TEXTO:

Anna had been depressed for much of her adult
life, seeking a range of treatments that might help her
condition. She took anti-depressants, underwent
psychotherapy and even experienced electroconvulsive
[5] therapy – which involves passing electricity through the
whole brain.
Treatments like these were only effective for short
periods, and her depression would soon return. Another
issue she faced was that she was morbidly obese,
[10] weighing 183kg. This resulted in severely limited
mobility which, naturally, exacerbated her depression,
putting in place a vicious circle of poor health.
Gastric bypass surgery helped her lose some
weight but not as much as expected from such a
[15] procedure, and it had little impact on her depression.
As a last resort treatment, psychiatrists took a drastic
decision to implant an electrical device in her brain, an
invasive therapy known as deep brain stimulation. It’s
a treatment that’s already frequently used to alleviate
[20] the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy.
Not only did this treatment significantly help her
depression, it had another astonishing outcome – she
lost more weight than she had with any previous
treatment, losing almost 50% more weight (2.8kg or
[25] 6.1lbs) per month than she had done after the gastric
bypass surgery. Thomas Munte, the neurologist who
treated Anna, says that while the initial goal was to treat
her depression, the weight loss was the “secondary
target” of the surgery. In her case, the two were
[30] seemingly linked.
That Anna successfully lost weight following the
treatment is opening up new discussions about how to
tackle what we know is a world-wide epidemic. It is
also revealing that in some rare cases, the brain can
[35] be “de-tuned” from debilitating behaviors, like addiction.

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Over-stretching? Yoga
Half a century after the Beatles meditated in Rishikesh, in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas, a new wave of spirituality tourists have arrived for this week’s International Yoga Festival.
Some 300 million people now practise yoga around the world, according to the International Yoga Federation. Since it became popular in the West in the 1980s it has moved beyond mere activity; in popular language use, it has become a “lifestyle” – on which Americans spent $16 billion in 2016. The yoga market is growing by 7% a year, while novelty yoga proliferates: hot yoga, beer yoga, naked yoga, goat yoga.
Some worry the practice is losing its spirituality and that the Instagram generation has made it about posing not poses. Others think it fills a spiritual vacuum in the irreligious West, where navel-gazing is not a tricky yoga move. Devotees defend its health benefits and positive messages of love, compassion and serenity. A noble position to take.
(https://espresso.economist.com, 03.03.2018. Adaptado.)

Read the text below and answer the following questionbased on it.

More than half your body is not human
Human cells make up only 43% of the body's total cell count. The rest are microscopic colonists.

Understanding this hidden half of ourselves - our microbiome - is rapidly transforming understanding of diseases from allergy to Parkinson's.

No matter how well you wash, nearly every nook and cranny of your body is covered in microscopic creatures.

This includes bacteria, viruses, fungi and archaea (organisms originally misclassified as bacteria). The greatest concentration of this microscopic life is in the dark murky depths of our oxygen-deprived bowels.

The human genome - the full set of genetic instructions for a human being - is made up of 20,000 instructions called genes.

But add all the genes in our microbiome together and the figure comes out between two and 20 million microbial genes.

Prof Sarkis Mazmanian, a microbiologist from Caltech, argues: "We don't have just one genome, the genes of our microbiome present essentially a second genome which augment the activity of our own.

Science is rapidly uncovering the role the microbiome plays in digestion, regulating the immune system, protecting against disease and manufacturing vital vitamins.

It is a new way of thinking about the microbial world. To date, our relationship with microbes has largely been one of warfare.

Antibiotics and vaccines have been the weapons unleashed against the likes of smallpox, Mycobacterium tuberculosis or MRSA.

That's been a good thing and has saved large numbers of lives.

But some researchers are concerned that our assault on the bad guys has done untold damage to our "good bacteria".

Prof Knight has performed experiments on mice that were born in the most sanitised world imaginable.

He says: "We were able to show that if you take lean and obese humans and take their faeces and transplant the bacteria into mice you can make the mouse thinner or fatter depending on whose microbiome it got."

"This is pretty amazing right, but the question now is will this be translatable to humans"

This is the big hope for the field, that microbes could be a new form of medicine. It is known as using "bugs as drugs".
Adaptado de: < http://www.bbc.com/news/health-43674270> Acessado em 13 de abril de 2018.

President Donald Trump is promoting new legislation to overhaul the US immigration system, drastically cutting the number of legal immigrants allowed into the country and implementing a "merit-based" visa scheme. If passed, the Raise Act would cut the number of immigrants allowed into the United States by 50 per cent over the next 10 years. It would eliminate diversity lottery visas and crack down on so-called "chain immigration" – visas provided based on family connections, rather than jobs skills. He claimed it would "reduce poverty, increase wages, and save taxpayers billions and billions of dollars". "This competitive application system will favor applicants who can speak English, financially support themselves and their families, and demonstrate skills that can contribute to the US economy", Mr Trump said.

Mr Trump frequently spoke out against illegal immigration during his campaign, accusing immigrants of stealing jobs from American workers and bringing crime into the country. As President, he has pushed for the construction of a wall on the US-Mexico border, and implemented a travel ban on six Muslim-majority countries.

To Kamal Essaheb, director of policy and advocacy for the National Immigration Law Center, these policies are an attempt to shift the blame for Mr Trump's legislative failures onto the immigrant community. "We’ve seen this during the campaign and we’re now seeing this, unfortunately, in his policies", Mr Essaheb said. "This is a President who has found his scapegoat."

How has Princess Diana's death changed the Royal Family?

The death of Princess Diana in 1997, and the public's response to it, shook the House of Windsor.

Twenty years on, there's been a coup at the palace. It was bloodless. All the royals remain standing. But the power has shifted.

The departure, earlier this month, of the Queen's dedicated senior official Sir Christopher Geidt has meant her eldest son can exert more control over the monarchy's direction of travel.

The comings and goings of courtiers excite those on the inside and leave outsiders cold.

However, recent changes should cheer Prince Charles. The heir who's waited and waited is more content and less anguished.

He's still driven by a desire to deliver change but the royal prophet in the wilderness on climate change has been embraced by the mainstream.

A prince once derided for talking to plants is praised for trying to save the planet.

With each year that passes, his mother will do less and he will do more.

There are fewer clouds on his horizon. It's a horizon that was once obscured by the War of the Waleses: his televised admission of adultery, and his leaked comments about tampons.

Lasting influence

And yet, and yet. Whatever accommodation he reached with his first wife in life hasn't survived her death. Diana haunts Charles.

A recent YouGov poll commissioned by the Press Association suggested that the number of people who believe the Prince of Wales has made a positive contribution to the Royal Family has fallen over the past four years, down from 60% to 36%.

This polling took place at a time when it was hard to escape references to Charles's painful past.

Newspapers and television channels have reflected at length on the influence of Diana, Princess of Wales, an influence that stretched from fashion to the British monarchy.

It's been a month of coverage that must have perplexed anyone under the age of 25 and would have confused a visiting Martian.

Charles's many supporters will argue that Diana's adverse impact on his popularity will recede with each passing year. But 20 years on, her influence still registers.(...)

Read the comic strip in order to do the question below.

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Brazilian doctors use fish skin to treat burn victims

Researchers in Brazil are experimenting with a new treatment for severe burns using the skin of tilapia fish, an unorthodox procedure they say can ease the pain of victims and cut medical costs. Frozen pig skin and even human tissue have long been placed on burns to keep them moist and allow the transfer of collagen, a protein that promotes healing.

Brazil’s public hospitals, however, lack human and pig skin supplies and the artificial alternatives easily available in Western countries. Instead, gauze bandage, which needs regular changing – often painfully – is the norm. Tilapia is abundant in Brazil’s rivers and fish farms, which are expanding rapidly as demand grows for the mildly flavored freshwater fish.

Scientists at the Federal University of Ceara in northern Brazil have found that tilapia skin has moisture, collagen and disease resistance at levels comparable to human skin, and can aid in healing. In China, researchers have tested tilapia skin on rodents to study its healing properties, but scientists in Brazil say their trials are the first on humans.

“The use of tilapia skin on burns is unprecedented,” said Odorico de Morais, a professor at Ceara University. “The fish skin is usually thrown away, so we are using this product to convert it into something of social benefit.” The tilapia treatment can speed up healing by several days and reduces the need for pain medication, the Brazilian researchers say

The fish skin has high levels of collagen type 1, stays moist longer than gauze, and does not need to be changed frequently. Morais said that the tilapia skin treatment costs 75 percent less than the sulfadiazine cream typically used on burn patients in Brazil, as it is a cheap fish-farming waste product. The researchers hope the treatment will prove commercially viable and encourage businesses to process tilapia skin for medical use.

Stephen Hawking recently said he knows what happened before the Big Bang. Other times, he blew our minds.

Famed physicist Stephen Hawking definitively answered one of humankind's grandest questions last week — What was around before the Big Bang? "Nothing was around," Hawking told astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson March 10 on his show StarTalk.
Saying he uses a "Euclidean approach to quantum gravity to describe the beginning of the universe," Hawking goes deep into what that actually means. A degree in astrophysics will help you understand, but he makes a concise point about the Big Bang, which happened nearly 14 billion years ago.
"The Euclidean space-time is a closed surface without end, like the surface of the Earth," he said. "One can regard imaginary and real time as beginning at the South Pole, which is a smooth point of space-time where the normal laws of physics hold. There is nothing south of the South Pole so there was nothing around before the Big Bang."
Hawking would regularly blow our minds with his theories on what happened and what's to come in our universe. Last year, he explained how we humans may have about 100 years left on Earth. Then there was his prediction Earth would become a "ball of fire" within about 600 years.
From: https://goo.gl/S4bQP2. Accessed on 04/25/2018