427 research outputs found
Status of marine protected areas in Egypt
Egypt has sought to protect its natural resources and marine biodiversity by establishing a network of six MPAs that are generally located in the Gulf of Aqaba and the Red Sea; most of them include interconnected marine and terrestrial sectors based on conserving coral reefs and
accompanying systems. We assessed the present status of MPA networks that showed a set of important results manifested in some strengths (i.e. proper selection according to specific criteria, management plans, etc.), and also some weaknesses (i.e. a relatively small protected proportion of the Egyptian marine territorial waters, significant pressures mainly by tourism activities, etc.). Finally, some recommendations are proposed
from this work (i.e. incorporate more habitats that are not well represented in the network, especially on the Mediterranean Sea; establishing a touristic carrying capacity of each area; etc.) to improve the current situation.
Key words: Marine reserves, Fishing, Tourism, Conservation, Sustainable development, Egypt.Egipto ha establecido una red de seis áreas marinas protegidas (AMPs), situadas principalmente en el Golfo de Aqaba y el mar Rojo para proteger sus recursos naturales y su biodiversidad marina. La mayoría incluyen sectores terrestres y marinos interconectados con el fin de conservar los arrecifes de coral y otros sistemas acompañantes. El estado actual de la red de AMPs se manifiesta mediante algunos puntos fuertes (selección basada en criterios apropiados, existencia de planes de gestión, etc.) y también algunos puntos débiles (protección de una proporción relativamente pequeña de
las aguas territoriales egipcias; presiones significativas de algunas actividades, principalmente el turismo, etc.). Finalmente, se proponen algunas recomendaciones (incorporación de más hábitats que no están bien representados en la red actual, particularmente en el Mediterráneo; establecimiento de una capacidad de carga turística para cada área; etc.) para mejorar la situación actual.
Palabras clave: Reservas marinas, Pesca, Turismo, Conservación, Desarrollo sostenible, Egipto.Egypt has sought to protect its natural resources and marine biodiversity by establishing a network of six MPAs that are generally located in the Gulf of Aqaba and the Red Sea; most of them include interconnected marine and terrestrial sectors based on conserving coral reefs and
accompanying systems. We assessed the present status of MPA networks that showed a set of important results manifested in some strengths (i.e. proper selection according to specific criteria, management plans, etc.), and also some weaknesses (i.e. a relatively small protected proportion of the Egyptian marine territorial waters, significant pressures mainly by tourism activities, etc.). Finally, some recommendations are proposed
from this work (i.e. incorporate more habitats that are not well represented in the network, especially on the Mediterranean Sea; establishing a touristic carrying capacity of each area; etc.) to improve the current situation.
Key words: Marine reserves, Fishing, Tourism, Conservation, Sustainable development, Egypt
Diagnostic accuracy of sliding sign for detecting pouch of Douglas obliteration and bowel involvement in women with suspected endometriosis: systematic review and meta-analysis
The aim of this systematic review and meta-analysis was to evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of the sliding sign on transvaginal ultrasound (TVS) in detecting pouch of Douglas obliteration and bowel involvement in patients with suspected endometriosis, using laparoscopy as the reference standard
Coronal abundances of X-ray bright pre-main sequence stars in the Taurus Molecular Cloud
We studied the thermal properties and chemical composition of the X-ray
emitting plasma of a sample of bright members of the Taurus Molecular Cloud to
investigate possible differences among classical and weak-lined T Tauri stars
and possible dependences of the abundances on the stellar activity level and/or
on the presence of accretion/circumstellar material. We used medium-resolution
X-ray spectra obtained with the sensitive EPIC/PN camera in order to analyse
the possible sample. The PN spectra of 20 bright (L_X ~ 10^30 - 10^31 erg/s)
Taurus members, with at least ~ 4500 counts, were fitted using thermal models
of optically thin plasma with two components and variable abundances of O, Ne,
Mg, Si, S, Ar, Ca, and Fe. Extensive preliminary investigations were employed
to study the performances of the PN detectors regarding abundance
determinations, and finally to check the results of the fittings. We found that
the observed X-ray emission of the studied stars can be attributed to coronal
plasma having similar thermal properties and chemical composition both in the
classical and in the weak-lined T Tauri stars. The results of the fittings did
not show evidence for correlations of the abundance patterns with activity or
accretion/disk presence. The iron abundance of these active stars is
significantly lower than (~ 0.2 of) the solar photospheric value. An indication
of slightly different coronal properties in stars with different spectral type
is found from this study. G-type and early K-type stars have, on average,
slightly higher Fe abundances (Fe ~ 0.24 solar) with respect to stars with
later spectral type (Fe ~ 0.15 solar), confirming previous findings from
high-resolution X-ray spectroscopy; stars of the former group are also found to
have, on average, hotter coronae.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figures, to be published in Astronomy & Astrophysic
Clostridioides difficile infection in a long-term convalescence hospital: A real tale of pitfalls and outdated therapy
Objective. The aim of the study was to know the char-acteristics and risk factors of Clostridioides difficile infection (CDI) in a long-term hospital is key to improve its manage-ment.
Material and methods. Retrospective study with 37 pa-tients, along 43 months. We describe demographic variables, clinical data, time to diagnosis, treatment, and evolution.
Results. Analysis of 46 episodes (37 patients, mean age=82.2 years). 77.8% were absolutely dependent, 41.7% had chronic kidney disease, 64.9% had received antibiotics in the previous three months, 40.5% received antibiotics at diagnosis. It was the first episode in 78.4%, and first recurrence in 21.6%. Therapy was started in the first 24 hours after diagnosis in 89.2%, mostly metronidazole. 83.3% recovered, 3 patients died from CDI, diagnosis was registered in the discharge report in 91.1%.
Conclusions. Previous antibiotic therapy, high grade of dependency and renal failure were the main risk factors. There is room for improvement in CDI management at our hospital.
Objective. The aim of the study was to know the characteristics and risk factors of Clostridioides difficile infection (CDI) in a long-term hospital is key to improve its management.
Material and methods. Retrospective study with 37 patients, along 43 months. We describe demographic variables, clinical data, time to diagnosis, treatment, and evolution.
Results. Analysis of 46 episodes (37 patients, mean age=82.2 years). 77.8% were absolutely dependent, 41.7% had chronic kidney disease, 64.9% had received antibiotics in the previous three months, 40.5% received antibiotics at diagnosis. It was the first episode in 78.4%, and first recurrence in 21.6%. Therapy was started in the first 24 hours after diagnosis in 89.2%, mostly metronidazole. 83.3% recovered, 3 patients died from CDI, diagnosis was registered in the discharge report in 91.1%.
Conclusions. Previous antibiotic therapy, high grade of dependency and renal failure were the main risk factors. There is room for improvement in CDI management at our hospital
HST PanCET program: A Cloudy Atmosphere for the promising JWST target WASP-101b
We present results from the first observations of the Hubble Space Telescope
(HST) Panchromatic Comparative Exoplanet Treasury (PanCET) program for
WASP-101b, a highly inflated hot Jupiter and one of the community targets
proposed for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Early Release Science (ERS)
program. From a single HST Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) observation, we find that
the near-infrared transmission spectrum of WASP-101b contains no significant
HO absorption features and we rule out a clear atmosphere at 13{\sigma}.
Therefore, WASP-101b is not an optimum target for a JWST ERS program aimed at
observing strong molecular transmission features. We compare WASP-101b to the
well studied and nearly identical hot Jupiter WASP-31b. These twin planets show
similar temperature-pressure profiles and atmospheric features in the
near-infrared. We suggest exoplanets in the same parameter space as WASP-101b
and WASP-31b will also exhibit cloudy transmission spectral features. For
future HST exoplanet studies, our analysis also suggests that a lower count
limit needs to be exceeded per pixel on the detector in order to avoid unwanted
instrumental systematics.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, 1 table, Accepted to ApJ
Estimating post-editing effort : a study on human judgements, task-based and reference-based metrics of MT quality
Devising metrics to assess translation quality has always been at the core of machine translation (MT) research. Traditional automatic reference-based metrics, such as BLEU, have shown correlations with human judgements of adequacy and fluency and have been paramount for the advancement of MT system development. Crowd-sourcing has popularised and enabled the scalability of metrics based on human judgements, such as subjective direct assessments (DA) of adequacy, that are believed to be more reliable than reference-based automatic metrics. Finally, task-based measurements, such as post-editing time, are expected to provide a more detailed evaluation of the usefulness of translations for a specific task. Therefore, while DA averages adequacy judgements to obtain an appraisal of (perceived) quality independently of the task, and reference-based automatic metrics try to objectively estimate quality also in a task-independent way, task-based metrics are measurements obtained either during or after performing a specific task. In this paper we argue that, although expensive, task-based measurements are the most reliable when estimating MT quality in a specific task; in our case, this task is post-editing. To that end, we report experiments on a dataset with newly-collected post-editing indicators and show their usefulness when estimating post-editing effort. Our results show that task-based metrics comparing machine-translated and post-edited versions are the best at tracking post-editing effort, as expected. These metrics are followed by DA, and then by metrics comparing the machine-translated version and independent references. We suggest that MT practitioners should be aware of these differences and acknowledge their implications when deciding how to evaluate MT for post-editing purposes
A microscopic model for thin film spreading
A microscopic, driven lattice gas model is proposed for the dynamics and
spatio-temporal fluctuations of the precursor film observed in spreading
experiments. Matter is transported both by holes and particles, and the
distribution of each can be described by driven diffusion with a moving
boundary. This picture leads to a stochastic partial differential equation for
the shape of the boundary, which agrees with the simulations of the lattice
gas. Preliminary results for flow in a thermal gradient are discussed.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures. Submitte
Improved age constraints for the AB Dor quadruple system - The binary nature of AB Dor B
We present resolved NACO photometry of the close binary AB Dor B in H- and
Ks-band. AB Dor B is itself known to be a wide binary companion to AB Dor A,
which in turn has a very low-mass close companion named AB Dor C. These four
known components make up the young and dynamically interesting system AB Dor,
which will likely become a benchmark system for calibrating theoretical
pre-main sequence evolutionary mass tracks for low-mass stars. However, for
this purpose the actual age has to be known, and this subject has been a matter
of discussion in the recent scientific literature. We compare our resolved
photometry of AB Dor Ba and Bb with theoretical and empirical isochrones in
order to constrain the age of the system. This leads to an age estimate of
about 50 to 100 Myr. We discuss the implications of such an age range for the
case of AB Dor C, and compare with other results in the literature.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in A&
Detection of He I \AA{} absorption on HD 189733 b with CARMENES high-resolution transmission spectroscopy
We present three transit observations of HD 189733 b obtained with the
high-resolution spectrograph CARMENES at Calar Alto. A strong absorption signal
is detected in the near-infrared He I triplet at 10830 \AA{} in all three
transits. During mid-transit, the mean absorption level is %
measured in a 10 km s range at a net blueshift of km
s (10829.84--10830.57 \AA{}). The absorption signal exhibits radial
velocities of km s and km s during
ingress and egress, respectively; measured in the planetary rest frame. We show
that stellar activity related pseudo-signals interfere with the planetary
atmospheric absorption signal. They could contribute as much as 80% of the
observed signal and might also affect the radial velocity signature, but
pseudo-signals are very unlikely to explain the entire signal. The observed
line ratio between the two unresolved and the third line of the He I triplet is
, which strongly deviates from the value expected for an optically
thin atmospheres. When interpreted in terms of absorption in the planetary
atmosphere, this favors a compact helium atmosphere with an extent of only 0.2
planetary radii and a substantial column density on the order of cm. The observed radial velocities can be understood either in
terms of atmospheric circulation with equatorial superrotation or as a sign of
an asymmetric atmospheric component of evaporating material. We detect no clear
signature of ongoing evaporation, like pre- or post-transit absorption, which
could indicate material beyond the planetary Roche lobe, or radial velocities
in excess of the escape velocity. These findings do not contradict planetary
evaporation, but only show that the detected helium absorption in HD 189733 b
does not trace the atmospheric layers that show pronounced escape signatures.Comment: 13 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in A&
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