Numerical Implementation of a Critical State Model for Soft Rocks

This paper details the basic tasks for the numerical implementation of a simple elasto-plastic critical state model for bonded materials (i.e. soft rocks-hard soils) into the finite element program SNAC developed at the University of Newcastle in Australia. The first task described focusses on the derivation of the incremental constitutive relationships used to represent the mechanical response of a bonded/cemented material under saturated conditions. The second task presents how these stress-strain relations can be numerically integrated using an explicit substepping scheme with automatic error control. The third task concentrates on the verification of the substepping algorithm proposed. The model used to represent the saturated mechanical response of a bonded material combines the modified Cam clay with the constitutive relationships for cemented materials proposed in Gens & Nova (1993), but incorporates some flexibility on the degradation law adopted. The role of suction and other relevant aspects of unsaturated behaviour are also discussed at the end of the paper

TPL-2 restricts Ccl24-dependent immunity to Heligmosomoides polygyrus

Funding: This work was supported by the Francis Crick Institute which receives its core funding from Cancer Research UK (FC001220), the UK Medical Research Council (FC001220), and the Wellcome Trust (FC001200). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Acknowledgments We are indebted to The Francis Crick Institute Flow Cytometry facility, and in particular Bhavik Patel, Graham Preece, Wayne Turnbull and Phil Hobson. We would also like to thank The Francis Crick Institute Procedural Service Section for production of GA lines and Biological Services, especially Trisha Norton, Keith Williams and Adebambo Adekoya for animal husbandry and technical support; to Riccardo Guidi for constructive discussions and technical assistance. We would like to thank Gitta Stockinger and AhR Immunity Laboratory for providing technical support and reagents throughout this study. We also thank Richard Rance and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute’s 454 pyrosequencing team for generating 16S rRNA gene data.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Fuel loading and flammability in the Mediterranean Basin woody species with different post-fire regenerative strategies

12 páginas, 5 figuras, 3 tablas.The flammability and combustibility of plant communities are determined by species features related to growth-form, structure and physiology. In some ecosystems, such as the Mediterranean ones, these characteristics may contribute to the existence of fire-prone species. We measured several parameters associated with the flammability and fuel loading of dominant woody species with different post-fire regenerative strategies ( seeders and non-seeders) in shrublands in the western Mediterranean Basin. Overall, seeder species show lower fuel load but are more prone to burning owing to a higher dead-to-live fuel ratio, live fine-fuel proportion and dead fine-fuel proportion. Moreover, they burst into flame at lower temperatures than non-seeders. In the Mediterranean Basin, most seeder species emerged mainly during the Quaternary, under a highly fluctuating Mediterranean climate and during recurrent fires. We propose that properties related to the combustibility and flammability of seeders may be the result of selective pressures associated with both fire and climate. These results suggest that ecosystems dominated by seeder species are more susceptible to fire risk than those dominated by non-seeder species in the Mediterranean Basin. Therefore, the proportion of these types of species resulting from previous fire or management history is likely to determine the characteristics of future fire events.We thank M. Jané, E. Martí, A. Vilà-Cabrera, J. Garcia, B. Moreira, S. Ribeiro and C. Beseler for helping in the field and in the laboratory work. Also, special thanks are due to J. Piñol for his advice and suggestions, and to J. Peñuelas and G. Alessio for supporting the flammability tests. This study was funded by the Department of Universities, Research and Information Society of the Generalitat de Catalunya, the European social funds, and the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología (MCYT) projects REN 2003–07198 and CGL2006–01293/BOS. It also contributes to the European research group (GDRE) ‘Mediterranean and mountain ecosystems in a changing world’ funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya and CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique). CEAM (Fundación Centro de Estudios Ambientales del Mediterráneo) is supported by the Generalitat Valenciana and Bancaixa.Peer reviewe

Structural, antigenic and immunogenic features of respiratory syncytial virus glycoproteins relevant for vaccine development

Extraordinary progress in the structure and immunobiology of the human respiratory syncytial virus glycoproteins has been accomplished during the last few years. Determination of the fusion (F) glycoprotein structure folded in either the prefusion or the postfusion conformation was an inspiring breakthrough not only to understand the structural changes associated with the membrane fusion process but additionally to appreciate the antigenic intricacies of the F protein. Furthermore, these developments have opened new avenues for structure-based designs of promising hRSV vaccine candidates. Finally, recent advances in our knowledge of the attachment (G) glycoprotein and its interaction with cell-surface receptors have revitalized interest in this molecule as a vaccine, as well as its role in hRSV immunobiology.Work in the Madrid lab is currently funded by grant SAF2015-67033-R from Plan Nacional de I+D+I. J.S.M is supported in part by award P20GM113132 from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health.S

Improved trilateration for indoor localization: Neural network and centroid-based approach

[EN] Location awareness is the key to success to many location-based services applications such as indoor navigation, elderly tracking, emergency management, and so on. Trilateration-based localization using received signal strength measurements is widely used in wireless sensor network-based localization and tracking systems due to its simplicity and low computational cost. However, localization accuracy obtained with the trilateration technique is generally very poor because of fluctuating nature of received signal strength measurements. The reason behind such notorious behavior of received signal strength is dynamicity in target motion and surrounding environment. In addition, the significant localization error is induced during each iteration step during trilateration, which gets propagated in the next iterations. To address this problem, this article presents an improved trilateration-based architecture named Trilateration Centroid Generalized Regression Neural Network. The proposed Trilateration Centroid Generalized Regression Neural Network-based localization algorithm inherits the simplicity and efficiency of three concepts namely trilateration, centroid, and Generalized Regression Neural Network. The extensive simulation results indicate that the proposed Trilateration Centroid Generalized Regression Neural Network algorithm demonstrates superior localization performance as compared to trilateration, and Generalized Regression Neural Network algorithm.Jondhale, SR.; Jondhale, AS.; Deshpande, PS.; Lloret, J. (2021). Improved trilateration for indoor localization: Neural network and centroid-based approach. International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks (Online). 17(11):1-14. https://doi.org/10.1177/15501477211053997114171

Flow injection photoinduced chemiluminescence determination of imazalil in water samples

The final publication is available at link.springer.com[EN] In this work, a fast, simple and economic method is proposed for the determination of imazalil in water samples by flow injection photoinduced chemiluminescence. In this method, imazalil degrades in basic media through the use of a photoreactor, and the resulting photofragments react with ferricyanide and generate the direct chemiluminescence signal. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time that a chemiluminescence method has been proposed for the determination of this fungicide. All physical and chemical parameters in the flow injection chemiluminescence system were optimized in the experimental setting. In the absence of preconcentration, the linear dynamic range for imazalil was 0.75-5 mg L(-1) and the detection limit was 0.171 mg L(-1). The application of solid-phase extraction with C18 cartridges allowed the elimination of interference ions, the reduction of the linear dynamic range to 15-100 mu g L(-1), and a detection limit of 3.4 mu g L(-1). This detection limit is below the maximum concentration level established by the Regulations of the Hydraulic Public Domain for pesticide dumping. The sample throughput after solid-phase extraction of the analyte was 12 samples h(-1). The intraday and interday coefficients of variation were below 9.9% in all cases. This method was applied to the analysis of environmental water samples, and recoveries of between 95.7 and 110% were obtained.The authors are grateful to The Spanish Ministry of Education and Science and FEDER funds for financial support (project CTM2006-11991). The translation of this paper was funded by the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain.Meseguer-Lloret, S.; Torres-Cartas, S.; Gómez Benito, C. (2010). Flow injection photoinduced chemiluminescence determination of imazalil in water samples. Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry. 398(7-8):3175-3182. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00216-010-4227-1S317531823987-8EC (1998) Council Directive 98/83/EC of 3 November 1998 on the quality of water intended for human consumption. European Council, BrusselsSpanish Ministry of Public Works and Transportation (1986) Royal Decree 849/1986 of 11 April of the Regulations of the Hydraulic Public Domain. Spanish Ministry of Public Works and Transportation, MadridPicó Y, la Farré M, Soler C, Barceló D (2007) J Chromatogr A 1176(1-2):123–134Ibáñez M, Sancho JV, Hernández F, McMillan D, Rao R (2008) Trends Anal Chem 27(5):481–489Yoshioka N, Akiyama Y, Teranishi K (2004) J Chromatogr A 1022(1–2):145–150Watanabe E, Yoshimura Y, Yuasa Y, Nakazawa H (2001) Anal Chim Acta 433(2):199–206Ito Y, Ikai Y, Oka H, Hayakawa J, Kagami T (1998) J Chromatogr A 810(1-2):81–87Garrido J, de Alba M, Jimenez I, Casado E, Folgueiras ML (1997) J Chromatogr A 765(1):91–97Charlton AJA, Jones A (2007) J Chromatogr A 1141(1):117–122Rodríguez R, Picó Y, Font G, Mañes J (2001) J Chromatogr A 924(1-2):387–396Balinova A (1995) Anal Chim Acta 311(3):423–427Menezes Filho A, Neves dos Santos F, Afonso de Pereira P (2010) Mikrochemical J 96:139–145Beale DJ, Porter NA, Roddick FA (2009) Talanta 78(2):342–347Albert-García JR, Martínez-Calatayud J (2008) Talanta 75(3):717–724Meseguer-Lloret S, Campíns-Falcó P, Tortajada-Genaro LA, Blasco-Gómez F (2003) Int J Environ Anal Chem 83(5):405–416Moliner-Martínez Y, Meseguer-Lloret S, Tortajada-Genaro LA, Campíns-Falcó P (2003) Talanta 60(2-3):257–268Lin Q, Guiraúm A, Escobar R, de la Rosa F (1993) Anal Chim Acta 283(1):379–385Townshend A, Ruengsitagoon W, Thongpoon C, Liawruangrath S (2005) Anal Chim Acta 541:105–111Lattanzio G, García-Campaña AM, Soto-Chinchilla JJ, Gámiz-Gracia L, Girotti S (2008) J Pharm Biomed Anal 46(2):381–385Catalá Icardo M, García Mateo JV, Fernández Lozano M, Martínez Calatayud J (2003) Anal Chim Acta 499(1-2):57–69Ciborowski M, Catalá Icardo M, García Mateo JV, Martínez Calatayud J (2004) J Pharm Biomed Anal 36(4):693–700Yang XF, Li H (2004) Talanta 64(2):478–483Gómez-Taylor B, Palomeque M, García Mateo JV, Martínez Calatayud J (2006) J Pharm Biomed Anal 41(2):347–357López Paz JL, Catalá-Icardo M (2008) Anal Chim Acta 625(2):173–179López Malo D, Martínez Calatayud J (2008) Talanta 77(2):561–56

Persistent gender bias in marine science and conservation calls for action to achieve equity

The increasing consideration of gender balance in conservation science and practice has been reflected in the setting of global commitments. Yet, women remain under-represented in science and conservation decision-making. We compiled and analyzed data on the representation of women in hiring, publishing, funding, and leadership positions in European Union marine sciences and conservation. To explore scientists' perceptions of gender imbalance in marine sciences and conservation more broadly, we conducted a global survey and analyzed 764 questionnaires from 42 countries. Participants were also asked to identify measures that promote gender equity. We found a consistent pattern of women being under-representated across institutions and nations characterized by a relatively balanced representation of men and women in early career stages and a growing gap in later stages, with women occupying only 13% to 24% of senior positions. The same pattern was found in publishing, funding, and leadership of research institutes. Survey results demonstrate that most marine scientists are aware of the general and persistent gender bias, and perceive that it may compromise our ability to effectively solve conservation problems. Measures that increase fairness in evaluations (e.g. for hiring) and that support work-life balance ranked high, whereas gender-oriented measures, such as gender-specific scholarships, received less support. Our findings suggest that mechanisms promoting a fairer share of family responsibilities and transparent processes in hiring and evaluation are the most promising path to a more balanced participation of women in scientific leadership and conservation decision-making. Such measures may benefit not only women but diversity more generally

Adaptive Cross-Layer Multipath Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

[EN] Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are generally created for temporary scenarios. In such scenarios, where nodes are in mobility, efficient routing is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose an adaptive and cross-layer multipath routing protocol for such changing scenarios. Our routing mechanisms operate keeping in view the type of applications. For simple applications, the proposed protocol is inspired from traditional on-demand routing protocols by searching shortest routes from source to destination using default parameters. In case of multimedia applications, the proposed mechanism considers such routes which are capable of providing more data rates having less packet loss ratio. For those applications which need security, the proposed mechanism searches such routes which are more secure in nature as compared to others. Cross-layer methodology is used in proposed routing scheme so as to exchange different parameters across the protocol stack for better decision-making at network layer. Our approach is efficient and fault tolerant in a variety of scenarios that we simulated and tested.The authors would like to extend their sincere appreciation to the Deanship of Scientific Research at King Saud University for funding this research group no. 037-1435-RG.Iqbal, Z.; Khan, S.; Mehmood, A.; Lloret, J.; Alrajeh, NA. (2016). Adaptive Cross-Layer Multipath Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks. Journal of Sensors. 2016:1-18. https://doi.org/10.1155/2016/5486437S1182016Abusalah, L., Khokhar, A., & Guizani, M. (2008). A survey of secure mobile Ad Hoc routing protocols. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 10(4), 78-93. doi:10.1109/surv.2008.080407Murthy, S., & Garcia-Luna-Aceves, J. J. (1996). An efficient routing protocol for wireless networks. Mobile Networks and Applications, 1(2), 183-197. doi:10.1007/bf01193336Toh, C.-K. (1997). Wireless Personal Communications, 4(2), 103-139. doi:10.1023/a:1008812928561Pearlman, M. R., & Haas, Z. J. (1999). Determining the optimal configuration for the zone routing protocol. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 17(8), 1395-1414. doi:10.1109/49.779922ZHEN, Y., WU, M., WU, D., ZHANG, Q., & XU, C. (2010). Toward path reliability by using adaptive multi-path routing mechanism for multimedia service in mobile Ad-hoc network. The Journal of China Universities of Posts and Telecommunications, 17(1), 93-100. doi:10.1016/s1005-8885(09)60431-3Sivakumar, R., Sinha, P., & Bharghavan, V. (1999). CEDAR: a core-extraction distributed ad hoc routing algorithm. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 17(8), 1454-1465. doi:10.1109/49.779926Zapata, M. G. (2002). Secure ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing. ACM SIGMOBILE Mobile Computing and Communications Review, 6(3), 106-107. doi:10.1145/581291.581312Khan, S., & Loo, J. (2010). Cross Layer Secure and Resource-Aware On-Demand Routing Protocol for Hybrid Wireless Mesh Networks. Wireless Personal Communications, 62(1), 201-214. doi:10.1007/s11277-010-0048-ySharma, V., & Alam, B. (2012). Unicaste Routing Protocols in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks: A Survey. International Journal of Computer Applications, 51(14), 9-18. doi:10.5120/8108-1714Tarique, M., Tepe, K. E., Adibi, S., & Erfani, S. (2009). Survey of multipath routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 32(6), 1125-1143. doi:10.1016/j.jnca.2009.07.002Shiwen Mao, Shunan Lin, Yao Wang, Panwar, S. S., & Yihan Li. (2005). Multipath video transport over ad hoc networks. IEEE Wireless Communications, 12(4), 42-49. doi:10.1109/mwc.2005.1497857Li, Z., Chen, Q., Zhu, G., Choi, Y., & Sekiya, H. (2015). A Low Latency, Energy Efficient MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks. International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks, 11(8), 946587. doi:10.1155/2015/946587Zheng, Z., Liu, A., Cai, L. X., Chen, Z., & Shen, X. (2016). Energy and memory efficient clone detection in wireless sensor networks. IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 15(5), 1130-1143. doi:10.1109/tmc.2015.2449847Dong, M., Ota, K., Liu, A., & Guo, M. (2016). Joint Optimization of Lifetime and Transport Delay under Reliability Constraint Wireless Sensor Networks. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 27(1), 225-236. doi:10.1109/tpds.2015.2388482Hamrioui, S., Lorenz, P., Lloret, J., & Lalam, M. (2013). A Cross Layer Solution for Better Interactions Between Routing and Transport Protocols in MANET. Journal of Computing and Information Technology, 21(3), 137. doi:10.2498/cit.1002136Sanchez-Iborra, R., & Cano, M.-D. (2014). An approach to a cross layer-based QoE improvement for MANET routing protocols. Network Protocols and Algorithms, 6(3), 18. doi:10.5296/npa.v6i3.5827Cho, J.-H., Swami, A., & Chen, I.-R. (2011). A Survey on Trust Management for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 13(4), 562-583. doi:10.1109/surv.2011.092110.0008

Effect of In Ovo Exposure to PCBs and Hg on Clapper Rail Bone Mineral Chemistry from a Contaminated Salt Marsh in Coastal Georgia

The effect of Hg and PCBs (Aroclor 1268) on bone characteristics was investigated in a population of Clapper Rails (Rallus longirostris) inhabiting contaminated and unimpacted estuarine marsh systems in coastal Georgia. Exposure to contaminants did not affect the length or weight of leg bones, but it significantly altered the chemical composition of the bone. Specifically, bone in the contaminated site had a higher Ca to P, and lower carbonate and acid phosphate content. These characteristics are typical of more mature bone mineral and indicate that toxicants have accelerated bone maturation. FTIR spectroscopy data revealed a dose dependent change in the crystallinity of bone mineral, and the relative proportion of specific PO4 groups in different molecular environments in the bone, with toxicants loads. These changes are most probably related to a hormonal alteration of the rate of bone remodelation induced by exposure to toxicant loads