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Background: Corrective spine surgery is widely accepted for treating severe adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS). Postoperative spinal range of motion (ROM) could be affected after such surgery. In certain populations, such as Muslims, this ROM change can impact daily life, as it may affect the five-times-a-day prayer (Salah). This study aims to assess the influence of spinal fusion (SF) in Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis (AIS) during the daily Islamic prayer (Salah). Methods: SF-AIS patients were videoed while performing Salah prayer. The kinematic documentation was assessed and compared to Salah movements of a control group of age-matched Muslim AIS patients, who had not had surgery. The prayer quality changes were subjectively classified into improved, no change/remained, and worsened, according to the Global Perceived Effect (GPE). Functional outcome and pain were assessed by the Scoliosis Research Society Questionnaire Version 30 (SRS-30). Results: Thirty-nine women and five men (mean age±SD: 14.8±2.3 years) met the inclusion criteria, and unoperated AIS patients were used as control (twenty-two women, mean age±SD: 15.32±1.43 years). The prostrations ROM of the SF-AIS group differed significantly from the control group (p

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is a highly aggressive lethal malignancy that accounts for more than 90% of pancreatic cancer diagnoses. Our research is focused on the physico-chemical properties of the tumour microenvironment (TME), including its tumoural extracellular matrix (tECM), as they may have an important impact on the success of cancer therapies. PDAC xenografts and their decellularized tECM offer a great material source for research in terms of biomimicry with the original human tumour. Our aim was to evaluate and quantify the physico-chemical properties of the PDAC TME. Both cellularized (native TME) and decellularized (tECM) patient-derived PDAC xenografts were analyzed. A factorial design of experiments identified an optimal combination of factors for effective xenograft decellularization. Our results provide a complete advance in our understanding of the PDAC TME and its corresponding stroma, showing that it presents an interconnected porous architecture with very low permeability and small pores due to the contractility of the cellular components. This fact provides a potential therapeutic strategy based on the therapeutic agent size.

The TTS package has been developed in R software to predict the mechanical properties of viscoelastic materials, at short and long observation times/frequencies by applying the Time Temperature Superposition (TTS) principle. TTS is a physical principle used in material science to estimate mechanical properties beyond the experimental range of observed times/frequencies by shifting data curves obtained at other temperatures relative to a reference temperature in the dataset. It is a methodology related to accelerated life-tests and reliability, whereas the TTS library is one of the first open source computational tool to apply the TTS principle. This R package provides free computational tools to obtain master curves that characterize materials from a thermal-mechanical approach. The TTS package also proposes, implements and explains our own method to obtain the shift factors and the master curve in a TTS analysis, based on horizontal shifting of the first derivative function of viscoelastic properties. This procedure provides shift factors estimates and smooth master curve estimates using B-spline fitting, in a fully automatic way, without assuming any parametric expression. Williams-Landel-Ferry (WLF) and Arrhenius TTS parametric models are also implemented in the TTS package. They can be fitted from shifts obtained by the our first derivative based method.

Mutualistic relationships, where species interact to obtain mutual benefits, constitute an essential component of natural ecosystems. The use of ecological networks to represent the species and their ecological interactions allows the study of structural and dynamic patterns common to different ecosystems. However, by neglecting the temporal dimension of mutualistic communities, relevant insights into the organization and functioning of natural ecosystems can be lost. Therefore, it is crucial to incorporate empirical phenology -the cycles of species’ activity within a season- to fully understand the impact of temporal variability on network architecture. In this paper, by using empirical datasets together with a set of synthetic models, we propose a framework to characterize the phenology of plant-pollinator communities and assess how it reshapes their portrayal as a network. Analyses of three empirical cases reveal that non-trivial information is missed when representing the network of interactions as static, which leads to overestimating the value of fundamental structural features. We discuss the implications of our findings for mutualistic relationships and intra-guild competition for common resources. We show that recorded interactions and species’ activity duration are pivotal factors in accurately replicating observed patterns within mutualistic communities. Furthermore, our exploration of synthetic models underscores the system-specific character of the mechanisms driving phenology, increasing our understanding of the complexities of natural ecosystems.

We present an agent-based model that explores the intricate relationship between pro-family and prosocial behaviors and their impact on settlement formation. The objective is to investigate how the technological level and various constraints influence the transition from pro-family to prosocial behavior. The model incorporates factors such as the specialization requirements of the technology, societal tolerance, and dynamic interactions within a synthetic population, where individuals may prioritize either their family or their own settlement. Agents’ fitness is determined by two components: the proportion of pro-family agents within their family and the fraction of prosocial agents in their settlement, along with its size. Our findings reveal that (i) the technological level drives the transition from pro-family to prosocial behavior, and (ii) the developmental requirements of the technology shape the smoothness of this transition, ranging from abrupt to gradual. These results emphasize the significance of considering the interplay between the technological level, the nature of the technology, and cultural influences when examining settlement patterns and the dynamics of pro-family and prosocial behaviors in human societies.

The sustainable exploitation of natural resources constitutes a real-world problem of interest for many fields. In this work, we study those situations in which the exploiting agents have information about the state of the resource and their own benefits and costs but not about the behavior or performance of the rest of the agents. Cognitive Hierarchy Theory provides a framework for those low-information scenarios by focusing on the assumptions that agents make about other individuals’ behavior. Motivated by this theory, we introduce a theoretical agent-based model in which agents exhibit varying degrees of rationalization when exploiting the resource, and this resource’s evolution is driven by a differential equation that mirrors the dynamics of real-world resource growth. Our results show that, although most regimes imply depletion, higher benefits and sustainability are obtained when agents assume overexploitation by the rest and try to compensate for it. Furthermore, many exploiting agents and a long-term perspective also involve a better resource state, reaching the optimal exploitation level when all these factors come together.

Background: Corrective spine surgery is widely accepted for treating severe adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS). Postoperative spinal range of motion (ROM) could be affected after such surgery. In certain populations, such as Muslims, this ROM change can impact daily life, as it may affect the five-times-a-day prayer (Salah). This study aims to assess the influence of spinal fusion (SF) in Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis (AIS) during the daily Islamic prayer (Salah). Methods: SF-AIS patients were videoed while performing Salah prayer. The kinematic documentation was assessed and compared to Salah movements of a control group of age-matched Muslim AIS patients, who had not had surgery. The prayer quality changes were subjectively classified into improved, no change/remained, and worsened, according to the Global Perceived Effect (GPE). Functional outcome and pain were assessed by the Scoliosis Research Society Questionnaire Version 30 (SRS-30). Results: Thirty-nine women and five men (mean age±SD: 14.8±2.3 years) met the inclusion criteria, and unoperated AIS patients were used as control (twenty-two women, mean age±SD: 15.32±1.43 years). The prostrations ROM of the SF-AIS group differed significantly from the control group (p

Antecedentes: La dehiscencia de la anastomosis colorrectal (DA) es la complicación más temida de la cirugía del cáncer de recto (1-19%), pues incrementa la morbimortalidad y empeora los resultados oncológicos en términos de recidiva local y supervivencia. La publicación del índice REAL-score permite predecir el riesgo de DA y comparar los resultados esperados con los obtenidos. Método: Estudio observacional, descriptivo, longitudinal y retrospectivo, de pacientes intervenidos de cáncer de recto en el Hospital Universitario Miguel Servet, en Zaragoza, España, en 2019. Análisis estadístico de variables resultado de morbimortalidad y del índice REAL-score mediante curvas ROC. Resultados: De 80 pacientes intervenidos de cáncer de recto, se realizó anastomosis colorrectal en 52 e ileostomía temporal en 11 (21.2%). La morbilidad fue alta (38.4%), pero grave solo en el 7.7% (Clavien-Dindo IIIb), sin ningún fallecimiento. Hubo cuatro dehiscencias: una de tipo B y tres de tipo C. Se observa una relación directa entre alto riesgo de DA y la práctica de estoma temporal cuando el punto de corte del REALscore supera el 14.74%. Conclusiones: El REAL-score puede ayudar en la toma de decisiones en la cirugía del cáncer de recto. Por encima de un punto de corte, el riesgo de DA implicaría ileostomía selectiva.

Abstract Global supply networks in agriculture, manufacturing, and services are a defining feature of the modern world. The efficiency and the distribution of surpluses across different parts of these networks depend on the choices of intermediaries. This paper conducts price formation experiments with human subjects located in large complex networks to develop a better understanding of the principles governing behavior. Our first experimental finding is that prices are larger and that trade is significantly less efficient in small-world networks as compared to random networks. Our second experimental finding is that location within a network is not an important determinant of pricing. An examination of the price dynamics suggests that traders on cheapest—and hence active—paths raise prices while those off these paths lower them. We construct an agent-based model (ABM) that embodies this rule of thumb. Simulations of this ABM yield macroscopic patterns consistent with the experimental findings. Finally, we extrapolate the ABM on to significantly larger random and small-world networks and find that network topology remains a key determinant of pricing and efficiency.

Gelatin is a popular biopolymer for biomedical applications due to its harmless impact with a negligible inflammatory response in the host organism. Gelatin interacts with soluble molecules in aqueous media as ionic counterparts such as ionic liquids (ILs) to be used as cosolvents to generate the so-called Ionogels. The perfluorinated IL (FIL), 1-ethyl-3-methylpyridinium perfluorobutanesulfonate, has been selected as co-hydrosolvent for fish gelatin due to its low cytotoxicity and hydrophobicity aprotic polar structure to improve the drug aqueous solubility. A series of FIL/water emulsions with different FIL content and their corresponding shark gelatin/FIL Ionogel has been designed to enhance the drug solubility whilst retaining the mechanical structure and their nanostructure was probed by simultaneous SAXS/WAXS, FTIR and Raman spectroscopy, DSC and rheological experiments. Likewise, the FIL assisted the solubility of the antitumoural Doxorubicin whilst retaining the performing mechanical properties of the drug delivery system network for the drug storage as well as the local administration by a syringe. In addition, the different controlled release mechanisms of two different antitumoral such as Doxorubicin and Mithramycin from two different Ionogels formulations were compared to previous gelatin hydrogels which proved the key structure correlation required to attain specific therapeutic dosages.

A series of bionanocomposites composed of shark gelatin hydrogels and PLA nanoparticles featuring different nanostructures were designed to generate multifunctional drug delivery systems with tailored release rates required for personalized treatment approaches. The global conception of the systems was considered from the desired customization of the drug release while featuring the viscoelastic properties needed for their ease of storage and posterior local administration as well as their biocompatibility and cell growth capability for the successful administration at the biomolecular level. The hydrogel matrix offers the support to develop a direct thermal method to convert the typical kinetic trapped nanostructures afforded by the formulation method whilst avoiding the detrimental nanoparticle agglomeration that diminishes their therapeutic effect. The nanoparticles generated were successfully formulated with two different antitumoral compounds (doxorubicin and dasatinib) possessing different structures to prove the loading versatility of the drug delivery system. The bionanocomposites were characterized by several techniques (SEM, DLS, RAMAN, DSC, SAXS/WAXS and rheology) as well as their reversible sol–gel transition upon thermal treatment that occurs during the drug delivery system preparation and the thermal annealing step. In addition, the local applicability of the drug delivery system was assessed by the so-called “syringe test” to validate both the storage capability and its flow properties at simulated physiological conditions. Finally, the drug release profiles of the doxorubicin from both the PLA nanoparticles or the bionanocomposites were analyzed and correlated to the nanostructure of the drug delivery system.

Dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA) is a thermo-analytical technique that is widely used as a part of polymer characterization. One of the most common tests consists of measuring viscoelastic properties as a function of temperature while subjecting the sample to controlled heating rates. In that tests, due to sample and instrument geometry and sample size, it is not possible to measure the temperature in all parts of the sample. As a result, the gradient of temperatures between different parts of the sample is unknown. Thus, an accurate estimation of the sample temperature in all its parts and of the temperature gradients between different parts are crucial for setting up experimental conditions and establishing confidence temperature ranges to better interpret the test results. In the present work, a simulation study is performed through the Comsol ™ software, to estimate the temperature distribution of samples of different density and heat capacity that are located inside a typical DMA furnace, which is subjected to different heating rates. The furnace has two gas inlets and three outlets and the sample is attached through standard 3-point bending fixtures. The results show that some of the temperature gradients produced in the sample high enough to significantly affect the viscoelastic response.

This article provides a personal overview of the last 25-year linguistic research on ancient Egyptian, the language spoken and written in Egypt since the origin of the written Egyptian civilization (c. 3150 BC) until the disappearance of Coptic as a living language (17th century AC), the longest-attested human language. With this purpose, the main theoretical approaches and their relationship to teaching ancient Egyptian at the university are reviewed. Through the analysis of the more relevant bibliography of the period, four productive research lines are discussed: form and function; documents and the language; lexicon and grammar; and ancient Egyptian metalinguistics. The article ends with a short comment on the need of more corpus-based studies in the future instead of theoretically-based frameworks for interpreting the ancient Egyptian language.

The skin of yellowfin tuna is one of the fishery industry solid residues with the greatest potential to add extra value to its circular economy that remains yet unexploited. Particularly, the high collagen content of fish skin allows generating gelatin by hydrolysis, which is ideal for forming hydrogels due to its biocompatibility and gelling capability. Hydrogels have been used as drug carriers for local administration due to their mechanical properties and drug loading capacity. Herein, novel tuna gelatin hydrogels were designed as drug vehicles with two structurally different antitumoral model compounds such as Doxorubicin and Crocin to be administrated locally in tissues with complex human anatomies after surgical resection. The characterization by gel permeation chromatography (GPC) of purified gelatin confirmed their heterogeneity composition, exhibiting three major bands that correspond to the β and α chains along with high molecular weight species. In addition, the Fourier Transform Infrared (FT-IR) spectra of gelatin probed the secondary structure of the gelatin showing the simultaneous existence of α helix, β sheet, and random coil structures. Morphological studies at different length scales were performed by a multi-technique approach using SAXS/WAXS, AFM and cryo-SEM that revealed the porous network formed by the interaction of gelatin planar aggregates. In addition, the sol-gel transition, as well as the gelation point and the hydrogel strength, were studied using dynamic rheology and differential scanning calorimetry. Likewise, the loading and release profiles followed by UV-visible spectroscopy indicated that the novel gelatin hydrogels improve the drug release of Doxorubicin and Crocin in a sustained fashion, indicating the structure-function importance in the material composition.

Understanding cooperative behavior in biological and social systems constitutes a scientific challenge, being the object of intense research over the past decades. Many mechanisms have been proposed to explain the presence and persistence of cooperation in those systems, showing that there is no unique explanation, as different scenarios have different possible driving forces. In this paper, we propose a model to study situations in which voluntary participation involves an access cost to the cooperative interaction, besides the cost associated with cooperation. The proposed costly-access prisoner’s dilemma (PD), a symmetric donation game with voluntary and costly participation, breaks the symmetry between abstainers and participants of the voluntary PD. A mean-field approach shows that, in well-mixed populations, the dynamic always leads the system to abstention. However, depending on the return parameter, numerical simulations in structured populations display an alternating behavior between mono-strategic, multi-stable, and coexistence phases. This behavior is fully explained through a theoretical analysis of the strategic motifs, the transitions being determined by the change in stability of those motifs.

Abstract In the animal world, the competition between individuals belonging to different species for a resource often requires the cooperation of several individuals in groups. This paper proposes a generalization of the Hawk-Dove Game for an arbitrary number of agents: the N-person Hawk-Dove Game. In this model, doves exemplify the cooperative behavior without intraspecies conflict, while hawks represent the aggressive behavior. In the absence of hawks, doves share the resource equally and avoid conflict, but having hawks around lead to doves escaping without fighting. Conversely, hawks fight for the resource at the cost of getting injured. Nevertheless, if doves are present in sufficient number to expel the hawks, they can aggregate to protect the resource, and thus avoid being plundered by hawks. We derive and numerically solve an exact equation for the evolution of the system in both finite and infinite well-mixed populations, finding the conditions for stable coexistence between both species. Furthermore, by varying the different parameters, we found a scenario of bifurcations that leads the system from dominating hawks and coexistence to bi-stability, multiple interior equilibria and dominating doves.

Leaf litterfall contributes significantly to carbon fluxes in forests. A crucial open question for the sustainability of mountain forests is how climate change will affect this and other carbon fluxes (eg photosynthesis and respiration). Leaf litterfall and decomposition of Polylepis reticulata, an endemic species of the Andes, were analyzed during a period of 1 year at 6 experimental plots located in the Andean páramo between 3700 and 3900 m above sea level in Cajas National Park, Ecuador. Litterfall was collected in each plot using 5 randomly distributed traps. Every trap had a 40-cm diameter (0.125 m2) and was suspended 0.8 to 1.0 m above the ground. The decomposition rate of the leaf litter was analyzed using litter bags. Eighteen bags with approximately 20 g of dry litter were placed in the litter layer in each experimental plot and collected 30, 60, 90, 150, 210, 300, and 365 days after they were installed. The mean annual litterfall recorded was 3.77 Mg ha−1, representing 51% of the leaf biomass present in the canopy, so the leaf life span of P. reticulata in Cajas National Park is 1.98 years. Litterfall occurred all year, with no significant seasonal pattern. The mean decomposition rate (k) obtained for this study period was 0.38 year−1. This study contributes to the information gap on litterfall and decomposition in natural forests located at the highest elevations in the world.

A recent work (Hernández, et al., 2018) introduced a networked voting rule supported by a trust-based social network, where indications of possible representatives were based on individuals opinions. Individual contributions went beyond a simple vote-counting and were based on proxy voting. This mechanism selects committees with high levels of representativeness, weakening the possibility of patronage relations. By incorporating the integrity of individuals and its perception, we here address the question of the resulting committee's trustability. Our results show that this voting rule provides sufficiently small committees with high levels of representativeness and integrity. Furthermore, the voting system displays robustness to strategic and untruthful application of the voting algorithm.

Climate change mitigation is a shared global challenge that involves collective action of a set of individuals with different tendencies to cooperation. However, we lack an understanding of the effect of resource inequality when diverse actors interact together towards a common goal. Here, we report the results of a collective-risk dilemma experiment in which groups of individuals were initially given either equal or unequal endowments. We found that the effort distribution was highly inequitable, with participants with fewer resources contributing significantly more to the public goods than the richer -sometimes twice as much. An unsupervised learning algorithm classified the subjects according to their individual behavior, finding the poorest participants within two "generous clusters" and the richest into a "greedy cluster". Our results suggest that policies would benefit from educating about fairness and reinforcing climate justice actions addressed to vulnerable people instead of focusing on understanding generic or global climate consequences.

We introduce a general framework for exploring the problem of selecting a committee of representatives with the aim of studying a networked voting rule based on a decentralized large-scale platform, which can assure a strong accountability of the elected. The results of our simulations suggest that this algorithm-based approach is able to obtain a high representativeness for relatively small committees, performing even better than a classical voting rule based on a closed list of candidates. We show that a general relation between committee size and representatives exists in the form of an inverse square root law and that the normalized committee size approximately scales with the inverse of the community size, allowing the scalability to very large populations. These findings are not strongly influenced by the different networks used to describe the individuals’ interactions, except for the presence of few individuals with very high connectivity which can have a marginal negative effect in the committee selection process.

Situations involving cooperative behaviour are widespread among animals and humans alike. Game theory and evolutionary dynamics have provided the theoretical and computational grounds to understand what are the mechanisms that allow for such cooperation. Studies in this area usually take into consideration different behavioural strategies and investigate how they can be fixed in the population under evolving rules. However, how those strategies emerged from basic evolutionary mechanisms continues to be not fully understood. To address this issue, here we study the emergence of cooperative strategies through a model of heuristics selection based on evolutionary algorithms. In the proposed model, agents interact with other players according to a heuristic specified by their genetic code and reproduce—at a longer time scale—proportionally to their fitness. We show that the system can evolve to cooperative regimes for low mutation rates through heuristics selection while increasing the mutation decreases the level of cooperation. Our analysis of possible strategies shows that reciprocity and punishment are the main ingredients for cooperation to emerge, and the emerging heuristics would likely cooperate in one-shot interactions. Additionally, we show that if in addition to behavioural rules, genetic relatedness is included, then kinship plays a relevant role, changing emerging strategies significantly. Our results illustrate that our evolutionary heuristics model is a generic and powerful tool to study the evolution of cooperative behaviour.

En este trabajo se aborda la importancia y tendencias actuales de la producción de plántulas de especies hortícolas en México, bajocondiciones de invernadero; los sistemas de producción agrícola que requieren de la producción de plántulas en contenedores; la descripción yanálisis de las operaciones que constituyen el proceso tecnológico de siembra en charolas, así como la descripción funcional y operativa delsistema de máquinas que se requieren para efectuar todas y cada una de las operaciones del proceso tecnológico

Es este estudio se propone una clasificación de las máquinas de siembra en bandejas, disponibles en el mercado nacional e internacional, en función de diversos parámetros: la fuente energética, el ciclo de trabajo, los principios de funcionamiento, los elementos de dosificación y el grado de automatización. Así mismo, se presenta información que puede ser de gran importancia para los productores involucrados en la producción de plántulas, respecto a las características técnicas generales de las máquinas de siembra y líneas de siembra en bandejas comercialmente disponibles, a fin de poder realizar un proceso fundamentado de selección de estos equipos. Por otra parte, se detalla la información referida a los índices y parámetros que determinan la calidad agrotécnica de la operación de siembra en bandejas, de gran ayuda para determinar qué equipo de siembra (tambor, boquillas, agujas, placas de orificios) realiza la siembra con los mejores indicadores de calidad del trabajo, en función del tipo de semilla utilizada. El conocimiento de los indicadores de la capacidad de trabajo de las máquinas de siembra en bandejas, proporciona la información en relación con la productividad o capacidad de trabajo que se requiere seleccionar e instalar, en función del uso anual potencial previsto y del volumen de producción anual que justifica la adquisición de una máquina, teniendo en consideración los principales cultivos, semillas y bandejas a emplear.

Con el objetivo de comprobar experimentalmente si el tipo de cama, y específicamente el fondo de ésta, influye de manera significativa en el proceso de levante o recolección de semillas por parte de una placa de orificios sometida a vacío, se construyó un dispositivo experimental instrumentado, para medir la altura desde la cual las semillas pueden ser aspiradas por parte de la placa de orificios. Se utilizaron tres tipos de materiales de siembra (M); cuatro tipos diferentes de camas de semillas (C) y seis distintos niveles de vacío (V), en un experimento factorial completo. De los resultados obtenidos en el experimento y sobre la base del análisis estadístico realizado, se encontró que: en los tres materiales (M) y para todos los niveles de vacío (V), existe una diferencia altamente significativa entre los valores medios de los datos de altura de succión obtenidos, al comparar los correspondientes a la placa cerrada contra los de las variantes que permiten el flujo, al emplear semillas individuales; en todos los materiales (M), en todos los tipos de camas (C) y en todos los niveles de vacío (V), la «eficiencia» del nivel de vacío, para convertir en altura de succión cada unidad de vacío aplicado, disminuye a medida que la altura de succión se incrementa; en el caso en que los materiales de siembra se colocaron formando lechos o camas, no se observó una diferencia importante de los valores medios de las alturas de succión obtenidos para placa cerrada y malla de alambre en un mismo nivel de vacío aplicado.

Diffusion and adoption of innovations is a topic of increasing interest in economics, market research, and sociology. In this paper we investigate, through an agent based model, the dynamics of adoption of innovative proposals in different kinds of structures. We show that community structure plays an important role on the innovation diffusion, so that proposals are more likely to be accepted in homogeneous organizations. In addition, we show that the learning process of innovative technologies enhances their diffusion, thus resulting in an important ingredient when heterogeneous networks are considered. We also show that social pressure blocks the adoption process whatever the structure of the organization. These results may help to understand how different factors influence the diffusion and acceptance of innovative proposals in different communities and organizations.

The outcome of many social and economic interactions, such as stock-market transactions, is strongly determined by the predictions that agents make about the behavior of other individuals. Cognitive hierarchy theory provides a framework to model the consequences of forecasting accuracy that has proven to fit data from certain types of game theory experiments, such as Keynesian beauty contests and entry games. Here, we focus on symmetric two-player-two-action games and establish an algorithm to find the players’ strategies according to the cognitive hierarchy approach. We show that the snowdrift game exhibits a pattern of behavior whose complexity grows as the cognitive levels of players increases. In addition to finding the solutions up to the third cognitive level, we demonstrate, in this theoretical frame, two new properties of snowdrift games: (i) any snowdrift game can be characterized by only a parameter, its class; (ii) they are anti-symmetric with respect to the diagonal of the pay-off’s space. Finally, we propose a model based on an evolutionary dynamics that captures the main features of the cognitive hierarchy theory.

Recent studies projecting future climate change impacts on forests mainly consider either the effects of climate change on productivity or on disturbances. However, productivity and disturbances are intrinsically linked because 1) disturbances directly affect forest productivity (e.g. via a reduction in leaf area, growing stock or resource-use efficiency), and 2) disturbance susceptibility is often coupled to a certain development phase of the forest with productivity determining the time a forest is in this specific phase of susceptibility. The objective of this paper is to provide an overview of forest productivity changes in different forest regions in Europe under climate change, and partition these changes into effects induced by climate change alone and by climate change and disturbances. We present projections of climate change impacts on forest productivity from state-of-the-art forest models that dynamically simulate forest productivity and the effects of the main European disturbance agents (fire, storm, insects), driven by the same climate scenario in seven forest case studies along a large climatic gradient throughout Europe. Our study shows that, in most cases, including disturbances in the simulations exaggerate ongoing productivity declines or cancel out productivity gains in response to climate change. In fewer cases, disturbances also increase productivity or buffer climate-change induced productivity losses, e.g. because low severity fires can alleviate resource competition and increase fertilization. Even though our results cannot simply be extrapolated to other types of forests and disturbances, we argue that it is necessary to interpret climate change-induced productivity and disturbance changes jointly to capture the full range of climate change impacts on forests and to plan adaptation measures.

The emergence of cooperation among unrelated human subjects is a long-standing conundrum that has been amply studied both theoretically and experimentally. Within the question, a less explored issue relates to the gender dependence of cooperation, which can be traced back to Darwin, who stated that "women are less selfish but men are more competitive". Indeed, gender has been shown to be relevant in several game theoretical paradigms of social cooperativeness, including prisoner's dilemma, snowdrift and ultimatum/dictator games, but there is no consensus as to which gender is more cooperative. We here contribute to this literature by analyzing the role of gender in a repeated Prisoners' Dilemma played by Spanish high-school students in both a square lattice and a heterogeneous network. While the experiment was conducted to shed light on the influence of networks on the emergence of cooperation, we benefit from the availability of a large dataset of more 1200 participants. We applied different standard econometric techniques to this dataset, including Ordinary Least Squares and Linear Probability models including random effects. All our analyses indicate that being male is negatively associated with the level of cooperation, this association being statistically significant at standard levels. We also obtain a gender difference in the level of cooperation when we control for the unobserved heterogeneity of individuals, which indicates that the gender gap in cooperation favoring female students is present after netting out this effect from other socio-demographics factors not controlled for in the experiment, and from gender differences in risk, social and competitive preferences.

The present paper explores the industrial capabilities of a CAM-ROB system implementation based on a commercial CAD/CAM system (NX™) for an industrial robotic workcell of eight joints, committed to the rapid prototyping of 3D CAD-defined models. The workcell consists of a KUKA™ KR15/2 manipulator assembled on a linear track and synchronized with a rotary table. A redundancy resolution scheme is developed to deal with the redundancies due to the additional joints of the robot, plus the one from the symmetry axis of the milling tool. During the path tracking, the use of these redundancies is optimized by adjusting two performance criterion vectors related to singularity avoidance and maintenance of a preferred reference posture, as secondary tasks to be done. In addition, two suitable fuzzy inference engines adjust the weight of each joint in these tasks. The developed system is validated in a real prototyping of a carving.

Background: Corrective spine surgery is widely accepted for treating severe adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS). Postoperative spinal range of motion (ROM) could be affected after such surgery. In certain populations, such as Muslims, this ROM change can impact daily life, as it may affect the five-times-a-day prayer (Salah). This study aims to assess the influence of spinal fusion (SF) in Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis (AIS) during the daily Islamic prayer (Salah). Methods: SF-AIS patients were videoed while performing Salah prayer. The kinematic documentation was assessed and compared to Salah movements of a control group of age-matched Muslim AIS patients, who had not had surgery. The prayer quality changes were subjectively classified into improved, no change/remained, and worsened, according to the Global Perceived Effect (GPE). Functional outcome and pain were assessed by the Scoliosis Research Society Questionnaire Version 30 (SRS-30). Results: Thirty-nine women and five men (mean age±SD: 14.8±2.3 years) met the inclusion criteria, and unoperated AIS patients were used as control (twenty-two women, mean age±SD: 15.32±1.43 years). The prostrations ROM of the SF-AIS group differed significantly from the control group (p Conclusion: Spinal fusion positively affects AIS Islamic patients in maintaining their daily Salah movement, ROM and prayer quality. Prayer quality assessment should be given extra attention as an adjuvant of the SRS-30 questionnaire to evaluate Muslim patients.

Background: Corrective spine surgery is widely accepted for treating severe adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS). Postoperative spinal range of motion (ROM) could be affected after such surgery. In certain populations, such as Muslims, this ROM change can impact daily life, as it may affect the five-times-a-day prayer (Salah). This study aims to assess the influence of spinal fusion (SF) in Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis (AIS) during the daily Islamic prayer (Salah). Methods: SF-AIS patients were videoed while performing Salah prayer. The kinematic documentation was assessed and compared to Salah movements of a control group of age-matched Muslim AIS patients, who had not had surgery. The prayer quality changes were subjectively classified into improved, no change/remained, and worsened, according to the Global Perceived Effect (GPE). Functional outcome and pain were assessed by the Scoliosis Research Society Questionnaire Version 30 (SRS-30). Results: Thirty-nine women and five men (mean age±SD: 14.8±2.3 years) met the inclusion criteria, and unoperated AIS patients were used as control (twenty-two women, mean age±SD: 15.32±1.43 years). The prostrations ROM of the SF-AIS group differed significantly from the control group (po and 53.4±9.6 o, respectively). Moreover, a significant moderate positive correlation between the bowing ROM and pain (r=0.417, p=0.007) was also found. Conclusion: Spinal fusion positively affects AIS Islamic patients in maintaining their daily Salah movement, ROM and prayer quality. Prayer quality assessment should be given extra attention as an adjuvant of the SRS-30 questionnaire to evaluate Muslim patients.

Background: Corrective spine surgery is widely accepted for treating severe adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS). Postoperative spinal range of motion (ROM) could be affected after such surgery. In certain populations, such as Muslims, this ROM change can impact daily life, as it may affect the five-times-a-day prayer (Salah). This study aims to assess the influence of spinal fusion (SF) in Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis (AIS) during the daily Islamic prayer (Salah). Methods: SF-AIS patients were videoed while performing Salah prayer. The kinematic documentation was assessed and compared to Salah movements of a control group of age-matched Muslim AIS patients, who had not had surgery. The prayer quality changes were subjectively classified into improved, no change/remained, and worsened, according to the Global Perceived Effect (GPE). Functional outcome and pain were assessed by the Scoliosis Research Society Questionnaire Version 30 (SRS-30). Results: Thirty-nine women and five men (mean age±SD: 14.8±2.3 years) met the inclusion criteria, and unoperated AIS patients were used as control (twenty-two women, mean age±SD: 15.32±1.43 years). The prostrations ROM of the SF-AIS group differed significantly from the control group (po and 53.4±9.6 o, respectively). Moreover, a significant moderate positive correlation between the bowing ROM and pain (r=0.417, p=0.007) was also found. Conclusion: Spinal fusion positively affects AIS Islamic patients in maintaining their daily Salah movement, ROM and prayer quality. Prayer quality assessment should be given extra attention as an adjuvant of the SRS-30 questionnaire to evaluate Muslim patients.