Sustainable nutrition and the case of vegetable oils to match present and future dietary needs.

Sustainable nutrition represents a formidable challenge for providing people with healthy, nutritious and affordable food, while reducing waste and impacts on the environment. Acknowledging the complexity and multi-dimensional nature of the food system, this article addresses the main issues related to sustainability in nutrition, existing scientific data and advances in research and related methodologies. Vegetable oils are epitomized as a case study in order to figure out the challenges inherent to sustainable nutrition. Vegetable oils crucially provide people with an affordable source of energy and are essential ingredients of a healthy diet, but entail varying social and environmental costs and benefits. Accordingly, the productive and socioeconomic context encompassing vegetable oils requires interdisciplinary research based on appropriate analyses of big data in populations undergoing emerging behavioral and environmental pressures. Since oils represent a major and growing source of energy at a global level, their role in sustainable nutrition should be considered beyond pure nutritional facts, at the light of soil preservation, local resources and human needs in terms of health, employment and socio-economic development.

A Need for a Paradigm Shift in Healthy Nutrition Research.

Research in the field of sustainable and healthy nutrition is calling for the application of the latest advances in seemingly unrelated domains such as complex systems and network sciences on the one hand and big data and artificial intelligence on the other. This is because the confluence of these fields, whose methodologies have experienced explosive growth in the last few years, promises to solve some of the more challenging problems in sustainable and healthy nutrition, i.e., integrating food and behavioral-based dietary guidelines. Focusing here primarily on nutrition and health, we discuss what kind of methodological shift is needed to open current disciplinary borders to the methods, languages, and knowledge of the digital era and a system thinking approach. Specifically, we advocate for the adoption of interdisciplinary, complex-systems-based research to tackle the huge challenge of dealing with an evolving interdependent system in which there are multiple scales-from the metabolome to the population level-, heterogeneous and-more often than not- incomplete data, and population changes subject to many behavioral and environmental pressures. To illustrate the importance of this methodological innovation we focus on the consumption aspects of nutrition rather than production, but we recognize the importance of system-wide studies that involve both these components of nutrition. We round off the paper by outlining some specific research directions that would make it possible to find new correlations and, possibly, causal relationships across scales and to answer pressing questions in the area of sustainable and healthy nutrition.

Topology driven modeling: the IS metaphor.

In order to define a new method for analyzing the immune system within the realm of Big Data, we bear on the metaphor provided by an extension of Parisi's model, based on a mean field approach. The novelty is the multilinearity of the couplings in the configurational variables. This peculiarity allows us to compare the partition function [Formula: see text] with a particular functor of topological field theory-the generating function of the Betti numbers of the state manifold of the system-which contains the same global information of the system configurations and of the data set representing them. The comparison between the Betti numbers of the model and the real Betti numbers obtained from the topological analysis of phenomenological data, is expected to discover hidden n-ary relations among idiotypes and anti-idiotypes. The data topological analysis will select global features, reducible neither to a mere subgraph nor to a metric or vector space. How the immune system reacts, how it evolves, how it responds to stimuli is the result of an interaction that took place among many entities constrained in specific configurations which are relational. Within this metaphor, the proposed method turns out to be a global topological application of the S[B] paradigm for modeling complex systems.

Possible effects of pramipexole on neck muscles in a patient with Parkinson's disease.

Recent case reports suggest a possible causal correlation between antecollis and pramipexole. Here, we report the case of a 62-year-old Italian man with a 2-year history of Parkinson's disease (PD) and cervical spondylosis for which he was treated with pramipexole. He developed severe neck rigidity immediately after an inguinal hernia operation but several months after introduction of pramipexole. He was initially treated with painkillers and physiotherapy with no significant improvement. His condition deteriorated presenting disproportionate rigidity between anterior and posterior neck muscles (antecollis) to the extent that normal activities were severely restricted. However, significant improvement occurred after the withdrawal of pramipexole. The patient undertook a second cycle of physiotherapy with remarkable results and returned to function normally in everyday life. This case report suggests that neurologists should be motivated to inform the scientific community about other possible cases in which an association between antecollis and pramipexole might operate in PD.

Peierls distortion and quantum solitons.

Peierls distortion and quantum solitons are two hallmarks of 1-dimensional condensed-matter systems. Here we propose a quantum model for a one-dimensional system of nonlinearly interacting electrons and phonons, where the phonons are represented via coherent states. This model permits a unified description of Peierls distortion and quantum solitons. The nonlinear electron-phonon interaction and the resulting deformed symmetry of the Hamiltonian are distinctive features of the model, of which that of Su, Schrieffer, and Heeger can be regarded as a special case.

Quantum tetrahedra.

We discuss in details the role of Wigner 6j symbol as the basic building block unifying such different fields as state sum models for quantum geometry, topological quantum field theory, statistical lattice models and quantum computing. The apparent 2-fold nature of the 6j symbol displayed in quantum field theory and quantum computing--a quantum tetrahedron and a computational gate--is shown to merge together in a unified quantum-computational SU(2)-state sum framework.