Morphometric Study for Identification of the Bactrocera Dorsalis Complex (Diptera : Tephritidae) Using Wing Image Analysis

The Bactrocera dorsalis complex (Diptera: Tephritidae) used in this study included B. dorsalis, B. arecae, B. propinqua, B. pyrifoliae, B. verbascifoliae, and three new species complexes are species E, species K and species P. Bactrocera tau was used as an out-group. A total of 424 adults, which emerged from pupae collected from natural populations in Thailand, were prepared for wing measurements. Morphometric analysis was performed on measurements of wing vein characters. Wing images were captured in digital format and taken through digital image processing to calculate the Euclidean distance between wing vein junctions. Discriminant and cluster analyses were used for dichotomy of classification processes. All 424 wing specimens were classified to species in terms of the percentage of "grouped" cases which yielded about 89.6% accurate identification compared with the formal description of these species. After clustering, the percentage of "grouped"cases yielded 100.0%, 98.9%, 98.1%, 95.2% and 84.6% accurate identification between the B. dorsalis complex and B. tau; B. arecae and Species E; B. dorsalis and B. verbascifoliae; B. propinqua and B. pyrifoliae; and species K and species P, respectively. This method of numerical taxonomy may be useful for practical identification of other groups of agricultural pests

MORPHOMETRIC STUDY FOR IDENTIFICATION OF THE BACTROCERA DORSALIS COMPLEX (DIPTERA : TEPHRITIDAE) USING WING IMAGE ANALYSIS

The Bactrocera dorsalis complex (Diptera: Tephritidae) used in this study included B. dorsalis, B. arecae, B. propinqua, B. pyrifoliae, B. verbascifoliae, and three new species complexes are species E, species K and species P. Bactrocera tau was used as an out-group. A total of 424 adults, which emerged from pupae collected from natural populations in Thailand, were prepared for wing measurements. Morphometric analysis was performed on measurements of wing vein characters. Wing images were captured in digital format and taken through digital  image processing to calculate the Euclidean distance between wing vein junctions. Discriminant and cluster analyses were used for dichotomy of classification processes. All 424 wing specimens were classified to species in terms of the percentage of "grouped" cases which yielded about 89.6% accurate identification compared with the formal description of these species. After clustering, the percentage of "grouped"cases yielded 100.0%, 98.9%, 98.1%, 95.2% and 84.6% accurate identification between the B. dorsalis complex and B. tau; B. arecae and Species E; B. dorsalis and B. verbascifoliae; B. propinqua and B. pyrifoliae; and species K and species P, respectively. This method of numerical taxonomy may be useful for practical identification of other groups of agricultural pests. Key words: Bactrocera dorsalis complex/wing image processing/morphometric/discriminant and cluster analyses

Thermal noise of folding mirrors

Current gravitational wave detectors rely on the use of Michelson interferometers. One crucial limitation of their sensitivity is the thermal noise of their optical components. Thus, for example fluctuational deformations of the mirror surface are probed by a laser beam being reflected from the mirrors at normal incidence. Thermal noise models are well evolved for that case but mainly restricted to single reflections. In this work we present the effect of two consecutive reflections under a non-normal incidence onto mirror thermal noise. This situation is inherent to detectors using a geometrical folding scheme such as GEO\,600. We revise in detail the conventional direct noise analysis scheme to the situation of non-normal incidence allowing for a modified weighting funtion of mirror fluctuations. An application of these results to the GEO\,600 folding mirror for Brownian, thermoelastic and thermorefractive noise yields an increase of displacement noise amplitude by 20\% for most noise processes. The amplitude of thermoelastic substrate noise is increased by a factor 4 due to the modified weighting function. Thus the consideration of the correct weighting scheme can drastically alter the noise predictions and demands special care in any thermal noise design process

Cryogenic and room temperature strength of sapphire jointed by hydroxide-catalysis bonding

Hydroxide-catalysis bonding is a precision technique used for jointing components in opto-mechanical systems and has been implemented in the construction of quasi-monolithic silica suspensions in gravitational wave detectors. Future detectors are likely to operate at cryogenic temperatures which will lead to a change in test mass and suspension material. One candidate material is mono-crystalline sapphire. Here results are presented showing the influence of various bonding solutions on the strength of the hydroxide-catalysis bonds formed between sapphire samples, measured both at room temperature and at 77 K, and it is demonstrated that sodium silicate solution is the most promising in terms of strength, producing bonds with a mean strength of 63 MPa. In addition the results show that the strengths of bonds were undiminished when tested at cryogenic temperatures

A spoonful of L‐fucose—an efficient therapy for GFUS‐CDG, a new glycosylation disorder

Abstract Congenital disorders of glycosylation are a genetically and phenotypically heterogeneous family of diseases affecting the co‐ and posttranslational modification of proteins. Using exome sequencing, we detected biallelic variants in GFUS (NM_003313.4) c.[632G>A];[659C>T] (p.[Gly211Glu];[Ser220Leu]) in a patient presenting with global developmental delay, mild coarse facial features and faltering growth. GFUS encodes GDP‐L‐fucose synthase, the terminal enzyme in de novo synthesis of GDP‐L‐fucose, required for fucosylation of N‐ and O‐glycans. We found reduced GFUS protein and decreased GDP‐L‐fucose levels leading to a general hypofucosylation determined in patient's glycoproteins in serum, leukocytes, thrombocytes and fibroblasts. Complementation of patient fibroblasts with wild‐type GFUS cDNA restored fucosylation. Making use of the GDP‐L‐fucose salvage pathway, oral fucose supplementation normalized fucosylation of proteins within 4 weeks as measured in serum and leukocytes. During the follow‐up of 19 months, a moderate improvement of growth was seen, as well as a clear improvement of cognitive skills as measured by the Kaufmann ABC and the Nijmegen Pediatric CDG Rating Scale. In conclusion, GFUS‐CDG is a new glycosylation disorder for which oral L‐fucose supplementation is promising

Tomonaga-Luttinger model with an impurity for a weak two-body interaction

The Tomonaga-Luttinger model with impurity is studied by means of flow equations for Hamiltonians. The system is formulated within collective density fluctuations but no use of the bosonization formula is made. The truncation scheme includes operators consisting of up to four fermion operators and is valid for small electron-electron interactions. In this regime, the exact expression for the anomalous dimension is recovered. Furthermore, we verify the phase diagram of Kane and Fisher also for intermediate impurity strength. The approach can be extended to more general one-body potentials.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figur

Physical activity and sedentary behavior from 6 to 11 years

OBJECTIVES: Physical activity (PA) is presumed to decline during childhood and adolescence, but only few long-term studies about PA development during this period of life exist. We assessed PA and sedentary behavior (SB) over a 5-year period to gain a better understanding of the extent of change in activity and potential influencing factors. METHODS: PA and SB of 600 children from the Childhood Obesity Project were objectively measured with the SenseWear Armband 2 at the ages of 6, 8, and 11 years, resulting in 1254 observations. Longitudinal changes of total PA, moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA), light physical activity (LPA), and SB were modeled with mixed-effects models. RESULTS: Total PA revealed a significant quadratic decline with age (P < .001), resulting in a change of total PA by -75.3 minutes per day from 6 to 11 years. LPA linearly declined (P < .001) by 44.6 minutes per day, MVPA quadratically declined (P < .001) by an overall 30.7 minutes, whereas SB increased significantly (+107 minutes; P = .001). Boys showed a steeper decline in LPA (P = .003) and MVPA (P < .001) than did girls. Higher fat mass index and BMI z scores were associated with lower levels of total PA and MVPA and higher levels of SB (all P < .001). CONCLUSIONS: We showed that PA decreased, and SB increased in earlier years than previously thought. MVPA remained relatively stable until 8 years, but revealed a drop-off at 11 years, identifying this period as a crucial time for intervention

Renormalized perturbation theory for Fermi systems: Fermi surface deformation and superconductivity in the two-dimensional Hubbard model

Divergencies appearing in perturbation expansions of interacting many-body systems can often be removed by expanding around a suitably chosen renormalized (instead of the non-interacting) Hamiltonian. We describe such a renormalized perturbation expansion for interacting Fermi systems, which treats Fermi surface shifts and superconductivity with an arbitrary gap function via additive counterterms. The expansion is formulated explicitly for the Hubbard model to second order in the interaction. Numerical soutions of the self-consistency condition determining the Fermi surface and the gap function are calculated for the two-dimensional case. For the repulsive Hubbard model close to half-filling we find a superconducting state with d-wave symmetry, as expected. For Fermi levels close to the van Hove singularity a Pomeranchuk instability leads to Fermi surfaces with broken square lattice symmetry, whose topology can be closed or open. For the attractive Hubbard model the second order calculation yeilds s-wave superconductivity with a weakly momentum dependent gap, whose size is reduced compared to the mean-field result.Comment: 18 pages incl. 6 figure

Influence of total sugar intake on metabolic blood markers at 8 years of age in the Childhood Obesity Project

PURPOSE We aimed to characterize the association of dietary sugar intake with blood lipids and glucose-related markers in childhood. METHODS Data from the multicentric European Childhood Obesity Project Trial were used. Three-day weighed dietary records were obtained at 8~years of age along with serum concentrations of triglycerides, total cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), glucose, and insulin. Total sugar intake comprised all mono- and disaccharides; different sugar sources were defined. Linear regression models were applied to investigate the cross-sectional association of total sugar intake with blood lipids and glucose-related markers with adjustment for total energy intake using the residual method. RESULTS Data were available for 325 children. Children consumed on average 332~kcal (SD 110) and 21% (SD 6) of energy from total sugar. In an energy-adjusted model, an increase of 100~kcal from total sugar per day was significantly associated with a z score HDL-C decrease (-~0.14; 95% CI -~0.01, -~0.27; p value = 0.031). Concerning different food groups of total sugar intake, 100~kcal total sugar from sweetened beverages was negatively associated with z score HDL-C (-~1.67; 95% CI -~0.42, -~2.91; p value = 0.009), while total sugar from milk products was positively related to z score HDL-C (1.38, 95% CI 0.03, 2.72; p value = 0.045). None of the other blood lipids or glucose-related markers showed a significant relationship with total sugar intake. CONCLUSION Increasing dietary total sugar intake in children, especially from sweetened beverages, was associated with unfavorable effects on HDL-C, which might increase the long-term risk for dyslipidemia and cardiovascular disease. CLINICAL TRIAL REGISTRY ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT00338689; Registered: June 19, 2006. URL: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00338689?term=NCT00338689&rank=1