22,810 research outputs found

    Developing a Community of Practice for Applied Uses of Future PACE Data to Address Marine Food Security Challenges

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    External interaction:The Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission will include a hyperspectral imaging radiometer to advance ecosystem monitoring beyond heritage retrievals of the concentration of surface chlorophyll and other traditional ocean color variables, offering potential for novel science and applications. PACE is the first NASA ocean color mission to occur under the agency's new and evolving effort to directly engage practical end users prior to satellite launch to increase adoption of this freely available data toward societal challenges. Here we describe early efforts to engage a community of practice around marine food-related resource management, business decisions, and policy analysis. Obviously one satellite cannot meet diverse end user needs at all scales and locations, but understanding downstream needs helps in the assessment of information gaps and planning how to optimize the unique strengths of PACE data in combination with the strengths of other satellite retrievals, in situ measurements, and models. Higher spectral resolution data from PACE can be fused with information from satellites with higher spatial or temporal resolution, plus other information, to enable identification and tracking of new marine biological indicators to guide sustainable management. Accounting for the needs of applied researchers as well as non-traditional users of satellite data early in the PACE mission process will ultimately serve to broaden the base of informed users and facilitate faster adoption of the most advanced science and technology toward the challenge of mitigating food insecurity

    Newsletter of the LowInputBreeds project. Issue 4. EU project LowInputBreeds - Development of integrated livestock breeding and management strategies to improve animal health, product quality and performance in European organic and ‘low input’ milk, meat and egg production

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    The fourth newsletter of the LowInputBreeds project reports on the successful first project symposium which took place in March in Wageningen, the Netherlands, focussing on ethical issues in animal breeding. Furthermore the newsletter contains an article on small ruminant production systems in Crete, and the traits required in order to improve production efficiency and product quality in traditional low-input dairy sheep production systems. And like every newsletter, we report progress in the four LowInputBreeds subprojects. Already now we would like to draw your attention to the next LowInputBreeds conference, which will take place in spring 2012 in Tunisia. More information is available in the last page of this newsletter and updates will be posted at the project website www.lowinputbreeds.org. Please also note that in June 2011 the course "Genomic Selection in Livestock" will take place in Davos, Switzerland, one of the LowInputBreeds workshops for early stage researchers and agricultural advisors/technologists to facilitate an exchange of ideas/opinions and know-how and encourage potential future collaboration. Finally we would like to announce Carlo Leifert has handed over project coordination responsibility to Gillian Butler, also from Newcastle University. She is not new to the project – she is responsible for work package 1.2 on the development of improved cross-breeding strategies

    Modelling colour properties for textiles

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    Aerospace Medicine and Biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes, supplement 212

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    A bibliography listing 146 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system is presented. The subject coverage concentrates on the biological, psychological, and environmental factors involved in atmospheric and interplanetary flight. Related topics such as sanitary problems, pharmacology, toxicology, safety and survival, life support systems, and exobiology are also given attention

    Comparison of Near-infrared Spectroscopy with other options for total carotenoids content phenotyping in fresh cassava roots

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    This study compared the relationship of different phenotyping methods including iCheckTM CAROTENE (iCheck), Chromameter, colour chart and visible/near-infrared spectroscopy (Vis/NIRS) used in quantifying total carotenoids content (TCC) in fresh cassava roots. Using a total of 194 cassava clones harvested from the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), Ibadan, we compared the repeatability precision, accuracy of measurement and correlations of these phenotyping methods. From the results, Vis/NIRS-analyzed TCC had high and positive correlations with Chromameter and Color chart (r = 0.91 and 0.71, respectively). On the other hand, the result revealed somewhat moderate correlation (r = 0.67) between Vis/NIRS and iCheck measurements. Vis/NIRS, iCheck and chromameter methods gave high and nearly equal heritability estimates (0.95, 0.98 and 0.98, respectively) illustrating high repeatability precision of these methods; an indication that they can be used for germplasm selection in the early stages of breeding. Conversely, with Bland-Altman plot at 95% confidence level, the accuracy of iCheck was not comparable with that of Vis/ NIRS. The information derived from this analysis directly contributes towards the genetic improvement of root quality traits in cassava and facilitates the sharing of data across cassava breeding consortium

    A PROOF OF CONCEPT FOR CROWDSOURCING COLOR PERCEPTION EXPERIMENTS

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    Accurately quantifying the human perception of color is an unsolved prob- lem. There are dozens of numerical systems for quantifying colors and how we as humans perceive them, but as a whole, they are far from perfect. The ability to accurately measure color for reproduction and verification is critical to indus- tries that work with textiles, paints, food and beverages, displays, and media compression algorithms. Because the science of color deals with the body, mind, and the subjective study of perception, building models of color requires largely empirical data over pure analytical science. Much of this data is extremely dated, from small and/or homogeneous data sets, and is hard to compare. While these studies have somewhat advanced our understanding of color adequately, mak- ing significant, further progress without improved datasets has proven dicult if not impossible. I propose new methods of crowdsourcing color experiments through color-accurate mobile devices to help develop a massive, global set of color perception data to aid in creating a more accurate model of human color perception

    Variation in Linkage Disequilibrium Patterns between Populations of Different Production Types

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    The aim of this study was to quantify the variation in linkage disequilibrium patterns between populations of Slovak Pinzgau, Austrian Pinzgau, Simmental, Charolais and Holstein. These comparisons included differences between the genetically close populations as well as between dairy and beef breed types. Total number of genes in regions with top 0.01 and 0.1 percentile was 202. The most significant SNPs for production, reproduction and functional traits were positioned in the chromosome 7, 9, 11, 14, 20 and 24 (H2AFY, MAP3K, FAM110B, UBXN2B, CYP7A1, SDCBP, NSMAF, PRKAA1, PTGER4, MIR2361, CDH18 and C9). Genome scans confirmed the presence of selective sweeps in the genomic regions that harbour candidate genes that are known to affect productive traits in cattle such as CAST, COQ3, GJA1, ACYP2, SPTBN1, EML6, RTN4, MAP3K7, PLAG1, CHCHD7, PENK, PRLR, GHR, C6, C7, LIFR, MOCOS, GALNT1, COLEC12, CETN1, TYMS, YES1, NDC80, LPIN2, MYOM1, MYL12A, MYL12B and DLGAP1. Although phenotypic diversity is not sufficiently large to be detected, investigating the polymorphisms presented in the regions of the genome that are involved in breeding traits can be very useful in terms of genetic improvement
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