The main purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the savings and economics of using an automated watering system within households. The paper will argue about a device capable of optimizing water consumption allowing water reuse. Device will be automated and will use an electric and mechanical system to redirect water to different reservoirs. System will make use of a wide diversity of sensors such as temperature, presence, and volume. Since project is being developed under Mexican investigators, this system is focused in Mexican values. Due to savings made on water bill it is expected to also have a monetary saving, making it a win-win to humans and the environment. It is important to resemble that all calculation within this article were made to solve the Mexican water scarcity problem, particularly in the City of Aguascalientes, but can also be replicated to any location. The city of Aguascalientes has water scarcity problems. Because of this an analysis was made in order to preserve this natural and vital resource as much as possible.

This document is a report by Syntraguard, LLC, a high-tech Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Development, that is meant to illustrates a practical means of nanotechnology transfer from academia to industry through partnering. The core competency of Syntraguard is deposition of thin films of DLC (diamond- like carbon) on various client-provided substrates tailored to specific client needs. Because of their superlative characteristics in almost every area for which materials are considered, DLC films offer the best hope for the fabrication of various types of advanced materials and devices that meet the nation's and world's projected technology goals for the 21st Century. Continuous development and use of other competencies outside its core are needed to fulfil the broad mission of Syntraguad.

In the context of noise pollution, this paper aims to demonstrate the importance of uncertainty evaluation in the environmental noise measurement focusing the attention on the variability of the measurand. Managing the result of a comparison between measured value and the maximum levels permitted in law does not involve a straightforward comparison of values, given that such measurement, which can only be an approximation of the value of the measurand, is expressed as an interval. Consequently, it is essential to take into account the uncertainty associated with the measurement. Attention is focused on the variability of the measurand as a source of uncertainty and a procedure for the evaluation of uncertainty for environmental noise measurement is proposed. Drawing on real traffic noise dataset, the contribution of measurand variability on measurement uncertainty is determined by using the bootstrap method. Experimental results exploring the adoption of the proposed method confirm the reliability of the proposal. It is shown to be very promising with regard to the prediction of expected values and uncertainty of environmental noise when a reduced dataset is considered.

Baseline elemental concentrations in blood samples from healthy Jamaicans were determined using total reflection x- ray fluorescence (TXRF) spectroscopy. The mean concentrations of Cu, Fe, P, Rb, S, Se and Zn of the cohort were found to be 92, 36045, 21930, 199, 147106, 10, 1211 µg/dL respectively. Except for Rb (lower) and Zn (higher) these are similar to values observed worldwide. The mean concentrations of P, S, Fe, Se and Rb in males were significantly different from those in females with males having higher concentrations of all elements determined except Rb. TXRF has demonstrated its ability to measure trace concentrations with accuracy and precision high enough to identify differences within a seemingly similar population of men and women and to identify sub populations within each of these. This technique promises possible studies into the effect of trace elements on various medical disorders such as cancer, diabetes, hypertension and heart diseases among others in Jamaica and other countries.

Freeze concentration is a promising water purification technology, specially due to the low levels of energy consumption when compared with other processes such as evaporation. Nevertheless, its development is still at pilot plant scale and more knowledge of the process is needed. One of the important parameters needed for design and control of the process is the growth velocity of the crystal, commonly known as the limit velocity. Above this velocity ice crystals will entrap solids and separation will not be successful. In this work, we describe a non-invasive technique to measure this limit velocity based on image analysis. Photographs were taken every 30 minutes in an experimental rig that allowed to freeze the sample unidirectionally. Back lighting was used in order to observe variations in luminosity at the samples surface. Image processing algorithms were used to segment the image, to identify the freezing front and to model its movement. Under the experimental conditions of this work, it was determined that the limiting freezing front velocity was 1.17 mm/h, which is a valuable information for the design and control of the process.