Perivascular adipose tissue as a relevant fat depot for cardiovascular risk in obesity

Obesity is associated with increased risk of premature death, morbidity, and mortality from several cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), including stroke, coronary heart disease (CHD), myocardial infarction, and congestive heart failure. However, this is not a straightforward relationship. Although several studies have substantiated that obesity confers an independent and additive risk of all-cause and cardiovascular death, there is significant variability in these associations, with some lean individuals developing diseases and others remaining healthy despite severe obesity, the so-called metabolically healthy obese. Part of this variability has been attributed to the heterogeneity in both the distribution of body fat and the intrinsic properties of adipose tissue depots, including developmental origin, adipogenic and proliferative capacity, glucose and lipid metabolism, hormonal control, thermogenic ability, and vascularization. In obesity, these depot-specific differences translate into specific fat distribution patterns, which are closely associated with differential cardiometabolic risks. The adventitial fat layer, also known as perivascular adipose tissue (PVAT), is of major importance. Similar to the visceral adipose tissue, PVAT has a pathophysiological role in CVDs. PVAT influences vascular homeostasis by releasing numerous vasoactive factors, cytokines, and adipokines, which can readily target the underlying smooth muscle cell layers, regulating the vascular tone, distribution of blood flow, as well as angiogenesis, inflammatory processes, and redox status. In this review, we summarize the current knowledge and discuss the role of PVAT within the scope of adipose tissue as a major contributing factor to obesity-associated cardiovascular risk. Relevant clinical studies documenting the relationship between PVAT dysfunction and CVD with a focus on potential mechanisms by which PVAT contributes to obesity-related CVDs are pointed out

Rewiring strategies for changing environments

A typical pervasive application executes in a changing environment: people, computing resources, software services and network connections come and go continuously. A robust pervasive application needs adapt to this changing context as long as there is an appropriate rewiring strategy that guarantees correct behavior. We combine the MERODE modeling methodology with the ReWiRe framework for creating interactive pervasive applications that can cope with changing environments. The core of our approach is a consistent environment model, which is essential to create (re)configurable context-aware pervasive applications. We aggregate different ontologies that provide the required semantics to describe almost any target environment. We present a case study that shows a interactive pervasive application for media access that incorporates parental control on media content and can migrate between devices. The application builds upon models of the run-time environment represented as system states for dedicated rewiring strategies

Reducing Data Center Loads for a Large-Scale, Low-Energy Office Building: NREL's Research Support Facility (Book)

This publication detailing the design, implementation strategies, and continuous performance monitoring of NREL's Research Support Facility data center. Data centers are energy-intensive spaces that facilitate the transmission, receipt, processing, and storage of digital data. These spaces require redundancies in power and storage, as well as infrastructure, to cool computing equipment and manage the resulting waste heat (Tschudi, Xu, Sartor, and Stein, 2003). Data center spaces can consume more than 100 times the energy of standard office spaces (VanGeet 2011). The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reported that data centers used 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) in 2006, which was 1.5% of the total electricity consumption in the U.S. (U.S. EPA, 2007). Worldwide, data centers now consume more energy annually than Sweden (New York Times, 2009). Given their high energy consumption and conventional operation practices, there is a potential for huge energy savings in data centers. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is world renowned for its commitment to green building construction. In June 2010, the laboratory finished construction of a 220,000-square-foot (ft{sup 2}), LEED Platinum, Research Support Facility (RSF), which included a 1,900-ft{sup 2} data center. The RSF will expand to 360,000 ft{sup 2} with the opening of an additional wing December, 2011. The project's request for proposals (RFP) set a whole-building demand-side energy use requirement of a nominal 35 kBtu/ft{sup 2} per year. On-site renewable energy generation will offset the annual energy consumption. To support the RSF's energy goals, NREL's new data center was designed to minimize its energy footprint without compromising service quality. Several implementation challenges emerged during the design, construction, and first 11 months of operation of the RSF data center. This document highlights these challenges and describes in detail how NREL successfully overcame them. The IT settings and strategies outlined in this document have been used to significantly reduce data center energy requirements in the RSF; however, these can also be used in existing buildings and retrofits

Effects of the measurement power on states discrimination and dynamics in a circuit-QED experiment

We explore the effects of driving a cavity at a large photon number in a circuit-QED experiment where the ``matter-like'' part corresponds to an unique Andreev level in a superconducting weak link. The three many-body states of the weak link, corresponding to the occupation of the Andreev level by 0, 1 or 2 quasiparticles, lead to different cavity frequency shifts. We show how the non-linearity inherited by the cavity from its coupling to the weak link affects the state discrimination and the photon number calibration. Both effects require treating the evolution of the driven system beyond the dispersive limit. In addition, we observe how transition rates between the circuit states (quantum and parity jumps) are affected by the microwave power, and compare the measurements with a theory accounting for the ``dressing'' of the Andreev states by the cavity.Comment: Reintroduced 2 sentences that had been accidentally deleted in the introduction. Corrected a few typo

Application of hyaluronic acid in non-surgical treatment of periodontitis

Poster apresentado no 2º Congresso Internacional do CiiEM: Translational Research and Innovation in Human in health Sciences. 11-13 Junho 2017, Campus Egas Moniz, Caparica, PortugalN/

Data-driven Estimation of Under Frequency Load Shedding after Outages in Small Power Systems

This paper presents a data-driven methodology for estimating Under Frequency Load Shedding (UFLS) in small power systems. UFLS plays a vital role in maintaining system stability by shedding load when the frequency drops below a specified threshold following loss of generation. Using a dynamic System Frequency Response (SFR) model we generate different values of UFLS (i.e., labels) predicated on a set of carefully selected operating conditions (i.e., features). Machine Learning (ML) algorithms are then applied to learn the relationship between chosen features and the UFLS labels. A novel regression tree and the Tobit model are suggested for this purpose and we show how the resulting non-linear model can be directly incorporated into a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problem. The trained model can be used to estimate UFLS in security-constrained operational planning problems, improving frequency response, optimizing reserve allocation, and reducing costs. The methodology is applied to the La Palma island power system, demonstrating its accuracy and effectiveness. The results confirm that the amount of UFLS can be estimated with the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) as small as 0.213 MW for the whole process, with a model that is representable as a MILP for use in scheduling problems such as unit commitment among others

Treatment of infra-bony periodontal defects using a collagen membrane and a bone substitute of equine origin : a pilot study

Abstract in proceedings of the Fourth International Congress of CiiEM: Health, Well-Being and Ageing in the 21st Century, held at Egas Moniz’ University Campus in Monte de Caparica, Almada, from 3–5 June 2019.This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio