Analysis of the Pressures in the Crown-Wall of Rubble-Mound Breakwaters under Tsunami Actions, Based on Laboratory Experiments

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° 603839 (Project ASTARTE - Assessment, Strategy and Risk Reduction for Tsunamis in Europe)

Creative assessment approaches to human interactions and music interfaces technology. A systematic literature review

[ES] Este artículo revisa el estado del arte de las investigaciones que han evaluado hasta el momento las interacciones entre los humanos y las tecnologías musicales. El objetivo es estudiar cuántas de las investigaciones existentes en este campo han evaluado la singular interacción proactiva, creativa y expresiva de los usuarios tecnológicos, y cuántas integran además aspectos relacionados con la educación, la salud y el bienestar, con el fin de potenciar un futuro enriquecimiento del trabajo colaborativo entre profesionales especializados dentro de los diseños de tecnología creativa musical, y los equipos educativos en los que se presencian este tipo de interacciones tecnológicas. La cuarta revolución industrial hipernormaliza progresivamente la creatividad, manteniendo una falsa y excesiva normalización social de su lógica funcional. Su paradigma tecnosimbólico afecta a ciencia, educación, uso y apropiación de la tecnología. Como consecuencia, la rigidez de la estandarización y automatización normaliza los procesos de aprendizaje creativos, generando disonancias cognitivas que afectan a la salud y el bienestar de las personas, evidenciando la necesidad de encontrar diseños tecnológicos flexiblemente humanizados. Este estudio pone en valor la práctica musical como una de las áreas creativas que más está revolucionando el campo de las interacciones tecnológicas cognitivas. A través de una metodología mixta, basada en la recopilación, el análisis y la interpretación de las fuentes más pertinentes, recabadas en tres de las principales bases de datos científicas, se obtiene un porcentaje escaso de investigaciones relacionadas con el objeto central de búsqueda ya mencionado en el objetivo descrito. Las conclusiones evidencian que la comunidad científica no se ha enfocado en la búsqueda de paradigmas inclusivos que integren una dimensión de la evaluación respetuosa con las capacidades creativas del usuario tecnológico, a partir de un concepto abierto y holístico de la educación, la salud y el bienestar. Ello señala la oportunidad para implementar evaluaciones que cuenten con la participación de musicoterapeutas y terapeutas artístico-creativos dentro de los procesos de diseño de la tecnología creativa y expresiva, con el fin de facilitar una búsqueda crítica y proactiva de nuevos paradigmas tecnológicos más respetuosos, flexibles y resilientes con la educación, la salud y el bienestar, incluyendo marcos capaces de aportar alternativas viables al problema que plantea la hipernormalización tecnológica actual.[EN] This article reviews the state of the art about previous studies which have evaluated interactions between humans and audio music technologies thus far. The objective is to study how many studies have evaluated singular proactive, creative and expressive interaction of technology users. Also included are studies that integrate aspects related to education, health and well-being, to promote a future enrichment of collaborative work among specialized professionals within the designs of creative music technology, and educational teams in which these types of technological interactions are used. The fourth industrial revolution is progressively hypernormalizing creativity, maintaining a false and excesive social normalization of its functional logic. Its techno-symbolic paradigm affects science, education and the use and appropriation of technology. As a consequence, standardization rigidity and automation normalize creative learning processes, generating cognitive dissonance which affect people’s health and well-being. This reveals the need to find technology designed to be flexible in humans. This study points to the value of practicing music as one of the most revolutionary creative areas in the field of technological cognitive interactions. Through a mixed methodology, based on collecting, analyzing and interpreting most of the relevant sources in the field, and summarized in three main scientific databases, a small percentage of researchers demonstrate a link to the main objective of this previously described study. The conclusions show that the scientific community has not focused on the search for inclusive paradigms that integrate a dimension of evaluation which respects the creative capacities of the technological user, based on an open and holistic concept of education, health and well-being. This indicates the opportunity to implement evaluations through music therapists and artistic-creative therapists within the design processes of creative and expressive technology. This would facilitate a critical and proactive search for new, more respectful, flexible technological paradigms. It would also be resilient for education, health and well-being, including frameworks capable of providing viable alternatives to the problem posed by current technological hypernormalizatio

Working with nature to enhance beach accretion: laboratory experiments of beach ploughing

Beach accretion is the natural mechanism that allows dry beaches to recover. Human response to climate change produces hardening of the coasts and the incident marine climate, which increases beach erosion produced during winter and prevents a full recovery during summer. Beach nourishments are performed all around the world to fight coastal erosion with a nature-friendly philosophy. Softer techniques as beach scraping are also widely applied. A kind of beach scraping is proposed here as an innovative nature-assisted beach enhancement technique, that aims to accelerate naturally produced sand accretion on the beach profile. It consists of mechanically ploughing the intertidal area of a beach to create ridges and furrows. Prototype-scale laboratory experiments were performed to analyse its effectiveness under controlled conditions. Seven 1 h tests having different water levels and the same initial bottom geometry and sea state conditions (Hs = 0.3 m, Tp = 7 s) were performed. Sea state, sand, and initial slope characteristics assured accretive conditions. Ploughed and flatbed initial slope geometries were simultaneously tested into two sub-channels of the wave flume. The results indicate that the bottom roughness is 3.57 times larger for the ploughed geometry. Consequently, wave energy dissipation is larger for the ploughed geometry, and therefore, the significant wave height at the shoreward end of the study area is 11% smaller for the ploughed geometry. This smaller wave height under the ploughed morphology leads to more accretive conditions, as observed from the measured onshore sediment transport, which is 2.9 times larger than the natural transport, and the larger accreted sediment volume in all seven test cases. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of ploughing to enhance natural beach accretion under highly probable accretion conditions. Further research is required to define the thresholds of marine conditions in which the potential of beach ploughing can be exploded.This work was developed under the Beach-ART project, which is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry, and Competitiveness under grant BIA2017-89491-R. The authors acknowledge the financial support from the Government of Cantabria through the Fénix Programme. The authors are grateful for the technical assistance of all the laboratory personnel during the experiments. Íñigo Aniel-Quiroga acknowledges the support of the University of Cantabria postdoc programme “Augusto G. Linares”

Laboratory evaluation of the effectiveness of nature-assisted beach enhancement techniques

Beaches are eroded and accrete under the effect of storms and calm marine conditions, respectively. Normally, beaches reach their narrower state in spring, after the action of winter storms. Accretion processes are slow, and maximum beach recovery doesn't occur until late summer. Sometimes this recovery is not enough to reach the width the beach had the previous year, producing a progressive shoreline retreat and an increased risk of dune erosion and inland flooding during the following winter seasons. The need for wider beaches in early summer for touristic purposes and social support to soft-engineering measures, have increased the interest in Nature-Assisted Beach Enhancement (NABE) techniques. In this study, reduced-scale laboratory experiments on beach ploughing and scraping allowed the comparison of various of these techniques and their effectiveness in controlled conditions for the first time. The beach widening and accretion achieved for five different NABE geometries were analysed and contrasted with natural (control) conditions. Our results show that the best technique is goal-dependent. For dry beach widening, ploughing is recommended as an effective and easy-to-design technique. Scraping the lower intertidal area and placing the sand on an intertidal bar or the beachfront are also effective alternatives if adequately designed. For dune nourishment, the best option is scraping the upper intertidal area and using the borrowed sand for dune regeneration. In general, all the analysed techniques enhance natural beach accretion, in collaboration with natural processes, thus reducing the human action required to achieve the desired objectives from a Building with Nature perspective

L-citrulline supplementation and exercise in the management of sarcopenia

Producción CientíficaSarcopenia is a process associated to aging. Persistent inflammation and oxidative stress in muscle favour muscle wasting and decreased ability to perform physical activity. Controlled exercise can optimize blood flux and moderate the production of reactive oxygen species. Therefore, supplements that can work as a vasodilators and control oxidative stress, might be beneficial for active elders. In this context, we have tested citrulline supplementation in a group of 44 participants aged from 60–73 years that followed a physical activity program adapted to their age and capacities. Volunteers were divided in two groups: placebo (n = 22) and citrullline supplemented (n = 22). Different physical tests and blood extractions were performed at the beginning and at the end of intervention (six weeks). Strength and endurance showed a tendency to increase in the citrulline supplemented group, with no significant differences respect to placebo. However, walking speed in the citrulline supplemented group improved significantly compared to placebo. Markers of muscle damage as well as circulating levels of testosterone, cortisol and vitamin D showed no significant changes, but a tendency to improve at the end of intervention in the supplemented group compared to placebo. Additional studies are necessary to confirm the effect of citrulline supplementation in sarcopenia delay.Caja Rural de Soria - Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria y Biomédica de Alicante (grant number 190290

Análisis de estabilidad ante tsunami de diques rompeolas de materiales sueltos basado en ensayos de laboratorio

Los autores quieren agradecer la financiación de este trabajo al proyecto ASTARTE (Assessment, Strategy and Risk Reduction for Tsunamis in Europe, FP7/2007-2013 nº603839)

Análisis de las presiones en el espadón de diques en talud bajo la acción de tsunamis, basado en ensayos de laboratorio

Los autores quieren agradecer la financiación de este trabajo al proyecto ASTARTE (Assessment, Strategy and Risk Reduction for Tsunamis in Europe, FP7/2007-2013 nº603839)

Brain structures identification based on feature descriptor

Traumatic Brain Injury -TBI- -1- is defined as an acute event that causes certain damage to areas of the brain. TBI may result in a significant impairment of an individuals physical, cognitive and psychosocial functioning. The main consequence of TBI is a dramatic change in the individuals daily life involving a profound disruption of the family, a loss of future income capacity and an increase of lifetime cost. One of the main challenges of TBI Neuroimaging is to develop robust automated image analysis methods to detect signatures of TBI, such as: hyper-intensity areas, changes in image contrast and in brain shape. The final goal of this research is to develop a method to identify the altered brain structures by automatically detecting landmarks on the image where signal changes and to provide comprehensive information to the clinician about them. These landmarks identify injured structures by co-registering the patient?s image with an atlas where landmarks have been previously detected. The research work has been initiated by identifying brain structures on healthy subjects to validate the proposed method. Later, this method will be used to identify modified structures on TBI imaging studies

Gold chain formation via local lifting of surface reconstruction by hot electron injection on H_2(D_2)/Au(111)

The hexagonal close packed surface of gold shows a 22 x root 3 "herringbone" surface reconstruction which makes it unique among the (111) surfaces of all metals. This long-range energetically favored dislocation pattern appears in response to the strong tensile stress that would be present on the unreconstructed surface. Adsorption of molecular and atomic species can be used to tune this surface stress and lift the herringbone reconstruction. Here we show that herringbone reconstruction can be controllably lifted in ultrahigh vacuum at cryogenic temperatures by precise hot electron injection in the presence of hydrogen molecules. We use the sharp tip of a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) for charge carrier injection and characterization of the resulting chain nanostructures. By comparing STM images, rotational spectromicroscopy and ab initio calculations, we show that formation of gold atomic chains is associated with release of gold atoms from the surface, lifting of the reconstruction, dissociation of H_2 molecules, and formation of surface hydrides. Gold hydrides grow in a zipper-like mechanism forming chains along the [1 (1) over bar0] directions of the Au(111) surface and can be manipulated by further electron injection. Finally, we demonstrate that Au(111) terraces can be transformed with nearly perfect terrace selectivity over distances of hundreds of nanometers

Technologies for Monitoring Lifestyle Habits Related to Brain Health : A Systematic Review

Brain health refers to the preservation of brain integrity and function optimized for an individual's biological age. Several studies have demonstrated that our lifestyles habits impact our brain health and our cognitive and mental wellbeing. Monitoring such lifestyles is thus critical and mobile technologies are essential to enable such a goal. Three databases were selected to carry out the search. Then, a PRISMA and PICOTS based criteria for a more detailed review on the basis of monitoring lifestyle aspects were used to filter the publications. We identified 133 publications after removing duplicates. Fifteen were finally selected from our criteria. Many studies still use questionnaires as the only tool for monitoring and do not apply advanced analytic or AI approaches to fine-tune results. We anticipate a transformative boom in the near future developing and implementing solutions that are able to integrate, in a flexible and adaptable way, data from technologies and devices that users might already use. This will enable continuous monitoring of objective data to guide the personalized definition of lifestyle goals and data-driven coaching to offer the necessary support to ensure adherence and satisfaction