Chiral condensate thermal evolution at finite baryon chemical potential within Chiral Perturbation Theory

We present a model independent study of the chiral condensate evolution in a hadronic gas, in terms of temperature and baryon chemical potential. The meson-meson interactions are described within Chiral Perturbation Theory and the pion-nucleon interaction by means of Heavy Baryon Chiral Perturbation Theory, both at one loop, and nucleon-nucleon interactions can be safely neglected within our hadronic gas domain of validity. Together with the virial expansion, this provides a systematic expansion at low temperatures and chemical potentials, which includes the physical quark masses. This can serve as a guideline for further studies on the lattice. We also obtain estimates of the critical line of temperature and chemical potential where the chiral condensate melts, which systematically lie somewhat higher than recent lattice calculations but are consistent with several hadronic models. We have also estimated uncertainties due to chiral parameters, heavier hadrons and higher orders through unitarized Chiral Perturbation Theory.Comment: 15 pages, 15 figures, 3 tables, ReVTeX. Version to appear in Phys. Rev. D. References added. More conservative estimate of applicability domain, with new figure. More detailed explanation of final results with two more figures. Results unchange

Seeding approach to bubble nucleation in superheated Lennard-Jones fluids

We investigate vapor homogeneous nucleation in a superheated Lennard-Jones liquid with computer simulations. Special simulation techniques are required to address this study since the nucleation of a critical vapor bubble-one that has an equal chance to grow or shrink-in a moderately superheated liquid is a rare event. We use the Seeding method, which combines Classical Nucleation Theory with computer simulations of a liquid containing a vapor bubble to provide bubble nucleation rates in a wide temperature range. Seeding has been successfully applied to investigate the nucleation of crystals in supercooled fluids, and here we apply it to the liquid-to-vapor transition. We find that the Seeding method provides nucleation rates that are consistent with independent calculations not based on the assumptions of Classical Nucleation Theory. Different criteria to determine the radius of the critical bubble give different rate values. The accuracy of each criterion depends of the degree of superheating. Moreover, seeding simulations show that the surface tension depends on pressure for a given temperature. Therefore, using Classical Nucleation Theory with the coexistence surface tension does not provide good estimates of the nucleation rate

Data Balancing for Efficient Training of Hybrid ANN/HMM Automatic Speech Recognition Systems

Hybrid speech recognizers, where the estimation of the emission pdf of the states of Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), usually carried out using Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs), is substituted by Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have several advantages over the classical systems. However, to obtain performance improvements, the computational requirements are heavily increased because of the need to train the ANN. Departing from the observation of the remarkable skewness of speech data, this paper proposes sifting out the training set and balancing the amount of samples per class. With this method the training time has been reduced 18 times while obtaining performances similar to or even better than those with the whole database, especially in noisy environments. However, the application of these reduced sets is not straightforward. To avoid the mismatch between training and testing conditions created by the modification of the distribution of the training data, a proper scaling of the a posteriori probabilities obtained and a resizing of the context window need to be performed as demonstrated in the paper.This work was supported in part by the regional grant (Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid-UC3M) CCG06-UC3M/TIC-0812 and in part by a project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (TEC 2008-06382).Publicad

The Effect of Atmospheric Pollution on the Thymus

Air pollution is a high-risk factor in megacities’ dwellers because of its effects on health. One of the most important components of the pollution is particulate matter (PM) on which metals are adhered. One element adhered to its surfaces is vanadium (V), and through this route, PM reaches the respiratory system, then the systemic circulation and the rest of the organs. Vanadium is released in the atmosphere as a consequence of the combustion of fossil fuels. Vanadium pentoxide is the compound liberated after the combustion and adhered into PM. Previous studies from our group have reported effects on diverse systems in a mouse model. Besides the morphological changes in the spleen and the decreased function of the immune humoral response, the thymus was also affected. Vanadium inhalation diminished thymic dendritic cells (DCs) and the biomarkers: CD11c and MHCII; in addition, thymic cytoarchitecture changed, demonstrated by cytokeratin-5, and also, modification in the expression of 3-nitrotyrosine was observed. Our findings suggest that autoreactive T cells could be released into the systemic circulation and favor the increase in autoimmune diseases in cities with high concentrations of PM

Altered tissue distribution of flaxseed lignans and their metabolites in Abcg2 knockout mice

Lignans are dietary polyphenols, which are metabolized by gut microbiota into the phytoestrogenic metabolites enterolignans, mainly enterolactone and enterodiol. Breast Cancer Resistance Protein (BCRP/ABCG2) is an efflux transporter that affects the plasma and milk secretion of several drugs and natural compounds. We hypothesized here that Abcg2 could influence the levels of lignans and their derived metabolites in target tissues. Consequently, we aimed to evaluate the role of Abcg2 in the tissue distribution of these compounds. We used Abcg2−/− knockout and wild-type male mice fed with a lignan-enriched diet for one week and analysed their plasma, small intestine, colon, liver, kidneys and testicles. High levels of lignans as well as enterolignans and their glucuronide and sulfate conjugates in the small intestine and colon were detected, with higher concentrations of the conjugates in the wildtype compared with Abcg2−/− mice. Particularly relevant was the detection of 24-fold and 8-fold higher concentrations of enterolactone-sulfate and enterolactone-glucuronide, respectively, in the kidney of Abcg2−/− compared with wild-type mice. In conclusion, our study showed that lignans and their derived metabolites were in vivo substrates of Abcg2, which affected their plasma and tissue levels. These results highlight the role of Abcg2 in influencing the health-beneficial properties of dietary lignans.S

Real-time robust automatic speech recognition using compact support vector machines

In the last years, support vector machines (SVMs) have shown excellent performance in many applications, especially in the presence of noise. In particular, SVMs offer several advantages over artificial neural networks (ANNs) that have attracted the attention of the speech processing community. Nevertheless, their high computational requirements prevent them from being used in practice in automatic speech recognition (ASR), where ANNs have proven to be successful. The high complexity of SVMs in this context arises from the use of huge speech training databases with millions of samples and highly overlapped classes. This paper suggests the use of a weighted least squares (WLS) training procedure that facilitates the possibility of imposing a compact semiparametric model on the SVM, which results in a dramatic complexity reduction. Such a complexity reduction with respect to conventional SVMs, which is between two and three orders of magnitude, allows the proposed hybrid WLS-SVC/HMM system to perform real-time speech decoding on a connected-digit recognition task (SpeechDat Spanish database). The experimental evaluation of the proposed system shows encouraging performance levels in clean and noisy conditions, although further improvements are required to reach the maturity level of current context-dependent HMM based recognizers.Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation TEC 2008-06382 and TEC 2008-02473 and Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid-UC3M CCG10-UC3M/TIC-5304.Publicad

The ABCG2 protein in vitro transports the xenobiotic thiabendazole and increases the appearance of its residues in milk

[EN] Thiabendazole (2–(4–thiazolyl)benzimidazole, TBZ) is a broad–spectrum anthelmintic widely used in humans and cattle. It is also used as post–harvest agricultural fungicide, thus preserving crop quality and marketability (Hajikhani et al., 2024). Adverse effects after TBZ exposure including endocrine, nephrogenic, hepatogenic, teratogenic and neurological effects have been reported in mammals (Ekman et al., 2014). Etiological factors behind TBZ toxicity remain ambiguous; however, it has been hypothesized that it may be due to its bioactivation to 5OH–TBZ by the cytochrome P450 1A2 (CYP1A2) (Coulet et al., 1998a; Jamieson et al., 2011) (Fig. 1). Therefore, National and International Food Safety Authorities have established regulations for the usage of TBZ on food products setting maximum residue limits (MRLs) for the sum of TBZ and its metabolites in both agricultural and animal products ranging from 0.01 to 7 mg/kg depending on the product (European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) et al., 2021; U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), 2021). Unfortunately, MRLs derived from pesticide use are equal to or higher than veterinary MRLs for all commodities, and the possible aggregated exposure from TBZ residues has not been studied, making it impossible to rule out an overexposure to TBZ through the food chain.SIPublicación en abierto financiada por el Consorcio de Bibliotecas Universitarias de Castilla y León (BUCLE), con cargo al Programa Operativo 2014ES16RFOP009 FEDER 2014-2020 DE CASTILLA Y LEÓN, Actuación:20007-CL - Apoyo Consorcio BUCL

Updated Aragonian biostratigraphy: Small Mammal distribution and its implications for the Miocene European Chronology

This paper contains formal definitions of the Early to Middle Aragonian (late Early–Middle Miocene) smallmammal biozones from the Aragonian type area in North Central Spain. The stratigraphical schemes of two of the best studied areas for the Lower and Middle Miocene, the Aragonian type area in Spain and the Upper Freshwater Molasse from the North Alpine Foreland Basin in Switzerland, have been compared. This comparison allows the analysis of the order of shared mammal events in the two countries, and the quantification of the resulting asynchronies based on their temporal correlations. The order of the events is very similar in Spain and Switzerland. In order to estimate the diachrony, two age-model options are used for the Swiss record. Our preferred option yields no discrepancies with SW European paleomagnetic and radiometric calibrations of the Ramblian and Early Aragonian bioevents. All Swiss first taxa occurrences precede those in the Aragonian type area by 0.74Myr on average. The asynchronies (1-2Myr) of the species arriving in the late Middle to early Late Aragonian may be higher than in the Early Aragonian (0-1Myr). The implications for the biochronological mammal Neogene system are discussed. Evidence is given confirming the unfeasibility of a formal European biozonation, since it is realised, that 1) most indicator species and many genera of rodents yielding the most detailed zonations have limited geographical ranges hampering recognition of the mammal Neogene zones; and 2) first and last taxon occurrences are diachronical. Therefore, the mammal Neogene system based on a sequence of time-ordered reference localities is preferred to the one based on selected bioevents “developed in widespread geographic areas”

Principales especies nativas de fauna y flora del Caquetá, usos actuales y potenciales: posibilidades de incorporación en Sistemas Alternativos Tradicionales

La cuenca Amazónica es un mosaico de hábitats, paisajes y vegetación, de la cual la Amazonía colombiana es tal vez más representativa y diversa. correspondiente al 35% de la superficie total del país, aproximadamente unos 399.183 kilómetros cuadrados