ALBERT

Description: New technologies offer an emerging framework to spread scientific knowledge. New sites based on different platforms (blogs, websites, youtube channels, etc.) are born everyday with an informative and educational spirit. The success of such proposals lies in an increasingly growing interest of the general publicusing these tools as an easy, convenient and funnyway to share information. These technologies contribute to spread and promote the participation in the IYCr2014 activities by supporting all the activities organized under the IYCr2014 [1,2] in Spain,accessing an ever wider audience through the network. First, we have created an own website: www.iycr2014.info where all the information about the different activities (national and international) of the IYCr2014 are being posted. This website has a TV channel available where some events (workshops, exhibitions, conferences, activities for school children or public engagement events) are broadcasted. Both, website and TV channel, are being supported by means of the most popular social networks: facebook and tweeter. Besides, some of our actions are designed by the use of different network tools. As selected running activities, we shall present the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) [3] about crystallization and crystallography. This course is builtby using an accessible language andwas thought to support Crystallization in the School Project. A second example is the Mobile application to the project: Sands of the world. This very complex project needs worldwide collaboration to collect samples of sand from as many beaches as possible around the world. A third application is the Online development of competitions such as The most relevant molecule in SpanishCrystallography and The Round Robin-Crystal phase identification. Acknowledgements: Financial support from Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad de España (MAT2010-15094, Factoría de Cristalización – Consolider Ingenio 2010) Figure: QR codes of the website (left) and the MOOC (right)

Description: During the last years, proteomics has facilitated biomarker discovery by coupling high-throughput techniques with novel nanosensors. In the present review, we focus on the study of label-based and label-free detection systems, as well as nanotechnology approaches, indicating their advantages and applications in biomarker discovery. In addition, several disease biomarkers are shown in order to display the clinical importance of the improvement of sensitivity and selectivity by using nanoproteomics approaches as novel sensors.

Description: ALCUDIA is a 230 km long, vertical incidence deep seismic reflection transect acquired in spring 2007 across the southern Central Iberian Zone (part of the pre-Mesozoic Gondwana paleocontinent) of the Variscan Orogen of Spain. The carefully designed acquisition parameters resulted in a 20 s TWTT deep, 60–90 fold, high-resolution seismic reflection transect. The processed image shows a weakly reflective upper crust (the scarce reflectivity matching structures identified at surface), a thick, highly reflective and laminated lower crust, and a flat Moho located at 10 s TWTT (∼30 km depth). The transect can be divided into three segments with different structural styles in the lower crust. In the central segment, the lower crust is imaged by regular, horizontal and parallel reflectors, whereas in the northern and southern segments it displays oblique reflectors interpreted as an important thrust (north) and tectonic wedging involving the mantle (south). The ALCUDIA seismic image shows that in an intracontinental orogenic crust, far from the suture zones, the upper and lower crust may react differently to shortening in different sectors, which is taken as evidence for decoupling. The interpreted structures, as deduced from surface geology and the seismic image, show that deformation was distributed homogeneously in the upper crust, whereas it was concentrated in wedge/thrust structures at specific sectors in the lower crust. The seismic image also shows the location of late Variscan faults in spatial association with the lower crustal thickened areas.

Description: The Laramide magmatic arc in the Arizpe-Mazocahui quadrangle of north-central Sonora, Mexico, is composed of volcanic rocks assigned to the Tarahumara Formation and several granitic plutons that intrude it. The arc was built over juxtaposed crustal basements of the Caborca and Mazatzal provinces. A basal conglomerate of the 〉4-km-thick Tarahumara Formation overlies deformed Proterozoic igneous rocks and Neoproterozoic to Early Cretaceous strata, thus constraining the age of a contractional tectonic event that occurred between Cenomanian and early Campanian time. The lower part of the Tarahumara Formation is composed of rhyolitic ignimbrite and ash-fall tuffs, andesite flows, and interbedded volcaniclastic strata, and its upper part consists of rhyolitic to dacitic ignimbrites, ash-fall tuffs, and volcaniclastic rocks. The Tarahumara Formation shows marked lateral facies change within the study area, and further to the north it grades into the coeval fluvial and lacustrine Cabullona Group. The age of the Tarahumara Formation is between ca. 79 and 59 Ma; the monzonitic to granitic plutons have ages of ca. 71–50 Ma. The informally named El Babizo and Huépac granites, La Aurora and La Alamedita tonalities, and the Puerta del Sol granodiorite compose the El Jaralito batholith in the southern part of the area.Major and trace element composition of the Laramide igneous rocks shows calc-alkaline differentiation trends typical of continental magmatic arcs, and the isotope geochemistry indicates strong contribution from a mature continental crust. Initial 87Sr/86Sr values range from 0.70589 to 0.71369, and eNd values range from –6.2 to –13.6, except for the El Gueriguito quartz monzonite value, –0.5. The Nd, Sr, and Pb isotopic values of the studied Laramide rocks permit comparison with the previously defined Laramide isotopic provinces of Sonora and Arizona. The El Gueriguito pluton and Bella Esperanza granodiorite in the northeastern part of the study area along with plutons and mineralization of neighboring northern Sonora have isotopic values that correspond with those of the southeastern Arizona province formed over the Mazatzal basement (Lang and Titley, 1998; Bouse et al., 1999). Isotopic values of the other Laramide rocks throughout the study area are similar to values of provinces A and B of Sonora (Housh and McDowell, 2005) and to those of the Laramide Pb boundary zone of western Arizona, while the Rancho Vaquería and La Cubana plutons in the northernmost part of the area have the isotopic composition of the Proterozoic Mojave province of the southwestern United States. These data permit us to infer that a covered crustal boundary, between the Caborca block with a basement of the Mojave or boundary zone and the Mazatzal province, crosses through the northeastern part of the area. The boundary may be placed between outcrops of the El Gueriguito and Rancho Vaquería plutons, probably following a reactivated Cretaceous thrust fault located north of the hypothesized Mojave-Sonora megashear, proposed to cross through the central part of the area.

Description: Crystal Growth & Design DOI: 10.1021/cg401500k

Description: In recent years, there have been major advances in the development of new and more powerful perception systems for agriculture, such as computer-vision and global positioning systems. Due to these advances, the automation of agricultural tasks has received an important stimulus, especially in the area of selective weed control where high precision is essential for the proper use of resources and the implementation of more efficient treatments. Such autonomous agricultural systems incorporate and integrate perception systems for acquiring information from the environment, decision-making systems for interpreting and analyzing such information, and actuation systems that are responsible for performing the agricultural operations. These systems consist of different sensors, actuators, and computers that work synchronously in a specific architecture for the intended purpose. The main contribution of this paper is the selection, arrangement, integration, and synchronization of these systems to form a whole autonomous vehicle for agricultural applications. This type of vehicle has attracted growing interest, not only for researchers but also for manufacturers and farmers. The experimental results demonstrate the success and performance of the integrated system in guidance and weed control tasks in a maize field, indicating its utility and efficiency. The whole system is sufficiently flexible for use in other agricultural tasks with little effort and is another important contribution in the field of autonomous agricultural vehicles.

Description: Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are a new communication scenario in which vehicles take an active part. Real-time reporting of misbehaving vehicles by surrounding ones is enabled by in-vehicle sensors and VANETs. Thus, sensors allow detecting the misbehavior whereas VANETs allow sending the report to the authority. Nevertheless, these reports should pass unnoticed by the reported driver to avoid his/her potential reprisals. Information hiding techniques could be used to allow vehicles to transmit information covertly. In this work, two mechanisms for vehicle reporting are proposed based on two information hiding techniques—subliminal channels and steganography. The approach is to embed information into beacon messages either in the signature process (subliminal channel) or altering the least significant bits of selected sensorial fields (steganography). Results show that the proposal is computationally feasible for current vehicular devices and that it is possible to configure the system to operate in highways, secondary roads, and urban maps.

Description: The 4 April 2010 moment magnitude (M w ) 7.2 El Mayor–Cucapah earthquake revealed the existence of a previously unidentified fault system in Mexico that extends ~120 km from the northern tip of the Gulf of California to the U.S.–Mexico border. The system strikes northwest and is composed of at least seven major faults linked by numerous smaller faults, making this one of the most complex surface ruptures ever documented along the Pacific–North America plate boundary. Rupture propagated bilaterally through three distinct kinematic and geomorphic domains. Southeast of the epicenter, a broad region of distributed fracturing, liquefaction, and discontinuous fault rupture was controlled by a buried, southwest-dipping, dextral-normal fault system that extends ~53 km across the southern Colorado River delta. Northwest of the epicenter, the sense of vertical slip reverses as rupture propagated through multiple strands of an imbricate stack of east-dipping dextral-normal faults that extend ~55 km through the Sierra Cucapah. However, some coseismic slip (10–30 cm) was partitioned onto the west-dipping Laguna Salada fault, which extends parallel to the main rupture and defines the western margin of the Sierra Cucapah. In the northernmost domain, rupture terminates on a series of several north-northeast–striking cross-faults with minor offset (〈8 cm) that cut uplifted and folded sediments of the northern Colorado River delta in the Yuha Desert. In the Sierra Cucapah, primary rupture occurred on four major faults separated by one fault branch and two accommodation zones. The accommodation zones are distributed in a left-stepping en echelon geometry, such that rupture passed systematically to structurally lower faults. The structurally lowest fault that ruptured in this event is inclined as shallowly as ~20°. Net surface offsets in the Sierra Cucapah average ~200 cm, with some reaching 300–400 cm, and rupture kinematics vary greatly along strike. Nonetheless, instantaneous extension directions are consistently oriented ~085° and the dominant slip direction is ~310°, which is slightly (~10°) more westerly than the expected azimuth of relative plate motion, but considerably more oblique to other nearby historical ruptures such as the 1992 Landers earthquake. Complex multifault ruptures are common in the central portion of the Pacific North American plate margin, which is affected by restraining bend tectonics, gravitational potential energy gradients, and the inherently three-dimensional strain of the transtensional and transpressional shear regimes that operate in this region.

Description: A study of the operator contact force influence on the performance of Articulated Arm Coordinate Measuring Machines (AACMMs) is presented in this paper. After developing a sensor capable of measuring the contact force applied by an operator, a ring gauge has been used to analyse the relationship between the contact force and diameter and form errors measured with the AACMM. As a result, contact force has been proved as one of the main factors influencing the AACMM performance. A probe deflection model based on the Finite Element Method (FEM) has been also proposed in order to obtain the AACMM probe deflection caused by contact force. This allows measurement correction by comparing them with reference values, specifically, a ring gauge. Experimental test results show a significant measurement improvement that minimizes diameter error. Finally, an uncertainty evaluation for the contact force sensor and AACMM measurements with and without probe deflection model has been carried out in order to validate the ability of the sensor and the methodology followed.