Nuclear Structure Calculations for Two-Neutrino Double-βDecay

Depto. de Estructura de la Materia, Física Térmica y ElectrónicaFac. de Ciencias FísicasTRUEUnión Europea. FP7Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO)pu

Enhanced Performance of Zn/Br Flow Battery Using N-Methyl-N-Propylmorpholinium Bromide as Complexing Agent

Redox flow batteries (RFB) are one of the most interesting technologies in the field of energy storage, since they allow the decoupling of power and capacity. Zinc–bromine flow batteries (ZBFB) are a type of hybrid RFB, as the capacity depends on the effective area of the negative electrode (anode), on which metallic zinc is deposited during the charging process. Gaseous bromine is generated at the positive electrode (cathode) during the charging process, so the use of bromine complexing agents (BCA) is very important. These BCAs are quaternary amines capable of complexation with bromine and generating an organic phase, immiscible with the aqueous electrolyte. One of the most commonly used BCAs in RFB technology is 4-methylethylmorpholinium bromide (MEM-Br). In this work, an alternative quaternary amine 4-methylpropylmorpholinium bromide (MPM-Br) was studied. MPM-Br was integrated into the electrolyte, and 200 charge–discharge cycles were performed on the resulting ZBFBs. The obtained results were compared with those when MEM-Br was used, and it was observed that the electrolyte with MPM-Br displays a higher resistance in voltage and higher energy efficiency, making it a promising alternative to MEM-Br

Low-complexity motion-based saliency map estimation for perceptual video coding

Proceeding of: 2nd National Conference on Telecommunications (CONATEL), Arequipa, 17-20 May 2011In this paper, a low-complexity motion-based saliency map estimation method for perceptual video coding is proposed. The method employs a camera motion compensated vector map computed by means of a hierarchical motion estimation (HME) procedure and a Restricted Affine Transformation (RAT)-based modeling of the camera motion. To allow for a computationally efficient solution, the number of layers of the HME has been restricted and the potential unreliable motion vectors due to homogeneous regions have been detected and specially managed by means of a smooth block detector. Special care has been taken of the smoothness of the resulting compensated camera motion vector map to avoid unpleasant artifacts in the perceptually-coded sequence, by including a final post-processing based on morphological filtering. The proposed saliency map has been both visually and subjectively assessed showing quality improvements when used as a part of the H.264/AVC standard codec at medium-to-low bitrates.Regional project CCG10-UC3M/TIC-5570 from Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid / University Carlos III MadridPublicad

Digital control implementation to reduce the cost and improve the performance of the control stage of an industrial switch-mode power supply

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. D. A. Díez, O. M. García, J. A. Oliver, P. Alou, F. Moreno, B. Duret, J. A. Cobos, F. V. Canales, and A. de Castro, "Digital control implementation to reduce the cost and improve the performance of the control stage of an industrial switch-mode power supply", in 2011 IEEE Energy Conversion Congress and Exposition (ECCE), Phoenix (AZ), 2011, pp. 2930 - 2935The main objective of this work is the design and implementation of the digital control stage of a 280W AC/DC industrial power supply in a single low-cost microcontroller to replace the analog control stage. The switch-mode power supply (SMPS) consists of a PFC boost converter with fixed frequency operation and a variable frequency LLC series resonant DC/DC converter. Input voltage range is 85VRMS-550VRMS and the output voltage range is 24V-28V. A digital controller is especially suitable for this kind of SMPS to implement its multiple functionalities and to keep the efficiency and the performance high over the wide range of input voltages. Additional advantages of the digital control are reliability and size. The optimized design and implementation of the digital control stage it is presented. Experimental results show the stable operation of the controlled system and an estimation of the cost reduction achieved with the digital control stage

Caracterización de la formación ética en la carrera de contabilidad de las universidades de la RPU. Tendencias en la elaboración del sílabo

Ethical education for public accounting involves incorporating the requirements established by the International Accounting Education Standards issued by the International Federation of Accountants. Therefore, it was important to carry out a study to characterize the elements included in the ethics courses syllabi from accounting faculties of the Peruvian Network of Universities (RPU).  In this exploratory study a qualitative methodology was applied. Analysis categories included learning achievements, methodology and evaluation system, among others. Some findings indicate dispersion between most of the categories analyzed as well as a lack of alignment between them.  However, in most of them the inclusion of the requirements established in the International Accounting Education Standards is observed.La formación ética del contador público demanda incorporar los requisitos incluidos en las Normas Internacionales de Formación que emite la Federación Internacional de Contabilidad, por lo que es importante realizar un estudio de caracterización de los elementos incluidos en los sílabos del curso de ética en las facultades de contabilidad de la Red Peruana de Universidades (RPU). La metodología aplicada es de tipo cualitativa exploratoria y las principales categorías de análisis son resultados de aprendizaje, metodología y sistema de evaluación, entre otros. Algunos resultados muestran una dispersión entre la mayoría de categorías analizadas y la falta de una alineación entre las mismas. Sin embargo, en la mayoría se observa la inclusión de los requerimientos establecidos en las Normas Internacionales de Formación

Elastic Magnetic Electron Scattering from odd-A Nuclei

Magnetic form factors from odd-A spherical and deformed nuclei corresponding to elastic electron scattering are calculated in the plane-wave Born approximation. The nuclear structure of the target is described within a deformed self-consistent mean-field calculation with effective interactions of Skyrme type and pairing correlations in the BCS approximation. We focus our attention to stable nuclei where experimental information is available. It is shown that the deformed formalism improves the agreement with experiment in deformed nuclei, while reproducing equally well spherical nuclei by taking properly the spherical limit of the deformed model. Effects of the collective rotation and nucleon-nucleon correlations are also studied. These results demonstrate the ability of the method to address electron scattering from unstable nuclei to be measured in future experiments on electron-ion beam colliders

Elastic magnetic electron scattering from deformed nuclei

Magnetic form factors corresponding to elastic electron scattering from odd-A nuclei are presented. The calculations are carried out in plane-wave Born approximation. The one-body properties are obtained in a deformed self-consistent mean-field calculation based on a Skyrme HF+BCS method. Collective effects are also included in the cranking approximation. Results on several stable nuclei are compared with the available experimental information. It is shown that a deformed formalism improves the agreement with experiment in deformed nuclei, while reproducing equally well spherical nuclei by taking properly the spherical limit of the deformed model and the effect of nucleon-nucleon correlations. Thus, the capability of the model to describe magnetic form factors is demonstrated. This opens the door to explore also unstable nuclei of particular interest that could be measured in future experiments on electron-radioactive beam colliders

Promoción del Pensamiento Computacional en estudiantes pre-universitarios: ¿cómo se emocionan?

En este trabajo se presenta un estudio de las emociones que se producen en estudiantes pre-universitarios al realizar actividades de Pensamiento Computacional. Se comparan dos estrategias en las que se intercalan las metodologías guiadas y por descubrimiento. Se concluye que se producen principalmente emociones positivas y ambiguas, mientras que las negativas tienen una intensidad relativamente baja. También se observa, en relación con las modalidades, que en secundaria las chicas parecen mostrar una menor intensidad en las emociones positivas y ambiguas y un ligero aumento en las negativas. En cuanto a las dos estrategias utilizadas no se observan diferencias significativas en ningún momento sobre la media.This paper presents a study of the emotions that are produced in pre-university students when performing Computational Thinking activities. Two strategies are compared in which the guided and discovery methodologies are interspersed. It is concluded that positive and ambiguous emotions are mainly produced, while negative ones have relatively low intensity. It is also observed in relation to the modalities, that in secondary, girls seem to show less intensity in positive and ambiguous emotions and a slight increase in negative ones. Regarding the two strategies used, no significant differences were observed at any time above the mean.Este trabajo ha sido financiado por “Piens@ Computacion@LLmente (A17120413). Programa educativo para el fomento del pensamiento computacional a través de la realización de actividades que permitan su desarrollo y su inclusión en el currículo”. Cabildo Insular de Tenerife. Fundación General de la Universidad de La Laguna

A Novel Saliva-Based miRNA Signature for Colorectal Cancer Diagnosis

Salivary microRNAs (miRNAs) are of high interest as diagnostic biomarkers for non-oral cancer. However, little is known about their value for colorectal cancer (CRC) detection. Our study aims to characterize salivary miRNAs in order to identify non-invasive markers for CRC diagnosis. The screening of 754 miRNAs was performed in saliva samples from 14 CRC and 10 healthy controls. The differential expressed miRNAs were validated by RT-qPCR in 51 CRC, 19 adenomas and 37 healthy controls. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and logistic regression models were performed to analyze the clinical value of these miRNAs. Twenty-two salivary miRNAs were significantly deregulated in CRC patients vs. healthy individuals (p < 0.05) in the discovery phase. From those, five upregulated miRNAs (miR-186-5p, miR-29a-3p, miR-29c-3p, miR-766-3p, and miR-491-5p) were confirmed to be significantly higher in the CRC vs. healthy group (p < 0.05). This five-miRNA signature showed diagnostic value (72% sensitivity, 66.67% specificity, AUC = 0.754) to detect CRC, which was even higher in combination with carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) levels. Overall, after the first global characterization of salivary miRNAs in CRC, a five-miRNA panel was identified as a promising tool to diagnose this malignancy, representing a novel approach to detect cancer-associated epigenetic alterations using a non-invasive strategy

Desarrollo de un libro electrónico mejorado sobre aplicaciones de la Física Nuclear a la Medicina

Proyecto de innovación docente con el objetivo de desarrollar una herramienta que facilite el aprendizaje de las aplicaciones a la Medicina de la Física Nuclear. Se ha creado el sitio web https://fisnucmed.wordpress.com/. Se abordan, entre otros contenidos, las radiaciones ionizantes y los fundamentos de la interacción de la radiación con la materia, nociones de detección de radiación e instrumentación nuclear , diagnóstico por imagen, y las modalidades de imagen PET, SPECT, CT, resonancia magnética nuclear, ultrasonidos, así como la radioterapia y en particular la hadronterapia