Biomedical engineering (BME) has the potential of transforming medical care towards universal healthcare by means of the democratization of medical technology. To this end, innovative holistic approaches and multidisciplinary teams, built upon the gathering of international talent, should be encouraged within the medical industry. However, these transformations can only be accomplished if BME education also continuously evolves and focuses on the internationalization of students, the promotion of collaborative design strategies and the orientation towards context relevant medical needs. In this study we describe an international teaching-learning experience, the ''UBORA (Swahili for 'excellence') Design School''. During an intensive week of training and collaboration 39 engineering students lived through the complete development process for creating innovative open-source medical devices following the CDIO (''conceivedesign-implement-operate'') approach and using the UBORA e-infrastructure as a co-design platform. Our post-school survey and analyses showed that this integral teaching-learning experience helped to promote professional skills and could nurture the future generation of biomedical engineers, who could transform healthcare technology through collaborative design oriented to open source medical devices.
Aims. The Seeds Of Life In Space IRAM/NOEMA large program aims at studying a set of crucial complex organic molecules in a sample of sources with a well-known physical structure that covers the various phases of solar-type star formation. One representative object of the transition from the prestellar core to the protostar phases has been observed toward the very low luminosity object (VeLLO) L1521F. This type of source is important to study to link prestellar cores and Class 0 sources and also to constrain the chemical evolution during the process of star formation. Methods. Two frequency windows (81.6-82.6 GHz and 96.65-97.65 GHz) were used to observe the emission from several complex organics toward the L1521F VeLLO. These setups cover transitions of ketene (HCCO), propyne (CHCCH), formamide (NHCHO), methoxy (CHO), methanol (CHOH), dimethyl ether (CHOCH), and methyl formate (HCOOCH). Results. Only two transitions of methanol (A, E) have been detected in the narrow window centered at 96.7 GHz (with an upper limit on E) in a very compact emission blob (∼7″ corresponding to ∼1000 au) toward the northeast of the L1521F protostar. The CS 2-1 transition is also detected within theWideX bandwidth. Consistently with what has been found in prestellar cores, the methanol emission appears ∼1000 au away from the dust peak. The location of the methanol blob coincides with one of the filaments that have previously been reported in the literature. The excitation temperature of the gas inferred from methanol is (10 ± 2) K, while the H gas density (estimated from the detected CS 2-1 emission and previous CS 5-4 ALMA observations) is a factor >25 higher than the density in the surrounding environment (n(H) ≥ 10 cm). Conclusions. Based on its compactness, low excitation temperature, and high gas density, we suggest that the methanol emission detected with NOEMA is (i) either a cold and dense shock-induced blob that formed recently (≤ a few hundred years) by infalling gas or (ii) a cold and dense fragment that may just have been formed as a result of the intense gas dynamics within the L1521F VeLLO system. ; With funding from the Spanish government through the "María de Maeztu Unit of Excellence" accreditation (MDM-2017-0737)