What is not seen of the pandemic. A scientific study from six Spanish universities analyzes the social behavior of the virus through 150.000 people to try to reduce its spread

En todo el mundo estamos viviendo la pandemia del COVID-19 y hemos visto cómo a lo largo de estos años en lo que el virus esta viviendo con nosotros, está afectando en gran nivel a la sociedad. Las medidas que cada país toma, para intentar frenar el avance del virus, en base a las predicciones que realizan los expertos encargados, son bien estudiadas para evitar el mayor caos posible en la sociedad. También hay muchos expertos que trabajan de forma independiente al Estado o en centros privados que realizan sus propias investigaciones y avanzan predicciones del COVID-19. Muchas de estás predicciones aparecen en los medios de comunicación social, y en ocasiones hacen contraste con otras predicciones sobre el número de contagios o fallecidos. Por lo tanto, las publicaciones sobre las predicciones, tanto en medios de comunicación social tradicionales como la televisión, la radio o los digitales, está afectando la salud mental de las personas. Ahora bien, a pesar del continuo aumento de fallecidos y de casos positivos, no hay que dejar de lado las enfermedades que afectan la salud mental como consecuencia de las medidas que aplica cada comunidad autónoma en base a las predicciones que hacen los centros privados o públicos. Estás enfermedades están afectando a gran cantidad de la población española, por lo tanto, la salud mental está siendo alterada desde una simple predicción. Es por ello que es importante hacer varias mediciones en base a qué grupo de edad es el más afectado, cuáles son las enfermedades más comunes o simplemente en que momento es cuando más personas padecen estos trastornos.All over the world we are living the COVID-19 pandemic and we have seen how over those two years in what the virus is living with us, it is affecting society on a great level. The measures that each country takes, to try to slow the advance of the virus, based on the predictions made by the experts in charge, are well studied to avoid as much chaos as possible in society. There are also many experts who work independently of the state or in private centers that conduct their own research and make predictions of COVID-19. Many of these predictions appear in the main media, and sometimes contrast with other predictions about the number of contagions or deaths from the pandemic. Therefore, publications on predictions, both in traditional media such as television, radio or new digital social media, are affecting people's mental health. However, despite the continuing increase in deaths and positive cases, diseases affecting mental health should not be set aside as a result of the measures implemented by each Autonomous Community on the basis of predictions made by private or public centers. These diseases are affecting a large number of the Spanish population, therefore mental health is being altered from a simple prediction. That is why it is important to make several measurements based on which age group is most affected, which social group is most affected, which are the most common diseases or simply when more people suffer from these disorders

“Fake News” or Real Science? Critical Thinking to Assess Information on COVID-19

Few people question the important role of critical thinking in students becoming active citizens; however, the way science is taught in schools continues to be more oriented toward “what to think” rather than “how to think.” Researchers understand critical thinking as a tool and a higher-order thinking skill necessary for being an active citizen when dealing with socio-scientific information and making decisions that affect human life, which the pandemic of COVID-19 provides many opportunities for. The outbreak of COVID-19 has been accompanied by what the World Health Organization (WHO) has described as a “massive infodemic.” Fake news covering all aspects of the pandemic spread rapidly through social media, creating confusion and disinformation. This paper reports on an empirical study carried out during the lockdown in Spain (March–May 2020) with a group of secondary students (N = 20) engaged in diverse online activities that required them to practice critical thinking and argumentation for dealing with coronavirus information and disinformation. The main goal is to examine students’ competence at engaging in argumentation as critical assessment in this context. Discourse analysis allows for the exploration of the arguments and criteria applied by students to assess COVID-19 news headlines. The results show that participants were capable of identifying true and false headlines and assessing the credibility of headlines by appealing to different criteria, although most arguments were coded as needing only a basic epistemic level of assessment, and only a few appealed to the criterion of scientific procedure when assessing the headlinesThis work was supported by the project ESPIGA, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Education and Universities, partly funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) Grant code: PGC2018-096581-B-C22S

Quantifying the impacts of ecological restoration on biodiversity and ecosystem services in agroecosystems: A global meta-analysis

Los apéndices, tablas y figuras que contiene el documento se localizan al final del mismo.Landscape transformation due to agriculture affects more than 40% of the planet’s land area and is the most important driver of losses of biodiversity and ecosystem services (ES) worldwide. Ecological restoration may significantly reduce these losses, but its effectiveness has not been systematically assessed in agroecosystems at the global level. We quantitatively meta-analyzed the results of 54 studies of how restoration actions reflecting the two contrasting strategies of land sparing and land sharing affect levels of biodiversity and ES in a wide variety of agroecosystems in 20 countries. Restoration increased overall biodiversity of all organism types by an average of 68%. It also increased the supply of many ES, in particular the levels of supporting ES by an average of 42% and levels of regulating ES by an average of 120% relative to levels in the pre-restoration agroecosystem. In fact, restored agroecosystems showed levels of biodiversity and supporting and regulating ES similar to those of reference ecosystems. Recovery levels did not correlate with the time since the last restoration action. Comparison of land sparing and land sharing as restoration strategies showed that while both were associated with similar biodiversity recovery, land sparing led to higher median ES response ratios. Passive and active restoration actions did not differ significantly in the levels of biodiversity or ES recovery. Biodiversity recovery positively correlated with ES recovery. We conclude that ecological restoration of agroecosystems is generally effective and can be recommended as a way to enhance biodiversity and supply of supporting and regulating ES in agricultural landscapes. Whether a land sharing or land sparing strategy is preferable remains an open question, and might be case dependent. Moreover, it is unclear whether crop production on restored land can meet future food production needs.Comunidad de MadridComisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología-CICY

Aniversario de Alfred Russel Wallace

ReviewReseñ

Covalent Immobilization of Antibodies through Tetrazine-TCO Reaction to Improve Sensitivity of ELISA Technique

This research was funded by Compra Publica Precomercial, Reference 2012/000069, Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad, Espana. ONCOVER project: Volatile compound detection system for early cancer diagnosis.Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) is routinely used to detect biomolecules related to several diseases facilitating diagnosis and monitoring of these, as well as the possibility of decreasing their mortality rate. Several methods have been carried out to improve the ELISA sensitivity through antibodies immobilization on the microtiter plates. Here, we have developed a strategy of antibodies immobilization to improve the ELISA sensitivity increasing the antibody density surface through the tetrazine (Tz)-trans-cyclooctene (TCO) reaction. For this, we prepared surfaces with tetrazine groups while the captured antibody was conjugated with TCO. The tetrazine surfaces were prepared in two different ways: (1) from aminated plates and (2) from Tz-BSA-coated plates. The surfaces were evaluated using two sandwich ELISA models, one of them using the low-affinity antibody anti-c-myc as a capture antibody to detect the c-myc-GST-IL8h recombinant protein, and the other one to detect the carcinoembryonic human protein (CEA). The sensitivity increased in both surfaces treated with tetrazine in comparison with the standard unmodified surface. The c-myc-GST-IL8h detection was around 10-fold more sensible on both tetrazine surfaces, while CEA ELISA detection increased 12-fold on surfaces coated with Tz-BSA. In conclusion, we show that it is possible to improve the ELISA sensitivity using this immobilization system, where capture antibodies bond covalently to surfaces.Compra Publica Precomercial, Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad, Espana 2012/00006

Aniversario de Alfred Russel Wallace

ReviewReseñ

Determination of Non-Invasive Biomarkers for the Assessment of Fibrosis, Steatosis and Hepatic Iron Overload by MR Image Analysis. A Pilot Study

[EN] The reference diagnostic test of fibrosis, steatosis, and hepatic iron overload is liver biopsy, a clear invasive procedure. The main objective of this work was to propose HSA, or human serum albumin, as a biomarker for the assessment of fibrosis and to study non-invasive biomarkers for the assessment of steatosis and hepatic iron overload by means of an MR image acquisition protocol. It was performed on a set of eight subjects to determine fibrosis, steatosis, and hepatic iron overload with four different MRI sequences. We calibrated longitudinal relaxation times (T1 [ms]) with seven human serum albumin (HSA [%]) phantoms, and we studied the relationship between them as this protein is synthesized by the liver, and its concentration decreases in advanced fibrosis. Steatosis was calculated by means of the fat fraction (FF [%]) between fat and water liver signals in "fat-only images" (the subtraction of in-phase [IP] images and out-of-phase [OOP] images) and in "water-only images" (the addition of IP and OOP images). Liver iron concentration (LIC [mu mol/g]) was obtained by the transverse relaxation time (T2* [ms]) using Gandon's method with multiple echo times (TE) in T2-weighted IP and OOP images. The preliminary results showed that there is an inverse relationship (r = -0.9662) between the T1 relaxation times (ms) and HSA concentrations (%). Steatosis was determined with FF > 6.4% and when the liver signal was greater than the paravertebral muscles signal, and thus, the liver appeared hyperintense in fat-only images. Hepatic iron overload was detected with LIC > 36 mu mol/g, and in these cases, the liver signal was smaller than the paravertebral muscles signal, and thus, the liver behaved as hypointense in IP images.This research was funded by "Conselleria d'Educacio, Investigacio, Cultura i Esport, Generalitat Valenciana" (grants AEST/2019/037 and AEST/2020/029), from the "Agencia Valenciana de la Innovacion, Generalitat Valenciana" (ref. INNCAD00/19/085 and INNCAD/2020/84), and from the "Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnologico Industrial" (Programa Eurostars-2, actuacion Interempresas Internacional), Spanish "Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovacion y Universidades" (ref. CIIP-20192020).Meneses, A.; Santabárbara, JM.; Romero, JA.; Aliaga, R.; Maceira, AM.; Moratal, D. (2021). Determination of Non-Invasive Biomarkers for the Assessment of Fibrosis, Steatosis and Hepatic Iron Overload by MR Image Analysis. A Pilot Study. Diagnostics. 11(7):1-12. https://doi.org/10.3390/diagnostics11071178S11211

Marco conceptual y propuesta metodológica para el desarrollo de observatorios de sustentabilidad rural : ejemplo de caso el observatorio Jacobacci

El problema de la sustentabilidad rural, debido a su complejidad, y los diferentes valores y subjetividades que involucra, requiere de nuevos abordajes. Los Observatorios de Sustentabilidad Rural son concebidos como dispositivos para observar, obtener y procesar información de un territorio con posibles síndromes de sustentabilidad, cuya finalidad es ayudar a generar las acciones de respuesta a estos síndromes, a través de espacios participativos. Se presentan aportes para discutir el marco conceptual y la aproximación metodológica para el desarrollo de estos Observatorios. Por último se muestran adelantos generados en relación al desarrollo de uno de estos Observatorios en la región de Ingeniero Jacobacci (Provincia de Río Negro).Fil: Bran, Donaldo.Fil: Alderete Salas, Susana.Fil: Calcaterra, Carlos.Fil: Zurita, Juan José.Fil: Murillo, Natalia.Fil: Gaitán, Juan.Fil: Maceira, Néstor.Fil: Velasco, Virginia

End-systole and end-diastole detection in short axis cine MRI using a fully convolutional neural network with dilated convolutions

[EN] The correct assessment and characterization of heart anatomy and functionality is usually done through inspection of magnetic resonance image cine sequences. In the clinical setting it is especially important to determine the state of the left ventricle. This requires the measurement of its volume in the end-diastolic and end-systolic frames within the sequence trough segmentation methods. However, the first step required for this analysis before any segmentation is the detection of the end-systolic and end-diastolic frames within the image acquisition. In this work we present a fully convolutional neural network that makes use of dilated convolutions to encode and process the temporal information of the sequences in contrast to the more widespread use of recurrent networks that are usually employed for problems involving temporal information. We trained the network in two different settings employing different loss functions to train the network: the classical weighted cross-entropy, and the weighted Dice loss. We had access to a database comprising a total of 397 cases. Out of this dataset we used 98 cases as test set to validate our network performance. The final classification on the test set yielded a mean frame distance of 0 for the end-diastolic frame (i.e.: the selected frame was the correct one in all images of the test set) and 1.242 (relative frame distance of 0.036) for the end-systolic frame employing the optimum setting, which involved training the neural network with the Dice loss. Our neural network is capable of classifying each frame and enables the detection of the end-systolic and end-diastolic frames in short axis cine MRI sequences with high accuracy.Funding sources This work was partially supported by the Conselleria d'Innovació, Universitats, Ciència i Societat Digital, Generalitat Valenciana (grants AEST/2020/029 and AEST/2021/050) .Pérez-Pelegrí, M.; Monmeneu, JV.; López-Lereu, MP.; Maceira, AM.; Bodi, V.; Moratal, D. (2022). End-systole and end-diastole detection in short axis cine MRI using a fully convolutional neural network with dilated convolutions. Computerized Medical Imaging and Graphics. 99:1-8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compmedimag.2022.102085189

Listado actualizado y claves para Polyplacophora (Mollusca) en Cuba

Actualmente existe un parcial desconocimiento sobre cuáles especies de quitones están presentes en Cuba y sobre su correcto arreglo taxonómico, además, se carece de claves dicotómicas para su identificación. Empleando el listado de los moluscos marinos cubanos elaborado por Espinosa (2006), se actualizó la clase Polyplacophora empleando los criterios taxonómicos de García-Ríos (2003), Espinosa et al. (2012) y de Kaas y Van Belle (1998). Esta actualización permitió registrar por primera vez para Cuba un orden, dos subórdenes, cuatro familias, siete subfamilias, 12 géneros y 27 especies de quitones vivientes y se proponen claves que permiten la identificación de los taxones