34 research outputs found
The Kepler-454 system : A small, not-rocky inner planet, a Jovian world, and a distant companion
No full textKepler-454 (KOI-273) is a relatively bright (V = 11.69 mag), Sun-like starthat hosts a transiting planet candidate in a 10.6 d orbit. From spectroscopy, we estimate the stellar temperature to be 5687 +/- 50 K, its metallicity to be [m/H] = 0.32 +/- 0.08, and the projected rotational velocity to be v sin i 10 years and mass >12.1M_J . The twelve exoplanets with radii <2.7 R_Earth and precise mass measurements appear to fall into two populations, with those <1.6 R_Earth following an Earth-like composition curve and larger planets requiring a significant fraction of volatiles. With a density of 2.76 +/- 0.73 g cm-3, Kepler-454b lies near the mass transition between these two populations and requires the presence of volatiles and/or H/He gas.Peer reviewe
Model of strategy games based on the paradigm of the iterated prisoner s dilemma employing fuzzy sets
No full textDevelopment of miniature all-solid-state potentiometric sensing system
No full textA procedure for the development of a pen-like, multi-electrode potentiometric sensing platform is described. The platform comprises a seven-in-one electrode incorporating all-solid-state ion-selective and reference electrodes based on the conductive polymer (poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT)) as an intermediate layer between the contacts and ion-selective membranes. The ion-selective electrodes are based on traditional, ionophore-based membranes, while the reference electrode is based on a polymer membrane doped with the lipophilic salt tetrabutyl ammonium tetrabutyl borate (TBA-TBB). The electrodes, controlled with a multichannel detector system, were used for simultaneous determination of the concentration of Pb2+ and pH in environmental water samples. The results obtained using pH-selective electrodes were compared with data obtained using a conventional pH meter and the average percent difference was 0.3%. Furthermore, the sensing system was successfully used for lead-speciation analysis in environmental water samples
Long-term cost-effectiveness of collaborative care (vs usual care) for people with depression and comorbid diabetes or cardiovascular disease:a Markov model informed by the COINCIDE randomised controlled trial
No full textObjectives To evaluate the long-term cost-effectiveness of collaborative care (vs usual care) for treating depression in patients with diabetes and/or coronary heart disease (CHD).Setting 36 primary care general practices in North West England.Participants 387 participants completed baseline assessment (collaborative care: 191; usual care: 196) and full or partial 4-month follow-up data were captured for 350 (collaborative care: 170; usual care: 180). 62% of participants were male, 14% were non-white. Participants were aged ≥18 years, listed on a Quality and Outcomes Framework register for CHD and/or type 1 or 2 diabetes mellitus, with persistent depressive symptoms. Patients with psychosis or type I/II bipolar disorder, actively suicidal, in receipt of services for substance misuse, or already in receipt of psychological therapy for depression were excluded.Intervention Collaborative care consisted of evidence-based low-intensity psychological treatments, delivered over 3 months and case management by a practice nurse and a Psychological Well Being Practitioner.Outcome measures As planned, the primary measure of cost-effectiveness was the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (cost per quality-adjusted life year (QALY)). A Markov model was constructed to extrapolate the trial results from short-term to long-term (24 months).Results The mean cost per participant of collaborative care was £317 (95% CI 284 to 350). Over 24 months, it was estimated that collaborative care was associated with greater healthcare usage costs (net cost £674 (95% CI −30 953 to 38 853)) and QALYs (net QALY gain 0.04 (95% CI −0.46 to 0.54)) than usual care, resulting in a cost per QALY gained of £16 123, and a likelihood of being cost-effective of 0.54 (willingness to pay threshold of £20 000).Conclusions Collaborative care is a potentially cost-effective long-term treatment for depression in patients with comorbid physical and mental illness. The estimated cost per QALY gained was below the threshold recommended by English decision-makers. Further, long-term primary research is needed to address uncertainty associated with estimates of cost-effectiveness
The Orbit and Mass of the Third Planet in the Kepler-56 System
No full textWhile the vast majority of multiple-planet systems have orbital angular momentum axes that align with the spin axis of their host star, Kepler-56 is an exception: its two transiting planets are coplanar yet misaligned by at least 40° with respect to the rotation axis of their host star. Additional follow-up observations of Kepler-56 suggest the presence of a massive, non-transiting companion that may help explain this misalignment. We model the transit data along with Keck/HIRES and HARPS-N radial velocity data to update the masses of the two transiting planets and infer the physical properties of the third, non-transiting planet. We employ a Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampler to calculate the best-fitting orbital parameters and their uncertainties for each planet. We find the outer planet has a period of 1002 ± 5 days and minimum mass of 5.61 ± 0.38 {M}{Jup}. We also place a 95% upper limit of 0.80 m s-1 yr-1 on long-term trends caused by additional, more distant companions
EARLINET instrument intercomparison campaigns: overview on strategy and results
No full textThis paper introduces the recent European Aerosol Research Lidar Network (EARLINET) quality-assurance efforts at instrument level. Within two dedicated campaigns and five single-site intercomparison activities, 21 EARLINET systems from 18 EARLINET stations were intercompared between 2009 and 2013. A comprehensive strategy for campaign setup and data evaluation has been established. Eleven systems from nine EARLINET stations participated in the EARLINET Lidar Intercomparison 2009 (EARLI09). In this campaign, three reference systems were qualified which served as traveling standards thereafter. EARLINET systems from nine other stations have been compared against these reference systems since 2009. We present and discuss comparisons at signal and at product level from all campaigns for more than 100 individual measurement channels at the wavelengths of 355, 387, 532, and 607 nm. It is shown that in most cases, a very good agreement of the compared systems with the respective reference is obtained
Bottlenecks in the Open-Access System: Voices from Around the Globe
No full textAbstractA level playing field is key for global participation in science and scholarship, particularly with regard to how scientific publications are financed and subsequently accessed. However, there are potential pitfalls of the so-called “Gold” open-access (OA) route, in which author-paid publication charges cover the costs of production and publication.Gold OA plans in which author charges are required may not solve the access problem, but rather may shift the access barrier from reader to writer. Under such plans, everyone may be free to read papers, but it may still be prohibitively expensive to publish them. In a scholarly community that is increasingly global, spread over more and more regions and countries of the world, these publication access barriers may be quite significant.In the present paper, a global suite of colleagues in academe joins this debate. The group of colleagues, a network of researchers active in scholarly publishing, spans four continents and multiple disciplines in the natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences, as well as diverse political and economic situations. We believe that this global sampling of researchers can provide the nuance and perspective necessary to grasp this complex problem. The group was assembled without an attempt to achieve global coverage through random sampling.This contribution differs from other approaches to the open-access problem in several fundamental ways. (A) It is scholar-driven, and thus can represent the ‘other side of the coin’ of scholarly communication. (B) It focuses on narrative report, where scholars were free to orient their responses as they saw fit, rather than being confined to binary or scalar choices. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, (C) it distinguishes among institutions and countries and situations, highlighting inequalities of access among wealthy and economically-challenged nations, and also within countries depending on the size and location of particular institutions.Avtorji prispevka: Elisa Bonaccorso, Reneta Božankova, Carlos D. Cadena, Veronika Čapská, Laura Czerniewicz, Ada Emmett, Folorunso F. Oludayo, Natalija Gluhova, Marc L. Greenberg, Miran Hladnik, María E. Grillet, Mohamad Indrawan, Mate Kapović, Jurij A. Klejner, Marek Łaziński, Rafael D. Loyola, Shaily Menon, Luis G. Morales, Clara Ocampo, Jorge Pérez-Emán, A. Townsend Peterson, Dimitar Poposki, Ajadi A. Rasheed, Kathryn M. Rodríguez-Clark, Jon P. Rodríguez, Brian Rosenblum, Victor Sánchez-Cordero, Filip Smolík, Marko Snoj, Imre Szilágyi, Orlando Torres, Piotr Tykarski ; prevedel Miran HladnikIzvirna različica članka je bila objavljena pod licenco CC BY/NC v reviji Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication 2(2):eP1126 in je dosegljiva na spletni strani: http://dx.doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.1126IzvlečekIzenačeni pogoji so ključ za globalno udeležbo v znanosti in raziskovanju, posebej glede na to, kako so znanstvene publikacije financirane in dostopne. Obstajajo pa potencialne pasti t. i. zlatega modela odprtega dostopa, pri katerem publikacije stroške produkcije in objave zaračunajo avtorjem. Zlati modeli, po katerih se računi izstavljajo avtorjem, ne rešujejo problema dostopnosti, ampak samo prestavijo oviro od bralca k avtorju. Po takih modelih lahko vsakdo prebira razprave, vendar je njihovo objavljanje lahko nedopustno drago. V znanstveni skupnosti, ki je vedno bolj globalna, razširjena čez vse več regij in držav sveta, so te publikacijske ovire lahko zelo moteče.V debato se s to razpravo vključuje tudi globalna skupina univerzitetnih kolegov. Mreža raziskovalcev dejavnih v akademskem publiciranju, se razteza čez štiri celine in več disciplin znotraj naravoslovja, humanistike in družbenih ved in zavzema različne politične ter ekonomske položaje. Verjamejo, da ta globalni vzorec raziskovalcev lahko predstavi kompleksno problematiko in ponudi perspektive, nujne za njeno obvladovanje. Skupina je bila sestavljena, ne da bi poskušala zajeti ves svet.Ta prispevek se razlikuje od drugih pristopov k problemu odprtodostopnega publiciranja v več temeljnih točkah. a) Izhaja iz situacije znanstvenikov in tako lahko predstavlja »drugo plat medalje « znanstvene komunikacije. b) Osredinja se na pričevanja, v katerih so znanstveniki svobodno usmerjali svoje odgovore, kot se jim je zdelo primerno, namesto da bi bili omejeni na odgovore tipa da/ne oz. na izbiro odgovorov na lestvici. Morda najbolj pomembno pa je c), da razlikuje med organizacijami, državami in položaji in tako osvetljuje neenake pogoje dostopa med bogatimi državami in državami v nezavidljivi ekonomski situaciji ter tudi znotraj držav, odvisno od velikosti in lokacije konkretnih institucij
Environmental, geographical and time-related impacts on avian malaria infections in native and introduced populations of house sparrows (Passer domesticus), a globally invasive species
No full textAC K N OW L E D G M E N T S
This study was funded by projects: IB20089 from the Consejería
de Economía, Ciencia y Agenda Digital of the Junta de Extremadura
and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional, P11-RNM-7038
from Junta de Andalucía, and PR(19_ECO_0070) from Ayudas
Fundación BBVA a Equipos de Investigación Científica 2019. MF
was supported by a Juan de la Cierva 2017 Formación contract
(FJCI-2017-34394) from the Ministry of Science, Innovation and
Universities, by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and
innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie (grant
agreement No 844285, ‘EpiEcoMod’) and she is currently funded
by a Ramón y Cajal postdoctoral contract (RYC2021- 031613-I) from
the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICINN). JJP was
supported by the Fundación Tatiana Pérez de Guzmán el Bueno.
JMP was supported by ProyExcel_00049 financed by Proyectos
I+D+i of Junta de Andalucía 2021. LGL was supported by Junta de
Extremadura (IB20089, Post-Doc grant). JM was supported by a
Juan de la Cierva - Formación contract (FJCI-2017-34109) from the
Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, and he is currently
supported by a postdoctoral researcher contract for scientific
excellence under the Plan Propio de I+D+i of the Universidad de
Castilla - La Mancha (UCLM), co-funded by the European Social
Fund Plus (ESF+). LZG was supported by funds from the Hungary's
National Research, Development and Innovation Office (K135841,
RRF-2.3.1-21-2022- 00006). We also acknowledge the comments of
four anonymous reviewers who improved the final version of this
manuscript.DATA AVA I L A B I L I T Y S TAT E M E N T
Data supporting the conclusions of this study are available in the
supplementary material to this article. Any further details are
available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.Aim
The increasing spread of vector-borne diseases has resulted in severe health concerns for humans, domestic animals and wildlife, with changes in land use and the introduction of invasive species being among the main possible causes for this increase. We explored several ecological drivers potentially affecting the local prevalence and richness of avian malaria parasite lineages in native and introduced house sparrows (Passer domesticus) populations.
Location
Global.
Time period
2002–2019.
Major taxa studied
Avian Plasmodium parasites in house sparrows.
Methods
We analysed data from 2,220 samples from 69 localities across all continents, except Antarctica. The influence of environment (urbanization index and human density), geography (altitude, latitude, hemisphere) and time (bird breeding season and years since introduction) were analysed using generalized additive mixed models (GAMMs) and random forests.
Results
Overall, 670 sparrows (30.2%) were infected with 22 Plasmodium lineages. In native populations, parasite prevalence was positively related to urbanization index, with the highest prevalence values in areas with intermediate urbanization levels. Likewise, in introduced populations, prevalence was positively associated with urbanization index; however, higher infection occurred in areas with either extreme high or low levels of urbanization. In introduced populations, the number of parasite lineages increased with altitude and with the years elapsed since the establishment of sparrows in a new locality. Here, after a decline in the number of parasite lineages in the first 30 years, an increase from 40 years onwards was detected.
Main conclusions
Urbanization was related to parasite prevalence in both native and introduced bird populations. In invaded areas, altitude and time since bird introduction were related to the number of Plasmodium lineages found to be infecting sparrows.Consejería de Economía, Innovación,
Ciencia y Empleo, Junta de Andalucía,
Grant/Award Number: P11-RNM-7038Fundación BBVA, Grant/Award Number:
PR(19_ECO_0070Junta de Extremadura,
Grant/Award Number: IB20089 and
PO17024Marie Sklodowska- Curie
Actions, Grant/Award Number: 844285Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y
Universidades, Grant/Award Number:
FJCI-2017-34109 and FJCI-2017-34394Proyectos I+D+i of Junta de Andalucía
2021, Grant/Award Number:
ProyExcel_00049Universidad de Castilla-
La Manch
