Values and Intercultural Experiences Through Picture Books

The authors searched for picture books that are useful for intercultural education and for discovering students’ perceptions about the values and intercultural experiences conveyed through the books. To do so, the authors selected two books by following established criteria and analyzed students’ responses through semistructured interviews. The data were obtained after reading the books aloud to 30 fifth-grade students in a school located in the south of Spain and reflecting on the books’ contents. As a main conclusion, the authors found that students’ answers revealed the presence of some positive values, such as helpfulness, friendship, and empathy, through questions about the experiences of characters in the books. Thus, prejudices were dismantled and positive intercultural experiences in school were fostered

Etología. Introducción a la ciencia del comportamiento

1ª ed., 3ª reimp.El objetivo de este libro es proporcionar una introducción a la Etología. Ésta ciencia responde al interés por profundizar en el conocimiento de las costumbres animales; por comprender la variedad de comportamientos que en diferentes situaciones exhiben los individuos de diferentes especies. Una posible definición de Etología podría ser: el estudio científico del comportamiento de los seres vivos. A lo largo de esta obra se analizan todos los aspectos que tienen que ver con el comportamiento animal, desde las causas y mecanismos de actuación o la adaptación y evolución y el bienestar animal.The purpose of this book is to provide an introduction to Ethology. This science responds to the interest in deepening the knowledge of animal customs; to understand the variety of behaviour that in different situations exhibit individuals of different species. A possible definition of ethology could be: the scientific study of the behavior of living beings. Throughout this book all aspects related to animal behavior, from the causes and mechanisms of action or adaptation and evolution and animal welfare, are analyzed

CIBERER : Spanish national network for research on rare diseases: A highly productive collaborative initiative

Altres ajuts: Instituto de Salud Carlos III (ISCIII); Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación.CIBER (Center for Biomedical Network Research; Centro de Investigación Biomédica En Red) is a public national consortium created in 2006 under the umbrella of the Spanish National Institute of Health Carlos III (ISCIII). This innovative research structure comprises 11 different specific areas dedicated to the main public health priorities in the National Health System. CIBERER, the thematic area of CIBER focused on rare diseases (RDs) currently consists of 75 research groups belonging to universities, research centers, and hospitals of the entire country. CIBERER's mission is to be a center prioritizing and favoring collaboration and cooperation between biomedical and clinical research groups, with special emphasis on the aspects of genetic, molecular, biochemical, and cellular research of RDs. This research is the basis for providing new tools for the diagnosis and therapy of low-prevalence diseases, in line with the International Rare Diseases Research Consortium (IRDiRC) objectives, thus favoring translational research between the scientific environment of the laboratory and the clinical setting of health centers. In this article, we intend to review CIBERER's 15-year journey and summarize the main results obtained in terms of internationalization, scientific production, contributions toward the discovery of new therapies and novel genes associated to diseases, cooperation with patients' associations and many other topics related to RD research

Development and characterization of genomic microsatellite markers in safflower (Carthamus tinctorius L.)

Specific and robust marker resources available for safflower breeding are scarce. The present research was aimed at developing a collection of genomic microsatellite (SSR) markers and to assess their informativeness. A genomic library enriched for AC- and AG- repeats was constructed from safflower DNA. Around 35% of the 768 clones that were isolated and sequenced contained SSR sequences. From these, 108 unique primer pairs were designed. The majority of the SSRs contained simple di-nucleotide motifs (77 of 108), most of them being perfect repeats (63 of 77). Reference allele length ranged from 95 to 414bp, averaging 241.2bp. The 108 SSRs were amplified in a set of ten safflower lines. From 88 SSR markers that amplified successfully, 64 of them detected polymorphism among the ten safflower lines genotyped. The number of alleles per locus ranged from 2 to 8 (mean value of 3.2), whereas heterozygosity ranged from 0.18 to 0.86 (mean value of 0.52). These genomic SSR markers will contribute to advance in safflower molecular breeding. © 2010 Blackwell Verlag GmbH.The research was partly funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the European Union FEDER (research project AGL2007-62834).Peer Reviewe