Metabolism-dependent bioaccumulation of uranium by Rhodosporidium toruloides isolated from the flooding water of a former uranium mine

Remediation of former uranium mining sites represents one of the biggest challenges worldwide that have to be solved in this century. During the last years, the search of alternative strategies involving environmentally sustainable treatments has started. Bioremediation, the use of microorganisms to clean up polluted sites in the environment, is considered one the best alternative. By means of culture-dependent methods, we isolated an indigenous yeast strain, KS5 (Rhodosporidium toruloides), directly from the flooding water of a former uranium mining site and investigated its interactions with uranium. Our results highlight distinct adaptive mechanisms towards high uranium concentrations on the one hand, and complex interaction mechanisms on the other. The cells of the strain KS5 exhibit high a uranium tolerance, being able to grow at 6 mM, and also a high ability to accumulate this radionuclide (350 mg uranium/g dry biomass, 48 h). The removal of uranium by KS5 displays a temperature- and cell viability-dependent process, indicating that metabolic activity could be involved. By STEM (scanning transmission electron microscopy) investigations, we observed that uranium was removed by two mechanisms, active bioaccumulation and inactive biosorption. This study highlights the potential of KS5 as a representative of indigenous species within the flooding water of a former uranium mine, which may play a key role in bioremediation of uranium contaminated sites.This work was supported by the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung grand nº 02NUK030F (TransAqua). Further support took place by the ERDF-co-financed Grants CGL2012-36505 and 315 CGL2014-59616R, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Spain

Dissociating the effects of alternative early-life feeding schedules on the development of adult depression-like phenotypes

Neville, V., Andrews, C., Nettle, D. and M. Bateson (2017). Dissociating the effects of alternative early-life feeding schedules on the development of adult depression-like phenotypes. Scientific Reports 7: 14832

Classification of Device Behaviour in Internet of Things Infrastructures: Towards Distinguishing the Abnormal From Security Threats

Increasingly, Internet of Things (IoT) devices are being woven into the fabric of our physical world. With this rapidly expanding pervasive deployment of IoT devices, and supporting infrastructure, we are fast approaching the point where the problem of IoT based cyber-security attacks is a serious threat to industrial operations, business activity and social interactions that leverage IoT technologies. The number of threats and successful attacks against connected systems using IoT devices and services are increasing. The Internet of Things has several characteristics that present technological challenges to traditional cyber-security techniques. The Internet of Things requires a novel and dynamic security paradigm. This paper describes the challenges of securing the Internet of Things. A discussion detailing the state-of-the-art of IoT security is presented. A novel approach to security detection using streaming data analytics to classify and detect security threats in their early stages is proposed. Implementation methodologies and results of ongoing work to realise this new IoT cyber-security technique for threat detection are presented

WiFi publics: producing community and technology

Drawing on community expertise, open-source software and non-hierarchical organizational strategies, community wireless networks (CWN) engage volunteers in building networks for public internet access and community media. Volunteers intend these networks to be used to reinvigorate local community. Together the following two purposes create two distinct mediated publics: to engage volunteers in discussing and undertaking technical innovations, and to provide internet access and local community media to urban citizens. To better address the potential of CWN as a form of local innovation and democratic rationalization, the relationship between the two publics must be better understood. Using a case study of a Canadian CWN, this article advances the category of 'public' as alternative and complementary to 'community' as it is used to describe the social and technical structures of these projects. By addressing the tensions between the geek-public of WiFi developers, and the community-public of local people using community WiFi networks, this article revisits questions about the democratic impact of community networking projects. The article concludes that CWN projects create new potential for local community engagement, but that they also have a tendency to reinforce geek-publics more than community-publics, challenging the assumption that community networks using technology development as a vector for social action necessarily promote greater democracy