Teaching about Madrid: A Collaborative Agents-Based Distributed Learning Course

Interactive art courses require a huge amount of computational resources to be running on real time. These computational resources are even bigger if the course has been designed as a Virtual Environment with which students can interact. In this paper, we present an initiative that has been develop in a close collaboration between two Spanish Universities: Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and Universidad Rey Juan Carlos with the aim of join two previous research project: a Collaborative Awareness Model for Task-Balancing-Delivery (CAMT) in clusters and the “Teaching about Madrid” course, which provides a cultural interactive background of the capital of Spain

Nonovershooting linear multivariable state feedback tracking controllers

We consider the use of linear multivariable feedback control to achieve a nonover-shooting step response. A method is given for designing an LTI state feedback controller toasymptotically track a constant step reference with no overshoot and arbitrarily small rise time. Results are given for both minimum phase and nonminimum phase multivariable LTI systems

Spring-block model for a single-lane highway traffic

A simple one-dimensional spring-block chain with asymmetric interactions is considered to model an idealized single-lane highway traffic. The main elements of the system are blocks (modeling cars), springs with unidirectional interactions (modeling distance keeping interactions between neighbors), static and kinetic friction (modeling inertia of drivers and cars) and spatiotemporal disorder in the values of these friction forces (modeling differences in the driving attitudes). The traveling chain of cars correspond to the dragged spring-block system. Our statistical analysis for the spring-block chain predicts a non-trivial and rich complex behavior. As a function of the disorder level in the system a dynamic phase-transition is observed. For low disorder levels uncorrelated slidings of blocks are revealed while for high disorder levels correlated avalanches dominates.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figure

Fallback Supernovae: A Possible Origin of Peculiar Supernovae with Extremely Low Explosion Energies

We perform hydrodynamical calculations of core-collapse supernovae (SNe) with low explosion energies. These SNe do not have enough energy to eject the whole progenitor and most of the progenitor falls back to the central remnant. We show that such fallback SNe can have a variety of light curves (LCs) but their photospheric velocities can only have some limited values with lower limits. We also perform calculations of nucleosynthesis and LCs of several fallback SN model, and find that a fallback SN from the progenitor with a main-sequence mass of 13 Msun can account for the properties of the peculiar Type Ia supernova SN 2008ha. The kinetic energy and ejecta mass of the model are 1.2*10^{48} erg and 0.074 Msun, respectively, and the ejected 56Ni mass is 0.003 Msun. Thus, SN 2008ha can be a core-collapse SN with a large amount of fallback. We also suggest that SN 2008ha could have been accompanied with long gamma-ray bursts and long gamma-ray bursts without associated SNe may be accompanied with very faint SNe with significant amount of fallback which are similar to SN 2008ha.Comment: 9 pages, 11 figures, 2 tables, accepted by The Astrophysical Journal, proofed and some references added in v

Immobilization of Rhodococcus Erythropolis as a Potential Treatment for Atherosclerosis

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the United States and isprimarily due to hypercholesterolemia. The novel approach of combatting atherosclerosis presented in this research entails delivery of microencapsulated Rhodococcus erythropolis immobilized in biodegradable alginate-based microcapsules and utilizing the bacterium\u27s cholesterol oxidase enzyme pathway to degrade cholesterol from intermediate-stage arterial plaque. The bacterial growth medium was optimized using Taguchi design methods to enable growth characterizations hindered by biosurfactant by-product. Methodologies for extraction and quantification of biosurfactant and cholesterol were developed and conducted simultaneous to bacterial growth assessment. Bacteria were encapsulated using atomization (850±50 μm) and inkjet bioprinting (32±5 μm) to study the effects of cell density and capsule miniaturization on the rate of cholesterol degradation. The cholesterol degradation rate was determined to be independent of cell density, and capsule miniaturization led to a near 4-fold increase in cholesterol degradation, thus allowing for 61.8% cholesterol in an intermediate-stage lesion to be degraded