Suchergebnisse

Statistics is a fundamental piece inside the Open Government philosophy, being a basic tool for citizens to know and make informed decisions about the society in which they participate. Due to the great number of organizations and agencies that collect, process and publish statistical data all over the world, several standards and methodologies for information exchange have been created in recent years in order to improve interoperability between data producers and consumers, of which SDMX is one of the most renowned examples. Despite having been developed independently of this, the global Semantic Web effort (backed mainly by the W3C-driven Linked Open Data initiatives) presents itself as an extremely useful tool for publishing both completely contextualized metadata and data, therefore making them easily understandable and processable by third parties. This report details the changes made to the IT systems of the Statistical Agency of Cantabria (Instituto Cántabro de Estadística, ICANE) with the purpose of implementing a Linked Open Data solution for its website and statistical data bank, making all data and metadata published by this Agency available not only to humans, but to automatized consumers, too. Multiple standards, recommendations and vocabularies were used for this task, ranging from Dublin Core metadata RDFa tagging, through the creation of several SKOS concept schemes, to providing statistical data using the RDF Data Cube vocabulary.

The global COVID-19 pandemic that began in late December 2019 led to unprecedented lockdowns worldwide, providing a unique opportunity to investigate in detail the impacts of restricted anthropogenic emissions on air quality. A wide range of strategies and approaches exist to achieve this. In this paper, we use the "deweather" R package, based on Boosted Regression Tree (BRT) models, first to remove the influences of meteorology and emission trend patterns from NO, NO2, PM10 and O3 data series, and then to calculate the relative changes in air pollutant levels in 2020 with respect to the previous seven years (2013-2019). Data from a northern Spanish region, Cantabria, with all types of monitoring stations (traffic, urban background, industrial and rural) were used, dividing the calendar year into eight periods according to the intensity of government restrictions. The results showed mean reductions in the lockdown period above -50% for NOx, around -10% for PM10 and below -5% for O3. Small differences were found between the relative changes obtained from normalised data with respect to those from observations. These results highlight the importance of developing an integrated policy to reduce anthropogenic emissions and the need to move towards sustainable mobility to ensure safer air quality levels, as pre-existing concentrations in some cases exceed the safe threshold.

The current pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is having negative health, social and economic consequences worldwide. In Europe, the pandemic started to develop strongly at the end of February and beginning of March 2020. Subsequently, it spread over the continent, with special virulence in northern Italy and inland Spain. In this study we show that an unusual persistent anticyclonic situation prevailing in southwestern Europe during February 2020 (i.e. anomalously strong positive phase of the North Atlantic and Arctic Oscillations) could have resulted in favorable conditions, e.g., in terms of air temperature and humidity among other factors, in Italy and Spain for a quicker spread of the virus compared with the rest of the European countries. It seems plausible that the strong atmospheric stability and associated dry conditions that dominated in these regions may have favored the virus propagation, both outdoors and especially indoors, by short-range droplet and aerosol (airborne) transmission, or/and by changing social contact patterns. Later recent atmospheric circulation conditions in Europe (July 2020) and the U.S. (October 2020) seem to support our hypothesis, although further research is needed in order to evaluate other confounding variables. Interestingly, the atmospheric conditions during the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918 seem to have resembled at some stage with the current COVID-19 pandemic. ; A, Sanchez-Lorenzo was supported by a fellowship (RYC-2016–20784) and a project (PID2019-105901RB-I00) funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain. Javier Vaquero-Martinez was supported by a predoctoral fellowship (PD18029) from Junta de Extremadura and European Social Fund. J.A. Lopez-Bustins was supported by Climatology Group of the University of Barcelona (2017 SGR 1362, Catalan Government) and the CLICES project (CGL2017-83866-C3-2-R, AEI/FEDER, UE). This research was supported by the Economy and Infrastructure Counselling of the Junta of Extremadura through grant GR18097 (co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund).

Introduction: Cell-free DNA (cfDNA) methylation is an important molecular biomarker, which provides information about the regulation of gene expression in the tissue of origin. There is an inverse correlation between SOST gene methylation and expression levels. Methods: We analyzed SOST promoter methylation in cfDNA from serum, and compared it with DNA from blood and bone cells from patients undergoing hip replacement surgery. We also measured cfDNA methylation in 28 osteoporotic patients at baseline and after 6 months of antiosteoporotic therapy (alendronate, teriparatide, or denosumab). Results: SOST gene promoter methylation levels in serum cfDNA were very similar to those of bone-derived DNA (79% ± 12% and 82% ± 7%, respectively), but lower than methylation levels in blood cell DNA (87% ± 10%). Furthermore, there was a positive correlation between an individual's SOST DNA methylation values in serum and bone. No differences in either serum sclerostin levels or SOST methylation were found after 6-months of therapy with antiosteoporotic drugs. Conclusions: Our results suggest that serum cfDNA does not originate from blood cells, but rather from bone. However, since we did not confirm changes in this marker after therapy with bone-active drugs, further studies examining the correlation between bone changes of SOST expression and SOST methylation in cfDNA are needed to confirm its potential role as a bone biomarker. ; This study was supported by two grants from Instituto de Salud Carlos III (PI12/615 and PI16/915), through a program potentially co-funded by FEDER Funds from the European Union.