Magnetoelastic Materials for Monitoring and Controlling Cells and Tissues

Advances in cell and tissue therapies are slow to be implemented in the clinic due to the limited standardization of safety and quality control techniques. Current approaches for monitoring cell and tissue manufacturing processes are time and labor intensive, costly, and lack commercial scalability. One method to improving in vitro manufacturing processes includes utilizing the coupled magnetic and mechanical properties of magnetoelastic (ME) materials as passive and wireless sensors and actuators. Specifically, ME materials can be used in quantifying cell adhesion, detecting contamination, measuring biomarkers, providing biomechanical stimulus, and enabling cell detachment in bioreactors. This review outlines critical design considerations for ME systems and summarizes recent developments in utilizing ME materials for sensing and actuation in cell and tissue engineering.

Irradiation of Sewage Sludge

A review of the current status of sewage sludge decontamination using electron beam irradiation at industrial scale is presented. The chapter includes a historical development of the technology using both gamma and electron beam sources, a description of a facility using an electron accelerator, a discussion of the quality control techniques used to certify that satisfactory decontamination levels for safe use of treated sludge have been achieved, the effect of electron beam irradiation on the bacteria and virus present in a typical sample of municipal sewage sludge, and an analysis of the costs of decontaminating sewage sludge using electron beam irradiation compared to traditional and more routine technologies. Finally, the chapter concludes by emphasizing on the fact that electron accelerators described in this chapter are capable to decontaminate a typical municipal sewage sludge at competitive costs which are shown to be comparable and/or lower than routinely used technologies to achieve class A biosolids by the Environmental Protection Agency standards.

Comparison of Gridded DEMs by Buffering

Comparing two digital elevation models (DEMs), S1 (reference) and S2 (product), in order to get the S2 quality, has usually been performed on sampled points. However, it seems more natural, as we propose, comparing both DEMs using 2.5D surfaces: applying a buffer to S1 (single buffer method, SBM) or to both S1 and S2 (double buffer method, DBM). The SBM and DBM approaches have been used in lines accuracy assessment and, in this paper, we generalize them to a DEM surface, so that more area of the S2 surface (in the case of the SBM), or the area and volume (in the case of the DBM) that are involved, more similarly are S1 and S2. The results obtained show that across both methods, SBM recognizes the presence of outliers and vertical bias while DBM allows a richer and more complex analysis based on voxel intersection. Both methods facilitate creating observed distribution functions that eliminate the need for the hypothesis of normality on discrepancies and allow the application of quality control techniques based on proportions. We consider that the SBM is more suitable when the S1 accuracy is much greater than that of S2 and DBM is preferred when the accuracy of S1 and S2 are approximately equal.

Dissolved Inorganic Nutrients in the Western Mediterranean Sea (2004–2017)

Long-term time-series are a fundamental prerequisite to understand and detect climate shifts and trends. Understanding the complex interplay of changing ocean variables and the biological implication for marine ecosystems requires extensive data collection for monitoring and hypothesis testing and validation of modelling products. In marginal seas, such as Mediterranean Sea, there are still monitoring gaps, both in time and in space. To contribute filling these gaps, an extensive dataset of dissolved inorganic nutrients profiles (nitrate, NO3; phosphate, PO43−; and silicate, SiO2) have been collected between 2004 and 2017 in the Western Mediterranean Sea and subjected to quality control techniques to provide to the scientific community a publicly available, long-term, quality controlled, internally consistent biogeochemical data product. The database includes 870 stations of dissolved inorganic nutrients sampled during 24 cruises, including temperature and salinity. Details of the quality control (primary and secondary quality control) applied are reported. The data are available in PANGAEA (https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.904172, Belgacem et al. 2019).