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Driven steel beams with grout injection (MV-piles) are since the 80’s in use in the Rotterdam harbour to deliver tension bearing capacity for anchoring large deep-sea quay walls. This paper discusses the results from pile load tests on two sites within a historical context of port development and evolving load tests. The tested tension piles were fully instrumented with fiber optic strain sensors allowing for capturing a continuous strain profile along the full length of the piles. Practical information on instrumentation, testing and interpretation will be illustrated with actual test results.

Este es un artículo de acceso abierto bajo la licencia CC BY. Expressive communication in the arts often involves deviations from stylistic norms, which can increase the aesthetic evaluation of an artwork or performance. The detection and appreciation of such expressive deviations may be amplified by cultural familiarity and expertise of the observer. One form of expressive communication in music is playing “out of time,” including asynchrony (deviations from synchrony between different instruments) and non-isochrony (deviations from equal spacing between subsequent note onsets or metric units). As previous research has provided somewhat conflicting perspectives on the degree to which deviations from synchrony and isochrony are aesthetically relevant, we aimed to shed new light on this topic by accounting for the effects of listeners' cultural familiarity and expertise. We manipulated (a)synchrony and (non-)isochrony separately in excerpts from three groove-based musical styles (jazz, candombe, and jembe), using timings from real performances. We recruited musician and non-musician participants (N = 176) from three countries (UK, Uruguay, and Mali), selected to vary in their prior experience of hearing and performing these three styles. Participants completed both an aesthetic preference rating task and a perceptual discrimination task for the stimuli. Our results indicate an overall preference toward synchrony in these styles, but culturally contingent, expertise-dependent preferences for deviations from isochrony. This suggests that temporal processing relies on mechanisms that vary in their dependence on low-level and high-level perception, and emphasizes the role of cultural familiarity and expertise in shaping aesthetic preferences.

Most potent therapeutics are unable to cross the blood-brain barrier following systemic administration, which necessitates the development of unconventional, clinically applicable drug delivery systems. With the given challenges, biologically active vehicles are crucial to accomplishing this task. We now report a new method for drug delivery that utilizes living cells as vehicles for drug carriage across the blood brain barrier. Cellular backpacks, 7���10 ��m diameter polymer patches of a few hundred nanometers in thickness, are a potentially interesting approach, because they can act as drug depots that travel with the cell-carrier, without being phagocytized. Backpacks loaded with a potent antioxidant, catalase, were attached to autologous macrophages and systemically administered into mice with brain inflammation. Using inflammatory response cells enabled targeted drug transport to the inflamed brain. Furthermore, catalase-loaded backpacks demonstrated potent therapeutic effects deactivating free radicals released by activated microglia in vitro. This approach for drug carriage and release can accelerate the development of new drug formulations for all the neurodegenerative disorders.