Bone resorption and formation in the pedicles of European roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) in relation to the antler cycle—A morphological and microanalytical study

We analyzed pedicle bone from roe bucks that had died around antler casting or shortly before or during the rutting period. Pedicles obtained around antler casting were highly porous and showed signs of intense osteoclastic activity that had caused the formation of an abscission line. Following the detachment of the antler plus a portion of pedicle bone, osteoclastic activity in the pedicles continued for some time, and new bone was deposited onto the separation plane of the pedicle stump, leading to partial pedicle restoration. Pedicles obtained around the rutting period were compact structures. The newly formed, often very large secondary osteons, which had filled the resorption cavities, exhibited a lower mineral density than the persisting older bone. The middle zones of the lamellar infilling frequently showed hypomineralized lamellae and enlarged osteocyte lacunae. This indicates a deficiency in mineral elements during the formation of these zones that occurred along with peak antler mineralization. We suggest that growing antlers and compacting pedicles compete for mineral elements, with the rapidly growing antlers being the more effective sinks. The competition between the two simultaneously mineralizing structures is probably more severe in Capreolus capreolus than in other cervids. This is because roe bucks regrow their antlers during late autumn and winter, a period of limited food and associated mineral supply. The pedicle is a heavily remodeled bone structure with distinct seasonal variation in porosity. Pedicle remodeling differs in several aspects from the normal bone remodeling process in the mammalian skeleton.18 página

Distribution, structure, and mineralization of calcified cartilage remnants in hard antlers

Antlers are paired deciduous bony cranial appendages of deer that undergo a regular cycle of growth, death and casting, and constitute the most rapidly growing bones in mammals. Antler growth occurs in an appositional mode and involves a modified form of endochondral ossification. In endochondral bones, calcified cartilage is typically a transient tissue that is eventually completely replaced by bone tissue. We studied the distribution and characteristics of calcified cartilage in hard antlers from three deer species (Capreolus capreolus, Cervus elaphus, Dama dama), i.e., in antlers from which the skin (velvet) had been shed. Remnants of calcified cartilage were regularly present as part of the trabecular framework in the late formed, distal antler portions in all three species, whereas this tissue was largely or completely missing in the more proximal antler portions. The presence of calcified cartilage remnants in the distal antler portions is attributed to the limited antler lifespan of only a few months, which is also the reason for the virtual lack of bone remodeling in antlers. The calcified cartilage matrix was more highly mineralized than the antler bone matrix. Mineralized deposits were observed in some chondrocyte lacunae and occasionally also in osteocyte lacunae, a phenomenon that has not previously been reported in antlers. Using synchrotron radiation-induced X-ray fluorescence (SR-XRF) mapping, we further demonstrated increased zinc concentrations in cement lines, along the inner borders of incompletely formed primary osteons, along the walls of partly or completely mineral-occluded chondrocyte and osteocyte lacunae, and in intralacunar mineralized deposits. The present study demonstrates that antlers are a promising model for studying the mineralization of cartilage and bone matrices and the formation of mineralized deposits in chondrocyte and osteocyte lacunae

Operational forecasting of daily summer maximum and minimum temperatures in the Valencia Region

Extreme-temperature events have a great impact on human society. Thus, knowledge of summer temperatures can be very useful both for the general public and for organizations whose workers operate in the open. An accurate forecasting of summer maximum and minimum temperatures could help to predict heatwave conditions and permit the implementation of strategies aimed at minimizing the negative effects that high temperatures have on human health. The objective of this work is to evaluate the skill of the regional atmospheric and modelling system (RAMS) model in determining daily summer maximum and minimum temperatures in the Valencia Region. For this, we have used the real-time configuration of this model currently running at the Centro de Estudios Ambientales de Mediterráneo Foundation. This operational system is run twice a day, and both runs have a 3-day forecast range. To carry out the verification of the model in this work, the information generated by the system has been broken into individual simulation days for a specific daily run of the model. Moreover, we have analysed the summer forecast period from 1 June to 31 August for 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010. The results indicate good agreement between observed and simulated maximum temperatures, with RMSE in general near 2 °C both for coastal and inland stations. For this parameter, the model shows a negative bias around −1.5 °C in the coast, while the opposite trend is observed inland. In addition, RAMS also shows good results in forecasting minimum temperatures for coastal locations, with bias lower than 1 °C and RMSE below 2 °C. However, the model presents some difficulties for this parameter inland, where bias higher than 3 °C and RMSE of about 4 °C have been found. Besides, there is little difference in both temperatures forecasted within the two daily RAMS cycles and that RAMS is very stable in maintaining the forecast performance at least for three forecast days

A disk of dust and molecular gas around a high-mass protostar

The processes leading to the birth of low-mass stars such as our Sun have been well studied, but the formation of high-mass (> 8 x Sun's mass) stars has heretofore remained poorly understood. Recent observational studies suggest that high-mass stars may form in essentially the same way as low-mass stars, namely via an accretion process, instead of via merging of several low-mass (< 8 Msun) stars. However, there is as yet no conclusive evidence. Here, we report the discovery of a flattened disk-like structure observed at submillimeter wavelengths, centered on a massive 15 Msun protostar in the Cepheus-A region. The disk, with a radius of about 330 astronomical units (AU) and a mass of 1 to 8 Msun, is detected in dust continuum as well as in molecular line emission. Its perpendicular orientation to, and spatial coincidence with the central embedded powerful bipolar radio jet, provides the best evidence yet that massive stars form via disk accretion in direct analogy to the formation of low-mass stars

Knowledge Graphs as Context Models: Improving the Detection of Cross-Language Plagiarism with Paraphrasing

Cross-language plagiarism detection attempts to identify and extract automatically plagiarism among documents in different languages. Plagiarized fragments can be translated verbatim copies or may alter their structure to hide the copying, which is known as paraphrasing and is more difficult to detect. In order to improve the paraphrasing detection, we use a knowledge graph-based approach to obtain and compare context models of document fragments in different languages. Experimental results in German-English and Spanish-English cross-language plagiarism detection indicate that our knowledge graph-based approach offers a better performance compared to other state-of-the-art models.The research has been carried out in the framework of the European Commission WIQ-EIIRSES (no. 269180) and DIANA-APPLICATIONS - Finding Hidden Knowledge in Texts:Applications (TIN2012-38603-C02-01) projects as well as the VLC/CAMPUS Microcluster on Multimodal Interaction in Intelligent Systems.Franco-Salvador, M.; Gupta, P.; Rosso, P. (2013). Knowledge Graphs as Context Models: Improving the Detection of Cross-Language Plagiarism with Paraphrasing. En Bridging Between Information Retrieval and Databases: PROMISE Winter School 2013, Bressanone, Italy, February 4-8, 2013. Revised Tutorial Lectures. Springer Verlag (Germany). 227-236. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54798-0_12S227236Barrón-Cedeño, A., Vila, M., Martí, M., Rosso, P.: Plagiarism meets paraphrasing: insights for the next generation in automatic plagiarism detection. Computational Linguistics 39(4) (2013)Barrón-Cedeño, A.: On the mono- and cross-language detection of text re-use and plagiarism. Ph.D. thesis, Universitat Politènica de València (2012)Barrón-Cedeño, A., Rosso, P., Pinto, D., Juan, A.: On cross-lingual plagiarism analysis using a statistical model. In: Proc. of the ECAI 2008 Workshop on Uncovering Plagiarism, Authorship and Social Software Misuse, PAN 2008 (2008)Franco-Salvador, M., Gupta, P., Rosso, P.: Cross-language plagiarism detection using BabelNet’s statistical dictionary. Computación y Sistemas, Revista Iberoamericana de Computación 16(4), 383–390 (2012)Franco-Salvador, M., Gupta, P., Rosso, P.: Cross-language plagiarism detection using a multilingual semantic network. In: Serdyukov, P., Braslavski, P., Kuznetsov, S.O., Kamps, J., Rüger, S., Agichtein, E., Segalovich, I., Yilmaz, E. (eds.) ECIR 2013. LNCS, vol. 7814, pp. 710–713. Springer, Heidelberg (2013)Franco-Salvador, M., Gupta, P., Rosso, P.: Graph-based similarity analysis: a new approach to cross-language plagiarism detection. Journal of the Spanish Society of Natural Language Processing (Sociedad Espaola de Procesamiento del Languaje Natural) (50) (2013)Montes-y-Gómez, M., Gelbukh, A., López-López, A., Baeza-Yates, R.: Flexible comparison of conceptual graphs. In: Mayr, H.C., Lazanský, J., Quirchmayr, G., Vogel, P. (eds.) DEXA 2001. LNCS, vol. 2113, pp. 102–111. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)Gupta, P., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Rosso, P.: Cross-language high similarity search using a conceptual thesaurus. In: Catarci, T., Forner, P., Hiemstra, D., Peñas, A., Santucci, G. (eds.) CLEF 2012. LNCS, vol. 7488, pp. 67–75. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)Mcnamee, P., Mayfield, J.: Character n-gram tokenization for European language text retrieval. Information Retrieval 7(1), 73–97 (2004)Miller, G.A., Leacock, C., Tengi, R., Bunker, R.T.: A semantic concordance. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Human Language Technology, HLT 1993, pp. 303–308. Association for Computational Linguistics, Stroudsburg (1993)Navigli, R., Ponzetto, S.P.: BabelNet: The automatic construction, evaluation and application of a wide-coverage multilingual semantic network. Artificial Intelligence 193, 217–250 (2012)Och, F.J., Ney, H.: A systematic comparison of various statistical alignment models. Computational Linguistics 29(1), 19–51 (2003)Potthast, M., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Stein, B., Rosso, P.: An evaluation framework for plagiarism detection. In: Proc. of the 23rd Int. Conf. on Computational Linguistics, COLING 2010, Beijing, China, pp. 997–1005 (2010)Potthast, M., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Stein, B., Rosso, P.: Cross-language plagiarism detection. Language Resources and Evaluation, Special Issue on Plagiarism and Authorship Analysis 45(1), 45–62 (2011)Potthast, M., Eiselt, A., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Stein, B., Rosso, P.: Overview of the 3rd int. competition on plagiarism detection. In: CLEF (Notebook Papers/Labs/Workshop) (2011)Potthast, M., Gollub, T., Hagen, M., Kiesel, J., Michel, M., Oberländer, A., Tippmann, M., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Gupta, P., Rosso, P., et al.: Overview of the 4th international competition on plagiarism detection. In: CLEF (Online Working Notes/Labs/Workshop) (2012)Pouliquen, B., Steinberger, R., Ignat, C.: Automatic linking of similar texts across languages. In: Proc. Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing III, RANLP 2003, pp. 307–316 (2003)Schmid, H.: Probabilistic part-of-speech tagging using decision trees. In: Proc. Int. Conf. on New Methods in Language Processing (1994)Stein, B., zu Eissen, S.M., Potthast, M.: Strategies for retrieving plagiarized documents. In: Proc. of the 30th Annual Int. ACM SIGIR Conf. on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pp. 825–826. ACM (2007)Steinberger, R., Pouliquen, B., Widiger, A., Ignat, C., Erjavec, T., Tufis, D., Varga, D.: The jrc-acquis: A multilingual aligned parallel corpus with +20 languages. In: Proc. 5th Int. Conf. on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2006 (2006)Vossen, P.: Eurowordnet: A multilingual database of autonomous and language-specific wordnets connected via an inter-lingual index. Proc. Int. Journal of Lexicography 17 (2004

Epidemiology of bacterial co-infections and risk factors in COVID-19-hospitalized patients in Spain: a nationwide study

Background: We performed a nationwide population-based retrospective study to describe the epidemiology of bacterial co-infections in coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)-hospitalized patients in Spain in 2020. We also analyzed the risk factors for co-infection, the etiology and the impact in the outcome. Methods: Data were obtained from records in the Minimum Basic Data Set (MBDS) of the National Surveillance System for Hospital Data in Spain, provided by the Ministry of Health and annually published with 2 years lag. COVID-19 circulated in two waves in 2020: from its introduction to 31st June and from 1st July to 31st December. The risk of developing a healthcare-associated bacterial co-infection and the risk for in-hospital and intensive care unit (ICU) mortality in co-infected patients was assessed using an adjusted logistic regression model. Results: The incidence of bacterial co-infection in COVID-19 hospitalized patients was 2.3%. The main risk factors associated with bacterial co-infection were organ failure, obesity and male sex. Co-infection was associated with worse outcomes including higher in-hospital, in-ICU mortality and higher length of stay. Gram-negative bacteria caused most infections. Causative agents were similar between waves, although higher co-infections with Pseudomonas spp. were detected in the first wave and with Haemophilus influenzae and Streptococcus pneumoniae in the second. Conclusions: Co-infections are not as common as those found in other viral respiratory infections; therefore, antibiotics should be used carefully. Screening for actual co-infection to prescribe antibiotic therapy when required should be performed.This work was supported by Instituto de Salud Carlos III (COV20/00491, PI18/01238, CIBERINFEC CB21/13/00051), Junta de Castilla y León (VA321P18, GRS 1922/A/19, GRS 2057/A/19), Consejería de Educación de Castilla y León (VA256P20) and Fundación Ramón Areces (CIVP19A5953). L. Sánchez-de Prada received a Río Hortega grant (CM20/00138) from Instituto Carlos III (Co-funded by European Regional Development Fund/European Social Fund ‘A way to make Europe’/’Investing in your future’).S

Two-dimensional carbon-based conductive materials with dynamically controlled asymmetric Dirac cones

The design of two dimensional graphene-type materials with an anisotropic electron flow direction in the X- and Y-axes opens the door for the development of novel electronic materials with multiple functions in nanoelectronics. In the present work, we have studied the electronic transport properties of a new family of 2D graphene-graphyne hybrids presenting conformationally free phenylethylene subunits. This system ensures two different conductive pathways that are perpendicular to each other: an acene nanoribbon subunit, in the X-axis, with graphene-type conduction, and a free to rotate phenylethylene subunit, in the Y-axis, in which the magnitude of the conduction depends dynamically on the corresponding torsion angle. Our calculations have confirmed that this system presents two different conduction pathways, which are related to the presence of asymmetric Dirac-type cones. Moreover, the Dirac cones can be dynamically modified in the presence of an external gate electrode, which is unprecedented in the literatureWe thank the MICINN (project CTQ-2011.22455) and the Regional Government of Andalucía (project P09-FQM-04571) for financial support and the ‘Centro de Supercomputación de la Universidad de Granada (UGRGRID-CSIRC)’ for computation time. NF and DM thank MICINN for their research contract

Depression and Suicide Risk in Mild Cognitive Impairment: The Role of Alzheimer’s Disease Biomarkers

Background: Patients with depression and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) are at greater risk of developing dementia. Depression involves a higher risk of suicidal ideation (SI) and suicide attempts (SA). Biomarkers of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) could help to clarify the role of depression and SI in AD. Method: Fifty-nine participants aged > 50 with criteria of MCI positive (MCI-AD) (n=22) and negative (MCI-Non AD) (n=24) AD and healthy controls (HC) (n=13) were evaluated. We used the Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS-30) and the GDS-SI factor to measure depression and indirect risk for suicide, respectively. Additionally, AD biomarkers such as amyloid-ß (Aß), hyperphosphorilated tau (P-tau), and total tau (T-tau) in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) were analyzed. Results: No significant differences between the groups were found in depression. However, in the MCI-AD group, lower P-tau and T-tau levels were related to higher GDS-SI scores, suggesting that MCI-AD patients with lower AD pathology are at a higher risk of suicide. Conclusions: The result highlights the importance of considering SI in the initial phases of AD, and the potential role of AD biomarkers in early detection of symptoms. Antecedentes: Los pacientes con depresión y deterioro cognitivo leve (DCL) tienen un alto riesgo de desarrollar demencia. La depresión implica un alto riesgo de ideación suicida (IS) e intentos de suicidio (AS). Los biomarcadores de la enfermedad de Alzheimer (EA) pueden clarificar el papel de la depresión e IS en la EA. Método: Cincuenta y nueve participantes >50 años con criterios de DCL-EA positivo (DCL-EA; 22) y negativo (DCL-NoEA; 24) y 13 controles sanos. La depresión fue evaluada con la Escala Geriátrica de Depresión (GDS-30) y la IS con el factor GDS-IS. Además, se midieron los siguientes biomarcadores en el líquido cefalorraquídeo: ß-amiloide (ß-A), tau hiperfosforilada (H-tau) y total (T-tau). Resultados: No se encontraron diferencias significativas entre los tres grupos de participantes en depresión o en IS. Sin embargo, en el grupo DCL-EA, niveles más bajos de H-tau y T-tau, indicadores de menor patología EA, se relacionaron significativamente con mayor riesgo de suicidio indirecto. Conclusiones: Este resultado subraya la importancia de considerar la IS en fases iniciales de EA, y el potencial papel de los biomarcadores de EA para detectar sus síntomas

Multiobjective-Optimized Design of a New UWB Antenna for UWB Applications

A multiobjective genetic algorithm has been applied to design a new printed, bow-tie antenna for ultrawideband applications, that is, ground penetrating radar, short range and high data rate communications, and so forth. The ultrawideband performance with respect to antenna impedance and gain is achieved by an optimized resistive loading profile and flare angle. A low-cost prototype is manufactured and numerical simulations are validated with measurements