Hera is a planetary defense mission under development in the Space Safety and Security Program of the European Space Agency for launch in 2024 October. It will rendezvous in late 2026 December with the binary asteroid (65803) Didymos and in particular its moon, Dimorphos, which will be impacted by NASA’s DART spacecraft on 2022 September 26 as the first asteroid deflection test. The main goals of Hera are the detailed characterization of the physical properties of Didymos and Dimorphos and of the crater made by the DART mission, as well as measurement of the momentum transfer efficiency resulting from DART’s impact. The data from the Hera spacecraft and its two CubeSats will also provide significant insights into asteroid science and the evolutionary history of our solar system. Hera will perform the first rendezvous with a binary asteroid and provide new measurements, such as radar sounding of an asteroid interior, which will allow models in planetary science to be tested. Hera will thus provide a crucial element in the global effort to avert future asteroid impacts at the same time as providing world-leading science.

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Although overall healthcare worker adherence with hand hygiene procedures before patient contact substantially increased after the multimodal intervention, considerable variability-for both nurses and doctors and across the 5 units-was seen. Although adherence substantially increased, overall hand hygiene in these units could still be greatly improved.

This paper aims to provide general considerations, in the form of a scientific review, with reference to selected experiences of ALS applications under alpine, temperate and Mediterranean environments in Italy as case studies. In Italy, the use of ALS data have been mainly focused on the stratification of forest stands and the estimation of their timber volume and biomass at local scale. Potential for ALS data exploitation concerns their integration in forest inventories on large territories, their usage for silvicultural systems detection and their use for the estimation of fuel load in forest and pre-forest stands. Multitemporal ALS may even be suitable to support the assessment of current annual volume increment and the harvesting rates.

According to World Health Organization (WHO), about 1 out of 10 hospitalized patients suffers an adverse event, in developed countries, being an adverse event an injury related to medical management, in contrast to complications of disease. These events cause both unnecessary suffering and huge cost to health systems. This issue is so important that WHO has defined it as a global health problem and in 2004 launched the World Alliance for Patient Safety, with the aim to coordinate, disseminate and accelerate improvements in Patient Safety. Office Hysteroscopy (OH), as an independent technique of the hospital circuit, has the ideal conditions to be qualified as the gold standard technique for the surgical treatment of intracavitary uterine pathology. It does not require the use of an operating room, hospital admission and general or locoregional anaesthesia. The appropriate surgical techniques, allied to pain control, allow OH to resolve much more than 90 % of the surgical needs of the intracavitary uterine pathology, thus being an important contribution for Patient Safety.

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