Suchergebnisse

Several reforms in national and international curricula have been implemented to introduce inquiry-based activities to promote different science process skills. Science skills require high cognitive effort for students and, thus, they need supports to develop them in an inquiry process. Among these supports, videoworked examples demonstrate how to perform these skills and provide students with a scheme for an inquiry activity. Recently, video-examples has been explored in primary and secondary education with promising results. However, to gain a broader perspective on their effectiveness, this article aims to evaluate the consistent improvement of each science skill from a comparison with a control group carrying out two consecutive classroom interventions. This research included 44 students in fifth and sixth grades and a quasi-experimental research design with a quantitative method has been applied. In the experimental group, video examples had a positive influence on the participants" inquiry behavior. For most of the science skills, students showed a consistent improvement in both the first and second inquiries supported by these videos. However, the control group showed less predictable outcomes, as some skills improved only during the first or the second intervention, but not throughout the whole study. ; This work was supported by the University of Lleida [Project Programa de Promoció de la Recerca 2016_A] and partially funded by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad of the Spanish Government (project number: PID2019-107399RB-I00).

The Ursid meteor shower is an annual shower that usually shows little activity. However, its Zenith hourly rate sometimes increases, usually either when its parent comet, 8P/Tuttle, is close to its perihelion or its aphelion. Outbursts when the comet is away from perihelion are not common and outbursts when the comet is close to aphelion are extremely rare. The most likely explanation offered to date is based on the orbital mean motion resonances. The study of the aphelion outburst of 2000 December provided a means of testing that hypothesis. A new aphelion outburst was predicted for 2014 December. The SPanish Meteor Network, in collaboration with the French Fireball Recovery and InterPlanetary Observation Network, set up a campaign to monitor this outburst and eventually retrieve orbital data that expand and confirm previous preliminary results and predictions. Despite unfavourable weather conditions over the south of Europe over the relevant time period, precise trajectories from multistation meteor data recorded over Spain were obtained, as well as orbital and radiant information for four Ursid meteors. The membership of these four meteors to the expected dust trails that were to provoke the outburst is discussed, and we characterize the origin of the outburst in the dust trail produced by the comet in the year ad 1392. ; This study was supported by the Spanish grants AYA2011- 26522 and AYA2015-67175-P (PI: JMTR), AYA2015-68646-P and AYA2014-61357-EXP (JMM). The FRIPON project is funded by ANR. MG acknowledges support from the ERC Advanced Grant No. 320773, and the Russian Foundation for BasicResearch, project nos. 16-07-01072 and 16-05-00004. Research at the Ural Federal University is supported by the Act 211 of the Government of the Russian Federation, agreement No 02.A03.21.0006. EB is supported by the Universitat Ramon Llull project 2016-URL-IR-001supported by 'Generalitat de Catalunya'. The authors acknowledge being a part of the network supported by the COST Action TD1403 'Big Data Era in Sky and EarthObservation'. The CINES supercomputer was used for theoretical work. This research has been made in the framework of EURONEAR. We thank Dr Aswin Sekhar for his valuable comments that helped to enhance this paper. This study was done in the frame of a PhD on Physics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) under the direction of Dr. Josep M. Trigo-Rodr´ıguez and Dr. Maria Gritsevich.

This paper attempts to identify implicit exchange rate regimes for the Yen/Dollar exchange rate. To that end, we apply a sequential procedure that considers both the dynamics of exchange rates and central bank interventions to data covering the period from 1971 to 2003. Our results suggest that implicit bands existed in two subperiods: April-December 1980 and March-October 1987, the latter coinciding with the Louvre Accord. Furthermore, the study of the credibility of such implicit bands indicates the high degree of confidence attributed by economic agents to the evolution of the Yen/Dollar exchange rate within the detected implicit band rate, thus lending further support to the relevance of such implicit bands.

<i>Aims:</i> This paper had three aims: (1) to validate a Spanish adaptation of the Modified Drinking Motives Questionnaire-Revised (M DMQ-R), (2) to explore the relationship of each drinking motive with different patterns of alcohol use, and (3) to compare the drinking motives of moderate drinkers, heavy drinkers, and alcohol abusing/dependent individuals. <i>Methods:</i> Two studies were carried out. In Study 1, a sample of 488 participants completed the M DMQ-R and a self-report scale of alcohol consumption in order to study the factor structure and different indices of reliability and validity of the Spanish M DMQ-R. In Study 2, we compared the drinking motives of moderate and heavy drinkers from Study 1 and an additional sample of 59 clinical drinkers. <i>Results:</i> The M DMQ-R demonstrated sound reliability and validity indices. Coping-with-anxiety, social, and enhancement motives predicted higher alcohol use on weekends, but only coping-with-anxiety and social motives were related to consumption on weekdays. Furthermore, moderate drinkers had the lowest scores for all motives, whereas alcohol-dependent participants obtained the highest scores for negative reinforcement drinking motives. <i>Conclusion:</i> The Spanish M DMQ-R is a reliable and valid measure of drinking motives and has potential for assisting with treatment planning for problem drinkers.

The present work aimed to extend the evidence of the structure validity of the Ruminative Thought Style Questionnaire (RTSQ) 15-item version testing: (1) the structure of two competing models (i.e., four-factor correlated model vs a second-order factor model); (2) the measurement invariance of the final model across four countries (U.S., Spain, Argentina, and the Netherlands) and gender groups (male and female); and (3) the invariance across three assessment waves in a subsample of Spanish youths. Participants were college students (mean age = 20.87, SD = 4.47) from the U.S. (n = 1875; 67.1% of females), Spain (T1, n = 732, 63.9% females; T2, n = 370, 71.6% females: T3, n = 307, 60.6% females), Argentina (n = 368, 65.6% females) and the Netherlands (n = 295, 74.8% females). Confirmatory Factor Analyses supported both correlated factors and second-order factor structure in the whole sample. Due to similar fit indices being observed for both models, and considering the theoretical and practical advantages, we kept the second-order model to examine its invariance across groups and time. Measurement invariance analyses showed that the second-order model was invariant across countries, gender, and over time. Comparisons of the total mean score and the subfacet mean scores (i.e., Repetitive Thoughts, Counterfactual Thoughts, Problem-focused Thoughts, and Anticipatory Thoughts) reveled only small differences across country and gender groups. The present work extends the structural validity evidence of the RTSQ, and provides the first evidence concerning its longitudinal stability across time. ; Funding for open access charge: CRUE-Universitat Jaume I ; Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature. Verónica Vidal-Arenas has been supported by a grant from Universitat Jaume I (PREDOC/18/12). This study was also supported by grants UJI-A2019-08 from the Universitat Jaume I, AICO/ 2019/197 from the Valencian Autonomous Government, and RTI2018-099800-B-I00 from the Spanish Ministry of ...

Thermal management complexity increases in high-performance chips, where the heat loads vary spatially and temporally, while liquid cooling systems are usually designed for most stringent stationary conditions. Several works developed heat transfer enhancement techniques to increase the cooling capacity of liquid cooled heat sinks, but pumping power is increased in a permanent way due to the addition of elements within the channels. Here, a liquid cooling self-adaptive heat sink that can efficiently adapt the distribution of its heat extraction capacity to time dependent and non-uniform heat load scenarios is proposed. Numerical design of the mesoscale cooling device with bimorph metal/SMA fins, definition of the fabrication and training procedure of the SMA fins to reach the desired behavior and experimental assessment is presented. The capacity of the self-adaptive fins to locally boost the heat transfer is numerically and experimentally demonstrated. Results obtained show that the self-adaptive fins can improve the temperature uniformity by 63% with respect to plain channel. The reduction in thermal resistance using bimorph metal/SMA fins sample allows the surface maximum temperature gradient to remain almost constant although heat flux increases. Energy savings are maximized in applications where partial load intervals contributes significantly to the overall operating period. ; The research leading to these results has been performed within the project Indústria del Coneixement 2018, PROD-00071 "Experimental demonstration and commercial viability of an energy efficient universal cooling scheme". It has been co-financed by the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER) and has the support of the Secretaria d'Universitats i Recerca from Departament d'Empresa i Coneixement of the Generalitat de Catalunya.

Objectives Neuritin 1 gene (NRN1) is involved in neurodevelopment processes and synaptic plasticity and its expression is regulated by brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). We aimed to investigate the association of NRN1 with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders (SSD) and bipolar disorders (BPD), to explore its role in age at onset and cognitive functioning, and to test the epistasis between NRN1 and BDNF. Methods The study was developed in a sample of 954 SSD/BPD patients and 668 healthy subjects. Genotyping analyses included 11 SNPs in NRN1 and one functional SNP in BDNF. Results The frequency of the haplotype C-C (rs645649–rs582262) was significantly increased in patients compared to controls (P = 0.0043), while the haplotype T-C-C-T-C-A (rs3763180–rs10484320–rs4960155–rs9379002–rs9405890–rs1475157) was more frequent in controls (P = 3.1 × 10−5). The variability at NRN1 was nominally related to changes in age at onset and to differences in intelligence quotient, in SSD patients. Epistasis between NRN1 and BDNF was significantly associated with the risk for SSD/BPD (P = 0.005). Conclusions Results suggest that: (i) NRN1 variability is a shared risk factor for both SSD and BPD, (ii) NRN1 may have a selective impact on age at onset and intelligence in SSD, and (iii) the role of NRN1 seems to be not independent of BDNF. ; We are grateful to all the participants, whose willingness to take part made this work possible. We also thank Anna Valldeperas for her participation in molecular laboratory tasks. Funding for this study was provided by: i) Centro de Investigación en Red de Salud Mental (CIBERSAM), ii) Fundación Alicia Koplowitz; iii) Ministry of Science and Innovation (PIM2010ERN-00642)-ERA-NET NEURON; iv) P1·1B2010-40 and P1·1B2011-47 from the Fundació Bancaixa-UJI; v) Miguel Servet Research Contracts (CP10/00596) from the Plan Nacional de I + D+i and co-funded by the Instituto de Salud Carlos III-Subdirección General de Evaluación y Fomento de la Investigación and the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER); vi) Health research funds from the Spanish Government (PI11/01977); vii) METSY project of the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission (FP7-HEALTH-602478) and Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (PI10/01920, PI14/02096); Claudia Prats was supported by APIF-IBUB grant 2014. Thanks to the Comissionat per a Universitats i Recerca del DIUE (2014SGR1636, 2014SGR1573, 2014SGR489).

Early exposure to negative environmental impact shapes individual behavior and potentially contributes to any mental disease. We reported previously that accumulated environmental risk markedly decreases age at schizophrenia onset. Follow-up of matched extreme group individuals (≤1 vs. ≥3 risks) unexpectedly revealed that high-risk subjects had >5 times greater probability of forensic hospitalization. In line with longstanding sociological theories, we hypothesized that risk accumulation before adulthood induces violent aggression and criminal conduct, independent of mental illness. We determined in 6 independent cohorts (4 schizophrenia and 2 general population samples) pre-adult risk exposure, comprising urbanicity, migration, physical and sexual abuse as primary, and cannabis or alcohol as secondary hits. All single hits by themselves were marginally associated with higher violent aggression. Most strikingly, however, their accumulation strongly predicted violent aggression (odds ratio 10.5). An epigenome-wide association scan to detect differential methylation of blood-derived DNA of selected extreme group individuals yielded overall negative results. Conversely, determination in peripheral blood mononuclear cells of histone-deacetylase1 mRNA as 'umbrella mediator' of epigenetic processes revealed an increase in the high-risk group, suggesting lasting epigenetic alterations. Together, we provide sound evidence of a disease-independent unfortunate relationship between well-defined pre-adult environmental hits and violent aggression, calling for more efficient prevention. ; This work was supported by the Max Planck Society, the Max Planck Förderstiftung, the DFG (CNMPB), EXTRABRAIN EU-FP7, the Niedersachsen-Research Network on Neuroinfectiology (N-RENNT), and EU-AIMS. The research of EUAIMS receives support from the Innovative Medicines Initiative Joint Undertaking under grant agreement n°115300, resources of which are composed of financial contribution from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013), from the EFPIA companies, and from Autism Speaks. Moreover, support from Centro de Investigación en Red de Salud Mental (CIBERSAM); Instituto de Salud Carlos III (PI16/00998), Comissionat per a Universitats i Recerca del DIUE (2014SGR1636) and Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (ES-EUEpiBrain, SAF2015-71526-REDT) is gratefully acknowledged. We thank all subjects for participating in the study, and all the many colleagues who have contributed over the past decade to the GRAS data collection.