Publications by authors named "Alex De Carvalho"

SARS-CoV-2 diagnostic tests have become an important tool for pandemic control. Among the alternatives for COVID-19 diagnosis, antigen rapid diagnostic tests (Ag-RDT) are very convenient and widely used. However, as SARS-CoV-2 variants may continuously emerge, the replacement of tests and reagents may be required to maintain the sensitivity of Ag-RDTs.

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  • * A study analyzed 12 cases over five years, revealing that most patients (average age 53) had ganglion cysts, with the surgical removal consistently performed from the dorsal side.
  • * Due to the complexity of the anatomy and variety of potential diagnoses, thorough preoperative planning and advanced imaging are essential for effective surgery.
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In 'Being pragmatic about syntactic bootstrapping', Hacquard (2022) argues that abstract syntax is useful for word learning, but that an additional cue, pragmatics, is both necessary and available for young children during the first steps of language acquisition. She focuses on modals and attitude verbs, where the physical context seems particularly impoverished as the sole basis for deriving meanings, and thus where linguistic cues may be particularly helpful. She convincingly shows how pragmatic and syntactic cues could be combined to help young language learners learn and infer the possible meanings of attitude verbs such as "think", "know" or "want".

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  • The study investigates the spread of the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 in Minas Gerais, Brazil, highlighting its introduction and dominance, which reached 70% of cases within 8 weeks during mid 2021.
  • Using PCR genotyping and genome sequencing, it is shown that Delta is more transmissible than the earlier Gamma variant, but this increase in transmissibility did not lead to a rise in cases or deaths, likely due to vaccination efforts.
  • The research also identifies Rio de Janeiro as the primary source for the Delta variant's spread in Minas Gerais, suggesting effective control measures despite the heightened transmissibility of the variant.
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This work aims to investigate French children's ability to use phrasal boundaries for disambiguation of a type of ambiguity not yet studied, namely stripping sentences versus simple transitive sentences. We used stripping sentences such as "[Le tigre tape]! [Le canard aussi]!" ("[The tiger is hitting]! [The duck too]!", in which both the tiger and the duck are hitting), which, without the prosodic information, would be ambiguous with a transitive sentence such as "[Le tigre] [tape le canard aussi]!" ("[The tiger] [is hitting the duck too]!", in which the tiger is hitting the duck). We presented 3-to-4-year-olds and 28-month-olds with one of the two types of sentence above, while they watched two videos side-by-side on a screen: one depicting the transitive interpretation of the sentences, and another depicting the stripping interpretation.

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Two word-learning experiments were conducted to investigate the understanding of negative sentences in 18- and 24-month-old children. In Experiment 1, after learning that bamoule means "penguin" and pirdaling means "cartwheeling," 18-month-olds (n = 48) increased their looking times when listening to negative sentences rendered false by their visual context ("Look! It is not a bamoule!" while watching a video showing a penguin cartwheeling); however, they did not change their looking behavior when negative sentences were rendered true by their context ("Look! It is not pirdaling!" while watching a penguin spinning). In Experiment 2, 24-month-olds (n = 48) were first exposed to a teaching phase in which they saw a new cartoon character on a television (e.

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  • Nitazoxanide was tested in a study to see its effects on COVID-19 patients, but it didn’t improve symptom resolution compared to a placebo.
  • The trial involved 392 patients who received either nitazoxanide or a placebo, with findings showing a significant reduction in viral load for those on nitazoxanide.
  • Overall, while nitazoxanide didn’t alleviate symptoms within 5 days, it was found to be safe and effective in lowering the amount of virus present in the body.
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Because linguistic communication is often noisy and uncertain, adults flexibly rely on different information sources during sentence processing. We tested whether toddlers engage in a similar process and how that process interacts with verb learning. Across two experiments, we presented French 28-month-olds with right-dislocated sentences featuring a novel verb ("He is VERBing, the boy"), where a clear prosodic boundary after the verb indicates that the sentence is intransitive (such that the NP "the boy" is coreferential with the pronoun "he" and the sentence means "The boy is VERBing").

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Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. But how do they learn which contexts are linked to which semantic features in the first place? We investigate if 3- to 4-year-old children (n = 60) can learn about a syntactic context from tracking its use with only a few familiar words. After watching a 5-min training video in which a novel function word (i.

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Free functional muscle transfer (FFMT) is a salvage procedure recommended in cases of brachial plexus injury with late presentations or failures of primary nerve reconstruction. The workhorse for most authors is the gracilis, and the most common indication is the restoration of elbow flexion. For successful revascularization of the muscle, donor vessels must be in proximity of the site of the muscle fixation and allow direct coaptation to a donor nerve, ideally without the use of nerve grafts.

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One of the major challenges in Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus L.) farming is the occurrence of bacterial infections, and the Francisella noatunensis subsp. orientalis (FNO) is an important pathogen that has emerged in last decades.

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Decades of research show that children rely on the linguistic context in which novel words occur to infer their meanings. However, because learning in these studies was assessed after children had heard numerous occurrences of a novel word in informative linguistic contexts, it is impossible to determine how much exposure would be needed for a child to learn from such information. This study investigated the speed with which French 20-month-olds and 3-to-4-year-olds exploit function words to determine the syntactic category of novel words and therefore infer their meanings.

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  • Language acquisition is crucial yet challenging for infants, particularly in learning word meanings and understanding syntax (how words combine into sentences).
  • Two important cues that assist infants in grasping syntax and enhancing their vocabulary are phrasal prosody (the melody of speech) and function words (like "the" or "and").
  • Research shows that 18-month-old infants can use these cues to determine the syntactic structure of sentences, which helps them deduce the meanings of new words based on their positions in those structures.
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Francisella noatunensis subsp. orientalis (FNO) is an important emerging pathogen associated with disease outbreaks in farm-raised Nile tilapia. FNO genetic diversity using PCR-based typing, no intra-species discrimination was achieved among isolates/strains from different countries, thus demonstrating a clonal behaviour pattern.

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Adults create and update predictions about what speakers will say next. This study asks whether prediction can drive language acquisition, by testing whether 3- to 4-year-old children (n = 45) adapt to recent information when learning novel words. The study used a syntactic context which can precede both nouns and verbs to manipulate children's predictions about what syntactic category will follow.

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This study examined whether phrasal prosody can impact toddlers' syntactic analysis. French noun-verb homophones were used to create locally ambiguous test sentences (e.g.

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Scalar implicatures, the phenomena where a sentence like "The pianist played Mozart sonatas" is interpreted, as "The pianist did play Mozart sonatas" have been given two different analyses. Neo-Griceans (NG) claim that this interpretation is based on lexical scales (e.g.

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To comprehend language, listeners need to encode the relationship between words within sentences. This entails categorizing words into their appropriate word classes. Function words, consistently preceding words from specific categories (e.

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This study tested American preschoolers' ability to use phrasal prosody to constrain their syntactic analysis of locally ambiguous sentences containing noun/verb homophones (e.g., [The baby flies] [hide in the shadows] vs [The baby] [flies his kite], brackets indicate prosodic boundaries).

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The epidemiology of Clostridium difficile infections is highly dynamic as new strains continue to emerge worldwide. Here we present a detailed analysis of a new C. difficile strain (ICC-45) recovered from a cancer patient in Brazil that died from severe diarrhea.

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Streptococcus agalactiae, also referred to as Group B Streptococcus, is a frequent resident of the rectovaginal tract in humans, and a major cause of neonatal infection. The pathogen can also infect adults with underlying disease, particularly the elderly and immunocompromised ones. In addition, S.

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Background: Studies have detected mis-assemblies in genomes of the species Corynebacterium pseudotuberculosis. These new discover have been possible due to the evolution of the Next-Generation Sequencing platforms, which have provided sequencing with accuracy and reduced costs. In addition, the improving of techniques for construction of high accuracy genomic maps, for example, Whole-genome mapping (WGM) (OpGen Inc), have allow high-resolution assembly that can detect large rearrangements.

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The genus Francisella is composed of Gram-negative, pleomorphic, strictly aerobic and non-motile bacteria, which are capable of infecting a variety of terrestrial and aquatic animals, among which Francisella noatunensis subsp. orientalis stands out as the causative agent of pyogranulomatous and granulomatous infections in fish. Accordingly, F.

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Leprosy, an infectious disease caused by Mycobacterium leprae, affects millions of people worldwide. However, little is known regarding its molecular pathophysiological mechanisms. In this study, a comprehensive assessment of human mRNA was performed on leprosy skin lesions by using DNA chip microarrays, which included the entire spectrum of the disease along with its reactional states.

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Oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) is the most common tumor of the oral cavity and has been associated with poor prognosis. Scarce prognostic markers are available for guiding treatment and/or sub-classifying patients. This study aims to identify biomarkers by searching for genes whose expression is increased or decreased during tumor progression (through T1 to T4 stages).

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