNGF over mature NGF. I found in-creased proliferation of progenitors but a reduced neurogenesis in the AD11 DG- hippocampus (HP-DG). Also in vitro, AD11 hippocampal neural stem cells (NSCs) pro-liferated mo...

Block rational Krylov methods for matrix equations and matrix functions

In this thesis, we describe block rational Krylov subspaces, highlighting their correspondence with rational matrices and generalizing important properties that apply to the non-block case. We develop procedures based on block rational Krylov subspaces for solving Sylvester and tensor Sylvester equations, computing functions of Hermitian hierarchically semiseparable (HSS) matrices, and applying functions of Hermitian matrices to block vectors.In the context of Sylvester equations with low-ran...

Peasants prefiguring agroecology, critical pedagogy and peasant feminism: a participatory action research project with the Kenyan Peasants League

Interstellar dust in galaxies in the Epoch of Reionization

We are living in the golden age of extra-galactic astrophysics. The construction of the submillimetre (sub-mm) interferometer ALMA, and the successful operation of the JWST, have marked a giant leap forward in terms of the amount and quality of extra-galactic data. Simultaneously, the rapidly increasing computational power of modern supercomputers allows us to develop and run increasingly detailed numerical simulations [1, 2], bridging the gap between cosmological [3, 4, 5, 6] and sub-ga...

Explainable AI methods and their interplay with privacy protection

Recent years have seen the emergence of Machine Learning models, which are accurate but lack transparency in their decision-making processes. The field of Explainable Artificial Intelligence has emerged to address this issue, but many questions remain unanswered. This Ph.D. Thesis presents two key contributions: (i) a novel variant of a local rule-based explanation method that provides stable and actionable explanations, and (ii) an investigation into the relationship between Data Privac...