Comparative study on the relationship between stroke hemisphere and functional evolution in right-handed individuals

OBJETIVO: O hemisfério esquerdo é dominante para o controle motor e o direito para a orientação espacial. Este estudo visou testar as hipóteses de que a lesão à esquerda causa maior prejuízo da movimentação voluntária e a lesão à direita resulta em perda na atenção espacial e no controle postural. Indivíduos com lesão à esquerda foram comparados com indivíduos com lesão à direita, com relação ao comprometimento inicial e recuperação três meses pós-lesão. MATERIAIS E MÉTODOS: Vinte e dois indivíduos destros com lesão isquêmica no território da artéria cerebral média (11 à esquerda e 11 à direita) foram avaliados mensalmente nos três primeiros meses pós-lesão em termos de sensibilidade, tônus, força, postura, marcha, independência funcional e atenção espacial. RESULTADOS: Com relação ao comprometimento inicial, não houve diferença na sensibilidade, tônus, força, postura e atenção dos grupos. O grupo com lesão à esquerda apresentou pior desempenho inicial nos testes de marcha e de independência funcional. Com relação à taxa de recuperação, não houve diferenças na sensibilidade, tônus, força, postura, atenção e independência funcional dos dois grupos. Porém, a taxa de recuperação da marcha do grupo com lesão à esquerda foi inferior à do outro grupo. CONCLUSÕES: Foi confirmada a hipótese de que a lesão à esquerda causa maior comprometimento da movimentação voluntária, representada pela marcha e independência funcional, que a lesão à direita. Não foi obtida, no entanto, evidência de que a lesão à direita compromete de modo mais intenso a atenção espacial e a manutenção da postura que a lesão à esquerda.OBJECTIVE: The left hemisphere is supposed to be dominant for motor control and the right hemisphere dominant for spatial orientation. This study aimed to test the hypothesis that left-side lesions cause greater impairment of voluntary movement, while right-side lesions cause loss of spatial attention loss and postural control. Individuals with left-side lesions were compared with individuals with right-side lesions, in relation to initial impairment and recovery three months after their stroke. METHODS: Twenty-two right-handed individuals with an ischemic lesion in the area of the middle cerebral artery (11 on the left side and 11 on the right side) were assessed monthly, for the first three months after their stroke, in terms of sensitivity, tonus, posture, gait, functional independence and spatial attention. RESULTS: In relation to the initial impairment, there was no difference in sensitivity, tonus, strength, posture and spatial attention between the groups. The left-side lesion group presented worse initial performance in gait and functional independence tests. In relation to the recovery rate, there were no differences in sensitivity, tonus, strength, posture, spatial attention or functional independence between the two groups. However, the gait recovery rate in the left-side lesion group was slower than in the other group. CONCLUSIONS: The hypothesis that left-side lesions cause greater impairment of voluntary movement (represented by gait and functional independence) than do right-side lesions was supported. However, no evidence that right-side lesions cause greater impairment of spatial attention and posture maintenance than do left-side lesions was found

Carcass Grading for Local Vietnamese Ban Pigs and its Potential for a Quality Feedback System in a Short Food Supply Chain

AbstractIn-situ conservation of local pig breeds in Southeast Asia requires genetic improvement embedded in viable marketing concepts. Increasing demand offers marketing opportunities for indigenous Vietnamese Ban pork. This study sought to adjust estimation methods for grading light carcasses according to their leanness. Using data from the dissection of 45 carcasses, several models were fitted and evaluated. Although the predictive power of the equations was limited, Ban carcasses could be approximatively classified according to their lean content. Finally, a suggestion of how to include these measurements in a quality feedback system of a short food supply chain is made

Publication of RDF streams with Ztreamy

Proceedings of ESWC 2014 Satellite Events, Anissaras, Crete, Greece, May 25–29, 2014There is currently an interest in the Semantic Web community for the development of tools and techniques to process RDF streams. Implementing an effective RDF stream processing system requires to address several aspects including stream generation, querying, reasoning, etc. In this work we focus on one of them: the distribution of RDF streams through the Web. In order to address this issue, we have developed Ztreamy, a scalable middleware which allows to publish and consume RDF streams through HTTP. The goal of this demo is to show the functionality of Ztreamy in two different scenarios with actual, heterogeneous streaming data.This work has been partially funded by the Spanish Government through the project HERMES-SMARTDRIVER (TIN2013-46801-C4-2-R)

Discriminating the quality of local pork from crossbred pork from extensive production of ethnic minorities in mountainous northern Vietnam

Developing short food supply chains for products from local pig (Sus scrofa domesticus) breeds may offer chances for smallholders in rural areas to participate in niche markets and obtain additional income. Because the authenticity and distinctness of products are crucial for establishing marketing, this study compared selected product characteristics of pork from the Vietnamese Ban breed with pork from crossbreds, each derived at their typical market weight and from their respective extensive and semi-extensive production environment; thus resembling the combination, the products are available for customers. Traditional Ban pork could be effectively discriminated from crossbred pork through cut dimensions, exemplified by the significantly reduced loin eye area (P 0.001), and by the significantly reduced backfat thickness (P 0.001). Also, marbling fat was significantly decreased in local pork (P 0.001), whereas differences in further meat quality parameters were rather weakly expressed. The significantly higher share of polyunsaturated fatty acids in loins of traditionally produced Ban pigs (P = 0.003) could possibly result in a preferred nutritional value, but lower oxidative stability of the products. This study provides novel information to improve the marketing of specialty pork in Vietnam and comparable situations in the Southeast Asian Massif

On the consistency of the peculiar GRBs 060218 and 060614 with the Ep,i - Eiso correlation

We analyze and discuss the position of GRB 060218 and GRB 060614 in the Ep,i - Eiso plane. GRB 060218 is important because of its similarity with GRB 980425, the proto-type event of the GRB-SN connection. While GRB 980425 is an outlier of the Ep,i - Eiso correlation, we find that GRB 060218 is fully consistent with it. This evidence, combined with the `chromatic' behavior of the afterglow light curves, is at odds with the hypothesis that GRB 060218 was a `standard' GRB seen off-axis and supports the existence of a class of truly sub--energetic GRBs. GRB 060614 is a peculiar event not accompanied by a bright Supernova. Based on published spectral information, we find that also this event is consistent with the Ep,i - Eiso correlation. We discuss the implications of our results for the rate of sub--energetic GRBs, the GRB/SN connection and the properties of the newly discovered sub-class of long GRBs not associated with bright Supernovae. We have included in our analysis other recent GRBs with clear evidence (or clear no evidence) of associated SNe.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, FINAL REVISED VERSION (added Figure 4 and short GRBs in Figure 1; minor changes and style corrections applied; references updated), submitted to A&A on November 25, 200

RDSZ: an approach for lossless RDF stream compression

In many applications (like social or sensor networks) the in- formation generated can be represented as a continuous stream of RDF items, where each item describes an application event (social network post, sensor measurement, etc). In this paper we focus on compressing RDF streams. In particular, we propose an approach for lossless RDF stream compression, named RDSZ (RDF Differential Stream compressor based on Zlib). This approach takes advantage of the structural similarities among items in a stream by combining a differential item encoding mechanism with the general purpose stream compressor Zlib. Empirical evaluation using several RDF stream datasets shows that this combi- nation produces gains in compression ratios with respect to using Zlib alone

Bouveret syndrome in a cholecystoduodenal fistula

The treatment of Bouveret syndrome lacks specific guidelines and is strictly interdisciplinary. Especially, if electrohydraulic lithotripsy is not available and endoscopic removal fails, a timely surgical approach is advised

Damping rate of plasmons and photons in a degenerate nonrelativistic plasma

A calculation is presented of the plasmon and photon damping rates in a dense nonrelativistic plasma at zero temperature, following the resummation program of Braaten-Pisarski. At small soft momentum $k$, the damping is dominated by $3 \to 2$ scattering processes corresponding to double longitudinal Landau damping. The dampings are proportional to $(\alpha/v_{F})^{3/2} k^2/m$, where $v_{F}$ is the Fermi velocity.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figure

Study of the role played by NfsA, NfsB nitroreductase and NemA flavin reductase from Escherichia coli in the conversion of ethyl 2-(2′-nitrophenoxy)acetate to 4-hydroxy-(2H)-1,4-benzoxazin-3(4H)-one (D-DIBOA), a benzohydroxamic acid with interesting biological properties

Benzohydroxamic acids, such as 4-hydroxy-(2H)- 1,4-benzoxazin-3(4H)-one (D-DIBOA), exhibit interesting herbicidal, fungicidal and bactericidal properties. Recently, the chemical synthesis of D-DIBOA has been simplified to only two steps. In a previous paper, we demonstrated that the second step could be replaced by a biotransformation using Escherichia coli to reduce the nitro group of the precursor, ethyl 2-(2′-nitrophenoxy)acetate and obtain D-DIBOA. The NfsA and NfsB nitroreductases and the NemA xenobiotic reductase of E. coli have the capacity to reduce one or two nitro groups from a wide variety of nitroaromatic compounds, which are similar to the precursor. By this reason, we hypothesised that these three enzymes could be involved in this biotransformation. We have analysed the biotransformation yield (BY) of mutant strains in which one, two or three of these genes were knocked out, showing that only in the double nfsA/nfsB and in the triple nfsA/nfsB/nemA mutants, the BY was 0%. These results suggested that NfsA and NfsB are responsible for the biotransformation in the tested conditions. To confirm this, the nfsA and nfsB open reading frames were cloned into the pBAD expression vector and transformed into the nfsA and nfsB single mutants, respectively. In both cases, the biotransformation capacity of the strains was recovered (6.09±0.06% as in the wild-type strain) and incremented considerably when NfsA and NfsB were overexpressed (40.33%±9.42% and 59.68%±2.0% respectively)

Measurement and Calculation for CO2 Solubility and Kinetic Rate in Aqueous Solutions of Two Tertiary Amines

AbstractAbsorbing CO2 with amine solutions is one of the most promising methods of CCS and has been widely applied. In order to improve efficiency and reduce costs, new solvents need to be selected. In this work, two amine solvents, N,N-dimethylethanolamine(DMEA) and Triethylene diamine (TEDA), have been characterized, with the use of gas- liquid reactor for CO2 solubility and kinetic rate measurements. Solubility of CO2 has been measured for amine concentrations of 1.0, 2.5 and 4.0mol/L at temperatures of 313.2K, 343.2K, 373.2K, and 393.2K while partial pressure of CO2 varies from 1 to 300kPa. The e-NRTL model has been used for these amine-water-CO2 systems in order to calculate CO2 solubility. Meanwhile the thermo-regulated constant interfacial area Lewis-type cell was also operated to obtain absorption kinetic data for CO2 absorption in 0.5M and 1.0M amine solutions