La protección de las invenciones mediante patentes en las universidades europeas, japonesas y estadounidenses

[ES] En los últimos años se ha producido en las universidades de todo el mundo una tendencia creciente a proteger sus invenciones a través de derechos de patentes. Este hecho refleja la mayor aplicabilidad de la investigación universitaria y la intención de transferir estos resultados al mundo empresarial.

Word frequency cues word order in adults: cross-linguistic evidence

[EN] One universal feature of human languages is the division between grammatical functors and content words. From a learnability point of view, functors might provide entry points or anchors into the syntactic structure of utterances due to their high frequency. Despite its potentially universal scope, this hypothesis has not yet been tested on typologically different languages and on populations of different ages. Here we report a corpus study and an artificial grammar learning experiment testing the anchoring hypothesis in Basque, Japanese, French, and Italian adults. We show that adults are sensitive to the distribution of functors in their native language and use them when learning new linguistic material. However, compared to infants’ performance on a similar task, adults exhibit a slightly different behavior, matching the frequency distributions of their native language more closely than infants do. This finding bears on the issue of the continuity of language learning mechanism.

Processing Facilitation Strategies in OV and VO Languages: A Corpus Study

The present corpus study aimed to examine whether Basque (OV) resorts more often than Spanish (VO) to certain grammatical operations, in order to minimi ze the number of arguments to be processed before the verb. Ueno & Polinsky (2009) argue that VO/OV languages use certain grammatical resources with different frequencies in order to facilitate real-time processing. They observe that both OV and VO languages in their sample (Japanese, Turkish and Spanish) have a similar frequency of use of subject pro-drop; however, they find that OV languages (Japanese, Turkish) use more intransitive sentences than VO languages (English, Spanish), and conclude this is an OV-specific strategy to facilitate processing. We conducted a comparative corpus study of Spanish (VO) and Basque (OV). Results show (a) that the fre- quency of use of subject pro-drop is higher in Basque than in Spanish; and (b) Basque does not use more intransitive sentences than Spanish; both languages have a similar frequency of intransitive sentences. Based on these findings, we conclude that the frequency of use of grammatical resources to facilitate the processing does not depend on a single typological trait (VO/OV) but it is modulated by the concurrence of other grammatical feature.

Cloning and analysis of laccases from acinetobacter baumannii isolates

Laccases (benzenediol : oxygen oxi doreductases; EC 1.10.3.2) are wide spread i n nature. They are usually found in higher plants and fungi (Thurston 19 94; Mayer and Staples 2002), but recently some bacterial laccases have also been found . The first laccase studied was from Rhus vernicifera in 1883, a Japanese lacquer tree, fr om which the name laccase was derived (Yoshida , 1883). These enzymes belong to the group of bl ue multi - copper oxidases (MCOs) . They usually contain four copper atoms located in three distinct sites. Each site reacts differently to light. The Type 1 (T1) site copper atom absorbs intensely at 600 nm and emits the blue light , the Type 2 (T2) site copper atom is not visible in the absorption spectr um and last, the Type 3 (T3) site has two c opper atoms and absorbs at 330 nm ( Santhanam et al . , 2011; Quintanar et al . , 2007 ) . The protei n structure acts as a complex ligand for the catalytic coppers, providing them the right structure where changes between the reduction states are thermodynamically possible (Dub é , 2008 ) . These enzymes oxidize a surprisingly wide variety of organic and inorganic compounds like, diphenols, polyphenols, substituted phenols, diamines and a romatic amines, with concomitant reduction of molecular oxygen to water (Thurston , 1

The impact of economic crises on social inequalities in health: what do we know so far?

Since 2008, Western countries are going through a deep economic crisis whose health impacts seem to be fundamentally counter-cyclical: when economic conditions worsen, so does health, and mortality tends to rise. While a growing number of studies have presented evidence on the effect of crises on the average population health, a largely neglected aspect of research is the impact of crises and the related political responses on social inequalities in health, even if the negative consequences of the crises are primarily borne by the most disadvantaged populations. This commentary will reflect on the results of the studies that have analyzed the effect of economic crises on social inequalities in health up to 2013. With some exceptions, the studies show an increase in health inequalities during crises, especially during the Southeast Asian and Japanese crises and the Soviet Union crisis, although it is not always evident for both sexes or all health or socioeconomic variables. In the Nordic countries during the nineties, a clear worsening of health equity did not occur. Results about the impacts of the current economic recession on health equity are still inconsistent. Some of the factors that could explain this variability in results are the role of welfare state policies, the diversity of time periods used in the analyses, the heterogeneity of socioeconomic and health variables considered, the changes in the socioeconomic profile of the groups under comparison in times of crises, and the type of measures used to analyze the magnitude of social inequalities in health. Social epidemiology should further collaborate with other disciplines to help produce more accurate and useful evidence about the relationship between crises and health equity.

Dependencia térmica del disponible metabólico para la actividad en bivalvos aclimatados a distintas temperaturas

[es]Para la realización del presente estudio, se utilizaron 50 ejemplares de Ruditapes Decussatus o almeja fina y otros 50 de Ruditapes Philippinarum o almeja japonesa, recogidas y seleccionadas por mariscadores profesionales de la Bahía de Santoña (Cantabria). La temperatura influye en las tasas fisiológicas, llegando a generar finalmente alteraciones en el metabolismo del organismo. Por ello, una variable de interés para el estudio se trata de la tasa metabólica, la cual puede ser estimada a través de la medición de la tasa de consumo de oxígeno (VO2). El objetivo final de este estudio es, por tanto, observar el efecto cinético de la temperatura y la aclimatación sobre el metabolismo de ambas especies de almejas, distribuidas en cuatro grupos de estudio (almeja fina y japonesa aclimatadas a 12oC y 22oC), midiendo la VO2 a diferentes temperaturas de exposición (7oC, 12oC, 17oC, 22oC y 27oC). Utilizando el la respirometría como medio para calcular la VO2 y el cálculo de la Q10 para determinar las tasas metabólicas. Los resultados ponen de manifiesto que en tres de los cuatro casos no se observaron diferencias significativas entre el metabolismo rutina y el metabolismo estándar. También se comprobó positivamente el efecto cinético de la temperatura sobre la VO2; así como la presencia de un intervalo de temperaturas, en las que se realiza compensación, más amplio para almeja japonesa que para almeja fina.