76 research outputs found

    SAFE USE OF BENTONITE IN DAIRY COWS. ASSESSMENT OF PHYSIOLOGICAL RESPONSES BY STUDYING METABOLOME AND MINERAL CONTENT IN BIOFLUIDS AND MILK CHARACTERISTICS.

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    La bentonite e altri minerali argillosi sono ampiamente utilizzati come additivi per mangimi negli allevamenti lattiferi per contrastare la contaminazione da micotossine dei mangimi, che influisce negativamente sulla salute e sulla produzione degli animali e rappresenta un grave rischio per i consumatori. Tuttavia, alcuni studi hanno riportato potenziali effetti indesiderati dei minerali argillosi in diverse specie animali e colture cellulari e, sulla base di osservazioni aneddotiche fatte dai casari, si teme che la bentonite possa influire negativamente sulle caratteristiche del latte vaccino e sulla produzione di formaggio. Inoltre, i minerali argillosi sembrano in grado di interagire con il microbiota intestinale e ruminale. Pertanto, lo scopo della presente tesi è stato quello di indagare i possibili effetti negativi della somministrazione di bentonite nelle vacche da latte. In particolare, sono stati condotti tre diversi esperimenti: due in vitro per valutare le potenziali interferenze di una bentonite commerciale sulle fermentazioni ruminali e uno in vivo su vacche da latte Holstein in lattazione per indagare i possibili effetti collaterali di questo additivo sulla salute, la fisiologia e la produzione degli animali e sulle caratteristiche e le proprietà casearie del latte. In questi studi sono stati applicati diversi metodi analitici, comprese le “Omics”. I risultati ottenuti suggeriscono che la bentonite può ridurre significativamente la produzione ruminale di gas in vitro, perlomeno alla dose più elevata utilizzata nell’esperimento. Inoltre, la bentonite ha prodotto lievi modifiche del metaboloma e del contenuto minerale (soprattutto microelementi) del liquido del rumine sia in vitro che in vivo, anche ai dosaggi stabiliti dalla normativa dell'Unione Europea. Tuttavia, i meccanismi omeostatici delle bovine sono sembrati in grado di contrastare questi lievi cambiamenti nel rumine, dal momento che sono stati riscontrati effetti trascurabili o nulli della bentonite sul metaboloma e sul contenuto minerale del plasma e del latte, nonché sugli altri parametri considerati (ossia indicatori generali della salute e della produzione animale, biomarcatori dello stress ossidativo, qualità e sottopopolazioni leucocitarie del latte, proteoma e peptidoma e proprietà di caseificazione del latte). In conclusione, la somministrazione di bentonite può essere considerata una pratica sicura negli allevamenti lattiferi in termini di salute e produzione animale, caratteristiche del latte per il consumo umano e proprietà di caseificazione del latte, almeno alle dosi prescritte dall'Unione Europea e per brevi periodi di trattamento. Sarebbero necessari ulteriori studi per valutare i possibili effetti collaterali della somministrazione a lungo termine della bentonite nelle vacche da latte.Bentonite and other clay minerals are largely used as feed additives in dairy farms in order to counteract the mycotoxin contamination of feed, which negatively affects animal health and production and represents a serious risk for consumers. However, some studies reported potential undesirable effects of clay minerals in different animal species and cell cultures and, based on anecdotical observations made by cheesemakers, there is concern that bentonite may negatively affect cow milk characteristics and cheesemaking. Moreover, clay minerals appear capable of interacting with the gut and ruminal microbiota. Therefore, the aim of the present dissertation was to investigate possible negative effects of bentonite administration in dairy cows. In particular, three different experiments were conducted: two in vitro experiments evaluated potential interferences of a commercial bentonite on ruminal fermentations and one in vivo experiment was performed in lactating Holstein dairy cows to investigate any possible side effects of this additive on animal health, physiology, and production and on milk characteristics and cheesemaking properties. In these studies, many different analytical methods were applied, including Omics. The results obtained suggest that bentonite can significantly reduce ruminal gas production in vitro, at least at the higher dose used in the experiment. Moreover, bentonite produced slight modifications of the metabolome and mineral content (mainly microelements) of the rumen fluid both in vitro and in vivo, also at the dosages set by the European Union regulation. However, cows’ homeostatic mechanisms seemed able to counteract these slight changes in rumen, as negligible or no effects of bentonite were found on the metabolome and mineral content of plasma and milk as well as on the others parameters considered (i.e. general indicators of animal health and production, oxidative stress biomarkers, milk quality and leukocyte subpopulations, milk proteome and peptidome, and milk cheesemaking properties). In conclusion, bentonite administration can be considered a safe practice in dairy farms in terms of animal health and production, milk characteristics for human consumption, and milk cheesemaking properties, at least at the doses prescribed by the European Union and for short periods. Further studies would be needed to evaluate possible side effects of long-term administration of bentonite in dairy cows

    Differences in feeding practices and supplementation on small ruminant farms in four provinces of Fiji

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    This research aimed to find out what feed resources and supplements are being used by farmers in the main sheep and goat producing areas of Fiji and investigate possible differences between provinces. Feeding practices and feed resources used on SR farms, and barriers to supplementation on farms were analysed using a structured farmer survey (n = 248) in two major divisions (Northern and Western) and four major sheep and goat producing provinces (Ba, Ra, Bua and Macuata). The study was conducted with three SR enterprise types (sheep only, goat only and dual farms). A total of 85 quantitative and qualitative questions were developed and applied using the kobo toolbox app to collect farm data. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, the survey was conducted via telephone during 15–24 December 2021

    Mastering Endo-Laparoscopic and Thoracoscopic Surgery

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    This is an open access book. The book focuses mainly on the surgical technique, OR setup, equipments and devices necessary in minimally invasive surgery (MIS). It serves as a compendium of endolaparoscopic surgical procedures. It is an official publication of the Endoscopic and Laparoscopic Surgeons of Asia (ELSA). The book includes various sections covering basic skills set, devices, equipments, OR setup, procedures by area. Each chapter cover introduction, indications and contraindications, pre-operative patient’s assessment and preparation, OT setup (instrumentation required, patient’s position, etc.), step by step description of surgical procedures, management of complications, post-operative care. It includes original illustrations for better understanding and visualization of specific procedures. The book serves as a practical guide for surgical residents, surgical trainees, surgical fellows, junior surgeons, surgical consultants and anyone interested in MIS. It covers most of the basic and advanced laparoscopic and thoracoscopic surgery procedures meeting the curriculum and examination requirements of the residents

    Evaluation of the ingestive behaviour of the dairy cow under two systems of rotation with slope

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    The ingestive behaviour of grazing animals is modulated by the vegetation characteristics, topography and the type of stocking method. This research was carried out in 2019, at the Rumipamba CADER-UCE. It aimed to evaluate the impact of two contrasting stocking methods of dairy cows grazing a pasture with an average of slope >8.5%. Four dairy cows were set to graze a 0.4 ha paddock for 5 days for continuous stocking methods, while for the electric fence methods the dairy cows were restricted to 0.2 ha and the fence was moved uphill every 3 hours, repeating this process four times a day. Cow were equipped with activity sensors for 12 h per day. The whole procedure was repeated 2 times after realizing an equalization cuts and both paddocks, a rest time of 30 days and a random reassignment of paddocks to one of the treatments. The cows showed a difference in terms of the percentage of grazing P=0.0072, being higher with the electric fence (55% of the measurement time). From rising-plate-meter estimates of available biomass along the grazing periods, we calculated despite similar forage allowances (electric fence = 48.06 kg DM/cow/d and continuous = 48.21 DM/cow/d) a higher forage intake was obtained in the electric fence treatment (17.5 kg DM/cow/d) compared the continuous stocking (15.7 kg DM/cow/d) (P=0.006). In terms of milk production animals grazing under the differences electrical fence stocking method tended (P=0.0985) to produce more milk (17.39 kg/d) than those grazing in the continuous system (15.16 kg/d) due to the influence of the slope (P=0.05), while for milk quality the protein content was higher for the electric fence (33.7 g/l) than the continuous method (30.5 g/l) (P=0.039). None of the other milk properties differed between methods (P>0.05)

    A Review of Rule Learning Based Intrusion Detection Systems and Their Prospects in Smart Grids

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    Searching for Needles in the Cosmic Haystack

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    Searching for pulsar signals in radio astronomy data sets is a difficult task. The data sets are extremely large, approaching the petabyte scale, and are growing larger as instruments become more advanced. Big Data brings with it big challenges. Processing the data to identify candidate pulsar signals is computationally expensive and must utilize parallelism to be scalable. Labeling benchmarks for supervised classification is costly. To compound the problem, pulsar signals are very rare, e.g., only 0.05% of the instances in one data set represent pulsars. Furthermore, there are many different approaches to candidate classification with no consensus on a best practice. This dissertation is focused on identifying and classifying radio pulsar candidates from single pulse searches. First, to identify and classify Dispersed Pulse Groups (DPGs), we developed a supervised machine learning approach that consists of RAPID (a novel peak identification algorithm), feature extraction, and supervised machine learning classification. We tested six algorithms for classification with four imbalance treatments. Results showed that classifiers with imbalance treatments had higher recall values. Overall, classifiers using multiclass RandomForests combined with Synthetic Majority Oversampling TEchnique (SMOTE) were the most efficient; they identified additional known pulsars not in the benchmark, with less false positives than other classifiers. Second, we developed a parallel single pulse identification method, D-RAPID, and introduced a novel automated multiclass labeling (ALM) technique that we combined with feature selection to improve execution performance. D-RAPID improved execution performance over RAPID by a factor of 5. We also showed that the combination of ALM and feature selection sped up the execution performance of RandomForest by 54% on average with less than a 2% average reduction in classification performance. Finally, we proposed CoDRIFt, a novel classification algorithm that is distributed for scalability and employs semi-supervised learning to leverage unlabeled data to inform classification. We evaluated and compared CoDRIFt to eleven other classifiers. The results showed that CoDRIFt excelled at classifying candidates in imbalanced benchmarks with a majority of non-pulsar signals (\u3e95%). Furthermore, CoDRIFt models created with very limited sets of labeled data (as few as 22 labeled minority class instances) were able to achieve high recall (mean = 0.98). In comparison to the other algorithms trained on similar sets, CoDRIFt outperformed them all, with recall 2.9% higher than the next best classifier and a 35% average improvement over all eleven classifiers. CoDRIFt is customizable for other problem domains with very large, imbalanced data sets, such as fraud detection and cyber attack detection

    Multi-Agent Systems

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    This Special Issue ""Multi-Agent Systems"" gathers original research articles reporting results on the steadily growing area of agent-oriented computing and multi-agent systems technologies. After more than 20 years of academic research on multi-agent systems (MASs), in fact, agent-oriented models and technologies have been promoted as the most suitable candidates for the design and development of distributed and intelligent applications in complex and dynamic environments. With respect to both their quality and range, the papers in this Special Issue already represent a meaningful sample of the most recent advancements in the field of agent-oriented models and technologies. In particular, the 17 contributions cover agent-based modeling and simulation, situated multi-agent systems, socio-technical multi-agent systems, and semantic technologies applied to multi-agent systems. In fact, it is surprising to witness how such a limited portion of MAS research already highlights the most relevant usage of agent-based models and technologies, as well as their most appreciated characteristics. We are thus confident that the readers of Applied Sciences will be able to appreciate the growing role that MASs will play in the design and development of the next generation of complex intelligent systems. This Special Issue has been converted into a yearly series, for which a new call for papers is already available at the Applied Sciences journal’s website: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/applsci/special_issues/Multi-Agent_Systems_2019
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