Renewable polybenzoxazines based in diphenolic acid

The reaction of mixtures of renewable diphenolic acid (DPA) and its methylesterbenzoxazine derivative (MDP-Bz) has been studied. The DPA was introduced to lower the high temperature needed to complete the curing of the pure benzoxazine. In this way, samples with different DPA/MDP-Bz ratio (0, 2, 5, 10 and 25% of DPA) were investigated. Moreover, high performance flame retardant thermosetting resins with phosphorus were prepared through the mixture of MDP-Bz and a DPA-phosphazene derivative (DPA-PPZ). The curing behavior of these materials was studied by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). Finally, the properties of the materials were evaluated by termogravimetric analysis (TGA), dynamic mechanical analysis (DMTA), tensile measurements, limiting oxygen index (LOI) and UL-94 Burn Test.     

X-Ray Imaging Using LEKIDs

We present the detection of 5.9 keV X-rays in a silicon wafer utilising an array of frequency multiplexed Kinetic Inductance Detectors. The readout electronics consists of a programmable digital electronics with an integrated 12-bit ADC, operating with a maximum frequency of 100 MHz. We implement a lumped element geometry, realising pixels as small as possible in order to achieve better position resolution. The whole system allows the simultaneous readout of 14 pixels with a bandwidth of 300 kHz, but it is easily scalable up to 100 pixels. A higher bandwidth detection, with less pixels, allows the reconstruction of the photon absorption position in the substrate up to hundreds of microns. This technological development could be applied in the next future to large area X-Ray Imaging. A better understanding of high energy photon and particle detection is also crucial for the space implementation of LEKIDs for mm-astronomy, where data loss due to Cosmic particles could be a major issue.     

Going beyond energy intensity to understand the energy metabolism of nations: The case of Argentina

The link between energy consumption and economic growth has been widely studied in the economic literature. Understanding this relationship is important from both an environmental and a socio-economic point of view, as energy consumption is crucial to economic activity and human environmental impact. This relevance is even higher for developing countries, since energy consumption per unit of output varies through the phases of development, increasing from an agricultural stage to an industrial one and then decreasing for certain service based economies.In the Argentinean case, the relevance of energy consumption to economic development seems to be particularly important. While energy intensity seems to exhibit a U-Shaped curve from 1990 to 2003 decreasing slightly after that year, total energy consumption increases along the period of analysis. Why does this happen? How can we relate this result with the sustainability debate? All these questions are very important due to Argentinean hydrocarbons dependence and due to the recent reduction in oil and natural gas reserves, which can lead to a lack of security of supply.In this paper we study Argentinean energy consumption pattern for the period 1990–2007, to discuss current and future energy and economic sustainability. To this purpose, we developed a conventional analysis, studying energy intensity, and a non conventional analysis, using the Multi-Scale Integrated Analysis of Societal and Ecosystem Metabolism (MuSIASEM) accounting methodology. Both methodologies show that the development process followed by Argentina has not been good enough to assure sustainability in the long term. Instead of improving energy use, energy intensity has increased. The current composition of its energy mix, and the recent economic crisis in Argentina, as well as its development path, are some of the possible explanations.     

Spermatozoa Transcriptional Response and Alterations in PL Proteins Properties after Exposure of Mytilus galloprovincialis to Mercury

Mercury (Hg) is an environmental pollutant that impacts human and ecosystem health. In our previous works, we reported alterations in the properties of Mytilus galloprovincialis protamine-like (PL) proteins after 24 h of exposure to subtoxic doses of toxic metals such as copper and cadmium. The present work aims to assess the effects of 24 h of exposure to 1, 10, and 100 pM HgCl₂ on spermatozoa and PL proteins of Mytilus galloprovincialis. Inductively coupled plasma–mass spectrometry indicated accumulation of this metal in the gonads of exposed mussels. Further, RT-qPCR analyses showed altered expression levels of spermatozoa mt10 and hsp70 genes. In Mytilus galloprovincialis, PL proteins represent the major basic component of sperm chromatin. These proteins, following exposure of mussels to HgCl₂, appeared, by SDS-PAGE, partly as aggregates and showed a decreased DNA-binding capacity that rendered them unable to prevent DNA damage, in the presence of CuCl₂ and H₂O₂. These results demonstrate that even these doses of HgCl₂ exposure could affect the properties of PL proteins and result in adverse effects on the reproductive system of this organism. These analyses could be useful in developing rapid and efficient chromatin-based genotoxicity assays for pollution biomonitoring programs.     

EETP-MAC: energy efficient traffic prioritization for medium access control in wireless body area networks

Wireless body area network (WBAN) has witnessed significant attentions in the healthcare domain using biomedical sensor-based monitoring of heterogeneous nature of vital signs of a patient’s body. The design of frequency band, MAC superframe structure, and slots allocation to the heterogeneous nature of the patient’s packets have become the challenging problems in WBAN due to the diverse QoS requirements. In this context, this paper proposes an Energy Efficient Traffic Prioritization for Medium Access Control (EETP-MAC) protocol, which provides sufficient slots with higher bandwidth and guard bands to avoid channels interference causing longer delay. Specifically, the design of EETP-MAC is broadly divided in to four folds. Firstly, patient data traffic prioritization is presented with broad categorization including Non-Constrained Data (NCD), Delay-Constrained Data (DCD), Reliability-Constrained Data (RCD) and Critical Data (CD). Secondly, a modified superframe structure design is proposed for effectively handling the traffic prioritization. Thirdly, threshold based slot allocation technique is developed to reduce contention by effectively quantifying criticality on patient data. Forth, an energy efficient frame design is presented focusing on beacon interval, superframe duration, and packet size and inactive period. Simulations are performed to comparatively evaluate the performance of the proposed EETP-MAC with the state-of-the-art MAC protocols. The comparative evaluation attests the benefit of EETP-MAC in terms of efficient slot allocation resulting in lower delay and energy consumption.

     

Simulated annealing-based fitting of CAD models to point clouds of mechanical parts’ assemblies

Engineering with Computers - This paper introduces a new fitting approach to allow an efficient part-by-part reconstruction or update of editable CAD models fitting the point cloud of a digitized...     

DiSeg 1.0: The first system for Spanish discourse segmentation

Nowadays discourse parsing is a very prominent research topic. However, there is not a discourse parser for Spanish texts. The first stage in order to develop this tool is discourse segmentation. In this work, we present DiSeg, the first discourse segmenter for Spanish, which uses the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory and is based on lexical and syntactic rules. We describe the system and we evaluate its performance against a gold standard corpus, divided in a medical and a terminological subcorpus. We obtain promising results, which means that discourse segmentation is possible using shallow parsing.