Honey and honey bees of Guinea-Bissau

Beekeeping is an ancient activity in Guinea-Bissau. The ancestral interaction with bees stands on “honey hunting” of natural colonies or use of traditional hives hanged on trees. These hives are perfect shelters for swarms but the colony is destroyed every year after honey harvesting. Bees are therefore kept as wild as ever with little, if any, interference from man. Reports on honey bees and honey of Guinea-Bissau are scarce. Herein we report the first data on honey quality and provide a morphometric and genetic identification of the bees. Fifteen colonies from 5 localities were examined for morphometry and mtDNA. Honey samples were collected from beekeepers using Kenyan top-bar and traditional hives and analyzed for color, humidity, conductivity, free acidity and diastase activity. The morphometric analysis showed a bee smaller than the Europeans but with similar leg and wing size. Regarding color, each worker displayed a very distinct yellow spot on thorax and a black spot at the fourth ring, which appeared either isolated from the black strip or linked, looking like a “T shape”. Those two features mark the difference towards other honey bees. The maternal genetic composition was assayed using the Dra I test (COI-COII mitochondrial region). Three haplotypes, each belonging to a distinct evolutionary sublineage, were found. Most colonies (11 out of 15) harbored an A1 haplotype (sublineage I) whereas only 3 and 1 were of A8 (sublineage II) and A14 (sublineage (AIII) ancestry, respectively. Honey samples showed significant differences in quality depending on the harvesting methodology: honey from modern beekeepers was light amber with 16% humidity, low acidity, and conductivity from 300-700 μS.cm-1. Samples from traditional production had debris contamination, an unpleasant flavor and color above 150 in the Pfund scale. Water content was higher than 20% and conductivity above 600 μS.cm-1

Subsídio para o estudo das características físicas, químicas e fisico-químicas dos vinhos da região demarcada de Colares

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Antimicrobial assessment of phage therapy using a porcine model of biofilm infection

Antibiotic resistant bacterial communities persist in many types of wounds, chronic wounds in particular, in the form of biofilms. Biofilm formation is a major cause of severe infections and the main reason for a negative treatment outcome and slow healing progression. Chronic wounds are a silent epidemic essentially affecting people with co-morbid conditions such as diabetes and obesity and elderly persons particularly those with movement limitations. The development of complementary and alternative effective strategies to antibiotics for the treatment of chronic wounds is highly desired. Phage therapy constitutes a very promising approach in the control of topical microbial populations. In this work newly isolated phages were tested for their efficacy to control bacterial species that predominate in chronic wounds. Phage effectiveness was studied on 24-h old biofilms formed in polystyrene microplates and in porcine skin explants using two treatment approaches: individual phage and a cocktail of phages against four main pathogens commonly isolated from chronic wounds. The two models produced variations in the surface colonization ability, assessed by viable bacterial counts and microscopy visualization after using peptide nucleic acid (PNA) or locked nucleic acid probes (LNA) and 2-O-methyl (2-OMe) in fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH), and in the phage-host interactions. Phages alone and combined caused greater reductions in the number of viable cells when biofilms had been formed on porcine skins and with greater variations detected at 4 h and 24 h of sampling. These results suggest that porcine skin models should be preferentially used to assess the use of phages and phage cocktails intended for topical use in order to understand the fate, throughout treatment time, of the population when dealing with biofilm-related infections.This work was supported by Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology under the scope of the strategic funding of UID/BIO/04469/2013 unit and COMPETE2020(POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006684) and BioTecNorte operation (NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000004) funded by the European Regional Development Fund under the scope of Norte2020–Programa Operacional Regional do Norte and the Project RECI/BBB-EBI/0179/2012 (FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-027462). CM ac- knowledges the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) grant SFRH/BD/94434/2013. SS is an Investigador FCT (IF/ 01413/2013).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

As características ácidas dos vinhos da Região Vinícola de Colares. Riqueza em cloretos destes vinhos e sua influência na variação do indíce de alcalinidade

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Analysis of drafting effects in swimming using computational fluid dynamics

The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of drafting distance on the drag coefficient in swimming. A k-epsilon turbulent model was implemented in the commercial code Fluent(®) and applied to the fluid flow around two swimmers in a drafting situation. Numerical simulations were conducted for various distances between swimmers (0.5-8.0 m) and swimming velocities (1.6-2.0 m.s(-1)). Drag coefficient (Cd) was computed for each one of the distances and velocities. We found that the drag coefficient of the leading swimmer decreased as the flow velocity increased. The relative drag coefficient of the back swimmer was lower (about 56% of the leading swimmer) for the smallest inter-swimmer distance (0.5 m). This value increased progressively until the distance between swimmers reached 6.0 m, where the relative drag coefficient of the back swimmer was about 84% of the leading swimmer. The results indicated that the Cd of the back swimmer was equal to that of the leading swimmer at distances ranging from 6.45 to 8. 90 m. We conclude that these distances allow the swimmers to be in the same hydrodynamic conditions during training and competitions. Key pointsThe drag coefficient of the leading swimmer decreased as the flow velocity increased.The relative drag coefficient of the back swimmer was least (about 56% of the leading swimmer) for the smallest inter-swimmer distance (0.5 m).The drag coefficient values of both swimmers in drafting were equal to distances ranging between 6.45 m and 8.90 m, considering the different flow velocities.The numerical simulation techniques could be a good approach to enable the analysis of the fluid forces around objects in water, as it happens in swimming.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Three-dimensional CFD analysis of the hand and forearm in swimming

The purpose of this study was to analyze the hydrodynamic characteristics of a realistic model of an elite swimmer hand/forearm using three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics techniques. A three-dimensional domain was designed to simulate the fluid flow around a swimmer hand and forearm model in different orientations (0°, 45°, and 90° for the three axes Ox, Oy and Oz). The hand/forearm model was obtained through computerized tomography scans. Steady-state analyses were performed using the commercial code Fluent. The drag coefficient presented higher values than the lift coefficient for all model orientations. The drag coefficient of the hand/forearm model increased with the angle of attack, with the maximum value of the force coefficient corresponding to an angle of attack of 90°. The drag coefficient obtained the highest value at an orientation of the hand plane in which the model was directly perpendicular to the direction of the flow. An important contribution of the lift coefficient was observed at an angle of attack of 45°, which could have an important role in the overall propulsive force production of the hand and forearm in swimming phases, when the angle of attack is near 45°.Lif

A 2MASS Analysis of the Stability of Southern Bok Globules

We used near-infrared 2MASS data to construct visual extinction maps of a sample of Southern Bok globules utilizing the NICE method. We derived radial extinction profiles of dense cores identified in the globules and analyzed their stability against gravitational collapse with isothermal Bonnor-Ebert spheres. The frequency distribution of the stability parameter xi_max of these cores shows that a large number of them are located in stable states, followed by an abrupt decrease of cores in unstable states. This decrease is steeper for globules with associated IRAS point sources than for starless globules. Moreover, globules in stable states have a Bonnor-Ebert temperature of T = 15 +- 6 K, while the group of critical plus unstable globules has a different temperature of T = 10 +- 3 K. Distances were estimated to all the globules studied in this work and the spectral class of the IRAS sources was calculated. No variations were found in the stability parameters of the cores and the spectral class of their associated IRAS sources. On the basis of 13CO J = 1-0 molecular line observations, we identified and modeled a blue-assymetric line profile toward a globule of the sample, obtaining an upper limit infall speed of 0.25 km/s.Comment: 53 pages, 15 figures, accepted for publication in Ap