Tag Archives: Spain

Spanish HIV Researcher Faces €210,000 Fine Over Unauthorized Clinical Trial

MADRID—A Spanish HIV/AIDS researcher is facing a hefty fine for violating clinical trial regulations. A court of appeals has upheld most of a lower court’s verdict against Vicente Soriano, a physician at the Hospital Carlos III here and a well-known clinical researcher with hundreds of publications to his name. Continue reading Spanish HIV Researcher Faces €210,000 Fine Over Unauthorized Clinical Trial

Train of Thought Derailed: How an Accident Can Affect Your Brain

My cousin Guillermo Cassinello Toscano was on the train that derailed in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, last week when it went around a bend at twice the speed limit. Cassinello heard a loud vibration and then a powerful bump and then found himself surrounded by bloody bodies in wagon number nine. Shaking, he escaped the wreckage through either a door or a hole in the train—he cannot recall—then sat amid the smoke and debris next to the track and began to cry. Seventy-nine passengers died. Continue reading Train of Thought Derailed: How an Accident Can Affect Your Brain

Spanish High-Speed Train Crash Offers Safety-System Lessons

The driver of the high-speed train that derailed July 25 at a sharp curve in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, killing at least 80 passengers and injuring 130 more, told controllers he took the curve at around 190 kilometers per hour, despite an 80 kph speed limit. He survived the crash and is now under investigation by local authorities. Even if the driver turns out to have been responsible for speeding, rail passengers might wonder what else had to fail in the safety system to allow one man’s error to harm so many people. Continue reading Spanish High-Speed Train Crash Offers Safety-System Lessons

Spain’s Lead-Lined Lakes

ja13-coverResearchers from the University of Granada collected mountain lake sediments from Laguna de Río Seco in southern Spain that had accumulated over 10,000 years, trapping deposits from the atmosphere. In these stacks of mud, they found fine layers of lead that reveal millennia of metalworking and migration, and may be the oldest evidence of air pollution in southern Europe. “[The mud] has been capturing the evolution of air pollution from the Neolithic to present times and giving us an idea of the activity of each of the populations that have passed through southern Iberia,” says team leader José Antonio Lozano, “such as the Phoenicians, Romans, Visigoths, Moors, and more.”

The team dates the first man-made uptick in pollution to between 3,900 and 3,500 years ago, which matches the appearance at nearby sites of coins, weapons, and decorations that, when made, left behind lead by-products. The lead records also attest to a quiet period, when mining moved elsewhere in Iberia, and to a spike corresponding with a period of Roman mining. But all those signals are dwarfed by a more modern surge, which the team attributes to the leaded gasoline in heavy use from the 1950s to the 1970s. The good news, the researchers report, is that present-day lead levels are already below those of the worst Roman deposits.

This From the Trenches item first appeared in the July/August 2013 issue of Archaeology Magazine: [html] [pdf]