The impact of climate change on photovoltaic power potential in Southwestern Colombia.

In this paper, we present the first study of the long-term climate-change impact on photovoltaic power potential in Nariño, Colombia. In this region, more than half of the territory does not have a constant electricity supply, but it has great potential for solutions with renewable energy sources. Based on the Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX), we assess the change in photovoltaic power potential towards the end of this century, considering two climate change scenarios, one optimistic and the other pessimistic.

Prediction of site-specific solar diffuse horizontal irradiance from two input variables in Colombia.

Accurate measurements of diffuse irradiance are essential to design a solar photovoltaic system. However, in-situ radiation measurements in Colombia, South America, can be limited by the costs of the implementation of meteorological stations equipped with a pyranometer mounted on a sun tracker with a shading device, which is required to measure diffuse irradiance. Furthermore, the databases found in Colombia contain missing data, which raises the need for implementing models that are trained with very few features.

Resilient Structural Sparsity in the Design of Consensus Networks.

The consensus problem is relevant to different areas ranging from biology, social psychology, and physics to power systems and robotics. Two crucial aspects of the design of a consensus system are the implementation issues that arise in densely connected networks and the presence of malicious agents that try to cause a deviation from a synchronization state. In this article, we introduce a formulation to design the topology of a consensus network to improve its resilience to attacks while remaining sparse and consistent with the a priori structural relations between the agents.

A four-year follow-up survey of antimicrobial resistance among Acinetobacter baumannii complex from inpatients in Southern Brazil.

Objectives: To determine the trends of antimicrobial resistance for Acinetobacter baumannii complex isolates recovered from inpatients over a 4-year follow-up survey.

Methods: A total of 659 A baumannii complex isolates were recovered from hospitalized patients in Porto Alegre and its metropolitan area, Southern Brazil, from 2017 to 2020. Susceptibility profile was determined for ampicillin/sulbactam, amikacin, gentamicin, imipenem, meropenem, minocycline, polymyxin B and tigecycline.

Evaluation of a polymyxin drop test for polymyxin resistance detection among non-fermentative gram-negative rods and enterobacterales resistant to carbapenems.

To assess the performance of the drop test for polymyxin B resistance detection among Enterobacterales and non-fermentative gram-negative rods resistant to carbapenems. Seven hundred and fifteen carbapenem-resistant isolates were tested: 628 Enterobacterales species and 87 non-fermentative gram-negative rods. For the polymyxin drop test, concentrations range from 0.

Impact of the blue-carba rapid test for carbapenemase detection on turnaround time for an early therapy against Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

Background: To determine the turnaround time from a blue-carba result until a final microbiological report (bacterial identification plus antimicrobial susceptibility profile) and to infer the impact of an early therapeutic intervention based on the blue-carba results.

Methods: Pseudomonas aeruginosa isolates were recovered from hospitalized patients from Porto Alegre, Brazil, and tested by blue-carba test. Time required for a blue-carba result, right after the sample processing, was compared with those required to get final report (specie identification and antimicrobial susceptibility profile) Isolates blue-carba positive were tested by phenotypically and genotypically for Klebsiella pneumoniae carbapenemase and metallo-β-lactamase genes.

Emergence of vanA vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium in a hospital in Porto Alegre, South Brazil.

Introduction: In Porto Alegre (South Brazil), since the first VRE isolation in 2000 until the middle of the last decade, the epidemiology of enterococcal infections presented the peculiarity that, as opposed to other regions of the country, almost all VRE were E. faecalis. The aim of this study was to investigate the microbiological and epidemiological characteristics of a VRE outbreak that occurred between August 2010 and September 2011 in Porto Alegre, South Brazil.

[CA MRSA in furunculosis: case report of southern Brazil].

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), particularly isolated at hospital setting, has been identified in cutaneous infections of community patients. This paper reports a case of furunculosis from the southern Brazil. Dermatologists must be attentive to this emergent etiological diagnosis.