Very few studies have described brain scaling in vertebrates throughout ontogeny and none in lampreys, one of the two surviving groups of the early agnathan (jawless) stage in vertebrate evolution. The life cycle of anadromous parasitic lampreys comprises two divergent trophic phases, firstly filter-feeding as larvae in freshwater and secondly parasitism as adults in the sea, with the transition marked by a radical metamorphosis. We characterized the growth of the brain during the life cycle of the pouched lamprey Geotria australis, an anadromous parasitic lamprey, focusing on the scaling between brain and body during ontogeny and testing the hypothesis that the vast transitions in behavior and environment are reflected in differences in the scaling and relative size of the major brain subdivisions throughout life. The body and brain mass and the volume of six brain structures of G. australis, representing six points of the life cycle, were recorded, ranging from the early larval stage to the final stage of spawning and death. Brain mass does not increase linearly with body mass during the ontogeny of G. australis. During metamorphosis, brain mass increases markedly, even though the body mass does not increase, reflecting an overall growth of the brain, with particularly large increases in the volume of the optic tectum and other visual areas of the brain and, to a lesser extent, the olfactory bulbs. These results are consistent with the conclusions that ammocoetes rely predominantly on non-visual and chemosensory signals, while adults rely on both visual and olfactory cues.

The Internet of Things (IoT) aims to create applications to improve people's quality of life using novel protocols, sensor networks, cloud computing, middlewares and other technologies. These applications can be used in several contexts such as industry, agriculture or smart cities. On university campuses, applications based on IoT can also be implemented. The applications can be focused on monitoring people's behavior, smart buildings, or sustainable environments. Generally, IoT applications are not designed and developed in a standardized way. Besides that, university campuses do not have a platform to manage and deploy these applications easily. This work presents Smart UTB, an IoT platform designed by using the Industrial Internet Reference Architecture (IIRA) and focused in the management and deployment of IoT applications towards sustainability in a smart campus.

Lampreys and hagfishes are the sole surviving representatives of the early agnathan (jawless) stage in vertebrate evolution, which has previously been regarded as the least encephalized group of all vertebrates. Very little is known, however, about the extent of interspecific variation in relative brain size in these fishes, as previous studies have focused on only a few species, even though lampreys exhibit a variety of life history traits. While some species are parasitic as adults, with varying feeding behaviors, others (nonparasitic species) do not feed after completing their macrophagous freshwater larval phase. In addition, some parasitic species remain in freshwater, while others undergo an anadromous migration. On the basis of data for postmetamorphic individuals representing approximately 40% of all lamprey species, with representatives from each of the three families, the aforementioned differences in life history traits are reflected in variations in relative brain size. Across all lampreys, brain mass increases with body mass with a scaling factor or slope (α) of 0.35, which is less than those calculated for different groups of gnathostomatous (jawed) vertebrates (α = 0.43-0.62). When parasitic and nonparasitic species are analyzed separately, with phylogeny taken into account, the scaling factors of both groups (parasitic α = 0.43, nonparasitic α = 0.45) approach those of gnathostomes. The relative brain size in fully grown adults of parasitic species is, however, less than that of the adults of nonparasitic species, paralleling differences between fully grown adults and recently metamorphosed individuals of anadromous species. The average degree of encephalization is found in anadromous parasitic lampreys and might thus represent the ancestral condition for extant lampreys. These results suggest that the degree of encephalization in lampreys varies according to both life history traits and phylogenetic relationships.

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In this paper, a practical analysis of stability by simulation for the effect of incorporating a Kalman estimator in the control loop of the inverted pendulum with a neurocontroller is presented. The neurocontroller is calculated by approximate optimal control, without considering the Kalman estimator in the loop following the Theorem of the separation. The results are compared with a time-varying linear controller, which in noiseless conditions in the state or in the measurement has an acceptable performance, but when it is under noise conditions its operation closes into a state space range more limited than the one proposed here.