The Building Services of the Juan de la Cierva Trust

The Juan de la Cierva Trust headquarters building, located in Madrid, is a great example of the outstanding Spanish architecture after the national Civil War, and reflects the situation of Spanish architecture and technology in the 40’s, a desire to advance with not many material or economical resources, with ambition and by using the technical knowledge of what was being done abroad, and how it could be launched in Spain. Spain was recovering in the technological and architectural fields, and the building was intended as a revolution compared to others constructed shortly before. However, the architects did not fully master the new stylistic tools (although they knew of them), so the HVAC technology and the solar passive design are of primary importance in the designing of the building. The article will describe the main architectural aspects including its history and the biography of the architects, the technological building systems and the solar design, concluding on how this knowledgecould be use nowadays

The Velocity Dispersion Profile of the Remote Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy Leo I: A Tidal Hit and Run?

(abridged) We present kinematic results for a sample of 387 stars located near Leo I based on spectra obtained with the MMT's Hectochelle spectrograph near the MgI/Mgb lines. We estimate the mean velocity error of our sample to be 2.4 km/s, with a systematic error of < 1 km/s. We produce a final sample of 328 Leo I red giant members, from which we measure a mean heliocentric radial velocity of 282.9 +/- 0.5 km/s, and a mean radial velocity dispersion of 9.2 +/- 0.4 km/s for Leo I. The dispersion profile of Leo I is flat out to beyond its classical `tidal' radius. We fit the profile to a variety of equilibrium dynamical models and can strongly rule out models where mass follows light. Two-component Sersic+NFW models with tangentially anisotropic velocity distributions fit the dispersion profile well, with isotropic models ruled out at a 95% confidence level. The mass and V-band mass-to-light ratio of Leo I estimated from equilibrium models are in the ranges 5-7 x 10^7 M_sun and 9-14 (solar units), respectively, out to 1 kpc from the galaxy center. Leo I members located outside a `break radius' (about 400 arcsec = 500 pc) exhibit significant velocity anisotropy, whereas stars interior appear to have isotropic kinematics. We propose the break radius represents the location of the tidal radius of Leo I at perigalacticon of a highly elliptical orbit. Our scenario can account for the complex star formation history of Leo I, the presence of population segregation within the galaxy, and Leo I's large outward velocity from the Milky Way. The lack of extended tidal arms in Leo I suggests the galaxy has experienced only one perigalactic passage with the Milky Way, implying that Leo I may have been injected into its present orbit by a third body a few Gyr before perigalacticon.Comment: ApJ accepted, 23 figures, access paper as a pdf file at http://www.astro.lsa.umich.edu/~mmateo/research.htm

Dark matter annihilation and decay profiles for the Reticulum II dwarf spheroidal galaxy

The dwarf spheroidal galaxies (dSph) of the Milky Way are among the most attractive targets for indirect searches of dark matter. In this work, we reconstruct the dark matter annihilation (J-factor) and decay profiles for the newly discovered dSph Reticulum II. Using an optimized spherical Jeans analysis of kinematic data obtained from the Michigan/Magellan Fiber System (M2FS), we find Reticulum II's J-factor to be among the largest of any Milky Way dSph. We have checked the robustness of this result against several ingredients of the analysis. Unless it suffers from tidal disruption or significant inflation of its velocity dispersion from binary stars, Reticulum II may provide a unique window on dark matter particle properties.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures. Match the ApJL accepted versio

The Case Against Cosmology

It is argued that some of the recent claims for cosmology are grossly overblown. Cosmology rests on a very small database: it suffers from many fundamental difficulties as a science (if it is a science at all) whilst observations of distant phenomena are difficult to make and harder to interpret. It is suggested that cosmological inferences should be tentatively made and sceptically received.Comment: 9 pages, no figure

EGNOS Terrestrial Regional Augmentation Networks Based on AIS for River Information Services

Within the ESA Advanced Research Telecommunications program ARTES-5, the project GALEWAT (Galileo and EGNOS for Waterway Transport) aims at introducing EGNOS into River Information Services (RIS) through the Automatic Identification System (AIS), a link that is mandatory for seagoing vessels above 300 GT. The GALEWAT project comprises several phases: During the initial definition phase, the system architecture and user equipment have been defined in line with standards and international recommendations. This phase was followed by the implementation phase, aiming at developing and setting up the equipment. Finally, the project will be completed by an extensive demonstration phase, which is currently under execution. Up to now, public GALEWAT demonstrations in Vienna (Austria), and Lisbon (Portugal) have been successfully executed. The last demonstration in Constanta (Romania) will take place in fall 2005. These demonstration sites have been chosen to test and demonstrate the GALEWAT system in different environments: river navigation, harbour approach, and open sea operations. The paper gives a short idea of River Information Services and an overview of the GALEWAT project. The main part concentrates on the presentation of field measurement results, which were collected in Lisbon, to show the performance of the GALEWAT concept. Finally, the paper presents an overview of user feedback resulting from the first two public demonstrations. Reprinted with permission from The Institute of Navigation (http://ion.org/) and The Proceedings of the 18th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation, (pp. 827-832). Fairfax, VA: The Institute of Navigation

What can biologists say about galaxy evolution ?

It is possible to borrow from a topic of biology called phylogenetic systematics, concepts and tools for a logical and objective classification of galaxies. It is based on observable properties of objects - characters - either qualitative (like morphology) or quantitative (like luminosity, mass or spectrum). Distance analysis can readily be performed using a method called phenetics and based on characters. But the most promising approach is cladistics. It makes use of characters that can exist in at least two states, one being ancestral and the other one derived. Objects are gathered depending on the derived states they share. We illustrate a first application of this method to astrophysics, that we name astrocladistics, with dwarf galaxies from the Local Group.Comment: Kiel Euroconference (2002) "The Evolution of Galaxies III. From Simple Approaches to Self-Consistent Models", Kluwer Academic Publishers (in press