Section 3 of the FM14 focus on the The IAU National Outreach Contacts (NOC) Network. This paper also contains supplementary materials that point to poster presentations that can be found online.

Slope deposits in semiarid regions are known to be very sensitive environments, especially those that occurred during the minor fluctuations of the late Holocene. In this paper we analyse Holocene colluvium genesis, composition, and paleoenvironmental meaning through the study of slope deposits in NE Spain. Two cumulative slope stages are described during this period. In the study area, both slope accumulations are superimposed and this has enabled an excellent preservation of the aggregative sequence and the paleosols corresponding to stabilisation stages. 14C and TL dating, as well as archaeological remains, provide considerable chronological precision for this sequence. The origin of the accumulation of the lower unit is placed around 4295–4083 cal yr BP/2346–2134 cal yr BC (late Chalcolithic) and it developed until the Iron Age in a cooler and wetter climate (Cold Iron Age). Under favourable conditions, a soil A-horizon was formed on top of this unit. A new slope accumulation was formed during the Little Ice Age. Within the slope two morphogenetic periods ending with A-horizons are distinguished and related with two main cold–wet climatic events. The study of these slopes provides a great amount of data for the paleoenvironmental and geoarchaeological reconstruction of the late Holocene in NE Spain.

We characterize some isometric immersions of a compact Riemannian manifold into a tube of Sn(λ) or CPn(λ) (in fact, in some more general spaces in the real case) around a totally geodesic Sq(λ) or CPq(λ) respectively, with the norm of the mean curvature of the immersion bounded from above. This bound depends on the radius of the tube, and is related with the mean curvature of its boundary.

We give a sharp lower bound for the first eigenvalue of the Dirichlet eigenvalue problem on a domain of a complex submanifold of a Kaehler manifold with curvature bounded from above. The bound on the first eigenvalue is given as a function of the extrinsic outer radius and the bounds on the curvature, and it is attained only on geodesic spheres of a space of constant holomorphic sectional curvature embedded in the Kaehler manifold as a totally geodesic submanifold.

In this paper we obtain some theorems of Bishop–Gromov type for tubes about a submanifold and semitubes about a real hypersurface of a Riemannian or Kaehler manifold with curvature bounded either from below or from above.