2,248 research outputs found

    Is Brazil really a catholic country? What opinions about abortion, sex between individuals who are not married to each other, and homosexuality say about the meaning of catholicism in three Brazilian cities

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    The idea of being a Catholic country is quite widespread throughout the nation. What does it mean to be Catholic in Brazil? Do Catholics follow the Catholic Doctrine? The objective of this paper is to investigate the relationship between religion and religious involvement (measured by religious affiliation and service attendance) and opinions about abortion, sex between individuals who are not married to each other, and homosexuality in São Paulo, Porto Alegre, and Recife. Data come from the survey “Spirit and Power: A 10-Country Survey of Pentecostals,” carried out in 2006. Results suggest that Brazilian Catholics are a very heterogeneous group with respect to opinions about abortion and sex between individuals who are not married to each other. In addition, service attendance among Catholics and those opinions are strongly correlated, except for the case of homosexuality, a topic which Catholics tend to have the same opinions about, irrespective of their religious involvement. Committed Protestants are, by far and away, the most conservative group.Brazil

    Response to comment on 'Amphibian fungal panzootic causes catastrophic and ongoing loss of biodiversity'

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    Lambert et al. question our retrospective and holistic epidemiological assessment of the role of chytridiomycosis in amphibian declines. Their alternative assessment is narrow and provides an incomplete evaluation of evidence. Adopting this approach limits understanding of infectious disease impacts and hampers conservation efforts. We reaffirm that our study provides unambiguous evidence that chytridiomycosis has affected at least 501 amphibian species

    Dense Plasma Focus: physics and applications (radiation material science, single-shot disclosure of hidden illegal objects, radiation biology and medicine, etc.)

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    The paper presents some outcomes obtained during the year of 2013 of the activity in the frame of the International Atomic Energy Agency Co-ordinated research project "Investigations of Materials under High Repetition and Intense Fusion-Relevant Pulses". The main results are related to the effects created at the interaction of powerful pulses of different types of radiation (soft and hard X-rays, hot plasma and fast ion streams, neutrons, etc. generated in Dense Plasma Focus (DPF) facilities) with various materials including those that are counted as perspective ones for their use in future thermonuclear reactors. Besides we discuss phenomena observed at the irradiation of biological test objects. We examine possible applications of nanosecond powerful pulses of neutrons to the aims of nuclear medicine and for disclosure of hidden illegal objects. Special attention is devoted to discussions of a possibility to create extremely large and enormously diminutive DPF devices and probabilities of their use in energetics, medicine and modern electronics

    Cyto-mechanoresponsive polyelectrolyte multilayer films.

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    Cell adhesion processes take place through mechanotransduction mechanisms where stretching of proteins results in biological responses. In this work, we present the first cyto-mechanoresponsive surface that mimics such behavior by becoming cell-adhesive through exhibition of arginine-glycine-aspartic acid (RGD) adhesion peptides under stretching. This mechanoresponsive surface is based on polyelectrolyte multilayer films built on a silicone sheet and where RGD-grafted polyelectrolytes are embedded under antifouling phosphorylcholine-grafted polyelectrolytes. The stretching of this film induces an increase in fibroblast cell viability and adhesion.journal articleresearch support, non-u.s. gov't2012 Jan 112011 12 20importe

    Model-Based Deconvolution of Cell Cycle Time-Series Data Reveals Gene Expression Details at High Resolution

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    In both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells, gene expression is regulated across the cell cycle to ensure “just-in-time” assembly of select cellular structures and molecular machines. However, present in all time-series gene expression measurements is variability that arises from both systematic error in the cell synchrony process and variance in the timing of cell division at the level of the single cell. Thus, gene or protein expression data collected from a population of synchronized cells is an inaccurate measure of what occurs in the average single-cell across a cell cycle. Here, we present a general computational method to extract “single-cell”-like information from population-level time-series expression data. This method removes the effects of 1) variance in growth rate and 2) variance in the physiological and developmental state of the cell. Moreover, this method represents an advance in the deconvolution of molecular expression data in its flexibility, minimal assumptions, and the use of a cross-validation analysis to determine the appropriate level of regularization. Applying our deconvolution algorithm to cell cycle gene expression data from the dimorphic bacterium Caulobacter crescentus, we recovered critical features of cell cycle regulation in essential genes, including ctrA and ftsZ, that were obscured in population-based measurements. In doing so, we highlight the problem with using population data alone to decipher cellular regulatory mechanisms and demonstrate how our deconvolution algorithm can be applied to produce a more realistic picture of temporal regulation in a cell
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