The Water Framework Directive (Directive 2000/60/EC) emphasises the need for simple tools and studies to characterise aquatic ecosystems. A wide range of methods has been developed, including different groups of biota and different taxonomic resolutions. Among these, the abundance biomass comparison (ABC) method is an important methodology widely used in marine benthic systems and well-founded from the ecological point of view. This method – with a slight modification using genera and families instead of species – was applied in a Mediterranean river (Eliche-Frío, northeast of Andalusia, Spain) using the macroinvertebrate community, together with the Margalef richness index and the Iberian BioMonitoring Working Party ( IBMWP) to determine the quality of the water. The obtained results show the suitability of the ABC curves method to analyse the macroinvertebrate community and estimate the ecological status of river ecosystems. Although both, the genus and family aggregations, showed a similar trend, the values obtained with the family level indicate a worse state of contamination than those shown with the genus level. The comparison between genus and family levels with other biological indices shows that the evaluation obtained with family aggregation is more similar to those obtained with the Margalef and IBMWP indices than the evaluation based on genera; therefore, we could conclude that this level of taxonomic resolution is adequate for the use of the ABC method in assessing the ecological status of Mediterranean rivers.

The flow structure around rising single air bubbles in water and their characteristics, such as equivalent diameter, rising velocity and shape, was investigated using Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) and Shadowgraphy in a transparent apparatus with a volume of 120 mL. The effect of different volumetric gas flow rates, ranging from 4 μL/min to 2 mL/min on the liquid velocity was studied. Ellipsoidal bubbleswere observedwith a rising velocity of 0.25–0.29m/s. It was found that a Kármán vortex street existed behind the rising bubbles. Furthermore, the wake region expanded with increasing volumetric gas flow rate as well as the number and size of the vortices.

Epididymal cysts are benign cystic formations of the epididymis that usually appear in adoles-cence or early adulthood. Their frequency doubles after the age of 14–15. Obstruction in the epididymal efferent ductules with subsequent prostenotic dilatation of them, as well as dysgenesis due to hormonal disorders during fetal or postnatal life, are possible. At the 1st Department of Pediatric Surgery of A.U.Th. we treated 11 cases of boys at the age of 11–16 who presented with acute scrotum because of an epididymal cyst. The diagnosis was confirmed by ultrasound scanning . Due to persistent symptomatology, patients underwent surgical exploration and removal of the cyst. The postoperative care of the patients was uncomplicated with immediate remission of symptoms. In one case, ipsilateral acute epididymitis oc-curred after 10 days, which was successfully treated with antibiotic therapy. It is reported that approxi-mately 50% of epididymal cysts involute within an average of 17 months. In conclusion, using the data obtained from the review ,of the small in number of international bibliography studies, it is proposed conservative treatment of asymptomatic cysts with diameter smaller than 1 cm and surgical excision [1] of large asymptomatic cysts with diameter greater than 1 cm, which do not regress after a follow-up of 24–48 months, cysts, regardless of their diameter, responsible for persistent symptoms and in the manifestation of acute scrotal symptoms due to inflammation, intravesical bleeding or secondarily torsion of the epi-didymis.

Between December 1978 and March 1979 studies on the ichthyofauna distribution in the regions of the Scotia Sea and Antarctic Peninsula were carried out on board of the r/v "Profesor Siedlecki" during the Fourth Polish Marine Antarctic Expedition. Fisheries were carried out using bottom and pelagic trawls. The presence of about 60 species of 15 families, including among others 17 species of Nototheniidae, 9 species of Chaenichthyidae and 7 species of Bathydraconidae was recorded. Iti the waters of the west regions of the Antarctic such species as Trematomus centronotus and Austrolycichtys botriocephalus were found.

The purpose of the article is to present perspectives for the development of offshore wind farms in the leading, in this respect, country in the EU and in the world – Great Britain. Wind power plays a remarkable role in the process of ensuring energy security for Europe since in 2016 the produced wind energy met 10.4% of the European electricity demand while in 2017 it was already around 11.6%. The article analyses the capacity of wind farms, support systems offered by this country and the criteria related to the location of offshore wind farms. The research has been based on the analysis of legal acts, regulations, literature on the subject, information from websites. The article shows that in recent years, the production of energy at sea has been developing very rapidly, and the leading, in this matter, British offshore energy sector is character-ised by strong governmental support.

In order to understand commands given through voice by an operator, user or any human, a robot needs to focus on a single source, to acquire a clear speech sample and to recognize it. A two-step approach to the deconvolution of speech and sound mixtures in the time-domain is proposed. At first, we apply a deconvolution procedure, constrained in the sense, that the de-mixing matrix has fixed diagonal values without non-zero delay parameters. We derive an adaptive rule for the modification of the de-convolution matrix. Hence, the individual outputs extracted in the first step are eventually still self-convolved. This corruption we try to eliminate by a de-correlation process independently for every individual output channel.