Nowadays technology follows us everywhere. However, it is often overlooked when dealing with social issues, despite how easily it might improve the life of countless handicapped individuals. In other words, small pieces of software, under the form of games, can help the individual remain focus and go through treatments and therapies effortlessly. But game development is tricky because simply adopting a software development approach is not enough, as it assumes that games as a software can be developed through the commonly used systematic processes, yet these do have specific requirements. This paper proposes a new game development model to successfully deliver a quality serious game, towards social causes, bearing in mind the specific aspects both from games as a special kind of software and from the target players introducing a therapeutic/clinical perspective in the games development model.

Precast concrete sandwich panels started being used as cladding for buildings, together with the rise of industrial prefabrication, during the mid-20th century. Since then, society and industry have become increasingly aware of energy efficiency in all fields, for both affordability and sustainability consciousness. As such, buildings have been subject to increasingly stringent requirements with the technology of sandwich panels kept continually at the forefront.
Nowadays, sandwich panels have reached the highest standards of functional performance as structural efficiency, flexibility in use, the speed as well as of aesthetic appeal. These combine in building construction with the well-known advantages of prefabrication; such as construction, quality consciousness, durability and sustainability. Sandwich panels have gained more and more important in their field, thus representing quite a significant application within the industry of prefabrication and an important share of the market.
The Commission ‘Prefabrication’ is keen to promote the development of all precast structural concrete products and to transfer the knowledge to practical design and construction. Now filling a strategic gap, by issuing this Guide to Good Practice, which includes design considerations, structural analysis, building physics, use of materials, manufacturing methods, equipment, field performance, and provides a comprehensive overview of the information currently available worldwide. The Commission is particularly proud that this document is a result of close cooperation with PCI and that it will be published by both fib and PCI. This cooperation started six years ago, first with comparing the different approaches to several issues, then progressively integrating up to producing common documents, like this one, that wasn’t yet treated in a specific Guide by either body.

Molybdenum is essential to most organisms, being found in the active site of enzymes that catalyze redox reactions involving carbon, nitrogen and sulfur atoms of key metabolites. Some of the molybdenum-dependent reactions constitute key steps in the global biogeochemical cycles of carbon, nitrogen and sulfur, with particular emphasis on the atmospheric dinitrogen fixation into ammonium. Presently, more than 50 molybdoenzymes are known. The great majority are prokaryotic, with eukaryotes holding only a restricted number of molybdoenzymes. Tungsten, probably because of its limited bioavailability, is less used, being found most often in anaerobic thermophilic prokaryotes.

This chapter provides an overview on the molybdo- and tungstoenzymes.
Their physiological context and significance will be described in Section 1.2,where the recent hypothesis that the lack of molybdenum could have been the limiting factor for the life evolution and expansion on early Earth will receive special attention (Section 1.2.1). A brief introduction to the chemical properties that shape the catalytically competent molybdenum/tungsten centres will be made in Section 1.3. In Section 1.4, the enzymes will be grouped in five main families (Sections 1.4.1 to 1.4.5), according to their metal/cofactor structure, and a general view on the structural (section (a)) and mechanistic (section (b)) versatility of each family will be presented. A brief account of novel heteronuclear centres containing molybdenum, whose physiological function is not yet fully understood, will be made in Section 1.4.6. A final outlook on our present knowledge about these enzymes will conclude this chapter.

http://docentes.fct.unl.pt/lblm/files/mo_w_enzymes-rsc_book-chap_1.pdf

Abstract The current chromatographic approaches used in protein purification are not keeping pace with the increasing biopharmaceutical market demand. With the upstream improvements, the bottleneck shifted towards the downstream process. New approaches rely in Anything But Chromatography methodologies and revisiting former techniques with a bioprocess perspective. Protein crystallization and precipitation methods are already implemented in the downstream process of diverse therapeutic biological macromolecules, overcoming the current chromatographic bottlenecks. Promising work is being developed in order to implement crystallization and precipitation in the purification pipeline of high value therapeutic molecules. This review focuses in the role of these two methodologies in current industrial purification processes, and highlights their potential implementation in the purification pipeline of high value therapeutic molecules, overcoming chromatographic holdups.

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The key step of the analog active filter design is the optimal selection of component values due to manufactured series (E12, E24, E48, E96 and E192). In this paper, four simulation-based metaheuristics are applied to optimize four active filters using commercials available ICs as building blocks. The emphasis of this work is applying Richardson extrapolation-based sensitivity analysis in the optimization process of analog active filters. Indeed, Richardson extrapolation technique facilitates the calculation of the partial derivatives for the sensitivity using the simulation-based evaluation, without an explicit mathematical expression. Viability and benefits of the sensitivity analysis are highlighted. Monte Carlo analysis is performed in order to investigate robustness of the proposed sensitivity analysis of the active filters in case of component value variations due to specified tolerances of manufactured series.

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