"The biggest parties ever seen in Spain": the Count of Haro in Briviesca (1440)

En julio de 1440, la comitiva que acompaña a la princesa Blanca de Navarra para su boda con el príncipe Enrique de Castilla llega a la villa de Briviesca, perteneciente al conde de Haro y que en aquel momento es el nuevo hombre fuerte en la corte castellana que preside la comitiva y se ocupará de la recepción en dicha villa. Con este motivo, tal como describe la crónica de Juan II, se realizarán durante cuatro días unas fiestas de una espectacularidad y singularidad tan extraordinaria que el cronista habrá de aludir a ellas como «las mayores fiestas que en España se vieron». En este artículo se aborda el estudio de estas fiestas en el marco de su contexto histórico.In July 1440, the entourage that accompanied the Princess Blanca of Navarre for her wedding to Prince Henry of Castile arrived at the town of Briviesca, which belonged to the Count of Haro. At that time, he was the new strongman at the Castilian court and the one who was going to preside over the entourage and would be in charge of the reception in that town. On this occasion, as described in the chronicle of John II, a spectacular and unique festival will be held for four days, so extraordinary that the chronicler will refer to it as «the biggest festivities ever seen in Spain». In this article, we will study these festivities in their historical context

New analysis and estimations of atmospheric attenuation at 100 GHz using meteorological data in Madrid

Atmospheric propagation at frequencies within the THz domain are deeply affected by the influence of the composition and phenomena of the troposphere. This paper is focused on the estimation of first order statistics of total attenuation under non-rainy conditions at 100 GHz. With this purpose, a yearly meteorological database from Madrid, including radiosoundings, SYNOP observations and co-site rain gauge, have been used in order to calculate attenuation due to atmospheric gases and clouds, as well as to introduce and evaluate a rain detection method. This method allows to filter out rain events and refine the statistics of total attenuation under the scenarios under study. It is expected that the behavior of the statistics would be closest to the ones obtained by experimental techniques under similar conditions

Experimental and numerical Investigation on the design of a bioinspired PEM fuel cell

Proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) are promising energy devices that directly convert chemical energy of fuels such as hydrogen to useful work with negligible environmental impact and high efficiency. The channel geometry of the Bipolar Plate (BP) has a considerably impact on the PEMFC performance. BP designs based on nature-inspired structures such as leaves, lungs or sponges have been explored to date with success but have not yet achieved their full potential. With the objective of researching new flow field designs with enhanced operation, this work presents an experimental analysis of a novel bioinspired design of the channels of a PEMFC. Starting from a CFD fluid flow analysis of different novel initial biomimetic designs, the most promising one was selected, manufactured and tested experimentally. Experimental results comprise polarization and power curves for a comprehensive set of operating conditions. Results were analysed and compared against a reference parallel-serpentine model. Results indicated that the proposed novel biomimetic design is particularly suited for improving water management at high reactants humidity reaching out a peak power a 6.0% higher in comparison with the reference design. Future research should further develop novel design variants and analyze water distribution within the channels

lme4qtl: linear mixed models with flexible covariance structure for genetic studies of related individuals.

BACKGROUND: Quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping in genetic data often involves analysis of correlated observations, which need to be accounted for to avoid false association signals. This is commonly performed by modeling such correlations as random effects in linear mixed models (LMMs). The R package lme4 is a well-established tool that implements major LMM features using sparse matrix methods; however, it is not fully adapted for QTL mapping association and linkage studies. In particular, two LMM features are lacking in the base version of lme4: the definition of random effects by custom covariance matrices; and parameter constraints, which are essential in advanced QTL models. Apart from applications in linkage studies of related individuals, such functionalities are of high interest for association studies in situations where multiple covariance matrices need to be modeled, a scenario not covered by many genome-wide association study (GWAS) software. RESULTS: To address the aforementioned limitations, we developed a new R package lme4qtl as an extension of lme4. First, lme4qtl contributes new models for genetic studies within a single tool integrated with lme4 and its companion packages. Second, lme4qtl offers a flexible framework for scenarios with multiple levels of relatedness and becomes efficient when covariance matrices are sparse. We showed the value of our package using real family-based data in the Genetic Analysis of Idiopathic Thrombophilia 2 (GAIT2) project. CONCLUSIONS: Our software lme4qtl enables QTL mapping models with a versatile structure of random effects and efficient computation for sparse covariances. lme4qtl is available at https://github.com/variani/lme4qtl

Atmospheric Propagation at 100 and 300 GHz: Assessment of a Method to Identify Rainy Conditions during Radiosoundings

The influence of atmospheric gases and tropospheric phenomena becomes more relevant at frequencies within the THz band (100 GHz to 10 THz), severely affecting the propagation conditions. The use of radiosoundings in propagation studies is a well established measurement technique in order to collect information about the vertical structure of the atmosphere, from which gaseous and cloud attenuation can be estimated with the use of propagation models. However, some of these prediction models are not suitable to be used under rainy conditions. In the present study, a method to identify the presence of rainy conditions during radiosoundings is introduced, with the aim of filtering out these events from yearly statistics of predicted atmospheric attenuation. The detection procedure is based on the analysis of a set of parameters, some of them extracted from synoptical observations of weather (SYNOP reports) and other derived from radiosonde observations (RAOBs). The performance of the method has been evaluated under different climatic conditions, corresponding to three locations in Spain, where colocated rain gauge data were available. Rain events detected by the method have been compared with those precipitations identified by the rain gauge. The pertinence Received 26 June 2012, Accepted 31 July 2012, Scheduled 15 August 2012 * Corresponding author: Gustavo Adolfo Siles Soria ([email protected]). 258 Siles et al. of the method is discussed on the basis of an analysis of cumulative distributions of total attenuation at 100 and 300 GHz. This study demonstrates that the proposed method can be useful to identify events probably associated to rainy conditions. Hence, it can be considered as a suitable algorithm in order to filter out this kind of events from annual attenuation statistics

A new gene-based association test for genome-wide association studies

Genome-wide association studies are widely used today to discover genetic factors that modify the risk of complex diseases. Usually, these methods work in a SNP-by-SNP fashion. We present a gene-based test that can be applied in the context of genome-wide association studies. We compare both strategies, SNP-based and gene-based, in a sample of cases and controls for rheumatoid arthritis