Inmovilización de Oenococcus oeni en matrices de Alginato-sílice para el desarrollo de la fermentación maloláctica en vinos tintos

El presente estudio, se elabora para mejorar un nuevo método para la realización de la fermentación maloláctica en vinos, como es el empleo de bacterias inmovilizadas. Con este sistema, se pretende conseguir un cultivo microbiológico más adaptado a las condiciones actuales, muy marcadas por el cambio climático, y conseguir fermentaciones más rápidas, evitando el tiempo de desarrollo del cultivo. Se empleó un método de inmovilización en esferas de alginato-silice, en el que se gelifica alginato de sodio en presencia de cloruro cálcico, y posteriormente se recubre con 3-aminopropiltrietoxisilano (APTES) por inmersión en agitación. Se estudió la resistencia mecánica de las esferas, la capacidad de retención de bacterias y la cinética de fermentación, variando las concentraciones de APTES y los pH de la disolución de recubrimiento.Grado en Enologí

Joint interpretation of magnetotelluric, seismic, and well-log data in Hontomín (Spain)

Acknowledgements. This work is dedicated to the memory of Andrés Pérez-Estaún, brilliant scientist, colleague, and friend. The authors sincerely thank Ian Ferguson and an anonymous reviewer for their useful comments on the manuscript. Xènia Ogaya is currently supported in the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies by a Science Foundation Ireland grant IRECCSEM (SFI grant 12/IP/1313). Juan Alcalde is funded by NERC grant NE/M007251/1, on interpretational uncertainty. Juanjo Ledo, Pilar Queralt and Alex Marcuello thank Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad and EU Feder Funds through grant CGL2014- 54118-C2-1-R. Funding for this Project has been partially provided by the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade, through the CIUDEN-CSIC-Inst. Jaume Almera agreement (ALM-09-027: Characterization, Development and Validation of Seismic Techniques applied to CO2 Geological Storage Sites), the CIUDEN-Fundació Bosch i Gimpera agreement (ALM-09-009 Development and Adaptation of Electromagnetic techniques: Characterisation of Storage Sites) and the project PIERCO2 (Progress In Electromagnetic Research for CO2 geological reservoirs CGL2009-07604). The CIUDEN project is co-financed by the European Union through the Technological Development Plant of Compostilla OXYCFB300 Project (European Energy Programme for Recovery).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Against the flow: evidence of multiple recent invasions of warmer continental shelf waters by a Southern Ocean brittle star

The Southern Ocean is anomalously rich in benthos. This biodiversity is native, mostly endemic and perceived to be uniquely threatened from climate- and anthropogenically- mediated invasions. Major international scientific effort throughout the last decade has revealed more connectivity than expected between fauna north and south of the worlds strongest marine barrier – the Polar Front (the strongest jet of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current). To date though, no research has demonstrated any radiations of marine taxa out from the Southern Ocean, except at abyssal depths (where conditions differ much less). Our phylogeographic investigation of one of the most ubiquitous and abundant clades at high southern latitudes, the ophiuroids (brittlestars), shows that one of them, Ophiura lymani, has gone against the flow. Remarkably our genetic data suggest that O. lymani has successfully invaded the South American shelf from Antarctica at least three times, in recent (Pleistocene) radiation. Many previous studies have demonstrated links within clades across the PF this is the first in which northwards directional movement of a shelf-restricted species is the only convincing explanation. Rapid, recent, regional warming is likely to facilitate multiple range shift invasions into the Southern Ocean, whereas movement of cold adapted fauna (considered highly stenothermal) out of the Antarctic to warmer shelves has, until now, seemed highly unlikely

The End of Liberal Peacebuilding

This article analyses the transformation in the conceptual understanding of liberal peacebuilding over the last few decades. It conceptualizes the fundamental shift in the understanding of international peacebuilding as one from the universalist liberal perspectives of the 1990s, through the institutionalist impasse of peacebuilding-as-statebuilding in the 2000s and the problems of the ‘local turn’, towards the dominance of the pragmatic perspective by the mid-2010s. These are heuristically framed in terms of the shift from peacebuilding interventions within the problematic of causation to those concerned with the pragmatic management of effects. In this shift, the means and mechanisms of international peacebuilding have been transformed, no longer focused on the universal application of Western causal knowledge through policy interventions but rather on the effects of specific and unique local and organic processes at work in societies themselves. The focus on effects recasts problems in increasingly organic ways, suggesting that artificial or hubristic attempts at socio-political intervention should be excluded or minimized. The conclusion is that the decline of modernist political framings and broader modernist understandings of causality have been central to the erasure of the particular space and goals of liberal peacebuilding, thereby transforming peacebuilding as an interventionary project. This article summarises the transformation in the conceptual understanding of liberal international peacebuilding over the last few decades. It suggests that the conceptual shifts can be usefully interrogated through their imbrication within broader epistemological shifts highlighting the limits of causal knowledge claims. These are heuristically framed in terms of the shift from peacebuilding interventions within the problematic of linear or universal framings of causation to those concerned with the pragmatic management of effects. In this shift, the means and mechanisms of international peacebuilding have been transformed, no longer focused on the ‘one-size-fits-all’ approaches of generalising policy approaches but rather on the effects of specific and unique local and organic processes at work in societies themselves. The focus on effects takes the conceptualization of international peacebuilding out of the traditional terminological lexicon of politics and international relations theory and instead recasts problems in increasingly organic ways, suggesting that artificial or hubristic attempts at socio-political intervention should be excluded or minimized. This fundamental shift in the understanding of liberal peacebuilding is grasped as one from the universalist liberal perspectives of the 1990s, through the institutionalist impasse of peacebuilding-as-statebuilding in the 2000s and the problems of the ‘local turn’, towards the dominance of the pragmatic perspective by the mid-2010s. In the pragmatic perspective, to all intents and purposes, peacebuilding no longer exists as a separate policy area. This shift reflects both the declining relevance of traditional disciplinary understandings of liberal modernist political categories and an increasing scepticism towards Western, liberal, or modernist forms of knowledge. Both of these are considered here. The conclusion is thus that the decline of both modernist political framings and broader modernist understandings of causality have been central to the erasure of the particular space and goals of liberal peacebuilding. Over the last few decades, debates over international peacebuilding saw a shift from political concerns of sovereign rights under international law to concerns of knowledge claims of cause and effect, highlighted through the problematization of peacebuilding policy interventions’ unintended consequences. This can be illustrated through contrasting the difference between the confidence – today, critics would, of course, say ‘hubris’ – of 1990s’ understandings of the transformative possibilities held out by the promise of international peacebuilding with the much more pessimistic approaches prevalent today. In the late 1990s, leading advocates understood international peacebuilding intervention as a clear exercise of Western power in terms of a ‘solutionist’ approach to problems that would otherwise have increasingly problematic knock-on effects in a global and interconnected world. Twenty-five years later, analysts are much more likely to highlight that the complexity of global interactions and processes, in fact, mitigate against ambitious schemas for intervention – aspiring to address problems at the level either of universalizable or generalizable solutions, exported from the West (‘top-down’ interventions), or through ambitious projects of social and political engineering (attempting to transform society through institutionalist approaches of peacebuilding-as-statebuilding). When peacebuilding is condemned for being ‘liberal’ today, this is much more likely to be a pragmatist critique of the epistemological or cause-and-effect assumptions involved in external claims of peacebuilding effectiveness, rather than a statement concerning any understanding of the rights of sovereignty, self-government, or political equality. ‘Liberal’ thus equates to the modernist episteme rather than to political or philosophical questions of sovereignty and individual rights. Today, it is increasingly argued that causal relations cannot be grasped in the frameworks which constituted liberal international peacebuilding intervention in terms of either ‘top-down’ liberal universalism or ‘bottom-up’ institutional capacity-building understandings of the mechanisms of socio-political transformation. In a more complex world, the lines of debate and discussion have shifted away from a political critique of peacebuilding, grounded in political theory and claims of rights to self-government vis-à-vis external hegemony, to an epistemic critique of linear or reductionist assumptions of policy efficacy. Liberal peacebuilding has thus been discredited not on traditional ‘political’ grounds but on the ‘pragmatist’ basis of a growing awareness that any forms of external peacebuilding intervention or social engineering will have unintended side effects. It is in the attempt to minimize these unintended consequences that the focus of policymakers has shifted to the pragmatic governance of effects (focusing on the fluid and specific context of engagements) rather than seeking to address ostensible universalist or structural cause-and-effect understandings of ‘root causes’. For example, rather than seeking to solve conflict or to end it (resulting in possibly problematic unintended consequences) international peacebuilding intervention is increasingly articulated as ‘managing’ conflict, developing societal strategies to cope better and thereby limit its effects. Focusing on managing effects rather than engaging with causative chains makes the forms and practices of peacebuilding intervention quite different. The shift beyond conceptual discussions of rights and sovereignty and towards epistemic questions of knowledge is undertaken here through developing Giorgio Agamben’s heuristic framing of a shift from a concern with causation to that of effects, which he rightly understood to be a depoliticizing move. Debates about addressing causation involved socio-political analysis and policy choices, putting decision-making and the question of sovereign power and political accountability at the forefront. Causal relations assume power operates ‘from the top down’ with policy outcomes understood to be direct products of conscious choices, powers, and capacities. Agamben argued that whilst the governing of causes was the essence of politics, the pragmatic governance of effects reversed the political process. The governance of effects can therefore be seen as a pragmatic retreat from the commitments of the international peacebuilding approaches of the 1990s and 2000s, in terms of both resources and policy goals. However, the pragmatic shift from causation to effects involved a shifting conceptualization of peacebuilding itself; it is this conceptual connection that is the central concern of this article. Peacebuilding policy intervention conceptualized as the governance of effects relocates the subject position of the peacebuilder in relation to both the problem under consideration, which is no longer amenable to external policy solutions, and the society or community being peacebuilt, which is no longer constructed as lacking knowledge or resources, but as being the key agency of peacebuilding transformation. Transformation comes not through external cause-and-effect policy interventions but through the facilitation or empowerment of local agential capacities. The regulation of effects thus shifts the focus away from the formal public, legal and political sphere to the more organic and generative sphere of everyday life. The management of effects involves on-going facilitative engagement in social processes and evades the question of government as political decision-making

Re-evaluation of individual diameter : height allometric models to improve biomass estimation of tropical trees

The first author was supported by the European Union under a IEF Marie-Curie Action.Accurate estimation of tree biomass is necessary to provide realistic values of the carbon stored in the terrestrial biosphere. A recognized source of errors in tree above-ground biomass (AGB) estimation is introduced when individual tree height values (H) are not directly measured but estimated from diameter at breast height (DBH) using allometric equations. In this paper we evaluate the performance of 12 alternative DBH : H equations and compare their effects on AGB estimation for three tropical forests that occur in contrasting climatic and altitudinal zones. We found that fitting a 3-parameter Weibull function using data collected locally generated the lowest errors and bias in H estimation, and that equations fitted to these data were more accurate than equations with parameters derived from the literature. For computing AGB, the introduced error values differed notably among DBH : H allometric equations, and in most cases showed a clear bias that resulted in either over- or under-estimation of AGB. Fitting the three-parameter Weibull function minimized errors in AGB estimates in our study and we recommend its widespread adoption for carbon stock estimation. We conclude that many previous studies are likely to present biased estimates of AGB due to the method of H estimation.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Is Anyone Looking? Mitigating Shoulder Surfing on Public Displays through Awareness and Protection

Displays are growing in size, and are increasingly deployed in semi-public and public areas. When people use these public displays to pursue personal work, they expose their activities and sensitive data to passers-by. In most cases, such shoulder-surfing by others is likely voyeuristic vs. a deliberate attempt to steal information. Even so, safeguards are needed. Our goal is to mitigate shoulder-surfing problems in such settings. Our method leverages notions of territoriality and proxemics, where we sense and take action based on the spatial relationships between the passerby, the user of the display, and the display itself. First, we provide participants with awareness of shoulder-surfing moments, which in turn helps both parties regulate their behaviours and mediate further social interactions. Second, we provide methods that protect information when shoulder-surfing is detected. Here, users can move or hide information through easy to perform explicit actions. Alternately, the system itself can mask information from the passerby’s view when it detects shoulder-surfing moments

Micro-scale habitat associations of woody plants in a neotropical cloud forest

Species?habitat associations may contribute to the maintenance of species richness in tropical forests, but previous research has been conducted almost exclusively in lowland forests and has emphasized the importance of topography and edaphic conditions. Is the distribution of woody plant species in a Peruvian cloud forest determined by microhabitat conditions? What is the role of environmental characteristics and forest structure in habitat partitioning in a tropical cloud forest? We examined species?habitat associations in three 1-ha plots using the torus-translation method. We used three different criteria to define habitats for habitat partitioning analyses, based on microtopography, forest structure and both sets of factors. The number of species associated either positively or negatively with each habitat was assessed. Habitats defined on the basis of environmental conditions and forest structure discriminated a greater number of positive and negative associations at the scale of our analyses in a tropical cloud forest. Both topographic conditions and forest structure contribute to small-scale microhabitat partitioning of woody plant species in a Peruvian tropical cloud forest. Nevertheless, canopy species were most correlated with the distribution of environmental variables, while understorey species displayed associations with forest structure

La Federación de Rusia: un análisis de su relación con América Latina, el Caribe y África en el período 2000-2022 a la luz de su Nueva Estrategia de Política Exterior

Since the very beginning of this century, the Russian Federation has promoted, in its relations with LatinAmerica, the Caribbean and Africa, some issues from the 2023 New Concept for Foreign Policy recentlydefined. In a period featured by the systemic and multidimensional crisis of capitalism, Russia has considered,opportunely, the contribution of both regions in the search for a new kind of financial and economicrelations. As a consequence, such an approach has a strategic nature: Latin America and the Caribbeanoffer wide possibilities for an opening of diverse and innovative economic fields; while Africa continues tobe an important area of geopolitical confrontation, although on a smaller scale than in other regions. Taking into account the previous explanation, this paper evaluates the state of the relations between the Russian Federation and Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa, respectively, in the prior period to the approval of the New Russian Strategy for Foreign Affairs (2000-2022). For this, the state of relations of both regions with the United States of America in the same period of study and the examination of the lines proposed in the 2023 new Russian concept are key elements for clarifying to what extent we can appreciate the opening or the consolidation of "new" perspectives of rapprochement in both directions, the Latin American and the African ones.Desde los propios inicios del presente siglo, la Federación de Rusia ya ponía en práctica, en sus relacionescon América Latina, el Caribe y África, líneas del Nuevo Concepto de la Política Exterior definido en2023. En un periodo marcado por la crisis sistémica y multidimensional del capitalismo, Rusia ha valorado,oportunamente, la contribución de ambas regiones en la búsqueda de relaciones financieras y económicasinternacionales de un nuevo tipo. De ahí que, tal aproximación posea un carácter estratégico: AméricaLatina y el Caribe ofrecen amplias posibilidades de apertura de frentes económicos diversos y novedosos;mientras que África continúa siendo un escenario de confrontación geopolítica importante, aunque a menor escala que en otras regiones. Teniendo en cuenta lo anterior, la presente investigación evalúa el estado de las relaciones de la Federación de Rusia con América Latina y el Caribe y África, respectivamente, en el periodo previo (2000-2022) a la aprobación de la Nueva Estrategia de Política Exterior Rusa. Para ello, el estado de las relaciones de ambas regiones con los Estados Unidos de América en el mismo periodo de estudio y el examen de las líneas propuestas en el “nuevo concepto ruso” de 2023 son elementos clave para esclarecer hasta qué punto se abren o consolidan “nuevas” perspectivas de acercamiento en las dos direcciones, latinoamericana y africana

La Federación de Rusia: un análisis de su relación con América Latina, el Caribe y África en el período 2000-2022 a la luz de su Nueva Estrategia de Política Exterior

Desde los propios inicios del presente siglo, la Federación de Rusia ya ponía en práctica, en sus relaciones con América Latina, el Caribe y África, líneas del Nuevo Concepto de la Política Exterior definido en 2023. En un periodo marcado por la crisis sistémica y multidimensional del capitalismo, Rusia ha valorado, oportunamente, la contribución de ambas regiones en la búsqueda de relaciones financieras y económicas internacionales de un nuevo tipo. De ahí que, tal aproximación posea un carácter estratégico: América Latina y el Caribe ofrecen amplias posibilidades de apertura de frentes económicos diversos y novedosos; mientras que África continúa siendo un escenario de confrontación geopolítica importante, aunque a menor escala que en otras regiones. Teniendo en cuenta lo anterior, la presente investigación evalúa el estado de las relaciones de la Federación de Rusia con América Latina y el Caribe y África, respectivamente, en el periodo previo (2000-2022) a la aprobación de la Nueva Estrategia de Política Exterior Rusa. Para ello, el estado de las relaciones de ambas regiones con los Estados Unidos de América en el mismo periodo de estudio y el examen de las líneas propuestas en el “nuevo concepto ruso” de 2023 son elementos clave para esclarecer hasta qué punto se abren o consolidan “nuevas” perspectivas de acercamiento en las dos direcciones, latinoamericana y africana