Recuperació de metalls en l’aigua residual de la indústria galvànica mitjançant l’electròlisi i l’energia solar

Proposta del procés d’electròlisi com a mètode de recuperació de metalls pesants presents en les aigües de rentat de la indústria galvànica i l’obtenció de l’energia necessària a través de l’energia solar fotovoltaica

El proyecto EMECAM: Estudio Multicéntrico Español sobre la Relación entre la Contaminación Atmosférica y la Mortalidad. Antecedentes, participantes, objetivos y métodología.

In recent years, a growing number of studies suggests that increases in air pollution levels may have short-term impact on human health, even at pollution levels similar to or lower than those which have been considered to be safe to date. The different methodological approaches and the varying analysis techniques employed have made it difficult to make a direct comparison among all of the findings, preventing any clear conclusions from being drawn. This has led to multicenter projects such as the APHEA (Short-Term Impact of Air Pollution on Health. A European Approach) within a European Scope. The EMECAM Project falls within the context of the aforesaid multicenter studies and has a wide-ranging projection nationwide within Spain. Fourteen (14) cities throughout Spain were included in this Project (Barcelona, Metropolitan Area of Bilbao, Cartagena, Castellón, Gijón, Huelva, Madrid, Pamplona, Seville, Oviedo, Valencia, Vigo, Vitoria and Saragossa) representing different sociodemographic, climate and environmental situations, adding up to a total of nearly nine million inhabitants. The objective of the EMECAM project is that to asses the short-term impact of air pollution throughout all of the participating cities on the mortality for all causes, on the population and on individuals over age 70, for respiratory and cardiovascular design causes. For this purpose, with an ecological, the time series data analyzed taking the daily deaths, pollutants, temperature data and other factors taken from records kept by public institutions. The period of time throughout which this study was conducted, although not exactly the same for all of the cities involved, runs in all cases from 1990 to 1996. The degree of relationship measured by means of an autoregressive Poisson regression. In the future, the results of each city will be combined by means of a meta-analysis.

Transmission delays in residual computation

The design of control, estimation or diagnosis algorithms most often assumes that all available process variables represent the system state at the same instant of time. However, this is never true in current network systems, because of the unknown deterministic or stochastic transmission delays introduced by the communication network. During the diagnosing stage, this will often generate false alarms. Under nominal operation, the different transmission delays associated with the variables that appear in the computation form produce discrepancies of the residuals from zero. A technique aiming at the minimisation of the resulting false alarms rate, that is based on the explicit modelling of communication delays and on their best-case estimation is proposed

Cytotoxic T cells deficient in both functional fas ligand and perforin show residual cytolytic activity yet lose their capacity to induce lethal acute graft-versus-host disease.

Graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) is the main complication after allogeneic bone marrow transplantation. Although the tissue damage and subsequent patient mortality are clearly dependent on T lymphocytes present in the grafted inoculum, the lethal effector molecules are unknown. Here, we show that acute lethal GVHD, induced by the transfer of splenocytes from C57BL/6 mice into sensitive BALB/c recipients, is dependent on both perforin and Fas ligand (FasL)-mediated lytic pathways. When spleen cells from mutant mice lacking both effector molecules were transferred to sublethally irradiated allogeneic recipients, mice survived. Delayed mortality was observed with grafted cells deficient in only one lytic mediator. In contrast, protection from lethal acute GVHD in resistant mice was exclusively perforin dependent. Perforin-FasL-deficient T cells failed to lyse most target cells in vitro. However, they still efficiently killed tumor necrosis factor alpha-sensitive fibroblasts, demonstrating that cytotoxic T cells possess a third lytic pathway.

Wavelet analysis residual kriging vs. neural network residual kriging

This paper deals with the problem of spatial data mapping. A new method based on wavelet interpolation and geostatistical prediction (kriging) is proposed. The method - wavelet analysis residual kriging (WARK) - is developed in order to assess the problems rising for highly variable data in presence of spatial trends. In these cases stationary prediction models have very limited application. Wavelet analysis is used to model large-scale structures and kriging of the remaining residuals focuses on small-scale peculiarities. WARK is able to model spatial pattern which features multiscale structure. In the present work WARK is applied to the rainfall data and the results of validation are compared with the ones obtained from neural network residual kriging (NNRK). NNRK is also a residual-based method, which uses artificial neural network to model large-scale non-linear trends. The comparison of the results demonstrates the high quality performance of WARK in predicting hot spots, reproducing global statistical characteristics of the distribution and spatial correlation structure.

Residual antimalarials in malaria patients from Tanzania--implications on drug efficacy assessment and spread of parasite resistance.

Repeated antimalarial treatment for febrile episodes and self-treatment are common in malaria-endemic areas. The intake of antimalarials prior to participating in an in vivo study may alter treatment outcome and affect the interpretation of both efficacy and safety outcomes. We report the findings from baseline plasma sampling of malaria patients prior to inclusion into an in vivo study in Tanzania and discuss the implications of residual concentrations of antimalarials in this setting. In an in vivo study conducted in a rural area of Tanzania in 2008, baseline plasma samples from patients reporting no antimalarial intake within the last 28 days were screened for the presence of 14 antimalarials (parent drugs or metabolites) using liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry. Among the 148 patients enrolled, 110 (74.3%) had at least one antimalarial in their plasma: 80 (54.1%) had lumefantrine above the lower limit of calibration (LLC = 4 ng/mL), 7 (4.7%) desbutyl-lumefantrine (4 ng/mL), 77 (52.0%) sulfadoxine (0.5 ng/mL), 15 (10.1%) pyrimethamine (0.5 ng/mL), 16 (10.8%) quinine (2.5 ng/mL) and none chloroquine (2.5 ng/mL). The proportion of patients with detectable antimalarial drug levels prior to enrollment into the study is worrying. Indeed artemether-lumefantrine was supposed to be available only at government health facilities. Although sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine is only recommended for intermittent preventive treatment in pregnancy (IPTp), it was still widely used in public and private health facilities and sold in drug shops. Self-reporting of previous drug intake is unreliable and thus screening for the presence of antimalarial drug levels should be considered in future in vivo studies to allow for accurate assessment of treatment outcome. Furthermore, persisting sub-therapeutic drug levels of antimalarials in a population could promote the spread of drug resistance. The knowledge on drug pressure in a given population is important to monitor standard treatment policy implementation.

High-resolution 3D whole-heart coronary MRA: a study on the combination of data acquisition in multiple breath-holds and 1D residual respiratory motion compensation.

OBJECT: To study a scan protocol for coronary magnetic resonance angiography based on multiple breath-holds featuring 1D motion compensation and to compare the resulting image quality to a navigator-gated free-breathing acquisition. Image reconstruction was performed using L1 regularized iterative SENSE. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The effects of respiratory motion on the Cartesian sampling scheme were minimized by performing data acquisition in multiple breath-holds. During the scan, repetitive readouts through a k-space center were used to detect and correct the respiratory displacement of the heart by exploiting the self-navigation principle in image reconstruction. In vivo experiments were performed in nine healthy volunteers and the resulting image quality was compared to a navigator-gated reference in terms of vessel length and sharpness. RESULTS: Acquisition in breath-hold is an effective method to reduce the scan time by more than 30 % compared to the navigator-gated reference. Although an equivalent mean image quality with respect to the reference was achieved with the proposed method, the 1D motion compensation did not work equally well in all cases. CONCLUSION: In general, the image quality scaled with the robustness of the motion compensation. Nevertheless, the featured setup provides a positive basis for future extension with more advanced motion compensation methods.

Contaminación en los puertos del Callao y Chimbote y su efecto en la productividad

Describe los problemas de contaminación identificados en 1979, producidos por cobre, fierro, y desechos domésticos e industriales frente al Callao y Chimbote y cómo se relacionan con los factores físicos y químicos del ambiente marino, así como también estudia sus efectos en la producción primaria.

Contaminación en el Puerto del Callao

Describe la identificación de tres focos principales de contaminación del Puerto de Callao, los mismos que están vinculados a: 1.- aguas provenientes del río Rímac; 2.- aguas de la rada interior del puerto, por la lenta remoción de las aguas, a las actividades del puerto y derrame ocasionales de petróleo, desechos industriales del SIMA y desechos del terminal pesquero; 3.- el área frente al muelle de guerra Camotal, donde la contaminación es principalmente por descarga de desechos de los buques y derrame de petróleo debido al transporte de estos y a las descargas periódicas de los restaurantes ubicados en el litoral.

Contaminación marina en el Perú

Inventario de las principales fuentes de contaminación marina, debido a los desechos domésticos e industriales, hidrocarburos de petróleo e hidrocarburos clorinados, afín de mostrar el estado actual de la contaminación y su problemática, así como su legislación.

Evaluación de la contaminación marina frente a la Bahía de Paita. Crucero Demersales 9505-06

Da a conocer los niveles de concentración de los parámetros físicos - químicos y contaminantes que se encuentran disueltos y dispersos frente a la Bahía de Paita, tomando como muestra doce estaciones y empleando el método de Winkler y el método gravimétrico en el análisis de resultados. Se colectaron miestras de agua en dos niveles dando como resultado que los valores de hidrocarburos del petróleo no superan el valor máximo permisible.

Evaluación de la varazón y contaminación en la Bahía Paracas – Pisco

Presenta los resultados de las prospecciones realizadas el 29 de abril y el 4-7 de mayo de 1995 como consecuencia de la varazón de lizas acaecido el 25 de abril en las playas de Santo Domingo, Pisco-Perú. Durante el operativo se realizó una evaluación, física, química y biológica del ecosistema marino costero el cual incluyó la cuantificación de hidrocarburos de petróleo. Los resultados demostraron condiciones críticas en el ambiente acuático (anoxia, sulfuros elevados, grandes cantidades de grasa, etc.). La bahía presentó principalmente problemas de eutroficación asociada a condiciones anóxicas que ocasionaron la muerte y posterior varazón de peces.

Evaluación de los efectos de la contaminación sobre el ecosistema marino del Callao en agosto y diciembre de 1996

Da a conocer los resultados de los análisis de los parámetros físicos, químicos y la calidad microbiológica del agua de mar en los muestreos de agosto y diciembre de 1996, realizados en la zona comprendida entre Ventanilla y la Mar Brava, incluidas en las Bahías del Callao y Miraflores. Se detectaron zonas de baja salinidad y anóxicas influenciadas por la descarga de los colectores y de los ríos Rímac y Chillón que constituyen las principales fuentes de contaminación de esta bahía.

Contaminación marina en las bahías de Paita y Talara en setiembre 1996

Describe el estudio de los efectos de la contaminación marina sobre el macrozoobentos de fondo blanco de aguas someras. Además, evaluó la calidad microbiológica y la demanda bioquímica de oxígeno en agua de mar y a nivel de playas. El estudio determinó que el agua de mar no presenta contaminación microbiológica según los resultados de coliformes totales y fecales.