Multi-Device Nutrition Control

Precision nutrition is a popular eHealth topic among several groups, such as athletes, 1 people with dementia, rare diseases, diabetes, and overweight. Its implementation demands tight 2 nutrition control, starting with nutritionists who build up food plans for specific groups or individuals. 3 Each person then follows the food plan by preparing meals and logging all food and water intake. 4 However, the discipline demanded to follow food plans and log food intake turns out into high 5 dropout rates. This article presents the concepts, requirements, and architecture of a solution that 6 assists the nutritionist in building up and revising food plans and the user following them. It does 7 so by minimizing human-computer interaction by integrating the nutritionist and user systems 8 and introducing off-the-shelf IoT devices in the system, such as temperature sensors, smartwatches, 9 smartphones, and smart bottles. An interaction time analysis using the Keystroke Level Model 10 provides a baseline for comparison in future work addressing both the use of machine learning and 11 IoT devices to reduce the interaction effort of users.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Lensing and shadow of a black hole surrounded by a heavy accretion disk

We consider a static, axially symmetric spacetime describing the superposition of a Schwarzschild black hole (BH) with a thin and heavy accretion disk. The BH-disk configuration is a solution of the Einstein field equations within the Weyl class. The disk is sourced by a distributional energy-momentum tensor and it is located at the equatorial plane. It can be interpreted as two streams of counter-rotating particles, yielding a total vanishing angular momentum. The phenomenology of the composed system depends on two parameters: the fraction of the total mass in the disk, $m$, and the location of the inner edge of the disk, $a$. We start by determining the sub-region of the space of parameters wherein the solution is physical, by requiring the velocity of the disk particles to be sub-luminal and real. Then, we study the null geodesic flow by performing backwards ray-tracing under two scenarios. In the first scenario the composed system is illuminated by the disk and in the second scenario the composed system is illuminated by a far-away celestial sphere. Both cases show that, as $m$ grows, the shadow becomes more prolate. Additionally, the first scenario makes clear that as $m$ grows, for fixed $a$, the geometrically thin disk appears optically enlarged, i.e., thicker, when observed from the equatorial plane. This is to due to light rays that are bent towards the disk, when backwards ray traced. In the second scenario, these light rays can cross the disk (which is assumed to be transparent) and may oscillate up to a few times before reaching the far away celestial sphere. Consequently, an almost equatorial observer sees different patches of the sky near the equatorial plane, as a chaotic "mirage". As $m\rightarrow 0$ one recovers the standard test, i.e., negligible mass, disk appearance.Comment: 24 pages, 15 figure

Saccharomyces cerevisiae Peroxiredoxins in Biological Processes: Antioxidant Defense, Signal Transduction, Circadian Rhythm, and More

The yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is a model organism for biochemical and genetic studies, and several very important discoveries of fundamental biological processes have been conducted using this yeast as an experimental organism. An emerging concept, which is validated by several works using this organism, relies on the biological importance of oxidant species, specially the hydroperoxides. These molecules were formed during aerobic biological process and control several intracellular mechanisms such as a range of signaling pathways, cell cycle, programmed cell death, circadian rhythm, aging, and lifespan extension. Thereby, cellular homeostasis depends on a refined control of hydroperoxides levels and low-molecular-weight molecules in combination with antioxidant enzymes playing a role in this equilibrium. This proposal is focused on the S. cerevisiae peroxiredoxins and their role in peroxide decomposition, signal transduction, circadian clocks, and aging as model enzymes for the study and comprehension of these biological processes in living organisms, including humans

Cross-correlation Weak Lensing of SDSS Galaxy Clusters I: Measurements

This is the first in a series of papers on the weak lensing effect caused by clusters of galaxies in Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The photometrically selected cluster sample, known as MaxBCG, includes ~130,000 objects between redshift 0.1 and 0.3, ranging in size from small groups to massive clusters. We split the clusters into bins of richness and luminosity and stack the surface density contrast to produce mean radial profiles. The mean profiles are detected over a range of scales, from the inner halo (25 kpc/h) well into the surrounding large scale structure (30 Mpc/h), with a significance of 15 to 20 in each bin. The signal over this large range of scales is best interpreted in terms of the cluster-mass cross-correlation function. We pay careful attention to sources of systematic error, correcting for them where possible. The resulting signals are calibrated to the ~10% level, with the dominant remaining uncertainty being the redshift distribution of the background sources. We find that the profiles scale strongly with richness and luminosity. We find the signal within a given richness bin depends upon luminosity, suggesting that luminosity is more closely correlated with mass than galaxy counts. We split the samples by redshift but detect no significant evolution. The profiles are not well described by power laws. In a subsequent series of papers we invert the profiles to three-dimensional mass profiles, show that they are well fit by a halo model description, measure mass-to-light ratios and provide a cosmological interpretation.Comment: Paper I in a series; v2.0 includes ApJ referee's suggestion

Diversity of metallophytes and metal(loid)-tolerant bacterial strains in a portuguese mine for phytotechnologies purposes

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

the SDSS-III APOGEE Spectral Line List for H-Band Spectroscopy

We present the H-band spectral line lists adopted by the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE). The APOGEE line lists comprise astrophysical, theoretical, and laboratory sources from the literature, as well as newly evaluated astrophysical oscillator strengths and damping parameters. We discuss the construction of the APOGEE line list, which is one of the critical inputs for the APOGEE Stellar Parameters and Chemical Abundances Pipeline, and present three different versions that have been used at various stages of the project. The methodology for the newly calculated astrophysical line lists is reviewed. The largest of these three line lists contains 134,457 molecular and atomic transitions. In addition to the format adopted to store the data, the line lists are available in MOOG, Synspec, and Turbospectrum formats. The limitations of the line lists along with guidance for its use on different spectral types are discussed. We also present a list of H-band spectral features that are either poorly represented or completely missing in our line list. This list is based on the average of a large number of spectral fit residuals for APOGEE observations spanning a wide range of stellar parameters.Alfred P. Sloan FoundationNational Science FoundationU.S. Department of Energy Office of ScienceJanos Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of SciencesSpanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness AYA-2011-27754, AYA-2014-58082-PRSF 14-50-00043McDonald Observator

Shadows of Kerr Black Holes with Scalar Hair

Using backwards ray tracing, we study the shadows of Kerr black holes with scalar hair (KBHSH). KBHSH interpolate continuously between Kerr BHs and boson stars (BSs), so we start by investigating the lensing of light due to BSs. Moving from the weak to the strong gravity region, BSs-which by themselves have no shadows-are classified, according to the lensing produced, as (i) noncompact, which yield not multiple images, (ii) compact, which produce an increasing number of Einstein rings and multiple images of the whole celestial sphere, and (iii) ultracompact, which possess light rings, yielding an infinite number of images with (we conjecture) a self-similar structure. The shadows of KBHSH, for Kerr-like horizons and noncompact BS-like hair, are analogous to, but distinguishable from, those of comparable Kerr BHs. But for non-Kerr-like horizons and ultracompact BS-like hair, the shadows of KBHSH are drastically different: novel shapes arise, sizes are considerably smaller, and multiple shadows of a single BH become possible. Thus, KBHSH provide quantitatively and qualitatively new templates for ongoing (and future) very large baseline interferometry observations of BH shadows, such as those of the Event Horizon Telescope

Photometric Redshift Probability Distributions for Galaxies in the SDSS DR8

We present redshift probability distributions for galaxies in the SDSS DR8 imaging data. We used the nearest-neighbor weighting algorithm presented in Lima et al. 2008 and Cunha et al. 2009 to derive the ensemble redshift distribution N(z), and individual redshift probability distributions P(z) for galaxies with r < 21.8. As part of this technique, we calculated weights for a set of training galaxies with known redshifts such that their density distribution in five dimensional color-magnitude space was proportional to that of the photometry-only sample, producing a nearly fair sample in that space. We then estimated the ensemble N(z) of the photometric sample by constructing a weighted histogram of the training set redshifts. We derived P(z) s for individual objects using the same technique, but limiting to training set objects from the local color-magnitude space around each photometric object. Using the P(z) for each galaxy, rather than an ensemble N(z), can reduce the statistical error in measurements that depend on the redshifts of individual galaxies. The spectroscopic training sample is substantially larger than that used for the DR7 release, and the newly added PRIMUS catalog is now the most important training set used in this analysis by a wide margin. We expect the primary source of error in the N(z) reconstruction is sample variance: the training sets are drawn from relatively small volumes of space. Using simulations we estimated the uncertainty in N(z) at a given redshift is 10-15%. The uncertainty on calculations incorporating N(z) or P(z) depends on how they are used; we discuss the case of weak lensing measurements. The P(z) catalog is publicly available from the SDSS website.Comment: 29 pages, 9 figures, single colum

Safety requirements for the design of collaborative robotic workstations in europe – a review

Industrial manufacturing is moving towards flexible and intelligent processes. Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) has a pivotal role in smart factories due to a more versatile resource allocation that ultimately drives higher productivity and efficiency. The physical barriers that separate robots’ and humans’ workspaces are removed to facilitate HRC, which raises new safety concerns. To cope with this new robotics paradigm, regulatory legislation and international safety standards have been issued and are enforced for any machinery placed in factories. In this paper, we aim to shorten the gap between research projects and industry-ready robotic systems, by providing the guidelines and general requirements for collaborative robotic applications. We review the current international safety standards, certification procedures under the scope of European jurisdiction, and elaborate a literature review of papers related to safety for collaborative workstations.This work was supported by NORTE-06-3559-FSE-000018, integrated into the invitation NORTE-59-2018-41, aiming to hire highly-qualified human resources, co-financed by the Regional Operational Programme of the North 2020, thematic area of Competitiveness and Employment, through the European Social Fund (ESF)