Additional Physical Interventions to Conventional Physical Therapy in Parkinson’s Disease: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Clinical Trials

Parkinson's disease (PD) represents the second most common neurodegenerative disease. Currently, conventional physical therapy is complemented by additional physical interventions with recreational components, improving different motor conditions in people with PD. This review aims to evaluate the effectiveness of additional physical interventions to conventional physical therapy in Parkinson's disease. A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials were performed. The literature search was conducted in PubMed, Physiotherapy Evidence Database (PEDro), Scopus, SciELO and Web of Science. The PEDro scale was used to evaluate the methodological quality of the studies. A total of 11 randomized controlled trials were included in this review. Five of them contributed information to the meta-analysis. The statistical analysis showed favorable results for dance-based therapy in motor balance: (Timed Up and Go: standardized mean difference (SMD) = −1.16; 95% Confidence Interval (CI):(−2.30 to −0.03); Berg Balance Scale: SMD = 4.05; 95%CI:(1.34 to 6.75)). Aquatic interventions showed favorable results in balance confidence (Activities-Specific Balance Confidence: SMD=10.10; 95%CI:(2.27 to 17.93)). The results obtained in this review highlight the potential benefit of dance-based therapy in functional balance for people with Parkinson's disease, recommending its incorporation in clinical practice. Nonetheless, many aspects require clarification through further research and high-quality studies on this subject

Una conversación con Cristóbal Halffter

Cristóbal Halffter (Madrid 1930), con más de cien obras salidas de sus manos, ocupan un lugar fundamental en el panorama de la composición actual. Ha explorado, en ellas, mundos tan diversos como el de la voz humana, la música de cámara, las grandes masas orquestales o la electrónica. De formación universal supo, desde muy temprano, mirar lejos desde dentro

A Fast Goal Recognition Technique Based on Interaction Estimates

Goal Recognition is the task of inferring an actor's goals given some or all of the actor's observed actions. There is considerable interest in Goal Recognition for use in intelligent personal assistants, smart environments, intelligent tutoring systems, and monitoring user's needs. In much of this work, the actor's observed actions are compared against a generated library of plans. Recent work by Ramirez and Geffner makes use of AI planning to determine how closely a sequence of observed actions matches plans for each possible goal. For each goal, this is done by comparing the cost of a plan for that goal with the cost of a plan for that goal that includes the observed actions. This approach yields useful rankings, but is impractical for real-time goal recognition in large domains because of the computational expense of constructing plans for each possible goal. In this paper, we introduce an approach that propagates cost and interaction information in a plan graph, and uses this information to estimate goal probabilities. We show that this approach is much faster, but still yields high quality results

Valence band offset of the ZnO/AlN heterojunction determined by X-ray photoemission spectroscopy

The valence band offset of ZnO/AlN heterojunctions is determined by high resolution x-ray photoemission spectroscopy. The valence band of ZnO is found to be 0.43±0.17 eV below that of AlN. Together with the resulting conduction band offset of 3.29±0.20 eV, this indicates that a type-II (staggered) band line up exists at the ZnO/AlN heterojunction. Using the III-nitride band offsets and the transitivity rule, the valence band offsets for ZnO/GaN and ZnO/InN heterojunctions are derived as 1.37 and 1.95 eV, respectively, significantly higher than the previously determined values

Editorial: Overcoming the Global Climate Crisis: Solutions to Minimize the Loss of Mediterranean Plants

Editorial on the Research Topic Overcoming the Global Climate Crisis: Solutions to Minimize the Loss of Mediterranean PlantsMediterranean-climate regions are home to significant levels of plant diversity and endemism that are challenged by the threats of the modern world: habitat loss and fragmentation, high human population growth, and overexploitation of natural resources. Because of the fast rate of changes occurring in its ecosystems, many plants are threatened, and the trend is to worsen throughout the century (Muñoz-Rodríguez et al., 2016; Habel et al., 2019; Abeli et al., 2021). By 2100, this area will experience the highest biodiversity loss of all terrestrial biomes (Sala et al., 2000). In this context, and with the Damocles sword of climate change, it is urgent to explore new perspectives to prevent and reduce the loss of Mediterranean plantsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Pitting Corrosion in Austenitic Stainless Steel Water Tanks of Hotel Trains

The water storage tanks of hotel trains suffered pitting corrosion. To identify the cause, the tanks were subjected to a detailed metallographic study and the chemical composition of the austenitic stainless steels used in their construction was determined. Both the tank water and the corrosion products were further examined by physicochemical and microbiological testing. Corrosion was shown to be related to an incompatibility between the chloride content of the water and the base and filler metals of the tanks. These findings formed the basis of recommendations aimed at the prevention and control of corrosion in such tanks. Se han detectado problemas de corrosión por picaduras en los depósitos de agua de trenes hotel. Para identificar las causas se llevó a cabo un detallado estudio metalográfico así como de la composición química de los aceros inoxidables austeníticos utilizados en su construcción. También se realizaron estudios fisicoquímicos y microbiológicos de los productos de corrosión. Se ha encontrado que los problemas de corrosión están relacionados con la incompatibilidad entre el contenido en cloruros del agua y los metales base y de aporte de la soldadura de los tanques. En base a estos hallazgos se proponen una serie de recomendaciones encaminadas a la prevención y control de la corrosión de dichos depósitos