Serum zinc levels have been measured in twenty-four asthmatic patients, of whom sixteen were on long term corticosteroid therapy. They were carefully screened to exclude any concomitant disease. The nonsteroid-treated asthmatics had normal serum zinc levels which ranged from 89 to 138 jig/ml. The corticosteroid-treated patients had a mean serum zinc level of 64 ± 9 p.g/100 ml; this was signific...

The failure probability of the structures is one of the challenging problems in structural engineering. To obtain the reliability index introduced by Hasofer and Lind, one needs to solve a nonlinear equality constrained optimization problem. In this study, four of the most recent metaheuristic algorithms are utilized for finding the design point and the failure probability of problems with cont...

The term semantic dementia was devised by Snowden et al. in 1989 and nowadays, the semantic dementia syndrome is recognized as one of the clinical forms of frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) and is characterized by a language semantic disturbance associated to non-verbal semantic memory impairment. Objectives The aim of this study was to describe a Brazilian sample of 19 semantic dement...

The spliceosome is a dynamic macromolecular machine composed of five small nuclear ribonucleoparticles (snRNPs), the NineTeen Complex (NTC), and other proteins that catalyze the removal of introns mature to form the mature message. The NTC, named after its founding member Saccharomyces cerevisiae Prp19, is a conserved spliceosome subcomplex composed of at least nine proteins. During spliceosome...

During the past three decades, we have witnessed remarkable progress in the development of speech input/output technologies. Despite these successes, we are far from reaching human capabilities of recognizing nearly perfectly the speech spoken by many speakers, under varying acoustic environments, with essentially unrestricted vocabulary. Synthetic speech still sounds stilted and robot-like, la...