Magnetically Responsive Melt Electrowritten Structures

While melt electrowriting (MEW) can result in complex microstructures, research demonstrating such fabrication with active materials is limited. Herein, magnetoresponsive poly(ε-caprolactone) (PCL) inks containing up to 10 wt% of iron-oxide (Fe3O4) nanoparticles are used to produce fiber with diameters of 9.2 ± 0.6 µm in ordered microstructures when processed by MEW. Introducing the Fe3O4 nanoparticles has a minimal overall effect on printing quality compared to pure PCL under similar conditions. The magnetic response of Fe3O4 containing fibers allows magnetic actuation, which is one of the first steps to control movement in such structures. Printed samples show different magnetic responses that can be controlled by the micro- and macro-structure design, the nanoparticle concentration, and multi-material design. The potential of MEW to print active magnetic complex micro- and macro-structures for 4D printing designs is demonstrated, in which active properties can be further tailored with magnetoresponsive fillers with varying characteristics and by changing MEW fiber diameters.The support of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) for the Margarita Salas postdoctoral grant for P.G.S. under the “Convocatoria de ayudas para la recualificación del sistema universitario español para 2021–2023” and for the Open Access funding is gratefully acknowledged. The financial support from the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance and the Joe and Clara Tsai Foundation is appreciated

Laser re-irradiation of palladium nanoparticles for antibacterial applications

Bacterial resistant infections represent the second leading cause of mortality worldwide, being responsible for almost the 14% of the global deaths according to figures of 2019. Nanoparticles of noble metals have received special attention because of their outstanding bactericidal activity, that is intrinsically linked to their physico-chemical properties, an asset that makes them an appealing alternative to combat resistant microorganisms. So as to optimize their applications within the biomedical field, it becomes relevant to develop and employ means to influence and act upon nanoparticles’ physico-chemical characteristics. In this research, palladium nanoparticles were synthesized via laser ablation. A nanosecond Nd:YVO4 laser operating at 532 nm was employed to ablate a palladium target immersed in deionized water in order to obtain the colloidal suspension. Then, the previous suspension was passed twice through a re-irradiation system to narrow the size and size distribution of palladium nanoparticles. Bacterial assays with Staphylococcus aureus revealed an effect of size on the bactericidal behaviour of palladium nanoparticles.This work was partially supported by the Government of Spain (PID2020-117900RB-I00 (MCI/AEI/FEDER, UE), EQC2018-004315-P (AEI/FEDER UE), FPU21/04488), Xunta de Galicia (ED431C 2019/23) and University of Vigo (Margarita Salas Postdoc Fellowship Program, M. Fernández Arias & P. Pou-Álvarez)

Multidecadal (1997-2020) telecoupling of water management for terrestrial agriculture and a marine fishery at southern Spain

Climate change is decreasing water supplies globally while water demand is rising, making water access and distribution essential for sustainability, equity, and efficiency. In response, water management has shifted towards practices that improve water efficiency. However, links between geographically separated socioecological systems, known as telecouplings, can obscure the potential consequences of water use. This study focuses on a telecoupling between terrestrial water use and marine fisheries for the period 1997 to 2020. We develop a case study in southern Spain using multidecadal time series of the Guadalquivir river’s hydrology, its estuarine community, and the European anchovy (Engraulis encrasicolus) fishery in the Gulf of Cadiz. We found that water extracted to irrigate crops decreased the river’s flow and seasonality. However, anchovies used the estuary as a nursery before recruiting to the ocean, where they were harvested. Anchovy recruitment improved when estuary hydrology matched the Guadalquivir River’s historical hydrology (i.e., high discharge and seasonality). Then using hydro-economic modeling, we explored the outcomes of different water policies on the telecoupled socioecological systems. Our models predicted that improved water efficiency incentivized agricultural expansion. In contrast, continued marine fishery yields required management values that supported the value of the marine fishery. We highlight estuaries’ critical role in driving marine systems; yet, upriver processes drive estuaries dynamics. Overall, marine-terrestrial telecouplings provide evidence that marine fisheries that rely on estuarine reliant species would benefit of water policy and management being extended beyond the water basin

Mode Converter and Multiplexer with a Subwavelength Phase Shifter for Extended Broadband Operation

4 pags., 3 figs., 1 tab.On-chip mode converters and multiplexers are fundamental components to scale the capacity of silicon optical interconnects by using different spatial modes of waveguides. Recently, we proposed a low loss and compact mode converter and multiplexer consisting of a subwavelength-engineered multimode interference coupler, tapered waveguides as phase shifter and a symmetric Y-junction. However, the narrow spectral response of the tapered phase shifter limited the device crosstalk performance. In this work, we demonstrate that the use of a subwavelength grating phase shifter with low phase-shift errors substantially reduces the crosstalk and expands the operational bandwidth. A complete multiplexer-demultiplexer link consisting of two devices in back-to-back configuration was fabricated in a 220-nm silicon-on-insulator platform. Experimental measurements of the complete link show insertion loss below 2 dB and crosstalk less than -17 dB over a bandwidth of 245 nm (1427 - 1672 nm).is work was supported in part by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICINN) under grants RTI2018- 097957-B-C33, RED2018-102768-T, TEC2015-71127-C2-1-R (FPI BES- 2016-077798) and NEOTEC-CDTI-SNEO20181232 (Alcyon Photonics S.L.); and the Community of Madrid – FEDER funds (S2018/NMT-4326). This project has received funding from the Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant No. 73433

Improved limits on the tensor-to-scalar ratio using BICEP and Planck data

We present constraints on the tensor-to-scalar ratio r using a combination of BICEP/Keck 2018 (BK18) and Planck PR4 data allowing us to fit for r consistently with the six parameters of the ? CDM model. We discuss the sensitivity of constraints on r to uncertainties in the ? CDM parameters as defined by the Planck data. In particular, we are able to derive a constraint on the reionization optical depth ? and thus propagate its uncertainty into the posterior distribution for r . While Planck sensitivity to r is slightly lower than the current ground-based measurements, the combination of Planck with BK18 and baryon-acoustic-oscillation data yields results consistent with r = 0 and tightens the constraint to r < 0.032 at 95% confidence.Planck is a project of the European Space Agency (ESA) with instruments provided by two scientific consortia funded by ESA member states and led by Principal Investigators from France and Italy, telescope reflectors provided through a collaboration between ESA and a scientific consortium led and funded by Denmark, and additional contributions from NASA (USA). We gratefully acknowledge support from the CNRS/IN2P3 Computing Center for providing computing and data-processing resources needed for this work. This research used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02- 05CH11231. Part of the research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Grant No. 80NM0018D0004)

Planck early results. V. The low frequency instrument data processing

We describe the processing of data from the Low Frequency Instrument (LFI) used in production of the Planck Early Release Compact Source Catalogue (ERCSC). In particular, we discuss the steps involved in reducing the data from telemetry packets to cleaned, calibrated, time-ordered data (TOD) and frequency maps. Data are continuously calibrated using the modulation of the temperature of the cosmic microwave background radiation induced by the motion of the spacecraft. Noise properties are estimated from TOD from which the sky signal has been removed using a generalized least square map-making algorithm. Measured 1/f noise knee-frequencies range from ~100 mHz at 30 GHz to a few tens of mHz at 70GHz. A destriping code (Madam) is employed to combine radiometric data and pointing information into sky maps, minimizing the variance of correlated noise. Noise covariance matrices required to compute statistical uncertainties on LFI and Planck products are also produced. Main beams are estimated down to the ??10dB level using Jupiter transits, which are also used for geometrical calibration of the focal plane.Planck is too large a project to allow full acknowledgement of all contributions by individuals, institutions, industries, and funding agencies. The main entities involved in the mission operations are as follows. The European Space Agency operates the satellite via its Mission Operations Centre located at ESOC (Darmstadt, Germany) and coordinates scientific operations via the Planck Science Office located at ESAC (Madrid, Spain). Two Consortia, comprising around 50 scientific institutes within Europe, the USA, and Canada, and funded by agencies from the participating countries, developed the scientific instruments LFI and HFI, and continue to operate them via Instrument Operations Teams located in Trieste (Italy) and Orsay (France). The Consortia are also responsible for scientific processing of the acquired data. The Consortia are led by the Principal Investigators: J.L. Puget in France for HFI (funded principally by CNES and CNRS/INSU-IN2P3) and N. Mandolesi in Italy for LFI(funded principally via ASI). NASA US Planck Project, based at J.P.L. and involving scientists at many US institutions, contributes significantly to the efforts of these two Consortia. The author list for this paper has been selected by the Planck Science Team, and is composed of individuals from all of the above entities who have made multi-year contributions to the development of the mission. It does not pretend to be inclusive of all contributions. The Planck-LFI project is developed by an International Consortium lead by Italy and involving Canada, Finland, Germany, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, UK, USA. The Italian contribution to Planck is supported by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and INAF. This work was supported by the Academy of Finland grants 121703 and 121962. We thank the DEISA Consortium (http://www.deisa.eu), co-funded through the EU FP6 project RI-031513 and the FP7 project RI-222919, for support within the DEISA Virtual Community Support Initiative. We thank CSC – IT Center for Science Ltd (Finland) for computational resources. We acknowledge financial support provided by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovaciõn through the Plan Nacional del Espacio y Plan Nacional de Astronomia y Astrofisica. We acknowledge The Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics Planck Analysis Centre (MPAC) is funded by the Space Agency of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) under grant 50OP0901 with resources of the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology, and by the Max Planck Society. This work has made use of the Planck satellite simulation package (Level-S), which is assembled by the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics Planck Analysis Centre (MPAC) Reinecke et al. (2006). We acknowledge financial support provided by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. Some of the results in this paper have been derived using the HEALPix package Górski et al. (2005). A description of the Planck Collaboration and a list of its members, indicating which technical or scientific activities they have been involved in, can be found at http://www.rssd.esa.int/index.php?project=PLANCK&page=Planck_Collaboration

Planck early results. XV. Spectral energy distributions and radio continuum spectra of northern extragalactic radio sources

Spectral energy distributions (SEDs) and radio continuum spectra are presented for a northern sample of 104 extragalactic radio sources, based on the Planck Early Release Compact Source Catalogue (ERCSC) and simultaneous multifrequency data. The nine Planck frequencies, from 30 to 857 GHz, are complemented by a set of simultaneous observations ranging from radio to gamma-rays. This is the first extensive frequency coverage in the radio and millimetre domains for an essentially complete sample of extragalactic radio sources, and it shows how the individual shocks, each in their own phase of development, shape the radio spectra as they move in the relativistic jet. The SEDs presented in this paper were fitted with second and third degree polynomials to estimate the frequencies of the synchrotron and inverse Compton (IC) peaks, and the spectral indices of low and high frequency radio data, including the Planck ERCSC data, were calculated. SED modelling methods are discussed, with an emphasis on proper, physical modelling of the synchrotron bump using multiple components. Planck ERCSC data also suggest that the original accelerated electron energy spectrum could be much harder than commonly thought, with power-law indexaround 1.5 instead of the canonical 2.5. The implications of this are discussed for the acceleration mechanisms effective in blazar shocks. Furthermore in many cases the Planck data indicate that gamma-ray emission must originate in the same shocks that produce the radio emission.The Planck Collaboration acknowledges the support of: ESA; CNES and CNRS/INSU-IN2P3-INP (France); ASI, CNR, and INAF (Italy); NASA and DoE (USA); STFC and UKSA (UK); CSIC, MICINN and JA (Spain); Tekes, AoF and CSC (Finland); DLR and MPG (Germany); CSA (Canada); DTU Space (Denmark); SER/SSO (Switzerland); RCN (Norway); SFI (Ireland); FCT/MCTES (Portugal); and DEISA (EU). A description of the Planck Collaboration and a list of its members, indicating which technical or scientific activities they have been involved in, can be found via http://www.rssd.esa.int/Planck. The Metsähovi and Tuorla observing projects are supported by the Academy of Finland (grant numbers 212656, 210338, 121148, 127740 and 122352). UMRAO is supported by a series of grants from the NSF and NASA, and by the University of Michigan. This publication is partly based on data acquired with the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX). APEX is a collaboration between the Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie, the European Southern Observatory, and the Onsala Space Observatory. This research is partly based on observations with the 100-m telescope of the MPIfR (Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie) at Effelsberg, the IRAM 30-m telescope, and the Medicina (Noto) telescope operated by INAF – Istituto di Radioastronomia. This paper makes use of observations obtained at the Very Large Array (VLA) which is an instrument of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). The NRAO is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. The observations at Xinglong station are supported by the Chinese National Natural Science Foundation grants 10633020, 10778714, and 11073032, and by the National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program) No. 2007CB815403. The OVRO 40-m monitoring program is supported in part by NASA. The Australia Telescope is funded by the Commonwealth of Australia for operation as a National Facility managed by CSIRO. The Fermi LAT Collaboration acknowledges generous ongoing support from a number of agencies and institutes that have supported both the development and the operation of the LAT as well as scientific data analysis. These include the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Department of Energy in the United States, the Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique/Institut National de Physique Nucléaire et de Physique des Particules in France, the Agenzia Spaziale Italiana and the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare in Italy, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) in Japan, and the K. A. Wallenberg Foundation, the Swedish Research Council and the Swedish National Space Board in Sweden. Additional support for science analysis during the operations phase is gratefully acknowledged from the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica in Italy and the Centre National d’Études Spatiales in France. Part of this work is based on archival data, software or on-line services provided by the ASI Science Data Center ASDC. We thank the Fermi LAT team reviewers, S. Ciprini and M. Giroletti, for their effort and valuable comments

Hidratos de gas marinos: ¿un recurso futuro de gas natural para Europa? M.

Los hidratos de gas son compuestos cristalinos donde una molécula de gas, principalmente metano, queda atrapada en una red de moléculas de agua en forma de hielo. La importancia de los hidratos de gas en la naturaleza es muy alta ya que constituye una fuente alternativa de energía y a su vez juegan un papel importante en el delicado equilibrio del clima a nivel global y en los riesgos geológicos en el ámbito marino. La acción COST MIGRATE está diseñada con el fin de integrar la experiencia de un gran número de grupos de investigación europeos y agentes del sector para promover el desarrollo de conocimientos multidisciplinarios sobre el potencial de los hidratos de gas como fuente de energía en Europa. Dos de los objetivos de esta acción son realizar un inventario europeo de hidratos de gas explotables y evaluar los riesgos ambientales. En este trabajo se muestran los principales indicios de hidratos de gas en los márgenes europeos incluida la Península Ibérica, con una primera aproximación sobre el espesor y situación de la zona de estabilidad de hidratos de gas en el margen Ibérico.Gas hydrates are crystalline compounds where a molecule of gas, mainly methane, is trapped in a cage of icewater molecules. The importance of gas hydrates in nature is very high because it is an alternative source of energy and play a major role in the delicate balance of the global climate and in the marine geological risks. MIGRATE COST action is designed to integrate the experience of a large number of European research groups and industrial players to promote the development of multidisciplinary knowledge on the potential of gas hydrates as energy resource in Europe. Two of the objectives of the action aim to estimate the European inventory of exploitable gas hydrates and to assess environmental risks. In this work we show the occurrences of gas hydrates described in European margins including the Iberian Peninsula, with a first approximation on the thickness and location of the area of stability of gas hydrates in the Iberian margin.COST Action ES1405 (MIGRATE)Versión del edito

Silicon photonic mode multiplexers based on subwavelength metamaterials and on-chip beam forming

4 pags., 1 fig. -- Event: SPIE OPTO, 2023, San Francisco, California, United StatesIntegration of photonic circuits on silicon offers a unique opportunity to address the scaling of inter- and intra-chip communications in an energy-efficient and cost-effective manner. Mode-division multiplexing (MDM) is deemed as one of the most promising technologies to increase aggregated data bandwidth and avoid a communication capacity crunch. In this invited talk, we review our latest advances on integrated silicon mode multiplexers, including new topologies based on subwavelength grating (SWG) metamaterials for extended broadband operation and higher-order mode support. Specifically, we report on an ultra-broadband multiplexer based on a phase shifter and a multimode interference (MMI) coupler both engineered with subwavelength metamaterials. Experimental measurements of a complete multiplexer-demultiplexer link show losses lower than 2 dB and crosstalk below -17 dB over a bandwidth of 245 nm (1427 – 1672 nm).This work has been funded in part by the French Industry Ministry (Nano2022 project under IPCEI program); the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-MIRSPEC-17- CE09-0041); the European Union’s Horizon Europe (Marie SklodowskaCurie grant agreement Nº 101062518); the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICINN) under grants RTI2018-097957-B-C33 and PID2020-115353RA-I00; the Spanish State Research Agency under grant MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 (PTQ2021-011974); the Community of Madrid – FEDER funds (S2018/NMT4326); the European Union – NextGenerationEU through the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan (DIN2020-011488). The fabrication of the device was performed at the Plateforme de Micro-NanoTechnologie/C2N, which is partially funded by the Conseil General de l’Essonne. This work was partly supported by the French RENATECH network.Peer reviewe

Genomic Characterization of Host Factors Related to SARS-CoV-2 Infection in People with Dementia and Control Populations: The GR@ACE/DEGESCO Study

Emerging studies have suggested several chromosomal regions as potential host genetic factors involved in the susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 infection and disease outcome. We nested a COVID-19 genome-wide association study using the GR@ACE/DEGESCO study, searching for susceptibility factors associated with COVID-19 disease. To this end, we compared 221 COVID-19 confirmed cases with 17,035 individuals in whom the COVID-19 disease status was unknown. Then, we performed a meta-analysis with the publicly available data from the COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative. Because the APOE locus has been suggested as a potential modifier of COVID-19 disease, we added sensitivity analyses stratifying by dementia status or by disease severity. We confirmed the existence of the 3p21.31 region (LZTFL1, SLC6A20) implicated in the susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 infection and TYK2 gene might be involved in COVID-19 severity. Nevertheless, no statistically significant association was observed in the COVID-19 fatal outcome or in the stratified analyses (dementia-only and non-dementia strata) for the APOE locus not supporting its involvement in SARS-CoV-2 pathobiology or COVID-19 prognosis