Effects of Habitat Enrichment on The Stress Level of The Sit-and-Wait Predator Sand Boa (Gongylophis Colubrinus)

Conditions in which the animals are housed vary according to animal use. Conditions unfamiliar or unsuited to organisms usually induce stress. Stress is mirrored by a hormone cascade resulting in glucocorticoids. Of the glucocorticoids corticosterone is regarded as the most important. The corticosterone levels of sand boas (Gongylophis colubrinus) were measured under enriched and barren soil and cage features. Enriched soil consisted of enough dirt to allow borrowing. Enriched cage featured consisted of a wooded ball. Barren soil consisted of newspaper as substrate. Barren cage features consisted of plane newspaper. Snakes were subject to treatment for two weeks. No significant difference was found between treatments of both soil and features using non-parametric Wilcoxon signed ranks test (P=.285, Z=-1.069,Fig 2). A low sample size prevented possible further analysis. However, data was suggestive of an increase in stress with cage features and a decrease in stress with enriched substrate

On the Calculation of the Incomplete MGF with Applications to Wireless Communications

(c) 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works. DOI: 10.1109/TCOMM.2016.2626440The incomplete moment generating function (IMGF) has paramount relevance in communication theory, since it appears in a plethora of scenarios when analyzing the performance of communication systems. We here present a general method for calculating the IMGF of any arbitrary fading distribution. Then, we provide exact closed-form expressions for the IMGF of the very general κ-μ shadowed fading model, which includes the popular κ-μ, η-μ, Rician shadowed, and other classical models as particular cases. We illustrate the practical applicability of this result by analyzing several scenarios of interest in wireless communications: 1) physical layer security in the presence of an eavesdropper; 2) outage probability analysis with interference and background noise; 3) channel capacity with side information at the transmitter and the receiver; and 4) average bit-error rate with adaptive modulation, when the fading on the desired link can be modeled by any of the aforementioned distributions.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Execelencia Internacional. Andalucía Tech

Two titans finally meet each other under nitrogen deficiencies: FERONIA-TORC1 activation promotes plant growth

Plant growth is determined by well-defined developmental processes that integrate cell-intrinsic factors and external environmental cues, and it is largely dependent on the assimilation of macro- and micro-nutrients from the environment. Between the macro-nutrients, the inorganic nitrogen (e.g., nitrate and ammonium) and amino acids are essential for plant survival and productivity. Beyond acting as macro-nutrients and structural components of macro-molecules, these nitrogen-containing molecules could also act as signaling molecules to orchestrate diverse genetic programs (Wang et al., 2018). Plant nutritional cues that rapidly change over time and space in the soils are tightly linked to signaling pathways that execute fast cellular programs to adjust to a challenging environment. Plant Rapid Alkalinization Factors (RALFs) are secreted peptides that function as extracellular signals and bind to Catharanthus roseus receptor-like kinase 1-like family members such as FERONIA (FER) (Liao et al., 2017). RALF1–FER complexes are central regulators of plant growth that allow plants to respond to environmental changes (Du et al., 2016; Zhu et al., 2020). This interaction triggers the recruitment of RPM1-induced protein kinase (RIPK) and the phosphorylation of both FER and RIPK in a mutually dependent manner (Du et al., 2016), followed by the recruitment and activation via phosphorylation of an early translation initiation factor (eIF4E1) (Zhu et al., 2020). These findings highlighted that the RALF1–FER–RIPK pathway is an important hub to control plant cell growth under specific conditions.Fil: Martinez Pacheco, Javier. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Parque Centenario. Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de Buenos Aires. Fundación Instituto Leloir. Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de Buenos Aires; ArgentinaFil: Estevez, Jose Manuel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Parque Centenario. Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de Buenos Aires. Fundación Instituto Leloir. Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de Buenos Aires; Argentina. Universidad Andrés Bello; Chile. Millennium Nucleus for the Development of Super Adaptable Plants; Chil

The κ-µ Shadowed Fading Model with Integer Fading Parameters

(c) 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works. DOI: 10.1109/TVT.2017.2678430We show that the popular and general κ-μ shadowed fading model with integer fading parameters μ and m can be represented as a mixture of squared Nakagami- m̂ (or Gamma) distributions. Thus, its PDF and CDF can be expressed in closed-form in terms of a finite number of elementary functions (powers and exponentials). The main implications arising from such connection are then discussed, which can be summarized as: (1) the performance evaluation of communication systems operating in κ-μ shadowed fading becomes as simple as if a Nakagami- m̂ fading channel was assumed; (2) the κ-μ shadowed distribution can be used to approximate the κ-μ distribution using a closed-form representation in terms of elementary functions, by choosing a sufficiently large value of m; and (3) restricting the parameters μ and m to take integer values has limited impact in practice when fitting the κ-μ shadowed fading model to field measurements. As an application example, the average channel capacity of communication systems operating under κ-μ shadowed fading is obtained in closed-form.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional. Andalucía Tech

Estimation of Energy Consumption in Street Lighting using Mobile Devices

The growing energy consumption is not sustainable in the long run. Taking into account that street lighting is one of the highest energy consumers in cities, this paper aims to develop a methodology to estimate the energy consumption of these installations with as few input variables as possible. In addition, the paper presents a mobile application developed to help lighting managers not only on the energy consumption evaluation, but suggesting the possible improvements on current systems which can save energy in case that they are implemented

Using SPICES for a better service consumption

In this poster we present SPICES (Semantic Platform for the Interaction and Consumption of Enriched Services), a Web based tool that automates the process of consuming a Web service by making use of the semantic annotations that describe them. SPICES supports both traditional WSDL services and RESTful ones and offers end-users the possibility of interacting with them in an easy yet personalised manner, without the need of advanced technical skills -which were traditionally required-, being the complexity that lies underneath hidden to them. SPICES is being developed within the European project SOA4All

The fluctuating two-ray fading model: exact and approximate statistical characterization

El congreso en el que se ha presentado este artículo no genera libro de actas, por lo que el copyright no se ha transferido a IEEE.We introduce the Fluctuating Two-Ray (FTR) fading model, a new statistical channel model that consists of two fluctuating specular components with random phases plus a diffuse component. The PDF and MGF are expressed in closed-form, having a functional form similar to other state-of-the-art fading models. We also provide an approximate closed-form expressions for the PDF, which allow for a simple evaluation of these statistics to an arbitrary level of precision. We show that the FTR fading model provides a much better fit than Rician fading for recent small-scale fading measurements in 28 GHz outdoor millimeter-wave channels.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech. Proyecto MINECO-FEDER TEC2013-42711-R, TEC2014-57901-R y TEC2013-44442-P. Junta de Andalucía P2011-TIC-7109 y P2011-TIC-8238

The Fluctuating Two-Ray Fading Model for mmWave Communications

We introduce the Fluctuating Two-Ray (FTR) fading model, a new statistical channel model that consists of two fluctuating specular components with random phases plus a diffuse component. The FTR model arises as a natural generalization of the two-wave with diffuse power (TWDP) fading model proposed by Durgin, Rappaport and de Wolf; in this extended model, the two specular components exhibit a random amplitude fluctuation. Unlike in the TWDP model, we show that all the chief probability functions of the FTR fading model (PDF, CDF and MGF) can be expressed in closed-form. We also show that the FTR fading model provides a much better fit than the Rician fading model for recent small-scale fading measurements of the 28 GHz outdoor millimeter-wave channels.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

The Fluctuating Two-Ray Fading Model: Statistical Characterization and Performance Analysis

(c) 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.We introduce the fluctuating two-ray (FTR) fading model, a new statistical channel model that consists of two fluctuating specular components with random phases plus a diffuse component. The FTR model arises as the natural generalization of the two-wave with diffuse power (TWDP) fading model; this generalization allows its two specular components to exhibit a random amplitude fluctuation. Unlike the TWDP model, all the chief probability functions of the FTR fading model (PDF, CDF, and MGF) are expressed in closed-form, having a functional form similar to other state-of-the-art fading models. We also provide approximate closed-form expressions for the PDF and CDF in terms of a finite number of elementary functions, which allow for a simple evaluation of these statistics to an arbitrary level of precision. We show that the FTR fading model provides a much better fit than Rician fading for recent small-scale fading measurements in 28 GHz outdoor mm-wave channels. Finally, the performance of wireless communication systems over FTR fading is evaluated in terms of the bit error rate and the outage capacity, and the interplay between the FTR fading model parameters and the system performance is discussed. Monte Carlo simulations have been carried out in order to validate the obtained theoretical expressions.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional. Andalucía Tech

Effect of uncommon exit location in the emergency evacuation of transport airplanes

The objective of the present paper is to show the effect of uncommon exit arrangement in the evacuation process of narrow-body airliners, from the point of view of emergency evacuation certification, using the ETSIA model. Two main possibilities will be considered: large longitudinal shifting of the main embarking/disembarking doors; and suppression of some over-the-wing exits