Questões de Inglês - Reading/Writing

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Your brain’s roughly 86 billion interconnected neurons endow it with the ability to understand the world, plan actions, and solve problems. Doing so requires the brain to incorporate all available information. By combining information from all of your body’s senses, the brain paints a picture of the world around you. Then, using inference and instinct, the brain makes sense of the picture it assembles.

The brain both makes and uses emotions, which are value judgments that help the brain respond effectively to events. It associates the pictures it assembles with feelings to form memories. Our brains store those memories, learn from them, and use that knowledge in the future. By combining all of these tools with imagination, your brain can predict future events, calculate your next move, and devise plans for future opportunities. Consciousness requires that all of these activities function normally. In other words, your brain’s trillions of connections work together to understand the world, to think about the future, and to create … you.

Available at: https://www.brainfacts.org/the-brain-facts-book. Accessed on: Aug 20, 2021.

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Insomnia

    Insomnia is the most common of all sleep complaints. Almost everyone has occasional sleepless nights, perhaps due to stress, heartburn or drinking too much caffeine or alcohol. Insomnia is a lack of sleep that occurs on a regular or frequent basis, often for no apparent reason.

    How much sleep is enough varies. Although 7 1/2 hours of sleep is about average, some people do fine on 4 or 5 hours of sleep. Other people need 9 or 10 hours a night.

    Inability to get a good night’s sleep can affect not only your energy level and mood but your health as well because sleep helps bolster your immune system. Fatigue, at any age, leads to diminished mental alertness and concentration. Lack of sleep is linked to accidents both on the road and on the job.

   About one out of three people have insomnia sometime in their life. Sleeplessness may be temporary or chronic. You don’t necessarily have to live with sleepless nights. Some simple changes in your daily routine and habits may result in better sleep.

htttp://www.mayoclinic.com.

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    There is no agent of ecological imperialism more ferocious than the wild pig. Wherever Europeans invaded, from the Americas to Australia, so did their pigs, many of which escaped into the countryside to wreak havoc. The beasts tear through native plants and animals, they spread disease, they destroy crops, and they reconstruct whole ecosystems in their wake. They’re not so much pests as they are chaos embodied.

    Now add climate change to the wild pig’s résumé of destruction. In their never-ending search for food, the pigs root through soils, churning the dirt like a farmer tills fields. Scientists already knew, to some extent, that this releases the carbon that’s locked in the soil, but researchers in Australia, New Zealand, and the US have now calculated how much soil wild pigs may be disturbing worldwide. The carbon dioxide emissions that they produce annually, the authors concluded, equal that of more than a million cars.

    It’s yet another piece of an increasingly worrisome puzzle, showing how modification of the land has — in this case, inadvertently — exacerbated climate change. “Anytime you disturb soil, you’re causing emissions,” says University of Queensland ecologist Christopher O’Bryan, lead author on a new paper describing the research in the journal Global Change Biology. “When you till soil for agriculture, for example, or you have widespread land-use change — urbanization, forest loss.”

    Given their domination of whole landscapes, pigs had to be making things worse, the researchers knew, but no one had modeled it worldwide. “We started to realize there’s a big gap at the global scale looking at this question,” O’Bryan adds.

(Matt Simon. www.wired.com, 19.07.2021. Adaptado.)

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Significant developments in a new urine test for prostate cancer

Prostate cancer is one of the most frequently diagnosed cancers among men. Although there are effective treatments, such as radiotherapy and surgery for localized prostate cancer, men diagnosed with more progressive prostate cancer have a poorer prognosis. Therefore, a sensitive and specific screening test to detect prostate cancer in its early states is urgently needed.

Currently, serum prostate specific antigen (PSA) levels and digital rectal examinations have been used as the screening and diagnostic tools for prostate cancer. However, researchers believe that a simple, non-invasive technique using urine can be a more sensitive and specific way to detect the early stages of the disease. Urine contains more than two thousand different metabolites and can provide clues to the human body’s metabolism, including the disordered metabolism of cancer cells.

Researchers in the United States have taken the opportunity to develop a new urine test for prostate cancer based on the metabolite profile and RNA sequencing found in prostate cancer-specific urine. The researchers took an approach that only required one single pass of urine, without the need for prostatic massage prior, to prove their principle that a simple urine sample could be sufficient for the identification of prostate cancer biomarkers.

Metabolic profiles of patients without cancer were taken and compared with metabolic profiles of patients with prostate cancer to identify metabolic changes and prostate cancerspecific biomarkers. The findings are the first to report a distinct prostate cancer profile from altered metabolic pathways in patient urine samples that can be differentiated between patients with normal prostates and benign prostatic hyperplasia (benign enlargement of the prostate).

The researchers conclude that their findings are a significant discovery to developing a new urine test for prostate cancer that is simple, non-invasive and convenient. The study’s proof-of-concept should be further tested and validated in larger sample sizes before it can be clinically implemented.

Adaptado de: https://medicalnewsbulletin.com/significantdevelopments-made-in-developing-a-new-urine-test-for-prostatecancer/ Acessado em 15 de novembro de 2020.