Effects over one year of low-intensity endurance exercise targeted at the level of maximal lipid oxidation

International audienc

Environmental Mineralogy: New challenges, new materials

The close links between mineralogy and materials science are leading to major developments in how society deals more effectively with energy and environmental challenges. The fast expanding field of "environmental mineralogy" helps mitigate major environmental issues related to the impact of anthropic activities on the global ecosystem. Focusing on energy-related materials and environmental cleanup, this article shows how minerals inspire us to design new materials for advanced technologies needed for energy production, managing contaminated areas, and disposing of nuclear waste. We illustrate the environmental importance of nanomaterials, non- and poorly crystalline phases, and the interactions between minerals and ubiquitous microbial activity

Rearranging the centromere of the human Y chromosome with φC31 integrase

We have investigated the ability of the integrase from the Streptomyces φC31 ‘phage to either delete or invert 1 Mb of DNA around the centromere of the human Y chromosome in chicken DT40 hybrid somatic cells. Reciprocal and conservative site-specific recombination was observed in 54% of cells expressing the integrase. The sites failed to recombine in the remaining cells because the sites had been damaged. The sequences of the damaged sites indicated that the damage arose as a result of repair of recombination intermediates by host cell pathways. The liability of recombination intermediates to damage is consistent with what is known about the mechanism of serine recombinase reactions. The structures of the products of the chromosome rearrangements were consistent with the published sequence of the Y chromosome indicating that the assembly of the highly repeated region between the sites is accurate to a resolution of about 50 kb. Mini-chromosomes lacking a centromere were not recovered which also suggested that neo-centromere formation occurs infrequently in vertebrate somatic cells. No ectopic recombination was observed between a φC31 integrase attB site and the chicken genome

Possible Patient Early Diagnosis by Ultrasonic Noninvasive Estimation of Thermal Gradients into Tissues Based on Spectral Changes Modeling

To achieve a precise noninvasive temperature estimation, inside patient tissues, would open promising research fields, because its clinic results would provide early-diagnosis tools. In fact, detecting changes of thermal origin in ultrasonic echo spectra could be useful as an early complementary indicator of infections, inflammations, or cancer. But the effective clinic applications to diagnosis of thermometry ultrasonic techniques, proposed previously, require additional research. Before their implementations with ultrasonic probes and real-time electronic and processing systems, rigorous analyses must be still made over transient echotraces acquired from well-controlled biological and computational phantoms, to improve resolutions and evaluate clinic limitations. It must be based on computing improved signal-processing algorithms emulating tissues responses. Some related parameters in echo-traces reflected by semiregular scattering tissues must be carefully quantified to get a precise processing protocols definition. In this paper, approaches for non-invasive spectral ultrasonic detection are analyzed. Extensions of author's innovations for ultrasonic thermometry are shown and applied to computationally modeled echotraces from scattered biological phantoms, attaining high resolution (better than 0.1°C). Computer methods are provided for viability evaluation of thermal estimation from echoes with distinct noise levels, difficult to be interpreted, and its effectiveness is evaluated as possible diagnosis tool in scattered tissues like liver

Development of a device to study fatigue life of fixed partial dentures

[EN] Fixed partial dentures can be fabricated by means of different materials and with different manufacturing processes. In order to establish possible differences among them, their behaviour, as fatigue life or cement shear bond strength, have to be evaluated. This article presents a modular, economic and robust device to evaluate fixed partial dentures and dental crowns. A base to support the fixed partial dentures and a device to simulate masticatory loads have been developed. The device has got a simple design. It is based on a pneumatic piston, with a pressure regulator to control masticatory loads. On a first stage, only vertical forces have been taking into account. However, the device will allow simulating tangential masticatory loads on the other axis, studying the behaviour of the fixed partial dentures submerged in a solution similar to saliva, changing masticatory load application, etc. with little modifications.Gutiérrez Rubert, SC.; Meseguer Calas, MD.; Estal, R.; Folguera, F.; Vidal, V. (2012). Development of a device to study fatigue life of fixed partial dentures. AIP Conference Proceedings. 1431:877-884. doi:10.1063/1.4707646S877884143

Organisational participation and women - an attitude problem?

Employee participation is a dynamic and contested area of organisational behaviour, attracting continuing academic, practitioner and policy interest and debate. This chapter focuses on organisational participation and women

Use of the gLite-WMS in CMS for production and analysis

The CMS experiment at LHC started using the Resource Broker (by the EDG and LCG projects) to submit Monte Carlo production and analysis jobs to distributed computing resources of the WLCG infrastructure over 6 years ago. Since 2006 the gLite Workload Management System (WMS) and Logging \& Bookkeeping (LB) are used. The interaction with the gLite-WMS/LB happens through the CMS production and analysis frameworks, respectively ProdAgent and CRAB, through a common component, BOSSLite. The important improvements recently made in the gLite-WMS/LB as well as in the CMS tools and the intrinsic independence of different WMS/LB instances allow CMS to reach the stability and scalability needed for LHC operations. In particular the use of a multi-threaded approach in BOSSLite allowed to increase the scalability of the systems significantly. In this work we present the operational set up of CMS production and analysis based on the gLite-WMS and the performances obtained in the past data challenges and in the daily Monte Carlo productions and user analysis usage in the experiment

Green space exposure and blood DNA methylation at birth and in childhood – A multi-cohort study

Green space exposure has been associated with improved mental, physical and general health. However, the underlying biological mechanisms remain largely unknown. The aim of this study was to investigate the association between green space exposure and cord and child blood DNA methylation. Data from eight European birth cohorts with a total of 2,988 newborns and 1,849 children were used. Two indicators of residential green space exposure were assessed: (i) surrounding greenness (satellite-based Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) in buffers of 100 m and 300 m) and (ii) proximity to green space (having a green space ≥ 5,000 m2 within a distance of 300 m). For these indicators we assessed two exposure windows: (i) pregnancy, and (ii) the period from pregnancy to child blood DNA methylation assessment, named as cumulative exposure. DNA methylation was measured with the Illumina 450K or EPIC arrays. To identify differentially methylated positions (DMPs) we fitted robust linear regression models between pregnancy green space exposure and cord blood DNA methylation and between cumulative green space exposure and child blood DNA methylation. Two sensitivity analyses were conducted: (i) without adjusting for cellular composition, and (ii) adjusting for air pollution. Cohort results were combined through fixed-effect inverse variance weighted meta-analyses. Differentially methylated regions (DMRs) were identified from meta-analysed results using the Enmix-combp and DMRcate methods. There was no statistical evidence of pregnancy or cumulative exposures associating with any DMP (False Discovery Rate, FDR, p-value &lt; 0.05). However, surrounding greenness exposure was inversely associated with four DMRs (three in cord blood and one in child blood) annotated to ADAMTS2, KCNQ1DN, SLC6A12 and SDK1 genes. Results did not change substantially in the sensitivity analyses. Overall, we found little evidence of the association between green space exposure and blood DNA methylation. Although we identified associations between surrounding greenness exposure with four DMRs, these findings require replication.</p