Pervasive gaps in Amazonian ecological research

Biodiversity loss is one of the main challenges of our time,1,2 and attempts to address it require a clear un derstanding of how ecological communities respond to environmental change across time and space.3,4 While the increasing availability of global databases on ecological communities has advanced our knowledge of biodiversity sensitivity to environmental changes,5–7 vast areas of the tropics remain understudied.8–11 In the American tropics, Amazonia stands out as the world’s most diverse rainforest and the primary source of Neotropical biodiversity,12 but it remains among the least known forests in America and is often underrepre sented in biodiversity databases.13–15 To worsen this situation, human-induced modifications16,17 may elim inate pieces of the Amazon’s biodiversity puzzle before we can use them to understand how ecological com munities are responding. To increase generalization and applicability of biodiversity knowledge,18,19 it is thus crucial to reduce biases in ecological research, particularly in regions projected to face the most pronounced environmental changes. We integrate ecological community metadata of 7,694 sampling sites for multiple or ganism groups in a machine learning model framework to map the research probability across the Brazilian Amazonia, while identifying the region’s vulnerability to environmental change. 15%–18% of the most ne glected areas in ecological research are expected to experience severe climate or land use changes by 2050. This means that unless we take immediate action, we will not be able to establish their current status, much less monitor how it is changing and what is being lostinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The complete genome sequence of Chromobacterium violaceum reveals remarkable and exploitable bacterial adaptability

Chromobacterium violaceum is one of millions of species of free-living microorganisms that populate the soil and water in the extant areas of tropical biodiversity around the world. Its complete genome sequence reveals (i) extensive alternative pathways for energy generation, (ii) ≈500 ORFs for transport-related proteins, (iii) complex and extensive systems for stress adaptation and motility, and (iv) wide-spread utilization of quorum sensing for control of inducible systems, all of which underpin the versatility and adaptability of the organism. The genome also contains extensive but incomplete arrays of ORFs coding for proteins associated with mammalian pathogenicity, possibly involved in the occasional but often fatal cases of human C. violaceum infection. There is, in addition, a series of previously unknown but important enzymes and secondary metabolites including paraquat-inducible proteins, drug and heavy-metal-resistance proteins, multiple chitinases, and proteins for the detoxification of xenobiotics that may have biotechnological applications

Mitochondrial physiology

As the knowledge base and importance of mitochondrial physiology to evolution, health and disease expands, the necessity for harmonizing the terminology concerning mitochondrial respiratory states and rates has become increasingly apparent. The chemiosmotic theory establishes the mechanism of energy transformation and coupling in oxidative phosphorylation. The unifying concept of the protonmotive force provides the framework for developing a consistent theoretical foundation of mitochondrial physiology and bioenergetics. We follow the latest SI guidelines and those of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) on terminology in physical chemistry, extended by considerations of open systems and thermodynamics of irreversible processes. The concept-driven constructive terminology incorporates the meaning of each quantity and aligns concepts and symbols with the nomenclature of classical bioenergetics. We endeavour to provide a balanced view of mitochondrial respiratory control and a critical discussion on reporting data of mitochondrial respiration in terms of metabolic flows and fluxes. Uniform standards for evaluation of respiratory states and rates will ultimately contribute to reproducibility between laboratories and thus support the development of data repositories of mitochondrial respiratory function in species, tissues, and cells. Clarity of concept and consistency of nomenclature facilitate effective transdisciplinary communication, education, and ultimately further discovery

Pervasive gaps in Amazonian ecological research

Biodiversity loss is one of the main challenges of our time,1,2 and attempts to address it require a clear understanding of how ecological communities respond to environmental change across time and space.3,4 While the increasing availability of global databases on ecological communities has advanced our knowledge of biodiversity sensitivity to environmental changes,5,6,7 vast areas of the tropics remain understudied.8,9,10,11 In the American tropics, Amazonia stands out as the world's most diverse rainforest and the primary source of Neotropical biodiversity,12 but it remains among the least known forests in America and is often underrepresented in biodiversity databases.13,14,15 To worsen this situation, human-induced modifications16,17 may eliminate pieces of the Amazon's biodiversity puzzle before we can use them to understand how ecological communities are responding. To increase generalization and applicability of biodiversity knowledge,18,19 it is thus crucial to reduce biases in ecological research, particularly in regions projected to face the most pronounced environmental changes. We integrate ecological community metadata of 7,694 sampling sites for multiple organism groups in a machine learning model framework to map the research probability across the Brazilian Amazonia, while identifying the region's vulnerability to environmental change. 15%–18% of the most neglected areas in ecological research are expected to experience severe climate or land use changes by 2050. This means that unless we take immediate action, we will not be able to establish their current status, much less monitor how it is changing and what is being lost

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Rythmic Gymnastics: Work, body and spectacle an analysis between Rythmic Gymnastics and contemporary society

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível SuperiorEsta dissertação tem como objetivo relacionar o trabalho da atleta de Ginástica Rítmica.(GR) e a formação de subjetividades na sociedade contemporânea. A visão sobre o trabalho da atleta de GR é formada a partir da entrevista de três ex-atletas. A perspectiva da formação de subjetividades na contemporaneidade é verificada a partir da pesquisa bibliográfica de autores como György Lukács, Richard Sennett, Michel Foucault, Vera Lúcia Soares, Guy Debord e Valter Bracht. A relação entre a sociedade capitalista e a modalidade esportiva é estabelecida através da análise de três grandes eixos que as atravessam: a questão do trabalho, a questão do corpo e a questão do espetáculo. Partindo do pressuposto de que o trabalho é constituinte do ser social, define-se a ginástica como um trabalho, discute-se o significado do trabalhar na sociedade contemporânea e analisa-se as condições de profissionalização e prática do Esporte no Brasil. Sobre a questão do corpo, observa-se a forma como o corpo é utilizado pelas atletas e as relações de proximidade com o uso do corpo pelo sujeito contemporâneo. Ainda, compara-se a forma como as atletas relatam sua experiência de apresentação da série com espetacularização da sociedade descrita por Debord. A conclusão revela que o as atletas atingem um grau de contato e discussão com temas do esporte de alto rendimento presentes na sociedade (tais como competitividade e sucesso) que extrapolam os estigmas que poderiam ser a elas atribuído

Estudo do sistema de drenagem urbana localizado na avenida José Caetano de Almeida, Quixadá/CE

A crescente urbanização, aliada à falta de planejamento urbano, trouxe um dos grandes problemas para o escoamento da água, que é a impermeabilização do solo. A impermeabilização decorrente da ocupação urbana altera o ciclo hidrológico, resultando em um aumento de alagamentos urbanos, causando desconforto para os moradores e degradação das águas pluviais. Uma das estruturas que compõem o sistema de saneamento é a drenagem urbana, que possui grande importância para o funcionamento do meio urbano, ajudando a drenar de forma satisfatória as águas pluviais. Diante desse contexto, este trabalho teve como objetivo estudar o sistema de microdrenagem urbana da avenida José Caetano de Almeida, do bairro Combate, na cidade de Quixadá-CE. Para isso, avaliou-se in loco os dispositivos que compõem o sistema de drenagem pluvial da avenida, verificando a presença de manifestações patológicas e seus agentes causadores. Não se dizer que o atual projeto existente na avenida não tem funcionalidade, pois o mesmo está em funcionamento há muitos anos sem manutenção e não foi concluído, tornando-o falho perante os demais. Ao verificar os dispositivos de drenagem e suas respectivas manifestações patológicas e agentes causadores, foram propostas estratégias para melhoria da região através de arborização, telhado verde e utilização de pavimentos permeáveis