Neurofisiologia hipocampal durante sessões de sono intercaladas por exploração espacial: Reverberação do passado ou predição do futuro?

The ability to predict future rewards or threats is crucial for survival. Recent studies have addressed future event prediction by the hippocampus. Hippocampal neurons exhibit robust selectivity for spatial location. Thus, the activity of hippocampal neurons represents a cognitive map of space during navigation as well as during planning and recall. Spatial selectivity allows the hippocampus to be involved in the formation of spatial and episodic memories, including the sequential ordering of events. On the other hand, the discovery of reverberatory activity in multiple forebrain areas during slow wave and REM sleep underscored the role of sleep on the consolidation of recently acquired memory traces. To this date, there are no studies addressing whether neuronal activity in the hippocampus during sleep can predict regular environmental shifts. The aim of the present study was to investigate the activity of neuronal populations in the hippocampus during sleep sessions intercalated by spatial exploration periods, in which the location of reward changed in a predictable way. To this end, we performed the chronic implantation of 32-channel multielectrode arrays in the CA1 regions of the hippocampus in three male rats of the Wistar strain. In order to activate different neuronal subgroups at each cycle of the task, we exposed the animals to four spatial exploration sessions in a 4-arm elevated maze in which reward was delivered in a single arm per session. Reward location changed regularly at every session in a clockwise manner, traversing all the arms at the end of the daily recordings. Animals were recorded from 2-12 consecutive days. During spatial exploration of the 4-arm elevated maze, 67,5% of the recorded neurons showed firing rate differences across the maze arms. Furthermore, an average of 42% of the neurons showed increased correlation (R>0.3) between neuronal pairs in each arm. This allowed us to sort representative neuronal subgroups for each maze arm, and to analyze the activity of these subgroups across sleep sessions. We found that neuronal subgroups sorted by firing rate differences during spatial exploration sustained these differences across sleep sessions. This was not the case with neuronal subgroups sorted according to synchrony (correlation). In addition, the correlation levels between sleep sessions and waking patterns sampled in each arm were larger for the entire population of neurons than for the rate or synchrony subgroups. Neuronal activity during sleep of the entire neuronal population or subgroups did not show different correlations among the four arm mazes. On the other hand, we verified that neuronal activity during pre-exploration sleep sessions was significantly more similar to the activity patterns of the target arm than neuronal activity during pre-exploration sleep sessions. In other words, neuronal activity during sleep that precedes the task reflects more strongly the location of reward than neuronal activity during sleep that follows the task. Our results suggest that neuronal activity during sleep can predict regular environmental changes

Ausência do pai ao longo do desenvolvimento ontogenético e indicadores de desconto de futuro: uma contribuição da psicologia evolucionista

The new Evolutionary Psychology (E. P.) paradigm has been trying to understand how the human beings make their decisions over time regarding the most diverse variables, always bearing in mind that such a cognitive process is due to a complex natural selection process that occurred millions of years ago. One of the main topics discussed by this new paradigm is the issue of parental investment, i.e., the care the parents provide to an offspring at the expense of the investment into a new one. The present work sought to integrate these two topics, trying to understand how some variables modulate the process of decision making in a sample of the city of Natal, Rio Grande do Norte state. It was investigated the hypothesis that the presence of both parents, along the individual development, could signal a more favorable environment, providing clues to the individual that he could assume a competitive position at the socio-biological market. His decisions, therefore, could be guided by long-term investments with aims to obtain more robust rewards. On the contrary, those who has suffered for some moment the absence of one the parents could develop theirselves in a not so competitive way, starting to choose immediate benefits - but lesser ones -, since the future would be less predictable due to their worse development conditions. This study involved 152 individuals from three higher education institutions, one of them being public and the others being private ones. In the results found, there was no difference between children of coupled parents and children of deceased or divorced parents concerning discount rates. The levels of hopelessness did not affect the discount rates of children of single parents when compared to children of coupled parents. Not having one of the parents because of divorce made the child to tend to present lower scores in the domain of social relations of WHOQOL - Bref, whilst the absence of the father by death made the scores lower in the domain of environment. The results indicate that loosing one of the parents along the development influences the individual's quality of life perception, but the measurement method of future discounting rates by means of financial choices is not sensitive to this variation

Avaliação clínica de pacientes submetidos à colocação de implantes zigomáticos pela técnica de Stella & Warner

This study aimed to evaluate patients who underwent placement of zygomatic implants technique by Stella & Warner, considering the survival of conventional and zygomatic implants, sinus health and level of patient satisfaction in relation to oral rehabilitation. We evaluated 28 patients where 14 had received conventional and zygomatic implants, being rehabilitated with implant-fixed dentures (group 1) and 14 were rehabilitated only with conventional implants and implant-fixed dentures (group 2). The study had four phases, represented by radiographic evaluation of implants (stage I), clinical evaluation (stage II), assessing the health of the maxillary sinus (stage III) and a questionnaire to measure satisfaction of rehabilitation with fixed prosthesis implant Total -backed (stage IV). Group 2 underwent only stage IV, while group 1 participated in all stages. Descriptive analysis and statistics were performed, using the t test for independent samples in the evaluation of phase IV. The results demonstrated that the technique of Stella & Warner proved effective, allowing a high survival rate of conventional implants and zygomatic (100%), considering a minimum follow-up of 15 months and maximum 53 months after prosthetic rehabilitation. There were no pathological changes in tissues periimplants conventional and zygomatic implants analyzed. Radiographic findings showed satisfactory levels bone implants in the oral rehabilitation with conventional zygomatic implants and a good positioning of the apex of the zygomatic implants over the zygomatic bone. The presence of the zygomatic implant did not cause sinus and the t test showed a satisfaction index lower in group 1 compared with group 2. The zygomatic implant placement technique by Stella & Warner proved to be a predictable technique with high survival rate in patients with atrophic jaws, necessitating long-term follow-up to confirm the initial findings of the study

Projeto de Sistemas Integrados de Propósito Geral Baseados em Redes em Chip Expandindo as Funcionalidades dos Roteadores para Execução de Operações: A plataforma IPNoSys

It bet on the next generation of computers as architecture with multiple processors and/or multicore processors. In this sense there are challenges related to features interconnection, operating frequency, the area on chip, power dissipation, performance and programmability. The mechanism of interconnection and communication it was considered ideal for this type of architecture are the networks-on-chip, due its scalability, reusability and intrinsic parallelism. The networks-on-chip communication is accomplished by transmitting packets that carry data and instructions that represent requests and responses between the processing elements interconnected by the network. The transmission of packets is accomplished as in a pipeline between the routers in the network, from source to destination of the communication, even allowing simultaneous communications between pairs of different sources and destinations. From this fact, it is proposed to transform the entire infrastructure communication of network-on-chip, using the routing mechanisms, arbitration and storage, in a parallel processing system for high performance. In this proposal, the packages are formed by instructions and data that represent the applications, which are executed on routers as well as they are transmitted, using the pipeline and parallel communication transmissions. In contrast, traditional processors are not used, but only single cores that control the access to memory. An implementation of this idea is called IPNoSys (Integrated Processing NoC System), which has an own programming model and a routing algorithm that guarantees the execution of all instructions in the packets, preventing situations of deadlock, livelock and starvation. This architecture provides mechanisms for input and output, interruption and operating system support. As proof of concept was developed a programming environment and a simulator for this architecture in SystemC, which allows configuration of various parameters and to obtain several results to evaluate it

Um estudo algorítmico da programação da intervenção de sondas de produção

This work approaches the Scheduling Workover Rigs Problem (SWRP) to maintain the wells of an oil field, although difficult to resolve, is extremely important economical, technical and environmental. A mathematical formulation of this problem is presented, where an algorithmic approach was developed. The problem can be considered to find the best scheduling service to the wells by the workover rigs, taking into account the minimization of the composition related to the costs of the workover rigs and the total loss of oil suffered by the wells. This problem is similar to the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), which is classified as belonging to the NP-hard class. The goal of this research is to develop an algorithmic approach to solve the SWRP, using the fundamentals of metaheuristics like Memetic Algorithm and GRASP. Instances are generated for the tests to analyze the computational performance of the approaches mentioned above, using data that are close to reality. Thereafter, is performed a comparison of performance and quality of the results obtained by each one of techniques used

Um estudo algorítmico de problemas logísticos na indústria de petróleo e gás natural

This work consists on the study of two important problems arising from the operations of petroleum and natural gas industries. The first problem the pipe dimensioning problem on constrained gas distribution networks consists in finding the least cost combination of diameters from a discrete set of commercially available ones for the pipes of a given gas network, such that it respects minimum pressure requirements at each demand node and upstream pipe conditions. On its turn, the second problem the piston pump unit routing problem comes from the need of defining the piston pump unit routes for visiting a number of non-emergent wells in on-shore fields, i.e., wells which don t have enough pressure to make the oil emerge to surface. The periodic version of this problem takes into account the wells re-filling equation to provide a more accurate planning in the long term. Besides the mathematical formulation of both problems, an exact algorithm and a taboo search were developed for the solution of the first problem and a theoretical limit and a ProtoGene transgenetic algorithm were developed for the solution of the second problem. The main concepts of the metaheuristics are presented along with the details of their application to the cited problems. The obtained results for both applications are promising when compared to theoretical limits and alternate solutions, either relative to the quality of the solutions or to associated running time

Implementação da técnica de software pipelining na rede em chip IPNoSyS

Alongside the advances of technologies, embedded systems are increasingly present in our everyday. Due to increasing demand for functionalities, many tasks are split among processors, requiring more efficient communication architectures, such as networks on chip (NoC). The NoCs are structures that have routers with channel point-to-point interconnect the cores of system on chip (SoC), providing communication. There are several networks on chip in the literature, each with its specific characteristics. Among these, for this work was chosen the Integrated Processing System NoC (IPNoSyS) as a network on chip with different characteristics compared to general NoCs, because their routing components also accumulate processing function, ie, units have functional able to execute instructions. With this new model, packets are processed and routed by the router architecture. This work aims at improving the performance of applications that have repetition, since these applications spend more time in their execution, which occurs through repeated execution of his instructions. Thus, this work proposes to optimize the runtime of these structures by employing a technique of instruction-level parallelism, in order to optimize the resources offered by the architecture. The applications are tested on a dedicated simulator and the results compared with the original version of the architecture, which in turn, implements only packet level parallelism

Interfaces cultural, política e organizacional do projeto caminhos do frio rota cultural no contexto da regionalização do turismo no brejo paraibano

This study is the analysis of cultural, political and organizational interfaces of "Caminhos do Frio Rota Cultural" Project in the context of tourism regionalization in Brejo Paraibano and it presents the characterization, routing and inventory of six municipalities of the Project, as well as the identification of cultural elements used for tourist in the routing of the pond, the investigation of political and organizational articulation and the verification of participation of each producing agent in the development of tourism resulting from the swamp of Paraiba. This is a qualitative descriptive and exploratory study, which makes use of the interpretive paradigm to perform an analysis of the environment where occurs the regionalization of tourism in Brejo of Paraíba and the social actors involved in this process in order to pursue development of the region through culture and tourism, with the collection spot in the six counties of the Project participants collected through interviews with managers, community, government agencies and tourist trade, and the use of the technique of direct observation. This time, with the data analysis it was possible to establish the production situation and its cultural and tourist development in the region of Brejo (PB), where culture has become a developmental tool within the tourism industry due to its innovation potential. It was possible to ratify the undisputed vocation of cultural tourism in the region in question, since other projects being developed with the use of cultural resources with a strong influence on the policies of regional tourism. Thus, the main result was that was seen is that the regional development has triggered a refunctionalisation / reappropriation of space just rebuilding a new territorial organization through the development of a regional autonomy of management, a capacity of collective ownership and the use of economic surplus, a spontaneous process of social inclusion as well as awareness and mobilization tourist (even if initial and shy), an appreciation of natural and cultural assets for all stakeholders and especially identification of the population with its region and its culture, as to achieve regional development is not enough to increase the economic, but above all the promotion of endogenous social factors such as changes in social and cultural values and the integration of social actors in this process. Finally, taking into account the definitions of sustainability, it is considered that cannot be said that the development model seen in the swamp of Paraiba is sustainable, but it is a model of regional development based on the unique characteristics that each municipality has and create a regional identity and have correponded expectations / desired results and therefore the viability of the region through the development of cultural tourism was proven