Breve incursão pelos manuais de editores nacionais e espanholas

Propõe-se uma breve análise ao modo como se introduzem as TIC (Tecnologias da Informação e Comunicação) no contexto de sala de aula de E/LE (Espanhol Língua Estrangeira). Explicar-se-á como pode ser feita a abordagem ao E/LE através das TIC, como está a ser essa abordagem no ensino e como devem os professores lidar com essa introdução. A este propósito, serão apresentados alguns exemplos de actividades, de possível aplicação em aula, dando privilégio às TIC. Finalmente, far-se-á uma explicação/exploração sobre a forma como se direccionam as actividades propostas nos manuais adoptados na Escola Básica 2/3 Ciclos com Ensino Secundário de Mação. Essa exploração pretende confirmar a inserção ou ausência de actividades a realizar através das TIC.It is proposed a brief analysis of the way to introduce the ICT (Information and Communication Technology) in the S/FL (Spanish as a Foreign Language) classroom context. It will be explained how the approach to the S/FL through ICT can be made, as this is being approached to teaching and how teachers should deal with this issue. In this regard, we introduce some examples of activities, for possible application in the classroom, giving privilege to ICT. Finally, we will make an explanation/exploration of how to direct the activities proposed in the textbooks adopted in the Basic School 2/3 cycles with secondary education in Mação. This procedure was designed to confirm the inclusion or lack of activities to be carried through ICT

A remote demonstrator for dynamic FPGA reconfiguration

This paper presents a demonstrator for partial reconfiguration of FPGAs applied to image processing tasks. The main goal of the project is to develop an environment whichallows users to assess some of the advantages of using dynamic reconfiguration. The demonstration platform is built around a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA, which is used to implement a chain of four reconfigurable filters for processing images. Using a graphical interface, the user can choose which filter goes into which reconfigurable slot, submit images for processing and visualize the outcome of the whole process

Ovarian sertoli-leydig cell tumour with heterologous elements of gastrointestinal type associated with elevated serum alpha-fetoprotein level: an unusual case and literature review

Here we describe the case of a 19-year-old woman with a poorly differentiated ovarian Sertoli-Leydig cell tumor and an elevated serum alphafetoprotein level. The patient presented with diffuse abdominal pain and bloating. Physical examination, ultrasound, and magnetic resonance imaging revealed a right ovarian tumor that was histopathologically diagnosed as a poorly differentiated Sertoli-Leydig cell tumor with heterologous elements. Her alpha-fetoprotein serum level was undetectable after tumor resection. Sertoli-Leydig cell tumors are rare sex cord-stromal tumors that account for 0.5% of all ovarian neoplasms. Sertoli-Leydig cell tumors tend to be unilateral and occur in women under 30 years of age. Although they are the most common virilizing tumor of the ovary, about 60% are endocrineinactive tumors. Elevated serum levels of alpha-fetoprotein are rarely associated with Sertoli-Leydig cell tumors, with only approximately 30 such cases previously reported in the literature. The differential diagnosis should include common alpha-fetoprotein-producing ovarian entities such as germ cell tumors, as well as other non-germ cell tumors that have been rarely reported to produce this tumor marker

O tempo e as réplicas

O recrutamento de diplomatas pelo Ministério dos Negócios Estrangeiros português é levado a cabo por intermédio de um concurso público. O formato desse concurso tem variado ao longo do tempo. Muito pouco é conhecido quanto à progressão diacrónica desse formato. Parece, no entanto, haver um consenso geral tácito de que os Concursos não são transparentes, e um artigo recente assevera-o explicitamente no que diz respeito ao período do Estado Novo. O presente estudo mostra que, pelo contrário – pelo menos ao nível do enquadramento legal a que estão sujeitos – os concursos têm vindo a evoluir lentamente na direcção de uma cada vez maior abertura. Mostra também em que sentido tais representações são compreensíveis, uma vez que o design geral do concurso mantém claros traços que apontam claramente na direcção de uma “reprodução simples” do “corpo” de funcionários que visa recrutar. Os concursos são assim encarados enquanto um rito cívico complexo de iniciação que tem sobrevivido tant bien que mal no quadro de um Estado moderno.The recruitment of diplomats by the Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs is carried out by a public exmination. The format of the Concurso has been changing, but little is known about such diachronic progression. It seems, however, there is a general tacit consensus the Concursos are not transparent and a recent article explicitly asserts it in what concerns the Estado Novo. The present study shows, however, that - at least at the level of their legal framework - the Concursos have been slowly evolving towards a ever greater openness. It also shows where such representations are grounded, since the general design of the Concursos clearly aims toward a "simple reproduction" of the "body" of civil servants they focus on recruiting. The Concursos are thus envisaged as a complex civic initiation rite which has survived, tant bien que mal, within a modern State

Weakly-supervised classification of HER2 expression in breast cancer haematoxylin and eosin stained slides

Human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) evaluation commonly requires immunohistochemistry (IHC) tests on breast cancer tissue, in addition to the standard haematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining tests. Additional costs and time spent on further testing might be avoided if HER2 overexpression could be effectively inferred from H&E stained slides, as a preliminary indication of the IHC result. In this paper, we propose the first method that aims to achieve this goal. The proposed method is based on multiple instance learning (MIL), using a convolutional neural network (CNN) that separately processes H&E stained slide tiles and outputs an IHC label. This CNN is pretrained on IHC stained slide tiles but does not use these data during inference/testing. H&E tiles are extracted from invasive tumour areas segmented with the HASHI algorithm. The individual tile labels are then combined to obtain a single label for the whole slide. The network was trained on slides from the HER2 Scoring Contest dataset (HER2SC) and tested on two disjoint subsets of slides from the HER2SC database and the TCGA-TCIA-BRCA (BRCA) collection. The proposed method attained 83.3% classification accuracy on the HER2SC test set and 53.8% on the BRCA test set. Although further efforts should be devoted to achieving improved performance, the obtained results are promising, suggesting that it is possible to perform HER2 overexpression classification on H&E stained tissue slides.publishersversionpublishe

Score CTo-aBCDE : um novo score preditor de sucesso nas CTOs

© 2020 Sociedade Portuguesa de Cardiologia. Published by Elsevier España, S.L.U. This is an open access article under the CC-BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).Introduction: Patient selection for percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) in chronic total occlusions (CTOs) is crucial to procedural success. Our aim was to identify independent predictors of success in CTO PCI in order to create an accurate score. Methods: In a single-center observational registry of CTO PCI, demographic and clinical data and anatomical characteristics of coronary lesions were recorded. Linear and logistic regression analysis were used to identify predictors of success. A score to predict success was created and its accuracy was measured by receiver operating curve analysis. Results: A total of 377 interventions were performed (334 patients, age 68±11 years, 75% male). The success rate was 65% per patient and 60% per procedure. Predictors of success in univariate analysis were absence of active smoking (OR 2.02, 95% CI 1.243-3.29; p=0.005), presence of tapered stump (OR 5.2, 95% CI 2.7-10.2; p8 with high probability (95%). Conclusion: In our sample only anatomical characteristics were predictors of success. The creation of a score to predict success, with good accuracy, may enable selection of cases that can be treated by any operator, those in which a dedicated operator will be desirable, and those with an extremely low probability of success, which should be considered individually for conservative management, surgical revascularization or PCI by a team experienced in CTO.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

HIF-transcribed p53 chaperones HIF-1α

Chronic hypoxia is associated with a variety of physiological conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, ischemia/reperfusion injury, stroke, diabetic vasculopathy, epilepsy and cancer. At the molecular level, hypoxia manifests its effects via activation of HIF-dependent transcription. On the other hand, an important transcription factor p53, which controls a myriad of biological functions, is rendered transcriptionally inactive under hypoxic conditions. p53 and HIF-1α are known to share a mysterious relationship and play an ambiguous role in the regulation of hypoxia-induced cellular changes. Here we demonstrate a novel pathway where HIF-1α transcriptionally upregulates both WT and MT p53 by binding to five response elements in p53 promoter. In hypoxic cells, this HIF-1α-induced p53 is transcriptionally inefficient but is abundantly available for protein-protein interactions. Further, both WT and MT p53 proteins bind and chaperone HIF-1α to stabilize its binding at its downstream DNA response elements. This p53-induced chaperoning of HIF-1α increases synthesis of HIF-regulated genes and thus the efficiency of hypoxia-induced molecular changes. This basic biology finding has important implications not only in the design of anti-cancer strategies but also for other physiological conditions where hypoxia results in disease manifestation

Overexpression of Insulin Degrading Enzyme could Greatly Contribute to Insulin Down-regulation Induced by Short-Term Swimming Exercise

Exercise training is highly correlated with the reduced glucose-stimulated insulin secretion (GSIS), although it enhanced insulin sensitivity, glucose uptake and glucose transporter expression to reduce severity of diabetic symptoms. This study investigated the impact of short-term swimming exercise on insulin regulation in the Goto-Kakizaki (GK) rat as a non-obese model of non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus. Wistar (W/S) and GK rats were trained 2 hours daily with the swimming exercise for 4 weeks, and then the changes in the metabolism of insulin and glucose were assessed. Body weight was markedly decreased in the exercised GK rats compare to their non-exercised counterpart, while W/S rats did not show any exercise-related changes. Glucose concentration was not changed by exercise, although impaired glucose tolerance was improved in GK rats 120 min after glucose injection. However, insulin concentration was decreased by swimming exercise as in the decrease of GSIS after running exercise. To identify the other cause for exercise-induced insulin down-regulation, the changes in the levels of key factors involved in insulin production (C-peptide) and clearance (insulin-degrading enzyme; IDE) were measured in W/S and GK rats. The C-peptide level was maintained while IDE expression increased markedly. Therefore, these results showed that insulin down-regulation induced by short-term swimming exercise likely attributes to enhanced insulin clearance via IDE over-expression than by altered insulin production

Age-related shift in LTD is dependent on neuronal adenosine A(2A) receptors interplay with mGluR5 and NMDA receptors

Synaptic dysfunction plays a central role in Alzheimer's disease (AD), since it drives the cognitive decline. An association between a polymorphism of the adenosine A2A receptor (A2AR) encoding gene-ADORA2A, and hippocampal volume in AD patients was recently described. In this study, we explore the synaptic function of A2AR in age-related conditions. We report, for the first time, a significant overexpression of A2AR in hippocampal neurons of aged humans, which is aggravated in AD patients. A similar profile of A2AR overexpression in rats was sufficient to drive age-like memory impairments in young animals and to uncover a hippocampal LTD-to-LTP shift. This was accompanied by increased NMDA receptor gating, dependent on mGluR5 and linked to enhanced Ca(2+) influx. We confirmed the same plasticity shift in memory-impaired aged rats and APP/PS1 mice modeling AD, which was rescued upon A2AR blockade. This A2AR/mGluR5/NMDAR interaction might prove a suitable alternative for regulating aberrant mGluR5/NMDAR signaling in AD without disrupting their constitutive activity