Publications by authors named "Castro N"

High-energy nuclear collisions create a quark-gluon plasma, whose initial condition and subsequent expansion vary from event to event, impacting the distribution of the eventwise average transverse momentum [P([p_{T}])]. Disentangling the contributions from fluctuations in the nuclear overlap size (geometrical component) and other sources at a fixed size (intrinsic component) remains a challenge. This problem is addressed by measuring the mean, variance, and skewness of P([p_{T}]) in ^{208}Pb+^{208}Pb and ^{129}Xe+^{129}Xe collisions at sqrt[s_{NN}]=5.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Motivation is of great importance in the teaching-learning process, because motivated students seek out opportunities and show interest and enthusiasm in carrying out their tasks. The objective of this review is to identify and present the information available in the literature on the status quo of motivation among nursing program entrants. This is a qualitative scoping review study, a type of literature review designed to map out and find evidence to address a specific research objective, following the Joanna Briggs Institute methodology.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objectives: to analyze the possibilities and potential of training indigenous nurses, given the Brazilian Health System (SUS), understanding the relationships between education and health.

Methods: theoretical-reflective study, based on scientific literature, aligned with the experience, critical thinking of its authors and the Sustainable Development Goals in Brazil.

Results: this text articulates three axes: Potential for including indigenous students in nursing training; Paths to achieving equity through inclusion and retention policies for indigenous students at different levels; and Implications of this for the SUS and global health.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background And Aims: Genomic changes triggered by polyploidy, chromosomal rearrangements, and/ or environmental stress are among factors that affect the activity of mobile elements, particularly Long Terminal Repeats Retrotransposons (LTR-RTs) and DNA transposons. Because these elements can proliferate and move throughout host genomes, altering the genetic, epigenetic and nucleotypic landscape, they have been recognized as a relevant evolutionary force. Beaksedges (Rhynchospora) stand out for their wide cosmopolitan distribution, high diversity (~400 spp.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Exfoliation Syndrome (XFS) is an age-related condition affecting the eye, leading to the accumulation of fibrillar materials that can cause Exfoliation Glaucoma (XFG), a form of secondary open-angle glaucoma.
  • XFG is linked to neurodegenerative disease features and characterized by mitochondrial dysfunction, including impaired energy production and increased reactive oxygen species (ROS) in affected cells.
  • Research shows that treating XFG patient-derived cells with agents like Urolithin A and Nicotinamide Ribose can help improve mitochondrial function and reduce ROS, suggesting a potential therapeutic approach for XFG.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Literature indicates a potential association between dairy consumption and risk of Parkinson´s disease (PD), especially among men, yet the results remain inconclusive. We investigated this association in a large prospective European cohort. Dietary and non-dietary data was collected from 183,225 participants of the EPIC-for-Neurodegenerative-Diseases (EPIC4ND) cohort, a sub-cohort of the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) cohort.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Diabetic retinopathy is a leading cause of vision loss in working adults, with disproportionate impact on women with lowered estrogen. Sex hormones and their receptors are significant to neuroprotection of the inner blood-retinal barrier (iBRB), a tissue that regulates transport across the neuroretina and vasculature. Moreover, high glucose levels in diabetes lead to the formation of advanced glycation end products (AGEs), which promote inflammation and iBRB breakdown to result in vision loss.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Emerging in vivo evidence suggests that repeated muscle contraction, or exercise, impacts peripheral nerves. However, the difficulty of isolating the muscle-specific impact on motor neurons in vivo, as well as the inability to decouple the biochemical and mechanical impacts of muscle contraction in this setting, motivates investigating this phenomenon in vitro. This study demonstrates that tuning the mechanical properties of fibrin enables longitudinal culture of highly contractile skeletal muscle monolayers, enabling functional characterization of and long-term secretome harvesting from exercised tissues.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Seven species of lichens were collected from Arequipa, Peru, and analyzed for their usnic acid (UA) and fatty acid (FA) content using advanced chromatography techniques.
  • The study evaluated the antimicrobial properties of these lichen extracts against various bacterial strains, along with their antioxidant capacities through multiple assays.
  • Results indicated that one lichen species showed potential as a source of antimicrobial metabolites, while another exhibited significant antioxidant activity due to its high polyphenol content.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A search for the exclusive hadronic decays W^{±}→π^{±}γ, W^{±}→K^{±}γ, and W^{±}→ρ^{±}γ is performed using up to 140  fb^{-1} of proton-proton collisions recorded with the ATLAS detector at a center-of-mass energy of sqrt[s]=13  TeV. If observed, these rare processes would provide a unique test bench for the quantum chromodynamics factorization formalism used to calculate cross sections at colliders. Additionally, at future colliders, these decays could offer a new way to measure the W boson mass through fully reconstructed decay products.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • - The ATLAS experiment at the LHC conducted a search for long-lived particles (LLPs) using a large dataset (140 fb^{-1}) from proton-proton collisions at 13 TeV, focusing on LLPs with masses from 5 to 55 GeV that decay within the inner detector.
  • - The study considered scenarios where LLPs are produced from exotic Higgs boson decays and models involving axionlike particles (ALPs).
  • - No significant findings above expected background levels were detected, leading to the establishment of upper limits on various production rates involving the Higgs boson and the top quark related to LLPs and ALPs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Serology testing is vital for assessing the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines and detecting past infections by measuring antibodies against SARS-CoV-2.
  • This study validated four laboratory-developed serology tests for antibodies (IgG and IgM) against Spike and Nucleocapsid proteins, ensuring they met strict Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI) guidelines for reliability.
  • Results showed good linearity and precision across the tests, demonstrating their validity for identifying levels of antibodies, which is crucial for ongoing COVID-19 research and management.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Thousands of phonological word forms known to a speaker can be organised as a lexical network using the tools of network science. In these networks, nodes represent words and edges are placed between phonological neighbours. Previous work has shown that phonological networks of various languages have similar macrolevel network properties.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates the associated production of Higgs and W bosons, focusing on how the relative signs of the Higgs couplings to W and Z bosons impact the process.
  • Two specific searches were conducted using large amounts of collision data from the LHC to analyze different coupling scenarios: one for opposite-sign couplings and another for same-sign (standard model-like) couplings.
  • The results significantly exclude the opposite-sign coupling hypothesis and set a strict upper limit on the production rate of this process compared to standard model predictions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The Hodgkin lymphoma International Study for Individual Care (HoLISTIC) Consortium's A-HIPI model, developed in 2022 for advanced-stage classical Hodgkin lymphoma (cHL), predicts survival within 5 years amongst newly diagnosed patients. This study validates its performance in the Brazilian Hodgkin lymphoma registry. By 2022, the Brazilian HL registry included 1357 cHL patients, with a median 5-year follow-up.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Increasing the mechanical strength of stainless steel is fundamental to expanding its applications and extending its useful life, especially due to its impressive corrosion resistance. However, many processes that make possible increasing the hardness and wear resistance of these steels also compromise their performance when they are subjected to corrosive environments. Because of the need to increase surface hardness without jeopardizing corrosion resistance, this study explores the impact of a surface mechanical rolling treatment (SMRT) with volumetric reductions of 50% and 70%, together with high-temperature plasma nitriding (PN) (450, 500, and 550 °C), on 316L steel.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Purpose: Determining the prognosis of aphasia recovery is an important task for clinicians in the rehabilitation of persons with aphasia. Although there are many variables identified as impactful to aphasia recovery, it is less clear (a) how clinicians perceive causality in aphasia rehabilitation and (b) how prognostic variables interact with each other. This study aimed to understand causal relations between prognostic variables from the clinician perspective.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Many studies have demonstrated the excellent performance of 10-MDP (10-methacryloyloxydecyl dihydrogen phosphate) as a functional monomer for dental adhesive materials and as a primer for ceramic surfaces. Although adhesive performance is affected by the purity level of 10-MDP, this parameter is rarely described, and possible byproducts have been suggested in the literature, but have not been identified to date. The present study aims to present an accessible 10-MDP synthesis strategy with easily handled reagents and address the characterization challenges, especially in identifying byproducts.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • A study assessed the impact of 12 modifiable risk factors related to dementia across seven Latin American countries, revealing that about 54% of dementia cases could be attributed to these risks.
  • Data was collected from over 100,000 individuals in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Honduras, Mexico, and Peru between 2015 and 2021, focusing on factors like education, hearing loss, and lifestyle choices.
  • The findings highlighted that obesity, physical inactivity, and depression were the leading contributors to dementia risk in these countries, indicating a higher population-attributable fraction compared to global estimates.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This Letter presents results from a combination of searches for Higgs boson pair production using 126-140  fb^{-1} of proton-proton collision data at sqrt[s]=13  TeV recorded with the ATLAS detector. At 95% confidence level (CL), the upper limit on the production rate is 2.9 times the standard model (SM) prediction, with an expected limit of 2.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This Letter presents the first study of the energy dependence of diboson polarization fractions in WZ→ℓνℓ^{'}ℓ^{'}(ℓ,ℓ^{'}=e,μ) production. The dataset used corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 140  fb^{-1} of proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV recorded by the ATLAS detector. Two fiducial regions with an enhanced presence of events featuring two longitudinally polarized bosons are defined.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

 To identify the factors related to sleep duration in 3-month-old infants.  From 2021 to 2023, we conducted a cross-sectional study in the city of Araraquara, Brazil, involving 140 mothers and their respective 3-month-old infants. Maternal socioeconomic, demographic, obstetric, and nutritional characteristics, as well as nutritional and morbidity characteristics of the respective infants, were evaluated.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Fluctuations in genomic repetitive fractions (repeatome) are known to impact several facets of evolution, such as ecological adaptation and speciation processes. Therefore, investigating the divergence of repetitive elements can provide insights into an important evolutionary force. However, it is not clear how the different repetitive element clades are impacted by the different factors such as ecological changes and/or phylogeny.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Derivatives of the potassium-sparing diuretic amiloride are preferentially cytotoxic toward tumor cells relative to normal cells, and have the capacity to target tumor cell populations resistant to currently employed therapeutic agents. However, a major barrier to clinical translation of the amilorides is their modest cytotoxic potency, with estimated IC values in the high micromolar range. Here we report the synthesis of ten novel amiloride derivatives and the characterization of their cytotoxic potency toward MCF7 (ER/PR-positive), SKBR3 (HER2-positive) and MDA-MB-231 (triple negative) cell line models of breast cancer.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • - The study analyzed mucormycosis cases over 15 years at a French center, reviewing medical records and introducing qPCR for better diagnosis in 2015.
  • - A total of 77 patients were examined, primarily with hematological diseases, and common infection sites included the lungs and sinuses. Diagnosis was challenging, with qPCR aiding in 30% of cases.
  • - The overall survival rate was low at 40%, but combining surgical and antifungal treatments significantly improved patient outcomes, particularly for those with hematological issues and burns.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF