Emerging and under-recognized Chagas cardiomyopathy in non-endemic countries

Due to recent population emigration movements, an epidemic of Chagas disease is currently menacing most developed countries. The authors report the case of a 53-year-old Brazilian woman living in Europe for the last 10 years who developed heart failure symptoms, having a previous symptomatic sinus node disease with a pacemaker implant at age of 40 years. The diagnosis was based on serology and myocardial biopsy and the patient was treated with nifurtimox. The authors emphasize the need of a high level of suspicion in patients with suggestive epidemiology and the need of populational screening of specific high risk groups. New treatment options are also discussed

Photochemistry and photophysics of thienocarbazoles

Two methylated thienocarbazoles and two of their synthetic nitro-precursors have been examined by absorption, luminescence, laser flash photolysis and photoacoustic techniques. Their spectroscopic and photophysical characterization involves fluorescence spectra, fluorescence quantum yields and lifetimes, and phosphorescence spectra and phosphorescence lifetimes for all the compounds. Triplet-singlet difference absorption spectra, triplet molar absorption coefficients, triplet lifetimes, intersystem crossing S-1 similar tosimilar to--> T-1 and singlet molecular oxygen yields were obtained for the thienocarbazoles. In the case of the thienocarbazoles it was found that the lowest-lying singlet and triplet excited states, S, and T-1, are of pi,pi* origin, whereas for their precursors S-1 is n,pi*, and T-1 is pi,pi*. In both thienocarbazoles it appears that the thianaphthene ring dictates the S, T, yield, albeit there is less predominance of that ring in the triplet state of the linear thienocarbazole, which leads to a decrease in the observed Phi(T) value.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Factorial Moments in a Generalized Lattice Gas Model

We construct a simple multicomponent lattice gas model in one dimension in which each site can either be empty or occupied by at most one particle of any one of $D$ species. Particles interact with a nearest neighbor interaction which depends on the species involved. This model is capable of reproducing the relations between factorial moments observed in high--energy scattering experiments for moderate values of $D$. The factorial moments of the negative binomial distribution can be obtained exactly in the limit as $D$ becomes large, and two suitable prescriptions involving randomly drawn nearest neighbor interactions are given. These results indicate the need for considerable care in any attempt to extract information regarding possible critical phenomena from empirical factorial moments.Comment: 15 pages + 1 figure (appended as postscript file), REVTEX 3.0, NORDITA preprint 93/4

Offshore Wind Energy Conversion System Connected to the Electric Grid: Modeling and Simulation

This paper is on modeling and simulation for an offshore wind system equipped with a semi-submersible floating platform, a wind turbine, a permanent magnet synchronous generator, a multiple point clamped four level or five level full-power converter, a submarine cable and a second order filter. The drive train is modeled by three mass model considering the resistant stiffness torque, structure and tower in deep water due to the moving surface elevation. The system control uses PWM by space vector modulation associated with sliding mode and proportional integral controllers. The electric energy is injected into the electric grid either by an alternated current link or by a direct current link. The model is intend to be a useful tool for unveil the behavior and performance of the offshore wind system, especially for the multiple point clamped full-power converter, under normal operation or under malfunctions

Neural Online Filtering Based on Preprocessed Calorimeter Data

Aiming at coping with LHC high event rate, the ATLAS collaboration has been designing a sophisticated three-level online triggering system. A significant number of interesting events decays into electrons, which have to be identified from a huge background noise. This work proposes a high-efficient L2 electron / jet discrimination algorithm based on artificial neural processing fed from preprocessed calorimeter information. The feature extraction part of the proposed system provides a ring structure for data description. Energy normalization is later applied to the rings, making the proposed system usable for a broad energy spectrum. Envisaging data compaction, Principal Component Analysis and Principal Component of Discrimination are compared in terms of both compaction rates and classification efficiency. For the pattern recognition section, an artificial neural network was employed. The proposed algorithm was able to achieve an electron detection efficiency of 96% for a false alarm of 7%

All spacetimes with vanishing curvature invariants

All Lorentzian spacetimes with vanishing invariants constructed from the Riemann tensor and its covariant derivatives are determined. A subclass of the Kundt spacetimes results and we display the corresponding metrics in local coordinates. Some potential applications of these spacetimes are discussed.Comment: 24 page

Ferramentas computacionais de apoio às boas práticas de manejo de tilápia.

A piscicultura brasileira cresce cerca de 30% ao ano, por tratar-se de fonte de proteína de alta qualidade e pela lucratividade. De origem africana, a tilapicultura está presente hoje em grande parte do território nacional, mas ainda sofrendo as pressões para a maior qualidade do produto e adoção de práticas menos impactantes ao ambiente. Entre alguns desses impactos citam-se as poluição e interferências em níveis de biodiversidade e de qualidade da água. Assim, o produtor carece de informação e ferramentas que favoreçam a rápida transferência de práticas já identificadas pela pesquisa, que aumentem seu conhecimento e agilidade na incorporação destas às atividades da propriedade. O projeto "Manejo e Gestão Ambiental da Aqüicultura" da Embrapa Meio Ambiente, componente do projeto em rede Aquabrasil, vem identificando Boas Práticas de Manejo (BPM) de tilápia passíveis de uso imediato pelo produtor a partir de sua rápida observação da propriedade. Nele, o sistema informatizado Aquisys está em desenvolvimento para vialibizar o acesso dinâmico, via web, às avaliações e indicadores de produção, manejo e qualidade de água em atenção às BPM. Este trabalho apresenta duas de suas ferramentas computacionais desenvolvidas para tilápia: a) um sistema especialista de rápida avaliação de BPM na propriedade (em linguagem CLIPS); e b) um programa para determinar a %ração e %proteína bruta a ser oferecida, considerando os pesos dos peixes e temperatura local (em linguagens PHP e HTML)

Estudo da diversidade genética de isolados de Corynespora cassiicola (Berk. e M.A. Curtis) C. T. Wei.

bitstream/item/71513/1/ID-30989.pd

Study of dimuon production in Indium-Indium collisions with the NA60 experiment

The NA60 experiment at the CERN-SPS is devoted to the study of dimuon production in heavy-ion and proton-nucleus collisions. We present preliminary results from the analysis of Indium-Indium collisions at 158 GeV per nucleon. The topics covered are low mass vector meson production, J/psi production and suppression, and the feasibility of the open charm measurement from the dimuon continuum in the mass range below the J/psi peak.Comment: Contribution at XXXXth Rencontres de Moriond, "QCD and High Energy Hadronic Interactions

Latest results from NA60

The NA60 experiment has measured the production of muon pairs and of charged particles in In+In collisions at a beam energy of 158 AGeV. For invariant dimuon masses below the phi the space-time averaged rho spectral function was isolated by a novel procedure. It shows a strong broadening but essentially no shift in mass. The production of J/psi was measured as a function of the collision centrality. As in previous experiments studying Pb+Pb collisions an anomalous supression is observed, setting in at approximately 90 participant nucleons. Using the charged particles the reaction plane was reconstructed. The elliptic flow of charged particles increases with pt showing a saturation for pt > 2GeV/c. For the first time azimuthal distributions for J/psi are shown.Comment: 9 pages, 11 figures, talk given at the conference "Strangeness in Quark Matter 2006 (SQM2006)", March 2006, Los Angeles, USA, accepted for publication in Journal of Physics