Molecular simulation of CO2 and H2 encapsulation in a nanoscale porous liquid

In this study we analyse from a theoretical perspective the encapsulation of both gaseous H2 and CO2 at different conditions of pressure and temperature in a Type II porous liquid, composed by nanometric scale cryptophane-111 molecules dispersed in dichloromethane, using atomistic molecular dynamics. Gaseous H2 tends to occupy cryptophane–111’s cavities in the early stages of the simulation; however, a remarkably greater selectivity of CO2 adsorption can be seen in the course of the simulation. Calculations were performed at ambient conditions first, and then varying temperature and pressure, obtaining some insight about the different adsorption found in each case. An evaluation of the host molecule cavities accessible volume was also performed, based on the guest that occupies the pore. Finally, a discussion between the different intermolecular host–guest interactions is presented, justifying the different selectivity obtained in the molecular simulation calculations. From the results obtained, the feasibility of a renewable separation and storage method for CO2 using these nanometric scale porous liquids is pointed out.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación | Ref. PID2021-125081NB-I0

Microwave-assisted extraction of hemicellulosic oligosaccharides and phenolics from Robinia pseudoacacia wood

Financiaciado para publicación en acceso aberto: Universidade de Vigo/CISUGMicrowave-assisted autohydrolysis is an environmentally friendly intensification technology that permits the selective solubilization of hemicelluloses in form of oligosaccharides in a short time and with low energy consumption. The purpose of this work was to evaluate the suitability of microwave-assisted autohydrolysis to produce oligosaccharides and phenolics with potential prebiotic and antioxidant activities from Robinia pseudoacacia wood. The influence of treatment time (0–30 min) and temperature (200–230 ◦C) on oligosaccharide production was studied and conditions of 230 ◦C and 0.25 min resulted in maximum content of xylooligosaccharides (7.69 g XO/L) and more efficient energy consumption. Furthermore, under those conditions, liquors showed high contents of phenols (80.28 mg GAE/g of RW) and flavonoids (44.51 RE/g) with significant antioxidant activities (112.07 and 102.30 mg TE/g, measured by ABTS and FRAP tests, respectively). Additionally, the solubilized hemicelluloses were structurally characterized by HPAEC-PAD, MALDI-TOF-MS, FTIR and TGA/DSC, and HPLC-ESI-MS analysis allowed the tentative identification of 17 phytochemicals.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad | Ref. PID2019-110031RB-I00Xunta de Galicia | Ref. ED431C 2017/62-GRCMinisterio de Ciencia e Innovación | Ref. FPU21/02446Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación | Ref. PRE 2020 093359Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación | Ref. RYC2018-026177-IXunta de Galicia | Ref. ED481B-2022-02

Synergetic effect of hydrothermal and deep eutectic solvents (DES) pretreatments on Robinia wood fractionation for the manufacture of bioethanol and cellulose nanocrystals

This study dealt with the use of environmentally friendly processes based on microwave-assisted autohydrolysis (MAA) and deep eutectic solvents (DES) for the selective fractionation of Robinia pseudoacacia wood (RW) within a biorefinery approach. MAA enabled the recovery of 76% of hemicelluloses in the form of oligomers. Afterwards, different conditions were assessed for the optimal delignification of RW with the DES choline chloride combined with lactic acid reaching delignification ratios up to 86%. Two different methods were accomplished to valorize the cellulosic-rich solid fraction after delignification: (i) bioethanol via enzymatic-fermentative pathway (attaining 53.3 g ethanol/L, about 83% of ethanol yield), and (ii) cellulose nanocrystals (length of 27–550 nm, width of 2–12 nm). Hence, this study presents a novel multiproduct biorefinery to selectively separate the main components of RW and valorize its cellulosic fraction using eco-friendly proceduresUniversidade de Vigo/CISUGMinisterio de Economía| Ref. PID2019-110031RB-I00Xunta de Galicia | Ref. ED431C 2017/62-GRCMinisterio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades | Ref. FPU21/02446Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades | Ref. PRE2020-093359Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades | Ref. RYC2018-026177-IXunta de Galicia | Ref. ED481B-2022-02

Predicting emotional states using behavioral markers derived from passively sensed data: Data-driven machine learning approach

Background: Mental health disorders affect multiple aspects of patients’ lives, including mood, cognition, and behavior. eHealth and mobile health (mHealth) technologies enable rich sets of information to be collected noninvasively, representing a promising opportunity to construct behavioral markers of mental health. Combining such data with self-reported information about psychological symptoms may provide a more comprehensive and contextualized view of a patient’s mental state than questionnaire data alone. However, mobile sensed data are usually noisy and incomplete, with significant amounts of missing observations. Therefore, recognizing the clinical potential of mHealth tools depends critically on developing methods to cope with such data issues. Objective: This study aims to present a machine learning–based approach for emotional state prediction that uses passively collected data from mobile phones and wearable devices and self-reported emotions. The proposed methods must cope with high-dimensional and heterogeneous time-series data with a large percentage of missing observations. Methods: Passively sensed behavior and self-reported emotional state data from a cohort of 943 individuals (outpatients recruited from community clinics) were available for analysis. All patients had at least 30 days’ worth of naturally occurring behavior observations, including information about physical activity, geolocation, sleep, and smartphone app use. These regularly sampled but frequently missing and heterogeneous time series were analyzed with the following probabilistic latent variable models for data averaging and feature extraction: mixture model (MM) and hidden Markov model (HMM). The extracted features were then combined with a classifier to predict emotional state. A variety of classical machine learning methods and recurrent neural networks were compared. Finally, a personalized Bayesian model was proposed to improve performance by considering the individual differences in the data and applying a different classifier bias term for each patient. Results: Probabilistic generative models proved to be good preprocessing and feature extractor tools for data with large percentages of missing observations. Models that took into account the posterior probabilities of the MM and HMM latent states outperformed those that did not by more than 20%, suggesting that the underlying behavioral patterns identified were meaningful for individuals’ overall emotional state. The best performing generalized models achieved a 0.81 area under the curve of the receiver operating characteristic and 0.71 area under the precision-recall curve when predicting self-reported emotional valence from behavior in held-out test data. Moreover, the proposed personalized models demonstrated that accounting for individual differences through a simple hierarchical model can substantially improve emotional state prediction performance without relying on previous days’ data. Conclusions: These findings demonstrate the feasibility of designing machine learning models for predicting emotional states from mobile sensing data capable of dealing with heterogeneous data with large numbers of missing observations. Such models may represent valuable tools for clinicians to monitor patients’ mood states.This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement number 813533. This work was partly supported by the Spanish government (Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación) under grants TEC2017-92552-EXP and RTI2018-099655-B-100; the Comunidad de Madrid under grants IND2017/TIC-7618, IND2018/TIC-9649, IND2020/TIC-17372, and Y2018/TCS-4705; the BBVA Foundation under the Domain Alignment and Data Wrangling with Deep Generative Models (Deep-DARWiN) project; and the European Union (European Regional Development Fund and the European Research Council) through the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program under grant 714161. The authors thank Enrique Baca-Garcia for providing demographic and clinical data and assisting in interpreting and summarizing the data

Evaluation of a Planar Reconfigurable Phased Array Antenna Driven by a Multi-Channel Beamforming Module at Ka Band

© 2021 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other worksIn this paper, a planar active phased array antenna demonstration with linear polarization (LP) at Ka Band (28-30 GHz) is presented. The proof of concept is carried out to evaluate the possible problems that may arise, to analyze possible calibration stages and to assess the viability of the integration of an active system with a Multi-Channel Beamforming Module (MCBM). To fulfill this task an 8times 8-element planar array arranged in column subarrays of 1times 8 elements for 1D beam steering is proposed. The single element consists of a printed circular patch connected to a microstrip feeding line through metallic vias in a multilayered structure. Both the amplitude and phase distributions are performed by a commercial integrated circuit (IC) designed for transmission purposes, from the common port to each of the 8 output ports. Thus, an evaluation of the IC performance is also included within this work. Despite the inherent amplitude and phase feeding errors of the IC, the beam-steering accuracy of the system is reasonable. A nice correspondence between the simulated and measured 8times 8-element array beam steering directions is obtained, with errors below 1° in the steering of the beamThis work was supported in part by the Spanish Government, Ministry of Economy, National Program of Research, Development and Innovation through the Project FUTURE RADIO ’’Radio systems and technologies for high capacity terrestrial and satellite communications in an hyperconnected world’’ under Grant TEC2017-85529-C3-1-R, and in part by the Project JETSTREAM ’’Desarrollo de una antena banda KA embarcada para la prestación de servicios de acceso a Internet por satélite en aviación comercial’’ in collaboration with TELNET Redes Inteligentes S.A. under Grant RTC-2015-3495-

Comparing two simple cryopreservation methods for porcine sperm: Effect on sperm quality parameters

Cerca del 40% de la carne roja que se consume en el mundo es provista por los cerdos. Los productores porcinos de nuestro país se encuentran ante el enorme desafío de lograr mejoras productivas con un desarrollo económico sustentable y eficiente, así como implementar tecnologías reproductivas, como la inseminación artificial y la criopreservación de semen. Tales adelantos aún presentan enormes problemas en estaespecie. El objetivo de este trabajo fue comparar dos métodos simples de congelamiento para semen porcino, evaluando los parámetros de calidad seminal al momento del descongelado. Las muestras de semen fueron criopreservadas en pajuelas siguiendo el protocolo descripto por Peña y colaboradores en 2003, realizando (grupo tratamiento) o no (grupo control) una modificación en el paso final de congelamiento posterior al envasado en las pajuelas. Las evaluaciones de motilidad y vitalidad se realizaron por microscopía óptica en platina termostatizada y por las técnicas de eosina/nigrosina y la combinación del colorante supravital azul tripán con microscopía de contraste interferencial diferencial, respectivamente. La criocapacitación se evaluó por la técnica fluorescente de clorotetraciclina (CTC). Los resultados de los diferentes experimentos fueron analizados por la prueba t de Student. Las muestras del grupo tratamiento evidenciaron una motilidad significativamente más alta (p<0,05) y una criocapacitación significativamente más baja (p<0,05) que la del grupo control. El porcentaje de espermatozoides vivos en las muestras del grupo tratamiento (33±3) resultó el doble que el del grupo control (16±2). Nuestros resultados demuestran que el método de congelamiento propuesto permite obtener, al descongelado, muestras de una mayor calidad que las obtenidas al descongelar muestras que hayan sido congeladas con el método tradicional.About 40% of red meat consumed around the world is porcine meat. Argentinean producers face the big challenge of achieving productive improvements with efficient and sustainable economic development and reproductive technologies, like artificial insemination and sperm cryopreservation (that still has many problems in this specie), seems to be an essential element for achieving them. The aim of this work was to compare two different simple cryopreservation methods for porcine sperm, evaluating sperm quality parameters at the moment of thawing. Sperm samples were cryopreserved following Peña et al. protocol (2003), performing (treatment group) or not (control group) a modification during the final step of cryopreservation after the straws’ packing. Sperm motility and viability of ejaculated and thawed sperm were evaluated by optic microscopy with thermal stage and the combination of the blue trypan supravital technique and differential interferential contrast microscopy, respectively. Cryocapacitation was evaluated by the chlortetracycline technique (CTC). The results of the different experiments were analyzed by t-student test. The samples of the treatment group showed a significantly higher (p<0.05) sperm motility and a significantly lower (p<0.05) cryocapacitation than the control group. The percentage of live spermatozoa in samples of the treatment group (33±3) doubled those in the control group (16±2). Our results demonstrate that the proposed method of cryopreser- 24 INTRODUCCIÓN La carne de cerdo representa hoy cerca del 40% de la carne roja que se consume en el mundo, proyectándose a nivel mundial un consumo de 15,3 kg/habitante/ año para el 2030 12 . En los últimos años, en nuestro país se ha incrementado sustancialmente su consumo, llegando en 2015 a unos 11,30 kg/habitante/año 10 . En tal sentido, los productores porcinos se encuentran ante el enorme desafío de lograr mejoras productivas con un desarrollo económico sustentable y eficiente 15 . La implementación de tecnologías reproductivas resulta un componente esencial para lograr un buen posicionamiento productivo 16 . La inseminación artificial (IA) es la técnica más importante para el mejoramiento genético de los animales y es una práctica corriente en los principales países productores de cerdos, sustituyendo prácticamente a la monta natural con niveles superiores al 90% en Europa y en EEUU. En Sudamérica se ha registrado un importante avance en los últimos años, llegando a casi 100% en Chile y 66% en Brasil 9 . En nuestro país las situación es diferente. Si bien los niveles de producción se han incrementado en un 160% en la última década 10 , el uso de la IA no ha seguido el mismo camino, mostrando aún bajos niveles de utilización. En Argentina, la utilización de esta técnica presenta un problema relacionado con el tiempo de conservación de los espermatozoides, que es de aproximadamente una semana para el semen refrigerado y que llevaría a problemas en el transporte de las dosis seminales debido a lo extenso de nuestro territorio. Una posible solución a este inconveniente se encuentra en otra biotecnología muy asociada a la IA, que es la criopreservación de semen. A diferencia de lo que ocurre en otras especies pecuarias como el bovino, a nivel mundial la IA en porcinos con semen congelado, sólo se utiliza con fines experimentales, para intercambio de material genético entre países o conservación de germoplasma de altísimo mérito genético, debido a la disminución en las dosis procesadas, la fertilidad y el tamaño de la camada 6, 7, 20 . Algunos investigadores indican que durante el congelamiento y descongelamien-to, los espermatozoides del porcino presentan cambios en la concentración y distribución de transportadores de glucosa, como el GLUT-3, en su membrana celular 1 . Su disminución podría explicar la corta viabilidad, alrededor de cuatro horas, de los espermatozoides descongelados del cerdo. Además la membrana plasmática del espermatozoide porcino tiene escasa resistencia al proceso de congelación-descongelación debido a su mayor concentración de fosfolípidos insaturados 2 . Las inseminaciones utilizando espermatozoides congelados/descongelados resultan en bajas tasas de preñez y escaso tamaño de las camadas, comparadas con las obtenidas con semen fresco o refrigerado 3 . Aún cuando la utilización de la inseminación intrauterina junto con la inseminación a tiempo fijo han permitido obtener mejores resultados 8 , la incorporación de esta biotecnología para el desarrollo productivocomercial se encuentra claramente limitada. La utilización de semen criopreservado no sólo tendría efectos a nivel productivo, como en la introducción de nueva genética, sino también a nivel sanitario 6 . De allí surge la importancia de posicionar no sólo el uso de la IA en porcinos en nuestro país sino también a la criopreservación de semen, como una tecnología de uso corriente en esta especie. El objetivo de este trabajo fue comparar dos métodos de congelamiento para semen porcino, evaluando los parámetros de calidad seminal al momento del descongelado. MATERIAL Y MÉTODOS Obtención de las muestras de semen. Las mismas se recolectaron por la técnica de mano enguantada de 4 porcinos jóvenes mestizos (Yorkshire x Pietrain), de probada fertilidad. Los animales utilizados pertenecían a la Facultad de Ciencias Veterinarias de la Universidad de Buenos Aires, presentaban un estado corporal y sanitario óptimo y fueron mantenidos bajo condiciones uniformes de manejo y alimentación durante el tiempo que duró el estudio. Fueron congelados todos los eyaculados que presentaron un mínimo de 70% de espermatozoides móviles y un 80% de espermatozoides con morfología normal. Congelamiento de las muestras de semen. Ellas fueron criopreservadas en pajuelas siguiendo un protocolo convencional 13 , realizando (grupo tratamiento) o no (grupo control) una modificación en el paso final de congelamiento posterior al envasado en las pajuelas. En forma resumida, las muestras a congelar se diluyeron a:a en medio Beltsville Thawing Solution (BTS) antes de pasar por un período de enfriamiento en dos etapas: primero a temperatura ambiente hasta los 25°C y luego, en heladera hasta los 15°C. El período de estabilización se llevó a cabo a esta temperatura durante 2 horas. Posteriormente, las muestras se centrifugaron a 300G por 3 min, descartando el plasma seminal. El precipitado se re-suspendió en diluyente de enfriamiento (lactosa, yema de huevo, penicilina y estreptomicina) previamente a la realización de una curva de enfriavation allows obtaining, at thawing, higher quality sperm samples than the ones obtained with the traditional method of cryopreservation.Fil: Perez, M.C. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Veterinarias. Área de Química Biológica; ArgentinaFil: Petrinelli, A.. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Veterinarias. Área de Química Biológica; ArgentinaFil: Rodriguez, Pablo C.. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Veterinarias. Área de Química Biológica; ArgentinaFil: Satorre, María Mercedes. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Veterinarias. Área de Química Biológica; ArgentinaFil: Breininger, Elizabeth. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Parque Centenario. Unidad Ejecutora de Investigaciones en Producción Animal. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Veterinarias. Unidad Ejecutora de Investigaciones en Producción Animal; Argentin

Measurement properties of the Community Wellbeing Index in older adults

PURPOSE: The international wellbeing index (IWI) consists of two scales, the personal (PWI) and national (NWI) wellbeing indices. The community wellbeing index (CWI) is a new measure of the individual's level of satisfaction with the local place of residence. The main goal of this paper is to validate the CWI in a sample of older adults. METHODS: The IWI was satisfactorily applied to survey the global quality of life of a community sample of 1,106 people aged 60 years and over residing in Spain. The CWI psychometric properties were studied using Rasch analysis. Classic psychometric parameters were also analyzed. RESULTS: Tests of unidimensionality, and exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, revealed the presence of three subscales: community services, community attachment, and physical and social environment. To achieve adequate model fit of the three subscales to the Rasch model, one item (distribution of wealth) of the initial 11 was removed and item response categories were rescored. The person separation index was 0.82-0.85, indicating a good reliability. All items were free from gender bias. The three subscales displayed satisfactory convergent validity with the PWI and NWI and were able to discriminate between groups with high and low satisfaction with local place of residence. CONCLUSION: The CWI, made up of three subscales, is a valid and reliable measure of subjective wellbeing related to the community as assessed by older adults. Further research with this promising measure should focus on cross-national comparisons.This research was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (National R&D&I Plan: ref. SEJ2006-15122-C02-00). Prieto-Flores’ position is supported by the Juan de la Cierva program for postdoctoral research, of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. The Carlos III Institute of Health team is a member of the Consortium for Biomedical Research in Neurodegenerative Diseases (Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red sobre Enfermedades Neurodegenerativas—CIBERNED). The Spanish Research Group on Quality of Life and Aging is made up as follows: (1) at the Carlos III Institute of Health by M. Joao Forjaz, Pablo Martinez-Martin, Maria-Eugenia Prieto-Flores, Belen Frades-Payo, Carmen Rodriguez-Blazquez and Concepcion Delgado-Sanz; and, (2) at the Spanish National Research Council by Gloria Fernandez-Mayoralas, Fermina Rojo-Perez, Karim Ahmed-Mohamed and Raul Lardies-Bosque

Worldwide impact of economic cycles on suicide trends over 3 decades: Differences according to level of development. A mixed effect model study

Objectives: To investigate the trends and correlations of gross domestic product (GDP) adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP) per capita on suicide rates in 10 WHO regions during the past 30 years. Design: Analyses of databases of PPP-adjusted GDP per capita and suicide rates. Countries were grouped according to the Global Burden of Disease regional classification system. Data sources: World Bank’s official website and WHO’s mortality database. Statistical analyses: After graphically displaying PPP-adjusted GDP per capita and suicide rates, mixed effect models were used for representing and analysing clustered data. Results: Three different groups of countries, based on the correlation between the PPP-adjusted GDP per capita and suicide rates, are reported: (1) positive correlation: developing (lower middle and upper middle income) Latin-American and Caribbean countries, developing countries in the South East Asian Region including India, some countries in the Western Pacific Region (such as China and South Korea) and high-income Asian countries, including Japan; (2) negative correlation: high-income and developing European countries, Canada, Australia and New Zealand and (3) no correlation was found in an African country. Conclusions: PPP-adjusted GDP per capita may offer a simple measure for designing the type of preventive interventions aimed at lowering suicide rates that can be used across countries. Public health interventions might be more suitable for developing countries. In high-income countries, however, preventive measures based on the medical model might prove more usefulAll authors have completed the Unified Competing Interest form. Dr. Blasco-Fontecilla acknowledges the Spanish Ministry of Health (Rio Hortega CMO8/00170; SAF2010-21849), Alicia Koplowitz Foundation and Conchita Rabago Foundation for funding his post-doctoral stage at CHRU, Montpellier, France

A comparison of cut points for measuring risk factors for adolescent substance use and antisocial behaviors in the U.S. and Colombia

As the identification and targeting of salient risk factors for adolescent substance use become more widely used globally, an essential question arises as to whether U.S.-based cut points in the distributions of these risk factors that identify high risk can be used validly in other countries as well. This study examined proportions of youth at high risk using different empirically derived cut points in the distributions of 18 measured risk factors. Data were obtained from large-scale samples of adolescents in Colombia and the United States. Results indicated that significant (p \u3c 0.05) differences in the proportions of high risk youth were found in 38.9% of risk factors for 6th graders, 61.1% for 8th graders, and 66.6% for 10th graders. Colombian-based cut points for determining the proportion of Colombian youth at high risk were preferable to U.S.-based cut points in almost all comparisons that exhibited a significant difference. Our findings suggest that observed differences were related to the type of risk factor (e.g., drug specific vs. non-drug specific). Findings from this study demonstrate the need for collecting large-scale national data on risk factors for adolescent substance use and developing country-specific cut points based on the distributions of these measures to avoid misidentification of youth at high risk