Suchergebnisse

Klappentext: O que motiva os portugueses e os brasileiros a interessarem-se, tão amiúde, sobre as suas vivências recíprocas? Em que lugar da História se fundaram as suas afinidades e também as suas divergências? Como se desenvolveram e manifestaram as perceções culturais sobre uns e sobre outros? Os relacionamentos perenes entre os dois povos originaram processos de tipificação mútuos, ancorados numa experiência humana e cultural de encontros e de desencontros que, simultaneamente, criaram laços e discórdias ao longo da sua existência. Na segunda metade do século XIX, a exponenciação da imprensa escrita e a sua circulação através do Atlântico fizeram surgir um manancial de informação e de autores, que alimentaram as imagens construídas de uns sobre os outros e cujas expressões ainda hoje se refletem na nossa vivência quotidiana comum.

Chapter 1- Introduction -- Chapter 2- Policy formulation, Morality issues and Euthanasia: A Literature Review -- Chapter 3- The parliamentary debate on euthanasia in Portugal: a tale in six rounds. -Chapter 4-. Ayes or Nos: Positions and used arguments by Political Parties at the Parliamentary debates. -Chapter 5- . The (un)used consultation processes: positions and arguments from Organizational Experts -- Chapter 6.-Does my voice also count? Positions and arguments during by Interest Groups in the parliamentary debate -- Chapter 7- The extra-parliamentary public debate on Euthanasia: positions expressed by the hierarchy of the Portuguese Catholic church and in the written media -- Chapter 8- Advocacy Coalitions in the debate on euthanasia -- Chapter 9- Conclusions .

Mobile robot competitions are events well suited to experimentation, research and development in many areas concerned with science and technology, ranging from material science to artificial intelligence. Aware of this fact, and for several years now, some Portuguese Universities have been involving some of their Engineering and Computer Science students in such contests, namely those of international level. The performance has been improving both in terms of the results and prizes obtained and the increasingly elaborate technical solutions developed by the teams. The importance recognised in these events has led the authors to submit to the Portuguese Government a proposal for an annual Festival of this kind in Portugal. This paper points out the advances in research, technology and education, which result from this type of ...

Wireless radio links deployed over aquatic areas (e.g., sea, estuaries or harbors) are affected by the conductive properties of the water surface, strengthening signal reflections and increasing interference effects. Recurrent natural phenomena such as tides or waves cause shifts in the water level that, in turn, change the interference patterns and cause varying impairments to propagation over water surfaces. In this work, we aim at mitigating the detrimental impact of tides on the quality of a line-of-sight over-water link between an onshore station and a surface node, targeting mission data transfer scenarios. We consider different types of surface nodes, namely, autonomous underwater vehicles, unmanned surface vehicles and buoys, and we use WiFi technology in both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz frequency bands. We propose two methods for link distance/height design: (i) identifying a proper Tx-Rx distance for improved link quality at each point of the tidal cycle; (ii) defining the height/distance that minimizes the path loss averaged during the whole tidal cycle.Experimental results clearly show the validity of our link quality model and the interest of method (i). Analytical results confirm method (ii) and show that it outperforms, in both frequency bands, the common practice of placing onshore antennas at the largest possible height and/or surface nodes at a short but arbitrary distance. ; This work was partially supported by National Funds through FCT/MCTES (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology), within the CISTER Research Unit (UIDP/UIDB/04234/2020) and by FCT through the European Social Fund (ESF) and the Regional Operational Programme (ROP) Norte 2020, under grant 2020.06685.BD, as well as by the European Union's Horizon 2020 Marine robotics research infrastructure network project under grant agreement No 731103. This support is gratefully acknowledged. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Machado-Joseph disease (MJD), also known as spinocerebellar ataxia type 3, is the most common of the dominantly inherited ataxias worldwide and is characterized by mutant ataxin-3 aggregation and neuronal degeneration. There is no treatment available to block or delay disease progression. In this work we investigated whether trehalose, a natural occurring disaccharide widely used in food and cosmetic industry, would rescue biochemical, behavioral and neuropathological features of an in vitro and of a severe MJD transgenic mouse model. ; This work was funded by BioBlast Pharma, the ERDF through the Regional Operational Program Center 2020, Competitiveness Factors Operational Program (COMPETE 2020) and National Funds through FCT (Foundation for Science and Technology) - SFRH/BD/87404/2012, BrainHealth2020 projects (CENTRO-01-0145-FEDER-000008), ViraVector (CENTRO-01-0145FEDER-022095), CortaCAGs (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-016719), SpreadSilenc‑ing POCI-01-0145-FEDER-029716 and POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007440, as well as the SynSpread, ESMI and ModelPolyQ under the EU Joint ProgramNeurodegenerative Disease Research (JPND), the last two co-funded bythe European Union H2020 program, GA No. 643417; by National Ataxia Foundation (USA), the American Portuguese Biomedical Research Fund (APBRF) and the Richard Chin and Lily Lock Machado–Joseph Disease Research Fund. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

We thank group members from MBI Rene-Marc Mege and W.J. Nelson for helpful discussions. We also thank MBI Microfabrication (Gianluca Grenci and Mohammed Asraf), MBI Science Communication Core (Larisa Bulavina, Andrew Wong and Steven Wolf) and MBI Microscopy Core (Felix Margadant) for continuous support. We are grateful to S. Yonemura and W.J. Nelson for their generous gift of MDCK cell lines and to Michael W. Davidson and Pakorn Kanchanawong for mApple-paxillin plasmid. Financial supports from the Human Frontier Science Program (grant RGP0040/2012), the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC grant agreement no. 617233, Agence Nationale pour la Recherche project REGENR (grant ANR-11-BSV5-0021), Pessoa programme (project 30920XM) and the Mechanobiology Institute are gratefully acknowledged. XT acknowledges Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (BFU2012-38146), the Generalitat de Catalunya (2014-SGR-927), and the European Research Council (CoG-616480). B.L. acknowledges the Institut Universitaire de France and T.C. the USPC-NUS agreement for his fellowship. ; Closure of wounds and gaps in tissues is fundamental for the correct development and physiology of multicellular organisms and, when misregulated, may lead to inflammation and tumorigenesis. To re-establish tissue integrity, epithelial cells exhibit coordinated motion into the void by active crawling on the substrate and by constricting a supracellular actomyosin cable. Coexistence of these two mechanisms strongly depends on the environment. However, the nature of their coupling remains elusive because of the complexity of the overall process. Here we demonstrate that epithelial gap geometry in both in vitro and in vivo regulates these collective mechanisms. In addition, the mechanical coupling between actomyosin cable contraction and cell crawling acts as a large-scale regulator to control the dynamics of gap closure. Finally, our computational modelling clarifies the respective roles of the two mechanisms during this process, providing a robust and universal mechanism to explain how epithelial tissues restore their integrity. ; publishersversion ; published

Background: Lifestyle could influence the course of hereditary ataxias, but representative data are missing. Objective: The objective of this study was to characterize lifestyle in spinocerebellar ataxia type 3 (SCA3) and investigate possible associations with disease parameters. Methods: In a prospective cohort study, data on smoking, alcohol consumption, physical activity, physiotherapy, and body mass index (BMI) were collected from 243 patients with SCA3 and 119 controls and tested for associations with age of onset, disease severity, and progression. Results: Compared with controls, patients with SCA3 were less active and consumed less alcohol. Less physical activity and alcohol abstinence were associated with more severe disease, but not with progression rates or age of onset. Smoking, BMI, or physiotherapy did not correlate with disease parameters. Conclusion: Differences in lifestyle factors of patients with SCA3 and controls as well as associations of lifestyle factors with disease severity are likely driven by the influence of symptoms on behavior. No association between lifestyle and disease progression was detected. © 2021 The Authors. Movement Disorders published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society ; Funding agencies: This publication is an outcome of the European Spinocerebellar ataxia type 3/Machado-Joseph disease initiative (ESMI), an EU Joint Programme–Neurodegenerative Disease Research (JPND) project (see www.jpnd.eu). The project is supported through the following funding organizations under the aegis of JPND: Germany, Federal Ministry of Education and Research (funding codes 01ED1602A/B); The Netherlands, The Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development; Portugal, Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT); United Kingdom, Medical Research Council. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Grant 643417. At the US sites, this work was in part supported by the National Ataxia Foundation and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke Grant R01 NS080816. P.G. is supported by the National Institute for Health Research University College London Hospitals (UCLH) Biomedical Research Centre. P.G. receives also support from the North Thames Clinical Research Network (CRN). P.G. and H.G.M. work at University College London Hospitals/University College London, which receives a proportion of funding from the Department of Health's National Institute for Health Research Biomedical Research Centres funding scheme. P.G. received funding from CureSCA3 in support of H.G.M.'s work. This work was moreover supported, in part, by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) No. 441409627, as part of the Progression chart of Spastic ataxias (PROSPAX) consortium under the frame of the European Joint Programme on Rare Diseases (EJP RD), under the EJP RD COFUND-EJP N 825575 (to M.S., B.v.W,) and Grant 779257 "Solve-RD" from the Horizon 2020 research and innovation program to M.S.