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Back in December 2019, the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) started rapidly spreading worldwide, especially in Italy that was among the most affected countries. The geographical distribution of air pollution and Covid-19 mortality in Italy suggested atmospheric pollution as a worsening factor of severe Covid-19 health outcomes. The present nationwide ecological study focused on all 107 Italian territorial areas, aiming to assess the potential association between Particulate Matter concentration, less than 2.5 μm in diameter (exposure), and Covid-19 mortality rate (outcome) throughout 2020, by looking at 28 potential confounders. A potential positive association between exposure and outcome was observed when performing a multivariate regression analysis with a Negative Binomial model, suggesting that an increase of 1 μg/m 3 in the exposure is associated with an increase of 9.0% (95% CI: 6.5%-11.6%) in the average Covid-19 mortality rate, conditional on all 28 potential confounders. A sensitivity analysis, based on the E-value, shows that a hypothetical unmeasured confounder would have to be associated with both PM 2.5 concentration and Covid-19 mortality rate by a rate ratio of at least 1.40-fold each to explain away the exposure-outcome association, conditional on all 28 covariates included in the main analysis model. Moreover, the Observed Covariate E-value (OCE) was reported to provide a contextualization of the E-value on the observed covariates included in the study. The OCE sensitivity analysis shows that a set of unknown confounders similar in size and magnitude to the set of the considered climatic factors could potentially explain away the estimated exposure-outcome association. Consequently, the role of climatic factors in the Covid-19 pandemic is worth of further investigation., (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Creativity refers to the capability to catch original and valuable ideas and solutions. It involves different processes. In this study the extent to which visual creativity is related to cognitive processes underlying visual mental imagery was investigated. Fifty college students (25 women) carried out: the Creative Synthesis Task, which measures the ability to produce creative objects belonging to a given category (originality, synthesis and transformation scores of pre-inventive forms, and originality and practicality scores of inventions were computed); an adaptation of Clark's Drawing Ability Test, which measures the ability to produce actual creative artworks (graphic ability, esthetic, and creativity scores of drawings were assessed) and three mental imagery tasks that investigate the three main cognitive processes involved in visual mental imagery: generation, inspection and transformation. Vividness of imagery and verbalizer-visualizer cognitive style were also measured using questionnaires. Correlation analysis revealed that all measures of the creativity tasks positively correlated with the image transformation imagery ability; practicality of inventions negatively correlated with vividness of imagery; originality of inventions positively correlated with the visualization cognitive style. However, regression analysis confirmed the predictive role of the transformation imagery ability only for the originality score of inventions and for the graphic ability and esthetic scores of artistic drawings; on the other hand, the visualization cognitive style predicted the originality of inventions, whereas the vividness of imagery predicted practicality of inventions. These results are consistent with the notion that visual creativity is domain- and task-specific.