University of Oviedo

Detailed geological mapping of a highly fractured Paleozoic basement and the scarce outcrops of overlying Permian-Mesozoic cover in the surroundings of the Duje Valley (Picos de Europa Unit, Cantabrian Mountains, NW Spain), together with new field data have allowed the separation of four genetic fault sets in a polyorogenic area, affected by the Variscan and Alpine cycles. These fault sets are, from oldest to youngest: Variscan thrusts (late Carboniferous), Late Variscan strike-slip faults (late Carboniferous–earliest Permian), Alpine normal faults (Permian–Mesozoic) and Alpine reverse faults (Cenozoic). A structural analysis is reported here, based in the joint use of geometric, kinematic and deformational features, crosscutting and tectono-sedimentary relationships between the structures. This analysis has allowed the recognition and full characterization of the four fault sets. These types of structural analyses are useful for unravelling complex tectonic histories in regions where massive limestone lithologies make reconstructing the timing of fault activity difficult, especially if the basement is affected by late deformation events that are not recorded by cover outcrops.

Mining is an economic activity that entails the production and displacement of significant amounts of atmospheric particulate matter (PM) during operations involving intense earthcrushing or earthmoving. As high concentrations of PM may have adverse effects on human health, it is necessary to monitor and control the fugitive emissions of this pollutant. This paper presents an innovative methodology for the online monitoring of PM10 concentrations in air using a low-cost sensor (LCS, <300 USD) onboard an unmanned aerial vehicle. After comprehensive calibration, the LCS was horizontally flown over seven different areas of the large Riotinto copper mine (Huelva, Spain) at different heights to study the PM10 distribution at different longitudes and altitudes. The flights covered areas of zero activity, intense mining, drilling, ore loading, waste discharge, open stockpiling, and mineral processing. In the zero-activity area, the resuspension of PM10 was very low, with a weak wind speed (3.6 m/s). In the intense-mining area, unhealthy concentrations of PM10 (>51 μgPM10/m3) could be released, and the PM10 can reach surrounding populations through long-distance transport driven by several processes being performed simultaneously. Strong dilution was also observed at high altitudes (> 50 m). Mean concentrations were found to be 22–89 μgPM10/m3, with peaks ranging from 86 to 284 μgPM10/m3. This study demonstrates the potential applicability of airborne LCSs in the high-resolution online monitoring of PM in mining, thus supporting environmental managers during decision-making against fugitive emissions in a cost-effective manner.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused drastic changes in education, which had to adapt to changing scenarios (online, face-to-face, hybrid teaching). Within physical education (PE), strategies such as ‘do not use or share equipment’ were proposed to avoid infections. These strategies fit with an emerging pedagogical model called the Self-made Material Model (SMM), which involves students creating their own PE equipment. The objectives of the present study were: a) to analyse PE teachers’ beliefs about the use of self-made material in their classes, b) to evaluate teachers’ perceptions of the impact of the use of self-made material in PE lessons during the pandemic, and c) to examine gender/age differences. A quantitative, snowball research design was followed. The Self-Made Material Questionnaire (Méndez-Giménez and Fernández-Río, 2011) comprising two scales (41 items) was adapted: Teachers’ beliefs about the use of self-made material scale, and Teachers’ perceptions of the impact of self-made material usage during the pandemic scale. 1093 in-service teachers (443 women, 40.5%; M = 41.39, SD = 9.54) from 13 Ibero-American countries participated. Descriptive statistics were calculated, Student's T test was conducted for comparisons by gender and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was run for comparisons by age ranges. Overall, the scores were high, emphasizing the potential to promote recycling and students’ creativity and respect for the material. Women scored higher in items such as promoting interdisciplinarity, equality, attention to disability and education in values. 833 (76.21%) teachers used self-made material during the pandemic and reported high levels of satisfaction, expectations of use, usefulness and profitability. No gender differences were found. In the COVID-19 era, the SMM is playing a relevant role as a meaningful framework and a helpful teaching methodology in different educational scenarios.

The ease of control of LEDs allows the development of drivers with luminous flux control without significantly increasing the cost. The preferred control system to minimize light color deviation at low power levels is through pulse width control. However, IEEE PAR1789 recommendations indicate that the frequency of these pulses should be greater than 1.5kHz to eliminate the adverse effects of light flicker. This strongly affects the design of LED drivers. Among other effects, it makes it more difficult to avoid the appearance of audible noise in the magnetic elements and can limit the ratio between the minimum and maximum power achievable without losing linearity. In this paper, a new solution based on a quasi-resonant buck in series with a low-voltage-drop current regulator is presented. The quasi-resonant buck is used to minimize the headroom voltage of the dissipative current regulator thus maximizing the efficiency. The operation of the resonant converter is analyzed using an energy-balance approach to model the circuit behavior during the resonant transitions. Based on this approach, a straightforward design procedure is proposed and applied to a design example. This example is used to build and test a low-cost experimental prototype based on the L6562A control integrated circuit. This paper is accompanied by several LT Spice files demonstrating the basic operation of the proposed circuit.

Income is a relevant factor for explaining outbound tourism demand. However, when working with regional-or country-level data, it is difficult to disentangle the role of income in stimulating tourism travelling from other factors that correlate with greater income levels. This paper exploits a natural experiment from Spanish Christmas Lottery to estimate the causal effect of income shocks on outbound tourism. We leverage the staggered and quasi-random assignment of lottery winnings across Spanish regions to estimate the elasticity of outbound annual trips and expenditure to windfall gains. Using difference-indifferences with the amount of lottery prizes as an indicator of treatment intensity, we show that lottery winnings per capita increase both the annual number of tourism trips and expenditure per capita. This effect operates during the first 2 years following the draw, which is likely explained by bandwagon and income multiplier effects.

Photonic crystals (PhCs) are interesting structures for photocatalytic applications because of their capability of harnessing distinct forms of light-matter interactions within the PhCs. Of all these, overlapping one of the photonic stopband's (PSB) edge with the absorption of the PhC material or adsorbed molecules improves their excitation and generated charge carriers can subsequently induce photocatalytic reactions. The PSB position of anodic aluminum oxide PhCs (AAO-PhCs) can be easily adjusted by modifying the anodization profile. Herein, AAO-PhCs are designed to match the band gap of a model semiconductor enabling a general photocatalytic activity enhancement independent of the chemical to be decomposed. Fe 2 O 3 , as an example photocatalyst, is coated onto AAO-PhCs to demonstrate efficient photocatalytic systems by utilizing the slow photon effect. Tailored Fe 2 O 3-AAO-PhCs with their PSB edge at 564 nm matching the Fe 2 O 3 band gap exhibit generally enhanced degradation of three different organic dyes while a significant activity decrease is observed when the PSB edge does not overlap with the Fe 2 O 3 absorption. Furthermore, photocatalyst degradation can be reduced down to only 4% activity loss over six consecutive measurements by an ultra-thin alumina coating.

Solution‐processed photodetectors incorporating liquid‐phase‐exfoliated transition metal dichalcogenide nanosheets are widely reported. However, previous studies mainly focus on the fabrication of photoconductors, rather than photodiodes which tend to be based on heterojunctions and are harder to fabricate. Especially, there are rare reports on introducing commonly used transport layers into heterojunctions based on nanosheet networks. In this study, a reliable solution‐processing method is reported to fabricate heterojunction diodes with tungsten selenide (WSe 2 ) nanosheets as the optical absorbing material and PEDOT: PSS and ZnO as injection/transport‐layer materials. By varying the transport layer combinations, the obtained heterojunctions show rectification ratios of up to ≈10 ⁴ at ±1 V in the dark, without relying on heavily doped silicon substrates. Upon illumination, the heterojunction can be operated in both photoconductor and photodiode modes and displays self‐powered behaviors at zero bias.

A new method is developed to estimate the contemporary effective population size ( N ) from linkage disequilibrium between SNPs without information on their location, which is the usual scenario in non-model species. The general theory of linkage disequilibrium is extended to include the contribution of full-sibs to the measure of LD, leading naturally to the estimation of Ne in monogamous and polygamous mating systems, as well as in multiparous species, and non-random distributions of full-sib family size due to selection or other causes. The prediction of confidence intervals for N estimates was solved using a small artificial neural network trained on a dataset of over 10 simulation results. The method, implemented in a user-friendly and fast software ( currentNe ) is able to estimate N even in problematic scenarios with large population sizes or small sample sizes, and provides confidence intervals that are more consistent than parametric methods or resampling.

The Comical History of Don Quixote (1694) is one of the first dramatizations of Miguel de Cervantes’s novel in English, written in three parts. Starting with the episode of Cardenio and Luscinda in the first part, Thomas D’Urfey takes liberties with the characters and twists the plot, mixing chapters and embellishing it with songs by composer Henry Purcell and music by other contemporary artists. However, this dramatist presents us with a noble and quite sensible Don Quixote, as opposed to a histrionic Sancho, thus inverting the essence of the original characters in Cervantes’s novel.This article will analyze – from the perspective of studies on theatrical adaptation, such as Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (2006) and Jane Barnette’s ADAPTURGY: The Dramaturg’s Art and Theatrical Adaptation (2018) – Thomas D’Urfey’s The Comical History of Don Quixote (1694) as an adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes’s Quixote . The author will explore the different episodes that D’Urfey chose to rewrite in the three parts of his play, analyzing the differences and similitudes between the original stories in the novel and their adapted version in the play, in order to prove that, on the one hand, Cervantes’s novel was already widely known by English audiences when D’Urfey’s plays were premiered, on the other, that he adapted the existing material to suit the preferences of English seventeenth-century audiences and, finally, that he created a parody in which Don Quixote is actually a nobler character than that of the preceding seventeenth-century adaptations.

We hypothesized that a three‐sample conditional discrimination can emerge as a result of learning conditional discriminations with relational stimuli. After learning three first‐order conditional discriminations AB, PQ, and CD, we taught a second‐order conditional discrimination XAB in which X1 indicated selection of related stimuli (e.g., A1 and B1) and X2 of unrelated stimuli (e.g., A1 and B2). Then, we probed the emergence of conditional discriminations PQX and XCD in which the X stimuli were comparisons and contextual stimuli, respectively. Finally, a conditional discrimination was probed with stimuli P, Q, and C as samples and D1 and D2 as comparisons. When the P and Q stimuli were related (and related to X1 in PQX), all participants selected the D stimulus that was related to the C stimulus (D1 when C1 was present and D2 when C2 was present); when the P and Q stimuli were unrelated (and related to X2 in PQX), they selected the D stimulus unrelated to the C stimulus (D2 when C1 and D1 when C2), which demonstrated emergence based on the relations established among all stimuli. In Experiment 2, the teaching of XAB was omitted and only one in six participants demonstrated emergence, which indicated that relational stimuli X1 and X2 played an important role in emergence. Thus, a new type of emergence that mimics analogical reasoning was demonstrated. The obtained outcome suggests that this procedure provides a learning foundation for acquiring reasoning capabilities.

Schizophrenia is a debilitating psychiatric disorder associated with a reduced fertility and decreased life expectancy, yet common predisposing variation substantially contributes to the onset of the disorder, which poses an evolutionary paradox. Previous research has suggested balanced selection, a mechanism by which schizophrenia risk alleles could also provide advantages under certain environments, as a reliable explanation. However, recent studies have shown strong evidence against a positive selection of predisposing loci. Furthermore, evolutionary pressures on schizophrenia risk alleles could have changed throughout human history as new environments emerged. Here in this study, we used 1000 Genomes Project data to explore the relationship between schizophrenia predisposing loci and recent natural selection (RNS) signatures after the human diaspora out of Africa around 100,000 years ago on a genome-wide scale. We found evidence for significant enrichment of RNS markers in derived alleles arisen during human evolution conferring protection to schizophrenia. Moreover, both partitioned heritability and gene set enrichment analyses of mapped genes from schizophrenia predisposing loci subject to RNS revealed a lower involvement in brain and neuronal related functions compared to those not subject to RNS. Taken together, our results suggest non-antagonistic pleiotropy as a likely mechanism behind RNS that could explain the persistence of schizophrenia common predisposing variation in human populations due to its association to other non-psychiatric phenotypes.

In recent years, as Internet use has become more widespread, the use of “beyond-GDP” measures have become increasingly important, bringing well-being analysis into a more prominent position within scientific research topics. At the same time, our society is going through a deep process of digital transformation, which is characterized by important digital inequalities, mainly rooted in traditional socio-economic divides between and within population groups. The aim of this paper is to explore the relationship between internet use and individuals’ perceived levels of well-being. Five dimensions of well-being are studied: happiness, life satisfaction, social meetings, personal connections and social life participation. The modelling strategy consists of a set of three-simultaneous equations, in which the first one explains individuals’ internet use; the second one, the intensity of usage (measured by the time spent on the internet) and the third one, focuses on the impact of such intensity on well-being. To estimate such models microdata from two rounds (2016 and 2018) of the European Social Survey (ESS) are collected for Spain. Results show that the effect of internet usage depends on the dimension of well-being considered, being negative for happiness, life satisfaction and meetings but positive as regards connections and participation. Furthermore, the relationship between individuals’ well-being and internet use depends, to a large extent, on the socio-economic and socio-demographic characteristics of the individuals.

Sex differences have been found in allocentric spatial learning and memory tasks, with the literature indicating that males outperform females, although this issue is still controversial. This study aimed to explore the behavior of male and female rats during the habituation and learning of a spatial memory task performed in the Morris Water Maze (MWM). The study included a large sample of 89 males and 85 females. We found that females searched slightly faster than males during habituation with a visible platform. During learning, both male and female rats decreased the latency and distance traveled to find the hidden platform over the days, with males outperforming females in the distance traveled. Females swam faster but did not find the platform earlier, suggesting a less directed navigational strategy. Both sexes increased time spent in the target zone over the days, with no sex differences. Although females swam more in the periphery during the first days of the task, both sexes decreased the time spent in this area. Finally, only males increased swimming in the pool's center over the days, spending more time than females in this area across the entire training. In conclusion, we need to register several variables in the MWM and analyze path strategies to obtain more robust results concerning sex differences. Research on spatial learning should include both sexes to achieve a more equitable, representative, and translational science.

The objective of this study was to analyze the proprioceptive innervation of human lips, especially of the orbicularis oris muscle, since it is classically accepted that facial muscles lack typical proprioceptors, that is, muscle spindles, but recently this has been doubted. Upper and lower human lips ( n = 5) from non‐embalmed frozen cadavers were immunostained for detection of S100 protein (to identify nerves and sensory nerve formations), myosin heavy chain (to label muscle fibers within muscle spindles), and the mechano‐gated ion channel PIEZO2. No muscle spindles were found, but there was a high density of sensory nerve formations, which were morphologically heterogeneous, and in some cases resemble Ruffini‐like and Pacinian sensory corpuscles. The axons of these sensory formations displayed immunoreactivity for PIEZO2. Human lip muscles lack typical proprioceptors but possess a dense sensory innervation which can serve the lip proprioception.

Invited for the cover of this issue is the group of Vicente del Amo, Alejandro Presa Soto and Joaquín García‐Álvarez ( QuimSinSos Group) at the University of Oviedo. The image depicts the use of the Fe III ‐based deep eutectic mixture [FeCl 3 ⋅6 H 2 O/ Gly (3:1)] ( Gly = glycerol) as both promoter and solvent for the straightforward and selective hydration of alkynes, working under mild (45 °C), bench‐type reaction conditions (air) and in the absence of ligands, co‐catalysts or co‐solvents. Read the full text of the article at 10.1002/chem.202301736 .

This chapter focuses on the origins and development of the gas industry of the North of Spain (the Cantabrian regions of Asturias, Santander and the Basque Country) from c. 1845 to 1950, and attempts to quantify its relative importance in the Spanish gas industry as a whole in terms of companies, production, consumption and clients. By analysing the different gasworks of the region, the chapter also reviews the changes in technologies and markets during the period, the companies’ strategies to cope with the competition of electricity and to shocks such as World War I or the Spanish Civil War and the evolution of costs and prices.

In a viral pandemic, predicting the number of infected per day and the total number of cases in each wave of possible variants is intended to aid decision-making in real public health practice. This paper compares the efficiency of three very simple models in predicting the behavior of COVID-19 in Spain during the first waves. The Verhulst, Gompertz and SIR models are used to predict pandemic behavior using past daily cases as observed data. The parameters of each model are identified at each wave by solving the corresponding inverse problem through a member of the PSO family and then their posterior distribution is calculated using the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm to compare the robustness of each predictive model. It can be concluded that all these models are incomplete without the corresponding parameter uncertainty analysis. In these cases, the comparison of the posterior prediction with respect to the predictive model used shows that this work can be used for real-life decision making.

We consider a decision making problem under imprecision, where the probabilistic information is given in terms of a set of probability measures, and where finding the optimal alternative(s) may be difficult. To ease the computation, we propose to transform the initial model into another one that (1) belongs to some subclass with better mathematical properties, such as supermodularity or complete monotonicity; (2) is at least as informative as the original model, while being as close as possible to it. We show that the problem can be approached in terms of linear or quadratic programming and that it can be connected with the one of determining the incenter of a credal set. Finally, we compare the solutions of a decision making problem with the initial and the transformed models and illustrate how our approach can be applied in a decision making problem under severe uncertainty.