Specific learning disorders affect a significant portion of the population. A total of 80% of its instances are dyslexia, which causes significant difficulties in learning skills related to reading, memorizing and the exposition of concepts. Whereas great efforts have been made to diagnose dyslexia and to mitigate its effects at primary and secondary school, little has been done at the university level. This has resulted in a sensibly high rate of abandonment or even of failures to enroll. The VRAIlexia project was created to face this problem by creating and popularizing an innovative method of teaching that is inclusive for dyslexic students. The core of the project is BESPECIAL, a software platform based on artificial intelligence and virtual reality that is capable of understanding the main issues experienced by dyslexic students and to provide them with ad hoc digital support methodologies in order to ease the difficulties they face in their academic studies. The aim of this paper is to present the conceptual design of BESPECIAL, highlighting the role of each module that composes it and the potential of the whole platform to fulfil the aims of VRAIlexia. Preliminary results obtained from a sample of about 700 dyslexic students are also reported, which clearly show the main issues and needs that dyslexic students experience and these will be used as guidelines for the final implementation of BESPECIAL.

Oxygenated fuels, in this case short carbon-chain alcohols, have been investigated as alternative fuels to power compression ignition engines. A major advantage of short-chain alcohols is that they can be produced from renewable resources, i.e., cultivated commodities or biomass-based biorefineries. However, before entering the market, the effects of short-chain alcohols on engine performance, exhaust emissions, noise and sound quality need to be understood. This work sheds light on the relationship between the physicochemical properties of the alcohol/diesel fuel blends (ethanol and 1-propanol) on engine performance, exhaust emissions and, for the first time, on noise and sound quality. It has been demonstrated that when the content of alcohol in blends increased, soot and soluble organic material emissions drastically decreased, mainly due to the increase of oxygen content in the fuel. Reduction in soot emissions combined with higher thermodynamic efficiency of alcohol fuels, with respect to diesel fuel, enable their utilization on compression ignition engines. There is also an improvement in the soot-NO_x trade off, leading to large reductions on soot with a small effect on NO_x emissions. The oxygen content within the fuel reduces CO and THC emissions at extra-urban driving operation conditions. However, hydrocarbons and CO emissions increased at urban driving conditions, due to the high heat of vaporization of the alcohol fuels which reduces cylinder temperature worsening fuel atomization, vaporization and mixing with air being more significant at lower cylinder temperature conditions (low engine loads and speeds). Similarly, the higher the presence of alcohol in the blend, the higher the noise emitted by the engine due to their low tendency to auto-ignition. The optimization of alcohol quantity and the calibration of engine control parameters (e.g., injection settings) which is out of the scope of this work, will be required to overcome noise emission penalty. Furthermore, under similar alcohol content in the blend (10% v/v), the use of propanol is preferred over ethanol, as it exhibits lower exhaust emissions and better sound quality than ethanol.

Due to the high environmental burden of plastics, this study aimed to evaluate the environmental performance of chemical recycling of plastic waste through Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), focusing on pyrolysis oil production as the primary output. A pyrolysis plant in Almería, Spain, was chosen as a case study. The results indicate that the production of 1 L of pyrolysis oil from plastic waste generates about 0.032 kg CO₂ eq and a water consumption of 0.031 m³, with other impact categories registering values of less than 0.1 kg/L or 0.01 m²a crop eq/L, reducing impacts in 17 out of 18 categories compared to fossil diesel. In addition, its chemical and physical properties, close to those of fossil diesel, suggest its suitability for internal combustion engines, although as a blend rather than a complete substitute. Chemical recycling also appears to be more environmentally favorable than incineration and landfilling in all 18 impact categories, achieving significant benefits, including a reduction in global warming of −3849 kg CO₂ eq/ton, ionizing radiation of −22.4 kBq Co-60 eq/ton, and fossil resource consumption of −1807.5 kg oil eq/ton. These results, thus, highlight the potential dual role of chemical recycling of plastic waste, both in mitigating environmental impacts and in supporting circular economy goals by reducing demand for virgin plastics. However, although it appears to be a promising technology, challenges associated with high energy requirements, raw material variability, and scale infrastructure still need to be addressed to ensure industrial competitiveness and significant environmental benefits.