Parasitological Survey On Birds At Some Selected Brazilian Zoos

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)A parasitological survey was conducted at some zoos in the states of Sao Paulo and Parana, Brazil, from 2009 to 2011. Several groups of birds were surveyed for fecal samples, but the most important was Psittacidae. Among the parasites, Eimeria (coccidian) and Capillaria, Ascaridia and Heterakis (nematodes) were observed in almost one third of the samples. Presence of a rich parasite fauna associated with captive birds seems to be an effect of captivity, since data on free-ranging birds indicate few or virtually no parasites at all. The discovery of new coccidian species during this survey reveals the need of more research on the subject as even well-known bird species have unknown parasites, but caution must be exercised in order to avoid descriptions of pseudoparasites.2418791Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES

Identificação humana por DNA mitocondrial

A molécula de DNA tornou-se uma ferramenta fundamental na identificação humana e na investigação criminal. O perfil genético de um indivíduo é definido pela análise do DNA e a combinação de diversos marcadores que são herdados dos pais. Entretanto, em alguns casos, o DNA nuclear não pode ser utilizado e, dessa forma, o DNA mitocondrial passa a ser uma alternativa viável. O objetivo desse trabalho foi apresentar, por meio de uma revisão bibliográfica, o DNA mitocondrial, suas características, funcionalidade e a aplicabilidade na identificação humana. Mostrando, assim, sua importância e vantagens

Mitigating the Position Bias of Transformer Models in Passage Re-Ranking

Supervised machine learning models and their evaluation strongly depends on the quality of the underlying dataset. When we search for a relevant piece of information it may appear anywhere in a given passage. However, we observe a bias in the position of the correct answer in the text in two popular Question Answering datasets used for passage re-ranking. The excessive favoring of earlier positions inside passages is an unwanted artefact. This leads to three common Transformer-based re-ranking models to ignore relevant parts in unseen passages. More concerningly, as the evaluation set is taken from the same biased distribution, the models overfitting to that bias overestimate their true effectiveness. In this work we analyze position bias on datasets, the contextualized representations, and their effect on retrieval results. We propose a debiasing method for retrieval datasets. Our results show that a model trained on a position-biased dataset exhibits a significant decrease in re-ranking effectiveness when evaluated on a debiased dataset. We demonstrate that by mitigating the position bias, Transformer-based re-ranking models are equally effective on a biased and debiased dataset, as well as more effective in a transfer-learning setting between two differently biased datasets

A NEW EIMERIAN SPECIES (APICOMPLEXA: EIMERIIDAE) FROM THE BLUE-FRONTED AMAZON PARROT AMAZONA AESTIVA L. (AVES: PSITTACIDAE) IN BRAZIL

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)The Neotropical psittacine species Amazona aestiva, commonly known as the blue-fronted Amazon, is one of the most common and best-known psittacine birds kept as a pet worldwide. However, very little is known about the diseases or parasites of these birds. In this study, we describe a new species, Eimeria aestivae, associated with these parrots. The new species is characterized by: ovoid smooth oocysts (n = 60), 36.8 (33.2-41.5) x 23.7 (21.7-25.7) mu m, length/width ratio = 1.55; polar granule present; ellipsoidal sporocysts (n = 25), 19.8 (17.5-21.6) X 9.3 (8.3-9.9) mu m; Stieda, sub-Stieda body, and sporocyst residuum present. Sporozoites (n = 20), 2 per sporocyst, elongate and curved, 17.6 (15.8-19.2) X 3.8 (3.2-4.8) mu m; each with 2 refractile bodies. The oocysts of the other 2 eimerian species described for Amazona are larger than those of the presented species, but they all seem to be closely related because of some similarities among them.97611401141Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES

Por mais experiências estéticas da natureza em escolas públicas de educação básica

Este ensaio teórico objetiva problematizar as (a falta das) experiências estéticas da natureza no currículo e nas práticas escolares, e suscitar possibilidades de enfrentamento dessa ausência. Entendemos que as experiências estéticas~éticas~políticas2 são constituintes e não dissociadas nos emaranhados da vida, e que nossos corpos estão em constante correspondência com o mundo mais que humano. Iniciamos o manuscrito, resgatando os principais documentos globais e leis nacionais que orientam a educação ambiental nas escolas. A partir disso, discutimos a negligência das recentes políticas públicas em educação ambiental no âmbito da escola. Pautadas/os na corrente filosófica da ecofenomenologia, defendemos uma educação ambiental escolar menos antropocêntrica e que preconize, também, mais experiências estéticas na natureza. Assim, argumentamos sobre as limitações legislativas, configurações de espaço escolar e do currículo para que essa educação ambiental seja concretizada

Method for fabricating or modifying an article comprising the removal of a polymer coating

Disclosed is a method for removing poly-para-xylylene, its derivatives, and copolymers (collectively called parylene ) from bodies, including relatively large bodies such as printed circuit (PC) boards, that is capable of yielding relatively high removal rates. A body such as a PC board coated with parylene is placed into a reaction chamber downstream from a microwave plasma such that plasma discharge products generated by the microwave plasma react with the parylene, etching the parylene without exposing the body to bombardment by energetic ions and/or electrons. The plasma is generated from a gas mixture containing oxygen, a second gas, and optional additives such as N2 O, He,or Ar. The second gas is selected from the group consisting of fluorocarbons, fluorosulfides, and chlorofluorocarbons. A currently preferred second gas is CFR4. The inventive method is also applicable for fabricating articles such as integrated circuits and semiconductor devices that comprise a parylene layer