Improved wear performance of ultra high molecular weight polyethylene coated with hydrogenated diamond like carbon

Hydrogenated diamond like carbon (DLCH) thin films were deposited on medical grade ultra high molecular weight polyethylene (UHMWPE) by radio frequency plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition. The DLCH coating thicknesses ranged from 250 to 700. nm. The substrates were disks made of UHMWPEs typically used for soft components in artificial joints, namely virgin GUR 1050 and highly crosslinked (gamma irradiated in air to 100. kGy) UHMWPEs. Mechanical and tribological properties under bovine serum lubrication at body temperature were assessed on coated and uncoated polyethylenes by means of nano-hardness and ball-on-disk tests, respectively. Morphological features of the worn surfaces were obtained by confocal microscopy and scanning electron microscopy. This study confirms an increase in surface hardness and good wear resistance for coated materials after 24. h of sliding test compared to uncoated polyethylene. These results point out that to coat UHMWPE with DLCH films could be a potential method to reduce backside wear in total hip and knee arthroplasties.Ministerio de Ciencia y Educación MAT2006-12603- C02-01, CSD2008-0002

QUIJOTE Scientific Results. II. Polarisation Measurements of the Microwave Emission in the Galactic molecular complexes W43 and W47 and supernova remnant W44

We present Q-U-I JOint TEnerife (QUIJOTE) intensity and polarisation maps at 10-20 GHz covering a region along the Galactic plane 24<l<45 deg, |b|<8 deg. These maps result from 210 h of data, have a sensitivity in polarisation of ~40 muK/beam and an angular resolution of ~1 deg. Our intensity data are crucial to confirm the presence of anomalous microwave emission (AME) towards the two molecular complexes W43 (22 sigma) and W47 (8 sigma). We also detect at high significance (6 sigma) AME associated with W44, the first clear detection of this emission towards a SNR. The new QUIJOTE polarisation data, in combination with WMAP, are essential to: i) Determine the spectral index of the synchrotron emission in W44, beta_sync =-0.62 +/-0.03, in good agreement with the value inferred from the intensity spectrum once a free-free component is included in the fit. ii) Trace the change in the polarisation angle associated with Faraday rotation in the direction of W44 with rotation measure -404 +/- 49 rad/m2. And iii) set upper limits on the polarisation of W43 of Pi_AME <0.39 per cent (95 per cent C.L.) from QUIJOTE 17~GHz, and <0.22 per cent from WMAP 41 GHz data, which are the most stringent constraints ever obtained on the polarisation fraction of the AME. For typical physical conditions (grain temperature and magnetic field strengths), and in the case of perfect alignment between the grains and the magnetic field, the models of electric or magnetic dipole emissions predict higher polarisation fractions.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRA

Remote mining: from clustering to DTM

LIDAR data acquisition is becoming an indispensable task for terrain characterization in large surfaces. In Mediterranean woods this job results hard due to the great variety of heights and forms, as well as sparse vegetation that they present. A new data mining-based approach is proposed with the aim of classifying LIDAR data clouds as a first step in DTM generation. The developed methodology consists in a multi-step iterative process that splits the data into different classes (ground and low/med/high vegetation) by means of a clustering algorithm. This method has been tested on three different areas of the southern Spain with successful results, verging on 80% hitsMinisterio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2007-6808

Thermal Conduction in Systems out of Hydrostatic Equilibrium

We analyse the effects of thermal conduction in a relativistic fluid, just after its departure from hydrostatic equilibrium, on a time scale of the order of thermal relaxation time. It is obtained that the resulting evolution will critically depend on a parameter defined in terms of thermodynamic variables, which is constrained by causality requirements.Comment: 16 pages, emTex (LaTex 2.09). To appear in Classical and Quantum Gravit

Influence of metal organic chemical vapour deposition growth conditions on vibrational and luminescent properties of ZnO nanorods

Producción CientíficaA detailed optical characterization by means of micro Raman and cathodoluminescence spectroscopy of catalyst-free ZnO nanorods grown by atmospheric-metal organic chemical vapour deposition has been carried out. This characterization has allowed correlating the growth conditions, in particular the precursors partial-pressures and growth time, with the optical properties of nanorods. It has been shown that a high Zn supersaturation can favor the incorporation of nonradiative recombination centers, which can tentatively be associated with ZnI-related defects. Characterization of individual nanorods has evidenced that ZnI-related defects have a tendency to accumulate in the tip part of the nanorods, which present dark cathodoluminescence contrast with respect to the nanorods bottom. The effect of a ZnO buffer layer on the properties of the nanorods has been also investigated, showing that the buffer layer improves the luminescence efficiency of the ZnO nanorods, revealing a significant reduction of the concentration of nonradiative recombination centers.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (Projects MAT2007-66129, MAT-2010-20441-C02, MAT-2010-16116, and TEC2011-28076-C02-02)Generalitat Valenciana (Prometeo/2011-035 and ISIC/2012/008, Institute of Nanotechnologies for Clean Energies

MRQAR: A generic MapReduce framework to discover quantitative association rules in big data problems

Many algorithms have emerged to address the discovery of quantitative association rules from datasets in the last years. However, this task is becoming a challenge because the processing power of most existing techniques is not enough to handle the large amount of data generated nowadays. These vast amounts of data are known as Big Data. A number of previous studies have been focused on mining boolean or nominal association rules from Big Data problems, nevertheless, the data in real-world applications usually consist of quantitative values and designing data mining algorithms able to extract quantitative association rules presents a challenge to workers in this research field. In spite of the fact that we can find classical methods to discover boolean or nominal association rules in the most well-known repositories of Big Data algorithms, such repositories do not provide methods to discover quantitative association rules. Indeed, no methodologies have been proposed in the literature without prior discretization in Big Data. Hence, this work proposes MRQAR, a new generic parallel framework to discover quantitative association rules in large amounts of data, designed following the MapReduce paradigm using Apache Spark. MRQAR performs an incremental learning able to run any sequential quantitative association rule algorithm in Big Data problems without needing to redesign such algorithms. As a case study, we have integrated the multiobjective evolutionary algorithm MOPNAR into MRQAR to validate the generic MapReduce framework proposed in this work. The results obtained in the experimental study performed on five Big Data problems prove the capability of MRQAR to obtain reduced set of high quality rules in reasonable time.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2017-89517-PMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2014-55894-C2-1-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2017-88209-C2-2-

Interrelationship between different loads in resisted sprints, half-squat 1RM, and kinematic variables in trained athletes

Resisted sprint running is a common training method for improving sprint-specific strength. It is well-known that an athlete's time to complete a sled-towing sprint increases linearly with increasing sled load. However, to our knowledge, the relationship between the maximum load in sled-towing sprint and the sprint time is unknown, The main purpose of this research was to analyze the relationship between the maximum load in sled-towing sprint, half-squat maximal dynamic strength and the velocity in the acceleration phase in 20-m sprint. A second aim was to compare sprint performance when athletes ran under different conditions: un-resisted and towing sleds. Twenty-one participants (17.86±2.27 years; 1.77±0.06 m and 69.24±7.20 kg) completed a one repetition maximum test (1 RM) from a half-squat position (159.68±22.61 kg) and a series of sled-towing sprints with loads of 0, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30% body mass (Bm) and the maximum resisted sprint load. No significant correlation (P<0.05) was found between half-squat 1 RM and the sprint time in different loaded conditions. Conversely, significant correlations (P<0.05) were found between maximum load in resisted sprint and sprint time (20-m sprint time, r=−0.71; 5% Bm, r=−0.73; 10% Bm, r=−0.53; 15% Bm, r=−0.55; 20% Bm, r=−0.65; 25% Bm, r=−0.44; 30% Bm, r=−0.63; MaxLoad, r= 0.93). The sprinting velocity significantly decreased by 4–22% with all load increases. Stride length (SL) also decreased (17%) significantly across all resisted conditions. In addition, there were significant differences in stride frequency (SF) with loads over 15% Bm. It could be concluded thatthe knowledge of the individual maximal load in resisted sprint and the effects on the sprinting kinematic with different loads, could be interesting to determinate the optimal load to improve the acceleration phase at sprint running.Actividad Física y Deport

Dissipative fluids out of hydrostatic equilibrium

In the context of the M\"{u}ller-Israel-Stewart second order phenomenological theory for dissipative fluids, we analyze the effects of thermal conduction and viscosity in a relativistic fluid, just after its departure from hydrostatic equilibrium, on a time scale of the order of relaxation times. Stability and causality conditions are contrasted with conditions for which the ''effective inertial mass'' vanishes.Comment: 21 pages, 1 postscript figure (LaTex 2.09 and epsfig.sty required) Submitted to Classical and Quantum Gravit

Mass-Up and Decision Peptide-Driven: two open-source applications for MALDI-TOF MS data analysis and protein quantification

Poster presentation at EUBIC Winter School 2017 (10th - 13th January 2017, Sporthotel Semmering, Austria)