Alberto Sols Biomedical Research Institute
Biblos-e Archivo. Repositorio Institucional de la UAMNot a member yet
65432 research outputs found
Sort by
How natural disasters affect the distribution of marine litter in protected island ecosystems (Seaflower Biosphere Reserve — Colombia)
Get PDFIslands are particularly vulnerable to storms and hurricanes, which can cause severe environmental, economic, and social impacts, including the accumulation of waste in marine ecosystems. In November 2020, Hurricane Iota struck the islands of Providencia and Santa Catalina in the Seaflower Biosphere Reserve, Colombia. This study assesses the distribution, composition, and sources of marine litter after the hurricane, focusing on variations observed across coastal ecosystems such as beaches, mangroves, and coral reefs. A comparative analysis of data from 2019 and 2021 reveals significant differences in how the island's diverse ecosystems interact with marine litter, underscoring the impact of extreme events on these environments. While mangroves and back- beach vegetation act as retention zones, particularly for plastic waste, these ecosystems showed a marked reduction in litter density in 2021, likely due to direct removal efforts during recovery and hurricane-driven oceanographic processes that may have redistributed lighter litter. In contrast, sandy beaches experienced an increase in litter following the hurricane, highlighting their greater vulnerability to litter deposition transported by waves and wind during extreme weather events. These findings emphasize the complexity of managing marine litter after natural disasters and underscore the need for enhanced waste management strategies in vulnerable island ecosystem
Sex differences in the affective-cognitive dimension of neuropathic pain: Insights from the spared nerve injury rat model
No full textOver 40% of neuropathic pain patients experience mood and cognitive disturbances, often showing reduced response to analgesics, with most affected individuals being female. This highlights the critical role of biological sex in pain-related affective and cognitive disorders, making it essential to understand the emotional and cognitive circuits linked to pain for improving treatment strategies. However, research on sex differences in preclinical pain models is lacking. This study aimed to investigate these differences using the spared nerve injury (SNI) rat model, conducting a comprehensive series of behavioural tests over 100 days post-injury to identify key time points for observing sex-specific behaviours indicative of pain-related conditions. The findings revealed that female rats exhibited greater mechanical and cold hypersensitivity compared to males following nerve injury and showed earlier onset of depression-related behaviours, while males were more prone to anxiety, social, and memory-related alterations. Interestingly, by the 14th week post-injury, females displayed no signs of these emotional and cognitive impairments. Additionally, fluctuations in the oestrous cycle or changes in testosterone and oestradiol levels did not correlate with sex differences in pain sensitivity or negative affect. Recognizing the influence of biological sex on pain-induced affective and cognitive alterations, especially in later stages post-injury, is crucial for enhancing our understanding of this complex pain disorder. Perspective: This manuscript reports the relevance of long-term investigations of sex differences in chronic pain. It shows differential development of somatosensory sensitivity, negative affective states and cognitive impairments in males and females. It emphasizes the importance of including subjects of both sexes in the investigation of pain-related mechanisms and therapeutic managementThis work was supported by the Irish Research Council (IRC) Laureate Award (Ref. IRCLA/2017/78
Drug addiction in gay and bisexual men living with HIV engaged in sexualized drug use: Recent drug use, polydrug and depressive symptoms as predictors
No full textEvidence shows that engaging in sexualized drug use (SDU) can be associated with sexual health problems and poor mental health. However, the prevalence of drug-related problems associated with SDU remains unclear. Our study aimed to examine the prevalence and associated factors of drug-related problems and drug dependence in a sample of gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men living with HIV (HIV + GBMSM). We included 101 HIV + GBMSM who had engaged in SDU in the last year. Participants completed an online survey featuring a validated questionnaire (the DUDIT test) to assess the risk of drug-related problems and drug dependence. Univariate and multivariate analyses were conducted to explore variables associated with drug-related problems. 80% of our sample had symptoms suggestive of drug-related problems, with 5% showing likely drug dependence. Additionally, 10% had suffered an overdose with loss of consciousness, 9% experienced suicidal thoughts associated with SDU, and approximately 20% had sexual difficulties during sober sex since using drugs for sex. Multivariate analysis identified that recent drug use (less than 15 days prior), polydrug use, and depressive symptoms are independent predictors of drug-related problems. Our study revealed a high prevalence of drug-related problems among HIV + GBMSM engaged in SDU. The factors associated with drug-related problems identified in our study can serve as key markers in clinical settings where HIV + GBMSM receive care. These indicators can help detect community members most at risk and facilitate the provision of resources and interventions to prevent SDU-related harmThe USEX-2 Study was funded by a research grant from Gilead Science (IN-ES-987-5391), which provided a grant of 10,000 Euros through GESIDA (the Spanish AIDS Study Group of the Spanish Society of Infectious Diseases). The funders had no role in the study design, data collection, analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscrip
Craniocervical morphological integration in birds
No full textThis study investigates the morphological diversity of the neck and its integration with skull anatomy in crown-group birds (Neornithes). The craniocervical articulation, where the skull connects with the neck, can adopt either caudal (rearward) or ventral (downward) orientations. Morphological coherence is crucial for maintaining head stability and precise movement, suggesting that the evolution of these structures must be not only functionally, but also developmentally coordinated (i.e., morphologically integrated). To explore this hypothesis, the relationship between conventional morphometric data of the neck and geometric morphometric data of the skull were assessed using multivariate statistics (Regressions and Two-block Partial Least Squares) across a broad phylogenetic range of Neornithes. Results indicate a significant level of integration between neck and skull morphologies, where variation in neck length, vertebral counts and relative lengths correspond predictably with specific craniocervical articulations. The most pronounced skull variation occurs around the occipital region, which we interpret as possibly relating to the mesodermic origin and shared genetic signalling in the morphogenesis of all craniocervical bones. Additionally, craniofacial changes align with craniocervical modifications, implying that the skull and neck evolve as a unified yet modular system. Analysis of selected fossils (Tsaagan, Archaeopteryx, and Pengornis) suggests that the ancestral craniocervical configuration was caudal, with neck changes associated with the development of a beak and craniocervical ventralization emerging in the lineage leading to modern birdsThis study was subsidized by the Synthesys DE-TAF-5103. SMN is supported by a FPI- UAM 2019 predoctoral grant from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and by a postdoctoral contract granted by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHMLAC) and the Dinosaur Institute, through a sponsorship agreement between the NHMLAC and the Centre for the Integration in Paleobiology at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (CIPb-UAM). SMN and JM-L are supported by the PID2023-147427NB-I00 project from the Ministerio de Ciencia, e Innovación de Españ
Hydrothermal carbonization of swine manure in a continuous flow reactor pilot plant with process water recycling
No full textThis paper deals with hydrothermal carbonization (HTC) of swine manure in a pilot plant setup operating in continuous mode. Two temperatures (210 °C and 250 °C) were tested and recycling of the liquid fraction was studied to improve the quality of the resulting hydrochar. The hydrochars obtained at 210 °C fulfill the criteria to be used as solid biofuels (ISO 17225–8:2023). Increasing the reaction temperature led to a dramatic reduction of hydrochar yield (from 50 to 20 %) in conventional HTC (with tap water), accompanied by a moderate improvement of higher heating value (HHV, 18.2–20.4 MJ/kg), which decreased the energy yield (from 52.2 % to 23.8 %). Process water recycling significantly improved the hydrochar yield, reaching more than 80 % and 55 % at 210 °C and 250 °C, respectively, because of the formation of secondary hydrochar. C content and HHV also increased, giving rise to substantially higher energy recovery, which surpassed 93 % after four recycling tests at 210 °C. Fouling and alkali indexes of hydrochars showed much lower values than those of the feedstock mainly attributed to the solubilization of Na and K. At 210 °C, process water recycling favored a further reduction of those indexes. N and P were largely transferred to the liquid fraction, particularly the latter. Zn and Cu were, by far, the most abundant heavy metals in hydrochars, with a Zn content being slightly above the value established in Decision (EU) 2022/1244 for their application as a soil amendmentAuthors greatly appreciate funding from Spanish MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033 and European Union “NextGenerationEU/PRTR” (TED2021-130287B-I00, PID 2022-138632OB-I00) and and Community of Madrid (TEC-2024/BIO-177). R.P. Ipiales acknowledges the financial support from the Community of Madrid (IND2019/AMB-17092) and Arquimea Agrotech company. Authors thank M. Colas for her valuable hel
Understanding information propagation in online social networks: A systematic mapping study
No full textOnline Social Networks (OSNs) have become a significant research focus across various fields. The increase in their use has prompted numerous studies, particularly on the complex Information Propagation (IP) process, which researchers have approached from different perspectives and lines of investigation. The work presented in this article aims to analyse the state of the art on IP in OSNs, mapping the models, methods, algorithms, tools, and techniques developed in this domain. In particular, we have conducted a Systematic Mapping Study (SMS). To our knowledge, this is the first study to address this issue. The SMS collected 424 studies and analysed 175 primary studies, and the results reveal that most studies are model proposals, the most researched topic is Influence Maximisation (IM), and Twitter (now X) is the most commonly used resource in experiments. Also, the SMS reveals that there is no formal classification of the terms to refer to propagated information. In addition, we also found several proposals to mitigate or control IP. However, there is no common methodological framework to reduce IP. To conclude the study, we propose groups of features/attributes of users during IP and a propagated information classification. This research provides a general and organised overview for the scientific community regarding studies on IP in OSN
Second FRCSyn-onGoing: Winning solutions and post-challenge analysis to improve face recognition with synthetic data
No full textArtículo escrito por un elevado número de autores, solo se referencian el que aparece en primer lugar, el nombre del grupo de colaboración, si le hubiere, y los autores pertenecientes a la UAMSynthetic data is gaining increasing popularity for face recognition technologies, mainly due to the privacy concerns and challenges associated with obtaining real data, including diverse scenarios, quality, and demographic groups, among others. It also offers some advantages over real data, such as the large amount of data that can be generated or the ability to customize it to adapt to specific problem-solving needs. To effectively use such data, face recognition models should also be specifically designed to exploit synthetic data to its fullest potential. In order to promote the proposal of novel Generative AI methods and synthetic data, and investigate the application of synthetic data to better train face recognition systems, we introduce the 2nd FRCSyn-onGoing challenge, based on the 2nd Face Recognition Challenge in the Era of Synthetic Data (FRCSyn), originally launched at CVPR 2024. This is an ongoing challenge that provides researchers with an accessible platform to benchmark (i) the proposal of novel Generative AI methods and synthetic data, and (ii) novel face recognition systems that are specifically proposed to take advantage of synthetic data. We focus on exploring the use of synthetic data both individually and in combination with real data to solve current challenges in face recognition such as demographic bias, domain adaptation, and performance constraints in demanding situations, such as age disparities between training and testing, changes in the pose, or occlusions. Very interesting findings are obtained in this second edition, including a direct comparison with the first one, in which synthetic databases were restricted to DCFace and GANDiffFaceThis study is supported by INTER-ACTION (PID2021-126521OBI00 MICINN/FEDER), Cátedra ENIA UAM-VERIDAS en IA Responsable (NextGenerationEU PRTR TSI-100927-2023-2), R&D Agreement DGGC/UAM/FUAM for Biometrics and Cybersecurity, and PowerAI+ (SI4/PJI/2024-00062, funded by Comunidad de Madrid, Spain through the grant agreement for the promotion of research and technology transfer at UAM). It is also supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the Hessian Ministry of Higher Education, Research, Science, and the Arts within their joint support of the National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity ATHENE. K-IBS-DS was supported by the Institute for Basic Science, Republic of Korea, (IBS-R029-C2). UNICA-IGD-LSI was supported by the ARIS program P2-0250
Mecanismos de la actividad física en el sistema inmune de los pacientes con enfermedad pulmonar obstructiva crónica (EPOC)
No full textTesis Doctoral inédita leída en la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Facultad de Medicina, Departamento de Medicina. Fecha de Lectura: 12-03-202
Automorphisms of the Rado meet-tree
No full textWe prove that the group of automorphisms of the generic meet-tree expansion of an infinite non-unary free Fraïssé limit over a finite relational language is simple. As a prototypical case, the group of automorphisms of the Rado meet-tree (i.e. the Fraïssé limit of finite graphs which are also meet-trees) is simpleKaplan would like to thank The Israel Science Foundation (ISF) for their support of this research (grants no. 1254/18 and 804/22). Rodríguez Fanlo was supported by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities & Council for Higher Education Excellence Fellowship Program for International Postdoctoral Researcher
Robust and adaptable monocular pose estimation of non-cooperative spacecraft
No full textTesis Doctoral inédita leída en la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Escuela Politécnica Superior, Departamento de Tecnología Electrónica y de las Comunicaciones. Fecha de Lectura: 03-03-2025Estimar con precisión la pose de una nave espacial no cooperativa es una capacidad clave tanto para la
eliminación activa de basura espacial como la reparación autónoma en órbita. Sin embargo, hay una
gran ausencia de datos adquiridos en condiciones reales, causado principalmente por los altos costes
asociados. Tradicionalmente, este problema se ha mitigado empleando simuladores de datos sintéticos.
Si bien estos simuladores han resuelto el problema de la disponibilidad de datos, han introducido el
problema de la diferencia entre dominio sintético y real. Esta diferencia se traduce en una bajada de
rendimiento de los modelos entrenados con datos sintéticos y probados con datos reales.
En esta tesis se exploran métodos para superar los problemas introducidos por la diferencia de
dominio siguiendo tres estrategias principales: a) Simulando datos que se asemejen más a los datos
de prueba reales; b) Introduciendo conocimientos a priori del dominio en el proceso de aprendizaje; c)
Adaptando los modelos al dominio de prueba optimizando objetivos auto supervisados. En esta línea,
las contribuciones presentadas son: a) La primera herramienta de código abierto para generar imágenes
de naves espaciales, junto a un estudio sobre el papel de simular datos visualmente más cercanos al
escenario objetivo; b) Un conjunto de funciones de coste robustas al cambio de dominio en la tarea
de estimación de pose de naves espaciales. En esta línea, exploramos un trabajo secundario utilizando
función de coste basada en frecuencia para la estimación de odometría visual y profundidad monocular
en la navegación de rovers; c) Dos métodos para ajustar modelos al dominio de test de manera auto
supervisada para la estimación de pose de naves espaciales. Siendo uno basado en imágenes estáticas
y otro que explota información temporalAlthough accurately estimating the pose of a non-cooperative spacecraft is a key capability to enable
active-debris removal and in-orbit servicing, there is a major absence of data acquired in operational or
hardware-in-the-loop scenarios. This, in part caused by the high associated costs, has been mitigated
by employing synthetic data simulators. While these simulators have solved the problem of data
availability, they have introduced the problem of the domain-gap that causes a performance drop for
models trained over synthetic data and tested over test data.
In this thesis we explore methods to overcome this domain-gap by following three main strategies:
a) Simulating data that resembles more to the real test data; b) Introducing domain priors in the
learning process; c) Adapting the models over the test-domain by optimising self-supervised objectives.
In this line, the presented contributions are: a) The first open-source tool to generate spacecraft
imagery, with a study on the role of simulating data that is visually closer to the target scenario; b)
A set of robust loss terms for spacecraft pose estimation. Following this line of thought, we explore
a secondary work using a frequency-based loss for the task of visual odometry and monocular depth
estimation in rover navigation; c) Two methods to learn from the target domain in a self-supervised
manner for the task of monocular spacecraft pose estimation, one based on still images and other that
exploits temporal informationIt was supported by the Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain) under the Grant IND2020/TIC-17515 and the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación of the Spanish Government under the project HVD (PID2021-125051OB-I00