The Internet of Things (IoT) is a paradigm based on the Internet that comprises many interconnected technologies like RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) and WSAN (Wireless Sensor and Actor ...Networks) in order to exchange information. The current needs for better control, monitoring and management in many areas, and the ongoing research in this field, have originated the appearance and creation of multiple systems like smart-home, smart-city and smart-grid. However, the limitations of associated devices in the IoT in terms of storage, network and computing, and the requirements of complex analysis, scalability, and data access, require a technology like Cloud Computing to supplement this field. Moreover, the IoT can generate large amounts of varied data and quickly when there are millions of things feeding data to Cloud Computing. The latter is a clear example of Big Data, that Cloud Computing needs to take into account. This paper presents a survey of integration components: Cloud platforms, Cloud infrastructures and IoT Middleware. In addition, some integration proposals and data analytics techniques are surveyed as well as different challenges and open research issues are pointed out.
Exponential growth in the interest in MOF (Metal-Organic Framework) materials in both scientific and industrial spheres has been flourishing in the last fifteen years. However, certain environmental ...and economic limitations could slow down their industrial establishment. Here we present an innovative, widely applicable, straightforward, rapid, inexpensive and environmentally friendly method to prepare high-quality carboxylate-based MOFs with properties rarely obtained under conventional conditions. The method is based on the use of organic salts (instead of their homologous protonated organic ligands) as anionic linker sources, so that their solubility and the deprotonation steps, which necessarily take place in the formation of MOFs, are notably favoured in aqueous solution. As an example, the preparation of X-MIL-53-Al (X = none, NH sub(2), NO sub(2)) materials is reported at room temperature, with the following additional advantages for some applications: they (i) are nanocrystalline, (ii) have notable and ordered inter-crystalline mesoporosity, and (iii) contain a reduced or even a negligible amount of unreacted linker within the pores. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first preparation of a 3-D highly-porous MOF under these two industrially-demanded synthesis conditions: room temperature and water as the sole solvent. The scarce commercial availability of these linker salts is a limitation that can be easily circumvented by replacing the salts with their protonated analogue plus a base. Following this method, a high-quality MOF-74 material, so far only prepared in organic solvents, could be also prepared in water and at room temperature. Even in organic media, in which this approach could be a prioriunfavourable from a linker solubility point of view, MOFs with properties unattainable through conventional methods of synthesis can be prepared following this approach. That is the case for the synthesis of MOF-5 with the highest interpenetration degree ever described by just replacing terephthalic acid with disodium terephthalate as the linker source and maintaining the otherwise conventional conditions including the use of DMF as the solvent.
RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) are essential for the development and function of the immune system. They interact dynamically with RNA to control its biogenesis and turnover by transcription-dependent ...and transcription-independent mechanisms. In this Review, we discuss the molecular mechanisms by which RBPs allow gene expression changes to occur at different speeds and to varying degrees, and which RBPs regulate the diversity of the transcriptome and proteome. These proteins are nodes for integration of transcriptional and signaling networks and are intimately linked to intermediary metabolism. They are essential components of regulatory feedback mechanisms that maintain immune tolerance and limit inflammation. The role of RBPs in malignancy and autoimmunity has led to their emergence as targets for the development of new therapeutic modalities.
The real industrial establishment of metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) requires significant advances in economic and chemical sustainability. This work describes a novel and simple method to prepare ...one of the most widely studied MOF materials, i.e., MIL-100(Fe), which significantly improves the sustainability of the conventional process in several aspects. This MOF material is prepared (i) at room temperature (instead of 150 °C used in the conventional method), (ii) after a few hours (instead of 6 days), (iii) in the absence of any inorganic corrosive acid (significant amounts of HF and HNO3 are used in the conventional method), and (iv) it is washed at room temperature (unlike the washing at 80 °C for 3 h). Interestingly, the only difference in the preparation method of MIL-100(Fe) compared with that of semiamorphous Fe-BTC (MOF material commercialized as Basolite F300 having the same metal and linker, and which can be also prepared under similar sustainable conditions) is to start from Fe(II) or Fe(III) sources, respectively, which opens certain versatility options in the room temperature synthesis procedures of MOF materials. The prepared samples were characterized using X-ray diffraction, thermogravimetric analysis, N2 adsorption/desorption isotherms, Cs-aberration corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy, and UV–vis diffuse reflectance spectroscopy. These two room-temperature-made Fe-BTC materials were tested in the industrially demanded photocatalytic degradation of methyl orange under both ultraviolet and solar light radiation. MIL-100(Fe) was a very active photocatalyst in comparison with its homologue. That difference was mainly attributed to the presence of larger cavities within its structure.
Taxol
, which is also known as paclitaxel, is a chemotherapeutic agent widely used to treat different cancers. Since the discovery of its antitumoral activity, Taxol
has been used to treat over one ...million patients, making it one of the most widely employed antitumoral drugs. Taxol
was the first microtubule targeting agent described in the literature, with its main mechanism of action consisting of the disruption of microtubule dynamics, thus inducing mitotic arrest and cell death. However, secondary mechanisms for achieving apoptosis have also been demonstrated. Despite its wide use, Taxol
has certain disadvantages. The main challenges facing Taxol
are the need to find an environmentally sustainable production method based on the use of microorganisms, increase its bioavailability without exerting adverse effects on the health of patients and minimize the resistance presented by a high percentage of cells treated with paclitaxel. This review details, in a succinct manner, the main aspects of this important drug, from its discovery to the present day. We highlight the main challenges that must be faced in the coming years, in order to increase the effectiveness of Taxol
as an anticancer agent.
Pipes are one of the key elements in the construction of ships, which usually contain between 15,000 and 40,000 of them. This huge number, as well as the variety of processes that may be performed on ...a pipe, require rigorous identification, quality assessment and traceability. Traditionally, such tasks have been carried out by using manual procedures and following documentation on paper, which slows down the production processes and reduces the output of a pipe workshop. This article presents a system that allows for identifying and tracking the pipes of a ship through their construction cycle. For such a purpose, a fog computing architecture is proposed to extend cloud computing to the edge of the shipyard network. The system has been developed jointly by Navantia, one of the largest shipbuilders in the world, and the University of A Coruña (Spain), through a project that makes use of some of the latest Industry 4.0 technologies. Specifically, a Cyber-Physical System (CPS) is described, which uses active Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags to track pipes and detect relevant events. Furthermore, the CPS has been integrated and tested in conjunction with Siemens' Manufacturing Execution System (MES) (Simatic IT). The experiments performed on the CPS show that, in the selected real-world scenarios, fog gateways respond faster than the tested cloud server, being such gateways are also able to process successfully more samples under high-load situations. In addition, under regular loads, fog gateways react between five and 481 times faster than the alternative cloud approach.
Alginate (ALG) is a lineal hydrophilic polysaccharide present in brown algae cell walls, which turns into a gel state when hydrated. Gelation readily produces a series of three dimensional (3D) ...architectures like fibers, capillaries, and microspheres, used as biosensors and bio‐actuators in a plethora of biomedical applications like drug delivery and wound healing. Hydrogels have made a great impact on regenerative medicine and tissue engineering because they are able to mimic the mechanical properties of natural tissues due to their high water content. Recent advances in neurosciences have led to promising strategies for repairing and/or regenerating the damaged nervous system. Spinal cord injury (SCI) is particularly challenging, owing to its devastating medical, human, and social consequences. Although effective therapies to repair the damaged spinal cord (SC) are still lacking, multiple pharmacological, genetic, and cell‐based therapies are currently under study. In this framework, ALG hydrogels constitute a source of potential tools for the development of implants capable of promoting axonal growth and/or delivering cells or drugs at specific damaged sites, which may result in therapeutic strategies for SCI. In this mini‐review, the current state of the art of ALG applications in neural tissues for repairing the damaged spinal cord is discussed.
Alginate‐based hydrogels can help in repairing the damaged spinal cord, providing scaffold for axonal regeneration and delivery system for cell, drug, and gene therapies. This article is part of an AFOB (Asian Federation of Biotechnology) Special issue. To learn more about the AFOB visit www.afob.org.
ABSTRACT
The formation and stability of collisionless self-gravitating systems are long-standing problems, which date back to the work of D. Lynden-Bell on violent relaxation and extends to the issue ...of virialization of dark matter (DM) haloes. An important prediction of such a relaxation process is that spherical equilibrium states can be described by a Fermi–Dirac phase-space distribution, when the extremization of a coarse-grained entropy is reached. In the case of DM fermions, the most general solution develops a degenerate compact core surrounded by a diluted halo. As shown recently, the latter is able to explain the galaxy rotation curves, while the DM core can mimic the central black hole. A yet open problem is whether these kinds of astrophysical core–halo configurations can form at all, and whether they remain stable within cosmological time-scales. We assess these issues by performing a thermodynamic stability analysis in the microcanonical ensemble for solutions with a given particle number at halo virialization in a cosmological framework. For the first time, we demonstrate that the above core–halo DM profiles are stable (i.e. maxima of entropy) and extremely long-lived. We find the existence of a critical point at the onset of instability of the core–halo solutions, where the fermion-core collapses towards a supermassive black hole. For particle masses in the keV range, the core-collapse can only occur for $M_{\rm vir} \gtrsim 10^{9}{\, \mathrm{M}_\odot}$ starting at zvir ≈ 10 in the given cosmological framework. Our results prove that DM haloes with a core–halo morphology are a very plausible outcome within non-linear stages of structure formation.
For a long time mercury electrodes have been the main choice for the analysis of metal ions and some metalloids. However, in the last years, safety and environmental considerations have restricted ...their use and encouraged the search for alternative materials more environmentally friendly and with more possibilities for in-situ and flow analysis. This research has been reinforced by the popularisation of nanomaterials, biomolecules and screen-printed electrodes, as well as for the new advances in sensor miniaturization and integration of the electrodes in multi-sensor platforms and electronic tongues. The present review critically summarizes and discusses the progress made since 2010 in the development and application of new electrodes for the analysis of metals and metalloids.
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•Recent progress, since 2010, in voltammetric analysis of metal ions is reviewed.•Policy against mercury along this period has encouraged the search for alternative materials.•In this search, the popularisation of nanomaterials, biomolecules and screen-printed electrodes plays a key role.•Electrode modification strategies have to face challenges to produce devices as an alternative to atomic spectroscopies.
Copper complexes are of medicinal and biological interest, including as anticancer drugs designed to cleave intracellular biomolecules by O2 activation. To exhibit such activity, the copper complex ...must be redox active and resistant to dissociation. Metallothioneins (MTs) and glutathione (GSH) are abundant in the cytosol and nucleus. Because they are thiol‐rich reducing molecules with high CuI affinity, they are potential competitors for a copper ion bound in a copper drug. Herein, we report the investigation of a panel of CuI/CuII complexes often used as drugs, with diverse coordination chemistries and redox potentials. We evaluated their catalytic activity in ascorbate oxidation based on redox cycling between CuI and CuII, as well as their resistance to dissociation or inactivation under cytosolically relevant concentrations of GSH and MT. O2‐activating CuI/CuII complexes for cytosolic/nuclear targets are generally not stable against the GSH/MT system, which creates a challenge for their future design.
Copper complexes are of medicinal and biological interest, including as anticancer drugs. O2‐activating CuI/CuII complexes for cytosolic/nuclear targets are generally not stable against glutathione and metallothioneins, which are abundant in the nucleus and cytosol. This should be considered when designing CuI/CuII complexes for biological and medicinal applications.
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