Precision fish farming: a new framework to improve production in aquaculture

Aquaculture production of finfish has seen rapid growth in production volume and economic yield over the last decades, and is today a key provider of seafood. As the scale of production increases, so does the likelihood that the industry will face emerging biological, economic and social challenges that may influence the ability to maintain ethically sound, productive and environmentally friendly production of fish. It is therefore important that the industry aspires to monitor and control the effects of these challenges to avoid also upscaling potential problems when upscaling production. We introduce the Precision Fish Farming (PFF) concept whose aim is to apply control-engineering principles to fish production, thereby improving the farmer's ability to monitor, control and document biological processes in fish farms. By adapting several core principles from Precision Livestock Farming (PLF), and accounting for the boundary conditions and possibilities that are particular to farming operations in the aquatic environment, PFF will contribute to moving commercial aquaculture from the traditional experience-based to a knowledge-based production regime. This can only be achieved through increased use of emerging technologies and automated systems. We have also reviewed existing technological solutions that could represent important components in future PFF applications. To illustrate the potential of such applications, we have defined four case studies aimed at solving specific challenges related to biomass monitoring, control of feed delivery, parasite monitoring and management of crowding operations

Associations of autozygosity with a broad range of human phenotypes

In many species, the offspring of related parents suffer reduced reproductive success, a phenomenon known as inbreeding depression. In humans, the importance of this effect has remained unclear, partly because reproduction between close relatives is both rare and frequently associated with confounding social factors. Here, using genomic inbreeding coefficients (F-ROH) for >1.4 million individuals, we show that F-ROH is significantly associated (p <0.0005) with apparently deleterious changes in 32 out of 100 traits analysed. These changes are associated with runs of homozygosity (ROH), but not with common variant homozygosity, suggesting that genetic variants associated with inbreeding depression are predominantly rare. The effect on fertility is striking: F-ROH equivalent to the offspring of first cousins is associated with a 55% decrease [95% CI 44-66%] in the odds of having children. Finally, the effects of F-ROH are confirmed within full-sibling pairs, where the variation in F-ROH is independent of all environmental confounding.Peer reviewe

Measurement of azimuthal anisotropy of muons from charm and bottom hadrons in Pb+Pb collisions at √sNN=5.02 TeV with the ATLAS detector

Azimuthal anisotropies of muons from charm and bottom hadron decays are measured in Pb+Pb collisions at √sNN=5.02 TeV. The data were collected with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider in 2015 and 2018 with integrated luminosities of  0.5 nb-1 and 1.4 nb-1, respectively. The kinematic selection for heavy-flavor muons requires transverse momentum 4<pT <30GeV and pseudorapidity ¦η¦ <2.0. The dominant sources of muons in this range are semi-leptonic decays of charm and bottom hadrons. These heavy-flavor muons are separated from light-hadron decay muons and punch-through hadrons using the momentum imbalance between the measurements in the tracking detector and in the muon spectrometers. Azimuthal anisotropies, quantified by flow coefficients, are measured via the event-plane method for inclusive heavy-flavor muons as a function of the muon pT  and in intervals of Pb+Pb collision centrality. Heavy-flavor muons are separated into contributions from charm and bottom hadron decays using the muon transverse impact parameter with respect to the event primary vertex. Non-zero elliptic (ν2) and triangular  (ν3) flow coefficients are extracted for charm and bottom muons, with the charm muon coefficients larger than those for bottom muons for all Pb+Pb collision centralities. The results indicate substantial modification to the charm and bottom quark angular distributions through interactions in the quark-gluon plasma produced in these Pb+Pb collisions, with smaller modifications for the bottom quarks as expected theoretically due to their larger mass