Questões de Concursos CEPROS

Read the text below and answer the following question.

Can Cellular Agriculture Feed the World?

Within 20 years, there will be 2 billion more people than today — over 9 billion people in total. The impact to the environment could be severe. Just feeding that population using current methods is problematic.

On average, cattle ranchers need 100 times more land than corn growers to produce a gram of food. So, if that hungry world continues to eat meat like we do, the demand for land — and fresh water — will be alarming, not to mention the environmental impact of raising so many animals. Meat production aside, the large-scale monoculture of crops like corn usually results in damaging terrestrial pollution from pesticides and soil depletion. The impact to the oceans is equally perilous.

Instead of farming animals, fish and plants, cellular agriculture grows the proteins and nutrients we consume from a culture, cell by cell. With this alternative approach, the consumable meat and plant tissues produced don’t need to be harvested from animals or plants. It’s food production on an industrial scale.

The technology to do this is not new. Growing meat from a scaffold embedded in growth culture is no different in theory than making bread from yeast. The vast majority of insulin for diabetics is already manufactured by genetically engineered bacteria, as is the rennet used to culture cheese. In the past 10 years, this approach has been pioneered with a variety of foodstuffs: milk, eggs, beef, chicken, fish — even coffee.

To succeed, cellular agriculture must overcome 6,000 years of established dependence on traditional agriculture, and it has to do so via one of the most finicky human senses: taste. No one will eat manufactured meat or fish if it doesn’t have the same sensual satisfaction generated by the grown version. So, in addition to all the technical challenges in creating edible tissues from cultures, the startups pioneering this approach are working diligently to make their products tasty.

The possibilities for cellular agriculture are seemingly limitless; it may be possible to grow human organs for transplant using the method. But it is still early days.

Adaptado de: <https://earth911.com/business-policy/cellular-agriculture/>Acessado em 19 de outubro de 2018.

Read the text below and answer the following question based 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.

Se você parar para pensar...

1. Na correria do dia a dia, o urgente não vem deixando tempo para o importante. Essa constatação, carregada de estranha obviedade, obriga-nos quase a tratar como uma circunstância paralela e eventual aquela que deve ser considerada a marca humana por excelência: a capacidade de reflexão e consciência. Aliás, em alguns momentos, as pessoas usam até uma advertência (quando querem afirmar que algo não vai bem): “Se você parar para pensar...”

2. Por que parar para pensar? Será tão difícil pensar enquanto continua fazendo outras coisas ou, melhor ainda, seria possível fazer sem pensar e, num determinado momento, ter de parar? Ora, pensar é uma atitude contínua, e não um evento episódico! Não é preciso parar – nem se deve fazê-lo – sob pena de romper com nossa liberdade consciente.

3. O escritor francês Anatole França, um mestre da ironia e do ceticismo, dizia: “O pensamento é uma doença peculiar de certos indivíduos, que, ao propagar-se, em breve acabaria com a espécie”.

4. Talvez “pensar mais” não levasse necessariamente ao “término da espécie”, mas, com muita probabilidade, dificultaria a presença daqueles, no mundo dos negócios e da comunicação, que só entendem e tratam as pessoas como consumidores vorazes e insanos. Talvez, um “pensar mais” nos levasse a gritar que basta de tantos imperativos. Compre! Olhe! Veja! Faça! Leia! Sinta! E a vontade própria e o desejo sem contornos? E a liberdade de decidir, escolher, optar, aderir? Será um basta do corpo e da mente que já não mais aguentam tantas medicinas, tantas dietas compulsórias, tantas ordens da moda e admoestações da mídia; corpo e mente que carecem, cada dia mais, de horas de sono complementares, horas de lazer suplementares e horas de sossego regulamentares, quase esgotados na capacidade de persistir, combater e evitar o amortecimento dos sentidos e dos sonhos pessoais e sinceros. Essa demora em “pensar mais”, esse retardamento da reflexão como uma atitude continuada e deliberada, vem produzindo um fenômeno quase coletivo: mais e mais pessoas querendo desistir, com vontade imensa de mudar de vida, transformar-se, livrando-se das pequenas situações que as torturam, que as amarguram, que as esvaem. Vêm à tona impulsos de romper as amarras da civilização e partir, céleres, em direção ao incerto, ao sedutor repouso oferecido pela irracionalidade e pela inconsequência. Cansaço imenso de um grande sertão com diminutas veredas? (...)

5. Pouco importa, dado que ser humano é ser capaz de dizer “não” ao que parece não ter alternativa. Apesar dos constrangimentos e da tentativa de sequestro da nossa subjetividade, pensar não é, de fato, crime e, por isso, não se deve parar.

(CORTELLA, Mário Sérgio. Folha de S. Paulo, maio de 2001. Adaptado)

New Parents Don’t Get Enough Sleep for Six Years After a Child Is Born

Those first three months with a newborn can be rough, but researchers say sleep deprivation is an issue with parents for years. New parents are sometimes shocked to discover how little sleep they get in the first six months after a baby is born. They might also be discouraged to learn that their sleep patterns might not return to normal until that newborn is ready for kindergarten.

A new study published in the journal Sleep found that both parental sleep satisfaction and sleep duration sharply declined after childbirth, hitting their lowest point when a baby is 3 months old.

Women’s sleep duration and quality were far more affected than men, whether or not they breastfed their child. Women lost an average of one hour of sleep nightly compared to what they got prior to pregnancy, while men lost about 15 minutes of sleep per night.

Even four to six years after childbirth, mothers were getting 20 minutes less sleep per night than before they became pregnant, while fathers were still getting 15 minutes less sleep.

“The short-term effects of childbirth on parental sleep is well known. Our study just confirmed these effects,” Lemola told Healthline. “However, it was largely unexpected to find decreased sleep duration and sleep satisfaction six years after birth.”

Sleep was more affected among first-time parents than among parents with more than one child.

The findings were based on interviews of 4,659 parents who had a child between 2008 and 2015.

“While having children is a major source of joy for most parents, it is possible that increased demands and responsibilities associated with the role as a parent lead to shorter sleep and decreased sleep quality even up to six years after birth of the first child,” said Lemola.

Lemola said that future research would be required to determine how parents can cope with sleep loss and regain their sleep patterns sooner.

Adaptado de: <https://www.healthline.com/health-news/newparents-dont-get-sound-sleep-for-6-years#The-bottom-line> Acessado em 04 de março de 2019

New Parents Don’t Get Enough Sleep for Six Years After a Child Is Born

Those first three months with a newborn can be rough, but researchers say sleep deprivation is an issue with parents for years. New parents are sometimes shocked to discover how little sleep they get in the first six months after a baby is born. They might also be discouraged to learn that their sleep patterns might not return to normal until that newborn is ready for kindergarten.

A new study published in the journal Sleep found that both parental sleep satisfaction and sleep duration sharply declined after childbirth, hitting their lowest point when a baby is 3 months old.

Women’s sleep duration and quality were far more affected than men, whether or not they breastfed their child. Women lost an average of one hour of sleep nightly compared to what they got prior to pregnancy, while men lost about 15 minutes of sleep per night.

Even four to six years after childbirth, mothers were getting 20 minutes less sleep per night than before they became pregnant, while fathers were still getting 15 minutes less sleep.

“The short-term effects of childbirth on parental sleep is well known. Our study just confirmed these effects,” Lemola told Healthline. “However, it was largely unexpected to find decreased sleep duration and sleep satisfaction six years after birth.”

Sleep was more affected among first-time parents than among parents with more than one child.

The findings were based on interviews of 4,659 parents who had a child between 2008 and 2015.

“While having children is a major source of joy for most parents, it is possible that increased demands and responsibilities associated with the role as a parent lead to shorter sleep and decreased sleep quality even up to six years after birth of the first child,” said Lemola.

Lemola said that future research would be required to determine how parents can cope with sleep loss and regain their sleep patterns sooner.

Adaptado de: <https://www.healthline.com/health-news/newparents-dont-get-sound-sleep-for-6-years#The-bottom-line> Acessado em 04 de março de 2019

How Sleep Strengthens Your Immune System

Numerous studies have reported the benefits of a good night’s sleep, and now researchers from Germany have found that sound sleep improves immune cells known as T cells.

“T cells are a type of… immune cells that fight against intracellular pathogens, for example virus-infected cells such as flu, HIV, herpes, and cancer cells,” Stoyan Dimitrov, PhD, told Healthline.

The study found a new mechanism through which sleep can assist the immune system.

“We show that the stress hormones adrenaline and noradrenaline and pro-inflammatory molecules prostaglandins inhibit the stickiness of a class of adhesion molecules called integrins,” Dr. Dimitrov said. “Because the levels of adrenaline, noradrenaline, and prostaglandins are low during sleep time, the stickiness of the integrins is stronger. This stickiness is important because in order for T cells to kill virus-infected cells or cancer cells, they need to get in direct contact with them, and the integrin stickiness is known to promote this contact.”

When cells in the body recognize a virally infected cell, they activate integrins, a sticky type of protein, that then allows them to attach to and kill infected cells.

The researchers compared T cells from healthy volunteers who either slept or stayed awake all night.

They found that in the study participants who slept, their T cells showed higher levels of integrin activation than in the T cells of those who were awake.

The findings indicate that sleep has the potential to improve T cell functioning. For people who get poor sleep, stress hormones may inhibit the ability of T cells to function as effectively.

Less than five hours sleep per night on a regular basis is associated with higher mortality, and having less than seven hours sleep for three nights in a row has the same effect on the body as missing one full night of sleep.

Poor sleep can increase inflammation, blood pressure, insulin resistance, cortisol, weight gain, and cardiovascular disease, as well as decrease blood sugar regulation.

Despite numerous studies proving the negative health impacts of poor sleep, experts say many people still don’t prioritize getting enough sleep.

Adaptado de: <https://www.healthline.com/health-news/how-sleepbolsters-your-immune-system#The-bottom-line> Acessado em 21 de fevereiro de 2019.

Nós, os brasileiros.

Uma editora europeia me pede que traduza poemas de autores estrangeiros sobre o Brasil.

Como sempre, eles falam da floresta amazônica, uma floresta muito pouco real, aliás. Um bosque poético, com “mulheres de corpos alvíssimos espreitando entre os troncos das árvores e olhos de serpentes hirtas acariciando esses corpos como dedos amorosos”. Não faltam flores azuis, rios cristalinos e tigres mágicos. Traduzo os poemas por dever de ofício, mas com uma secreta – e nunca realizada – vontade de inserir ali um grãozinho de realidade.

Nas minhas idas ao Exterior, onde convivi, sobretudo com escritores, professores e estudantes universitários – portanto, gente razoavelmente culta –, fui invariavelmente surpreendida com a profunda ignorância a respeito de quem, como e o que somos.

– A senhora é brasileira? Comentaram espantados alunos de uma Universidade americana famosa: – Mas a senhora é loira!

Depois de ler, num Congresso de escritores em Amsterdã, um trecho de um de meus romances traduzidos em inglês, ouvi de um senhor, dono de um antiquário famoso, que segurou comovido minhas duas mãos:

– Que maravilha! Nunca imaginei que no Brasil houvesse pessoas cultas!

Pior ainda, no Canadá, alguém exclamou incrédulo:

– Escritora brasileira? Ué, mas no Brasil existem editoras?

A culminância foi a observação de uma crítica berlinense, num artigo sobre um romance meu editado por lá, acrescentando, a alguns elogios, a grave restrição: “porém não parece livro brasileiro, pois não fala nem de plantas, nem de índios, nem de bichos.”

Diante dos três poemas sobre o Brasil, esquisitos para qualquer brasileiro, pensei mais uma vez que esse desconhecimento não se deve apenas à natural alienação estrangeira quanto ao geograficamente fora de seus interesses, mas também é culpa nossa. Pois o que mais exportamos de nós é o exótico e o folclórico.

Em uma feira do livro de Frankfurt, no espaço brasileiro, o que se via eram livros (não muito bem arrumados), muita caipirinha na mesa, e televisões mostrando carnaval, futebol, praias e ... matos.

E eu, mulher essencialmente urbana, escritora das geografias interiores de meus personagens neuróticos, me senti tão deslocada quanto um macaco em uma loja de cristais. Mesmo que tentasse explicar, ninguém acreditaria que eu era tão brasileira quanto qualquer negra de origem africana vendendo acarajé nas ruas de Salvador. Porque o Brasil é tudo isso.

E nem a cor de meu cabelo e olhos, nem meu sobrenome, nem os livros que li na infância, nem o idioma que falei naquele tempo, além do português, me fazem menos nascida e vivida nesta terra de tão surpreendentes misturas: imensa, desaproveitada, instigante e (por que ter medo da palavra?) maravilhosa!

(Lya Luft. Pensar é transgredir. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2009, p. 49-51)