University of Madeira

About: University of Madeira is a education organization based out in Funchal, Portugal. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Dendrimer. The organization has 1014 authors who have published 2759 publications receiving 59457 citations.

SMART: a SysteM of Augmented Reality for Teaching 2 nd grade students

Abstract: In this paper, we describe the design and evaluation of SMART, an educational system that uses augmented reality for teaching 2nd grade-level concepts, adequate and integrated with national curriculum guidelines SMART puts children exploring concepts like means of transportation, types of animals and similar semantic categories through the use of a set of racquets that are used to manipulate a TV-show style game with 3D models which are superimposed to the real time video feed of the whole class Experiments were performed with several classes of students in three different, local primary schools Results suggest that SMART is effective in maintaining high levels of motivation among children, and also that SMART has a positive impact on the students' learning experience, especially among the weaker students

Dendrimer-Modified MoS2 Nanoflakes as a Platform for Combinational Gene Silencing and Photothermal Therapy of Tumors

Abstract: Exploitation of novel hybrid nanomaterials for combinational tumor therapy is challenging. In this work, we synthesized dendrimer-modified MoS2 nanoflakes for combinational gene silencing and photothermal therapy (PTT) of cancer cells. Hydrothermally synthesized MoS2 nanoflakes were modified with generation 5 (G5) poly(amidoamine) dendrimers partially functionalized with lipoic acid via disulfide bond. The formed G5-MoS2 nanoflakes display good colloidal stability and superior photothermal conversion efficiency and photothermal stability. With the dendrimer surface amines on their surface, the G5-MoS2 nanoflakes are capable of delivering Bcl-2 (B-cell lymphoma-2) siRNA to cancer cells (4T1 cells, a mouse breast cancer cells) with excellent transfection efficiency, inducing 47.3% of Bcl-2 protein expression inhibition. In vitro cell viability assay data show that cells treated with the G5-MoS2/Bcl-2 siRNA polyplexes under laser irradiation have a viability of 21.0%, which is much lower than other groups of...

Re-Structuring of Marine Communities Exposed to Environmental Change: A Global Study on the Interactive Effects of Species and Functional Richness

Abstract: Species richness is the most commonly used but controversial biodiversity metric in studies on aspects of community stability such as structural composition or productivity. The apparent ambiguity of theoretical and experimental findings may in part be due to experimental shortcomings and/or heterogeneity of scales and methods in earlier studies. This has led to an urgent call for improved and more realistic experiments. In a series of experiments replicated at a global scale we translocated several hundred marine hard bottom communities to new environments simulating a rapid but moderate environmental change. Subsequently, we measured their rate of compositional change (re-structuring) which in the great majority of cases represented a compositional convergence towards local communities. Re-structuring is driven by mortality of community components (original species) and establishment of new species in the changed environmental context. The rate of this re-structuring was then related to various system properties. We show that availability of free substratum relates negatively while taxon richness relates positively to structural persistence (i.e., no or slow re-structuring). Thus, when faced with environmental change, taxon-rich communities retain their original composition longer than taxon-poor communities. The effect of taxon richness, however, interacts with another aspect of diversity, functional richness. Indeed, taxon richness relates positively to persistence in functionally depauperate communities, but not in functionally diverse communities. The interaction between taxonomic and functional diversity with regard to the behaviour of communities exposed to environmental stress may help understand some of the seemingly contrasting findings of past research.