Publications by authors named "Rafael Fernandez"

Mercury (Hg) is a global pollutant with substantial risks to human and ecosystem health. By upward transport in tropical regions, mercury enters into the stratosphere, but the contribution of the stratosphere to global mercury dispersion and deposition remains unknown. We find that between 5 and 50% (passing through the 400-kelvin isentropic surface and tropopause, respectively) of the mercury mass deposited on Earth's surface is chemically processed in the lower stratosphere.

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Unlabelled: Understanding how mechanical stimulation from exercise influences cellular responses during tissue repair could enhance therapeutic strategies. We explored zebrafish caudal fin regeneration to study exercise impacts on a robust model of tissue regeneration. We used a swim tunnel to determine that exercise initiated during but not after blastema establishment impaired fin regeneration, including of the bony ray skeleton.

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Ocean-emitted dimethyl sulfide (DMS) is a major source of climate-cooling aerosols. However, most of the marine biogenic sulfur cycling is not routed to DMS but to methanethiol (MeSH), another volatile whose reactivity has hitherto hampered measurements. Therefore, the global emissions and climate impact of MeSH remain unexplored.

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  • Biomass burning (BB) produces harmful gases and particles that affect air quality and climate, but scientists haven't focused much on chlorine emissions from this process.
  • A study from 2001 to 2018 found that Asia released a lot of chlorine from BB, especially China, Myanmar, and India, and that this can change with farming practices.
  • The research showed that burning biomass increases chlorine levels in the air, which affects other important chemicals, making BB a bigger player in air pollution than we thought.
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  • * This reduction is due to the movement of ozone-poor and halogen-rich air from the Arctic, which impacts ozone levels further south by decreasing the overall tropospheric ozone column by around 4%.
  • * Comparatively, the current effect of Arctic halogens on ozone reduction is less significant than it was in preindustrial times, highlighting a complex relationship between human pollution and natural halogen contributions that should be better represented in global climate models.
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Purpose: Studies integrating an exhaustive longitudinal long-term follow-up of postintensive care syndrome (PICS) in critically ill COVID-19 survivors are scarce. We aimed to 1) describe PICS-related sequelae over a 12-month period after intensive care unit (ICU) discharge, 2) identify relevant demographic and clinical factors related to PICS, and 3) explore how PICS-related sequelae may influence health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in critically ill COVID-19 survivors.

Methods: We conducted a prospective cohort study in adult critically ill survivors of SARS-CoV-2 infection that did or did not need invasive mechanical ventilation (IMV) during the COVID-19 pandemic in Spain (March 2020 to January 2021).

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Background: In standard weaning from mechanical ventilation, a successful spontaneous breathing test (SBT) consisting of 30 min 8 cmHO pressure-support ventilation (PSV8) without positive end-expiratory pressure (PEEP) is followed by extubation with continuous suctioning; however, these practices might promote derecruitment. Evidence supports the feasibility and safety of extubation without suctioning. Ultrasound can assess lung aeration and respiratory muscles.

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Objectives: When dental practitioners encounter a defective restoration, they are faced with a crucial decision whether to repair or replace it. This study aims to explore international preferences for repair procedures and the clinical steps taken during the repair process.

Method: An 11-question survey was distributed to dentists across 21 countries via different platforms.

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Background: Patients with obesity are at increased risk of postoperative pulmonary complications. CPAP has been used successfully to prevent and treat acute respiratory failure, but in many clinical scenarios, high-flow nasal cannula (HFNC) therapy is emerging as a possible alternative. We aimed to compare HFNC and CPAP in a sequential study measuring their effects on gas exchange, lung volumes, and gas distribution within the lungs measured through electrical impedance tomography (EIT).

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Tropospheric reactive bromine is important for atmospheric chemistry, regional air pollution, and global climate. Previous studies have reported measurements of atmospheric reactive bromine species in different environments, and proposed their main sources, e.g.

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Background: Flow starvation is a type of patient-ventilator asynchrony that occurs when gas delivery does not fully meet the patients' ventilatory demand due to an insufficient airflow and/or a high inspiratory effort, and it is usually identified by visual inspection of airway pressure waveform. Clinical diagnosis is cumbersome and prone to underdiagnosis, being an opportunity for artificial intelligence. Our objective is to develop a supervised artificial intelligence algorithm for identifying airway pressure deformation during square-flow assisted ventilation and patient-triggered breaths.

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Mercury (Hg) is a contaminant of global concern, and an accurate understanding of its atmospheric fate is needed to assess its risks to humans and ecosystem health. Atmospheric oxidation of Hg is key to the deposition of this toxic metal to the Earth's surface. Short-lived halogens (SLHs) can provide halogen radicals to directly oxidize Hg and perturb the budget of other Hg oxidants (e.

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Although mechanisms of telomere protection are well-defined in differentiated cells, how stem cells sense and respond to telomere dysfunction, in particular telomeric double-strand breaks (DSBs), is poorly characterized. Here, we report the DNA damage signaling, cell cycle, and transcriptome changes in human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) in response to telomere-internal DSBs. We engineer human iPSCs with an inducible TRF1-FokI fusion protein to acutely induce DSBs at telomeres.

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  • Active chlorine in the atmosphere affects methane oxidation, leading to uncertainty in methane budget assessments globally due to limited understanding of its production and role.
  • A new photocatalytic mechanism suggests chlorine atoms are produced when Sahara dust interacts with sea spray aerosol, validated through modeling and explaining long-standing observations of carbon depletion in air samples from Barbados and the CO:ethane ratio at Cape Verde.
  • Increased chlorine production, particularly in the North Atlantic, alters methane budget models and can lead to miscalculations in methane emissions from biological sources like agriculture and wetlands, complicating our understanding of recent methane increases linked to North African dust emissions.
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  • Atmospheric methane is a significant greenhouse gas with both natural and human-made sources, and adding chlorine to the atmosphere has been suggested as a way to reduce methane's impact on global warming.
  • Research indicates that to effectively lower methane levels by specific targets (20%, 45%, or 70% by 2050), a substantial increase in chlorine emissions (from 630 to 1880 Tg Cl/year) is required due to the non-linear nature of atmospheric chemistry.
  • The proposed increase in chlorine emissions could lead to a decrease in surface temperature by up to 0.6 °C by 2050, but careful consideration of the environmental implications, including air quality and ocean acidity, is essential before proceeding with this approach.
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  • Ocean-emitted short-lived halogens are common in the atmosphere, and their natural emissions have increased due to human activities since pre-industrial times, along with added human-made halocarbons.
  • These halogens have a significant indirect cooling effect on Earth's radiative balance, calculated at about -0.13 watts per square meter, influenced primarily by their effects on ozone and moderated by methane and aerosols.
  • This cooling effect has risen by 61% since 1750 and is expected to change by 18-31% by 2100, highlighting the need to include short-lived halogens in climate models for better predictions of the climate system.
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Background & Aims: Dyskeratosis congenita (DC) is a telomere biology disorder caused primarily by mutations in the DKC1 gene. Patients with DC and related telomeropathies resulting from premature telomere dysfunction experience multiorgan failure. In the liver, DC patients present with nodular hyperplasia, steatosis, inflammation, and cirrhosis.

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  • This study investigated the safety and tolerability of a treatment combining ruxolitinib, nilotinib, and prednisone in patients with myelofibrosis (MF) who were either naïve or resistant to ruxolitinib.
  • A total of 15 patients participated, with the majority having prior ruxolitinib treatment; most experienced adverse events, particularly hyperglycemia, although no deaths occurred and the combination showed acceptable tolerability.
  • At Cycle 7, 27% of patients had significant spleen size reductions, indicating the treatment demonstrated relevant clinical activity in MF cases.
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Background: Intensive Care Unit (ICU) COVID-19 survivors may present long-term cognitive and emotional difficulties after hospital discharge. This study aims to characterize the neuropsychological dysfunction of COVID-19 survivors 12 months after ICU discharge, and to study whether the use of a measure of perceived cognitive deficit allows the detection of objective cognitive impairment. We also explore the relationship between demographic, clinical and emotional factors, and both objective and subjective cognitive deficits.

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  • Reactive trace gas emissions like benzene and toluene from polar oceans impact atmospheric chemistry and climate, yet they are not well-studied.
  • Measurements in the Southern Ocean and Arctic suggest these gases have a marine biogenic source, with calculated emission fluxes.
  • Incorporating these emissions into climate models showed a significant increase in secondary organic aerosol concentrations, especially in the Southern Ocean, highlighting the need to address these emissions in climate assessments.
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As COVID-19 spread throughout the world, the hospitality and tourism sectors were hard hit as no other industry. For this reason, the UNWTO developed the One Planet Vision as a response to a sustainable recovery of the tourism sector. At present, when people are starting to travel and stay at hotels again, it is important to analyze what their expectations are of hotels to move forward in the post-pandemic era.

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The Hellmann-Feynman (HF) theorem provides a way to compute forces directly from the electron density, enabling efficient force calculations for large systems through machine learning (ML) models for the electron density. The main issue holding back the general acceptance of the HF approach for atom-centered basis sets is the well-known Pulay force which, if naively discarded, typically constitutes an error upward of 10 eV/Å in forces. In this work, we demonstrate that if a suitably augmented Gaussian basis set is used for density functional calculations, the Pulay force can be suppressed, and HF forces can be computed as accurately as analytical forces with state-of-the-art basis sets, allowing geometry optimization and molecular dynamics to be reliably performed with HF forces.

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Purpose: Proteasome inhibitors (PI) are the backbone of various treatment regimens in multiple myeloma. We recently described the first in-patient point mutations affecting the 20S subunit PSMB5 underlying PI resistance. Notably, in vivo, the incidence of mutations in PSMB5 and other proteasome encoding genes is too low to explain the development of resistance in most of the affected patients.

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