Efecto de la incorporación de aceites esenciales de romero sobre la producción de leche de cabra y el crecimiento de los cabritos

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Identification of compounds and genes that affect neurodegenerative diseases in Caenorhabditis elegans.

Motivation: Neurodegenerative diseases have become a global health problem that need more research to find a solution. Our group has described in the organism model Caenorhabditis elegans that the loss of function of the sul-2 gene, which encodes a steroid hormone sulfatase homologous STS human, improvement the symptoms of neurodegenerative diseases. Likewise, the compound STX64, an inhibitor of steroid hormone sulphatases activity, mimics the lack of sul-2 function. It has been described that ssu-1, the only C. elegans gene orthologous to human steroid hormone sulfotransferase, is expressed in ASJ amphids neurons. The initial hypothesis is to see if the improvement of the symptoms of neurodegenerative diseases in the sul-2 mutant and with the STX treatment is due to the accumulation of sulfated hormone, or on the contrary, to the decrease of the non-sulfated hormone

Spin splitting in a polarized quasi-two-dimensional exciton gas

We have observed a large spin splitting between "spin" $+1$ and $-1$ heavy-hole excitons, having unbalanced populations, in undoped GaAs/AlAs quantum wells in the absence of any external magnetic field. Time-resolved photoluminescence spectroscopy, under excitation with circularly polarized light, reveals that, for high excitonic density and short times after the pulsed excitation, the emission from majority excitons lies above that of minority ones. The amount of the splitting, which can be as large as 50% of the binding energy, increases with excitonic density and presents a time evolution closely connected with the degree of polarization of the luminescence. Our results are interpreted on the light of a recently developed model, which shows that, while intra-excitonic exchange interaction is responsible for the spin relaxation processes, exciton-exciton interaction produces a breaking of the spin degeneracy in two-dimensional semiconductors.Comment: Revtex, four pages; four figures, postscript file Accepted for publication in Physical Review B (Rapid Commun.

Human interaction categorization by using audio-visual cues

Human Interaction Recognition (HIR) in uncontrolled TV video material is a very challenging problem because of the huge intra-class variability of the classes (due to large differences in the way actions are performed, lighting conditions and camera viewpoints, amongst others) as well as the existing small inter-class variability (e.g., the visual difference between hug and kiss is very subtle). Most of previous works have been focused only on visual information (i.e., image signal), thus missing an important source of information present in human interactions: the audio. So far, such approaches have not shown to be discriminative enough. This work proposes the use of Audio-Visual Bag of Words (AVBOW) as a more powerful mechanism to approach the HIR problem than the traditional Visual Bag of Words (VBOW). We show in this paper that the combined use of video and audio information yields to better classification results than video alone. Our approach has been validated in the challenging TVHID dataset showing that the proposed AVBOW provides statistically significant improvements over the VBOW employed in the related literature

"Resonance" phenomena in thermal diffusion processes in two-layer structures

The dependence on chopper frequency of the effective thermal diffusivity and effective thermal conductivity in photoacoustic experiments is discussed. The theoretical model of a two-layer structure at rear-surface illumination in the high frequency limit is considered. It is shown that the effective thermal diffusivity presents ``resonance'' while the effective thermal conductivity sharply changes its magnitude and sign. Such ``resonant'' behavior strongly depends on the surface thermal conductivities associated with the interface thermal contacts.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figure

Influencia de los estilos de vida físicamente activos y sedentarios en la percepción subjetiva de la salud y el bienestar de la juventud española

La presente comunicación se enmarca en un estudio financiado por el Consejo Superior de Deportes (CSD) (Ref. 007/UPB10/12). Uno de los objetivos específicos del estudio, en el que se basa la comunicación, es ampliar el conocimiento sobre la influencia de los estilos de vida físicamente activos y sedentarios en la percepción subjetiva de la salud y el bienestar de la juventud española

Zircon to monazite phase transition in CeVO4

X-ray diffraction and Raman-scattering measurements on cerium vanadate have been performed up to 12 and 16 GPa, respectively. Experiments reveal that at 5.3 GPa the onset of a pressure-induced irreversible phase transition from the zircon to the monazite structure. Beyond this pressure, diffraction peaks and Raman-active modes of the monazite phase are measured. The zircon to monazite transition in CeVO4 is distinctive among the other rare-earth orthovanadates. We also observed softening of external translational Eg and internal B2g bending modes. We attributed it to mechanical instabilities of zircon phase against the pressure-induced distortion. We additionally report lattice-dynamical and total-energy calculations which are in agreement with the experimental results. Finally, the effect of non-hydrostatic stresses on the structural sequence is studied and the equations of state of different phases are reported.Comment: 45 pages, 8 figures, 8 table

SHARDS: Constraints on the dust attenuation law of star-forming galaxies at z~2

We make use of SHARDS, an ultra-deep (<26.5AB) galaxy survey that provides optical photo-spectra at resolution R~50, via medium band filters (FWHM~150A). This dataset is combined with ancillary optical and NIR fluxes to constrain the dust attenuation law in the rest-frame NUV region of star-forming galaxies within the redshift window 1.5<z<3. We focus on the NUV bump strength (B) and the total-to-selective extinction ratio (Rv), targeting a sample of 1,753 galaxies. By comparing the data with a set of population synthesis models coupled to a parametric dust attenuation law, we constrain Rv and B, as well as the colour excess, E(B-V). We find a correlation between Rv and B, that can be interpreted either as a result of the grain size distribution, or a variation of the dust geometry among galaxies. According to the former, small dust grains are associated with a stronger NUV bump. The latter would lead to a range of clumpiness in the distribution of dust within the interstellar medium of star-forming galaxies. The observed wide range of NUV bump strengths can lead to a systematic in the interpretation of the UV slope ($\beta$) typically used to characterize the dust content. In this study we quantify these variations, concluding that the effects are $\Delta\beta$~0.4.Comment: 13 pages, 11+2 figures, 3 tables. MNRAS, in pres

Influence of climate change on the flowering of temperate fruit trees

It is well known that winter chilling is necessary for the flowering of temperate trees. The chilling requirement is a criterion for choosing a species or variety at a given location. Also chemistry products can be used for reducing the chilling-hours needs but make our production more expensive. This study first analysed the observed values of chilling hours for some representative agricultural locations in Spain for the last three decades and their projected changes under climate change scenarios. Usually the chilling is measured and calculated as chilling-hours, and different methods have been used to calculate them (e.g. Richarson et al., 1974 among others) according to the species considered. For our objective North Carolina method (Shaltout and Unrath, 1983) was applied for apples, Utah method (Richardson et al. 1974) for peach and grapevine and the approach used by De Melo-Abreu et al. (2004) for olive trees. The influence of climate change in temperate trees was studied by calculating projections of chilling-hours with climate data from Regional Climate Models (RCMs) at high resolution (25 km) from the European Project ENSEMBLES (http://www.ensembles-eu.org/). These projections will allow for analysing the modelled variations of chill-hours between 2nd half of 20C and 1st half of 21C at the study locations