A study on embryonic development of Yellow Fin Seabream (Acanthopagrus latus)

Embryonic and larval development stages of yellow fin seabream (Acanthopagrus latus) were studied in two average temperatures (21 and 24C) in Marine Fish Research Center in Emam Khomeini Port. Egg diameter in initiation of fertilization was 739.35 plus or minus 0.0081k and during final hatching it was 792.36 plus or minus 0.0095k. The average egg diameter from fertilization until final hatching was 763.49 plus or minus 0.00l6k. The average egg diameter was 751.81 plus or minus 0.0064k in murola stage, 767.55 plus or minus 0.0074k in nurula stage, 779.97 plus or minus 0.0084k in appearance of heart stage and 780.84 plus or minus 0.0086k in the increasing of pigmentation stage. Duration of egg incubation and embryo development of yellow fin seabream (Acanthopagrus latus) was 31 hours and 15 minutes at 20clC and 26 hours and 15 minutes at 23 plus or minus 1C. In this study, 20 stages of embryo development of yellow fin seabream were identified through incubation period from fertilization to final hatching. It seems that water temperature can be an effective environmental factor in the fish embryo development, so that hatching at 20clC occurred in 5 hours later than when at 23clC. Temperature change had no effect on the number of larvae and characteristics of embryo development. The information gathered through this study is useful when planning for artificial reproduction of this commercial species and can improve the propagation process

A Comparative Clinical Study on Phalatrikadi Kwata and Darvyadi Kwatha in the management of Kamala w.s.r. to Jaundice

Background: Jaundice (Kamala) is a yellowish pigmentation of the skin, the conjunctival membranes over the sclera (whitish of the eyes), and other mucous membranes caused by hyperbilirubinemia (increased levels of bilirubin in the blood). Today’s lifestyle with unhygienic and poor dietary habits and alcoholic habits etc. are responsible factors to promote hepatic damage which clinically reflects as Kamala Roga. The incidence of such causes resulting in Jaundice. In India it is 2.37-3.15 per 1000 population. The effect of Ayurvedic treatment was assessed in relation to improvement in overall clinical signs and symptoms. Objectives: To evaluate the effect of Phalatrikaadi Kwatha and Darvyadi Kwatha in Kamala Roga. Methodology: A comparative clinical study was conducted on Kamala for period of 15 days. The patients were divided into 2 groups. In Group A 20 patients were administered with Phalatrikadi Kwatha internally and in Group B 20 patients were administered with Darvyadi Kwatha internally. Results: Group A and Group B have shown statistically significant result. Group B treated with Darvyadi Kwatha showed better result compared with Group B treated with Phalatrikadi Kwatha

{\mu}-DDRL: A QoS-Aware Distributed Deep Reinforcement Learning Technique for Service Offloading in Fog computing Environments

Fog and Edge computing extend cloud services to the proximity of end users, allowing many Internet of Things (IoT) use cases, particularly latency-critical applications. Smart devices, such as traffic and surveillance cameras, often do not have sufficient resources to process computation-intensive and latency-critical services. Hence, the constituent parts of services can be offloaded to nearby Edge/Fog resources for processing and storage. However, making offloading decisions for complex services in highly stochastic and dynamic environments is an important, yet difficult task. Recently, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has been used in many complex service offloading problems; however, existing techniques are most suitable for centralized environments, and their convergence to the best-suitable solutions is slow. In addition, constituent parts of services often have predefined data dependencies and quality of service constraints, which further intensify the complexity of service offloading. To solve these issues, we propose a distributed DRL technique following the actor-critic architecture based on Asynchronous Proximal Policy Optimization (APPO) to achieve efficient and diverse distributed experience trajectory generation. Also, we employ PPO clipping and V-trace techniques for off-policy correction for faster convergence to the most suitable service offloading solutions. The results obtained demonstrate that our technique converges quickly, offers high scalability and adaptability, and outperforms its counterparts by improving the execution time of heterogeneous services

Substitution of rotifer by a microencapsulated diet in yellow fin seabream (Acanthopagrus lotus) larviculture

We examined the possibility of replacement of the live food (rotifer) with a microencapsulated diet (MED) from first feeding in yellow fin seabream larvae by utilizing compound feeding technique during the first two weeks of larval life. The experiment consisted of five treatments and a control group (100% rotifer), which was fed live food during experimental period (regime A), three experimental treatments which received MED supplementing with reduced rations of rotifer including 75, 50 and 25 percent of rotifer in the control treatment (regimes B, C and D, respectively), and finally a treatment received exclusively MED throughout the experiment (regime E). At the end of the experiment results indicated that the regimes A, B and C did not differ significantly for total lengths, final survival and stress test resistance (P>0.05). In terms of dry weight, there was no significant difference between 100% live food treatment (A) and that received 75% live food in control treatment (B) (P>0.05). The solely MED treatment showed significantly lower growth and survival than other treatments receiving rotifer (P<0.05). The results revealed that complete replacement of live food with MED is still not possible in Acanthopagrus lotus larval rearing. Nevertheless, a substantial 50% reduction in the daily supply of live food can be achieved with a combination of microencapsulated diet and live food

Digestive enzymes activity and growth indices of rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) fed diets supplemented with silymarin and Nickle Oxide nanoparticles

There is growing concern regarding nano-sized material discharge into water bodies and their subsequent toxicity to aquatic lives owing to increasingly rapid development and industrial applications of nanoparticles. This study evaluates the oral prescription of silymarin and Nickel Oxide nanoparticles in rainbow trout with an emphasis on growth indices and digestive enzymes activity. To that end, 1200 fish (3.83±0.01g) were randomly allotted into 8 distinct treatments including control group without any supplemental dietary Nickel Oxide nanopartcles or silymarin and the remaining seven experimental groups comprised of different combinations of Nickel Oxide nanoparticles (0, 100 and 500 mg /kg feed) and silymarin (0 and 1 g /kg feed) in the first and second month of the trial. All treatments were carried out in trplicate and the experiment lasted for 60 days. Results showed that the highest amylase activity was recorded in treatment 6 (16.56±1.00) (0 mg Nickel nanoparticle along with 1 g silymaryn - 500 mg Nickel nanoparticle and 1 g silymarin) which significantly differed from treatments 5 (0 mg Nickel Oxide nanoparticles and 1 mg silymarin-100 mg Nickel Oxide nanoparticles with 1 mg silymarin), 7 and 8 (fed diets containing 100 and 500 mg Nickel Oxide nanoparticles, respectively) (P≤0.05). The highest alkaline protease activity was observed in treatment 1 (0.54±0.05) (without any supplemental Nickel or silymarin), which was significantly different from those of treatments 7 and 8 (P≤0.05). The highest lipase activity was reported for treatment 4 (1.03±0.04) (500 mg Nickel nanoparticle with 1 g silymaryn- 0 mg nanoparticle and 1 g silymarin) which was significantly different from other treatments (P≤0.05). The results showed that simultaneous use of Nickel nanoparticle and silymarin in treatments 3, 4, 5 and 6 led to higher digestive enzymes activities in comparison to treatments 7 and 8. However, growth indices did not show any noticeable differences amongst studied treatments. It seems that in a long term exposure to Nickel Oxide nanoparticles and simoltanoues dietary silymarin inclusion, it would also be possible to observe differences in growth and nutritional indices, requiring further clarification

Studying the chronic effects of silver nanoparticles on survival, growth rate and reproductive traits of Urmia Lake Artemia (Artemia urmiana)

The application and environmental hazards of nanotechnology to aquatic species are increasingly growing. To address the issue, the present study was designed and carried out to elucidate the toxic effects of silver nanoparticles on growth, survival and reproductive traits of Artemia urmiana. The experiment consisted of five treatments, namely control group and those exposed to 0.001, 0.01, 0.1 and 1 mgl-1 silver nanoparticles, with four respective replicates. To do so, 500 newly hatched nauplii were counted and transferred to 1 liter containers exposing to various concentrations of the silver nanoparticles. Microalgae Dunaliella tertiolecta and zymogenic was used to feed Artemia. Growth and survival rates were recorded on days 8, 11, 17, 20 and 23. After sexual maturation, Artemia were transferred to a new environment free from nanoparticles and their reproductive traits were studied. Results showed that higher concentrations of silver nanoparticles led to lower survival rate and augmented growth rate of Artemia (p<0.05). Regarding reproductive traits, group exposed to 1mgl-1 silver nanoparticles showed the lowest total offspring, offspring per day, offspring per brood and life span (p<0.05). In conclusion, the discharge of silver nanoparticles even at lower concentrations would undesirably influence reproductive cycle of A. urmiana and result in lower survival and reproductive performance of the animal

Investigation on feeding behaviour of yellowfin seabream larvae, Acanthopagrus latus, fed on live food and microencapsulated diet

Feeding behavior of yellowfin seabream larvae during the first two weeks of larval life was studied by feeding larvae on different ratios of live food and microencapsulated diet (MED). Food consumption rate increased progressively with increasing larval weight. The results from visual observation of the larval guts under a light microscope indicated that yellowfin seabream larvae were able to ingest and digest MED from the onset of exogenous feeding. Comparing the average number of rotifers and MED ingested by larvae in treatments including either only live food or MED did not show any significant differences (P>0.05). In addition, the gut contents examination from the larvae fed simultaneously on both rotifer and MED, revealed that the larvae's tendency towards live food and/or MED was a function of live food density in the rearing tanks. The larvae preferentially ingest live food even when these are present at a very low concentration in comparison to MED. The mouth diameter of larvae has a strong influence on the amount of ingested rotifers and MED. There was a significant positive correlation between larvae growth and the average number of both live food and MED ingested by larvae in this trial (P0.05)

Relationship between urbanization and cancer incidence in Iran using quantile regression

Quantile regression is an efficient method for predicting and estimating the relationship between explanatory variables and percentile points of the response distribution, particularly for extreme percentiles of the distribution. To study the relationship between urbanization and cancer morbidity, we here applied quantile regression. This cross-sectional study was conducted for 9 cancers in 345 cities in 2007 in Iran. Data were obtained from the Ministry of Health and Medical Education and the relationship between urbanization and cancer morbidity was investigated using quantile regression and least square regression. Fitting models were compared using AIC criteria. R (3.0.1) software and the Quantreg package were used for statistical analysis. With the quantile regression model all percentiles for breast, colorectal, prostate, lung and pancreas cancers demonstrated increasing incidence rate with urbanization. The maximum increase for breast cancer was in the 90th percentile (β=0.13, p-value < 0.001), for colorectal cancer was in the 75th percentile (β=0.048, p-value < 0.001), for prostate cancer the 95th percentile (β=0.55, p-value < 0.001), for lung cancer was in 95th percentile (β=0.52, p-value=0.006), for pancreas cancer was in 10th percentile (β=0.011, p-value < 0.001). For gastric, esophageal and skin cancers, with increasing urbanization, the incidence rate was decreased. The maximum decrease for gastric cancer was in the 90th percentile(β=0.003, p-value < 0.001), for esophageal cancer the 95th (β=0.04, p-value=0.4) and for skin cancer also the 95th (β=0.145, p-value=0.071). The AIC showed that for upper percentiles, the fitting of quantile regression was better than least square regression. According to the results of this study, the significant impact of urbanization on cancer morbidity requirs more effort and planning by policymakers and administrators in order to reduce risk factors such as pollution in urban areas and ensure proper nutrition recommendations are made. © 2016, Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention

Estimating the completeness of gastric cancer registration in Ardabil/Iran by a capture-recapture method using population-based cancer registry data

Background: Knowledge of cancer incidences is essential for cancer prevention and control programs. Capture-recapture methods have been recommended for reducing bias and increasing the accuracy of cancer incidence estimations. This study aimed to estimate the completeness of gastric cancer registration by the capture-recapture method based on Ardabil population-based cancer registry data. Materials and Methods: All new cases of gastric cancer reported by three sources, pathology reports, death certificates and medical records that reported to Ardabil population-based cancer registry in 2006 and 2008 were enrolled in the study. The duplicate cases based on the similarity of first name, surname and fathers names were identified between sources. The estimated number of gastric cancers was calculated by the log-linear method using Stata 12 software. Results: A total of 857 new cases of gastric cancer were reported from three sources. After removing duplicates, the reported incidence rates for the years 2006 and 2008 were 35.3 and 32.5 per 100,000 population, respectively. The estimated completeness calculated by log-linear method for these years was 36.7 and 36.0, respectively. Conclusions: These results indicate that none of the sources of pathology reports, death certificates and medical records individually or collectively fully cover the incident cases of gastric cancer. We can obtain more accurate estimates of incidence rates using the capture-recapture method