Worm Control for Small Ruminants in Tropical Asia

Livestock Production/Industries,

Encounters with the military : toward an ethics of feminist critique?

This conversation developed from a panel titled “Interrogating the Militarized Masculine: Reflections on Research, Ethics and Access” held at the May 2013 International Feminist Journal of Politics conference at the University of Sussex, UK

Heat Shock Protein Induced Protection against Cisplatin-Induced Hair Cell Death

Cisplatin is a highly successful and widely used chemotherapy for the treatment of various solid malignancies in both adult and pediatric patients. Side effects of cisplatin include nephrotoxicity and ototoxicity. Cisplatin\u27s ototoxic effect results in part from damage to and death of cochlear hair cells. Mechanisms underlying cisplatin-induced hair cell death are poorly understood and have been attributed to DNA damage, oxidative stress, and inflammation. This study was designed to determine the role of p53 in cisplatin-induced hair cell death and to investigate heat shock proteins (HSPs) as potential protectants against cisplatin-induced hair cell death using adult mouse utricle as an in vitro model of mature mammalian hair cells. p53 is a well-known transcription factor involved in the DNA damage response. Using p53-/- mice and wild-type litter mates, results indicate that p53 is not necessary for cisplatin-induced death of hair cells and hearing loss. Heat shock has been previously shown to inhibit cisplatin-induced hair cell death. Since HSP70 is upregulated following sublethal heat shock, the role ofHSP70 in heat shock-conferred protection against cisplatin was investigated. HSP70 is necessary for the protective effect conferred by heat shock against cisplatin-induced hair cell death. Constitutive expression of inducible HSP70 offered modest protection against cisplatin-induced hair cell death, indicating that HSP70 is sufficient to protect against cisplatin. HSP32, a stress-inducible protein responsible for the catabolism of free heme, has been shown to protect against oxidative and inflammatory stress in multiple systems. Cobalt protoporphyrin IX (CoPPIX) -induced HSP32 was previously shown to inhibit cisplatin-induced death of hair cells from neonatal rat cochlear explants. Results indicate that HSP32 offers significant protection against cisplatin-induced hair cell death in cultured adult mouse utricle at multiple cisplatin concentrations, that CoPPIX induces expression ofHSP32 primarily in resident macrophages of mouse utricle, and that macrophages are necessary for the protection conferred by CoPPIX-induced HSP32 against cisplatin. Due to the robust protection conferred by HSP32, it may prove promising in the design of a co-therapy for the prevention of cisplatin-induced hearing loss

Integration of tools for the Design and Assessment of High-Performance, Highly Reliable Computing Systems (DAHPHRS), phase 1

Systems for Space Defense Initiative (SDI) space applications typically require both high performance and very high reliability. These requirements present the systems engineer evaluating such systems with the extremely difficult problem of conducting performance and reliability trade-offs over large design spaces. A controlled development process supported by appropriate automated tools must be used to assure that the system will meet design objectives. This report describes an investigation of methods, tools, and techniques necessary to support performance and reliability modeling for SDI systems development. Models of the JPL Hypercubes, the Encore Multimax, and the C.S. Draper Lab Fault-Tolerant Parallel Processor (FTPP) parallel-computing architectures using candidate SDI weapons-to-target assignment algorithms as workloads were built and analyzed as a means of identifying the necessary system models, how the models interact, and what experiments and analyses should be performed. As a result of this effort, weaknesses in the existing methods and tools were revealed and capabilities that will be required for both individual tools and an integrated toolset were identified

Worm control for small ruminants in tropical Asia

ACIAR funded a collaborative project between research organisations in Southeast Asia for ILRI and regional partners to explore new ways to control helminth parasites in the tropics. The project aimed to increase small ruminant production in Southeast Asia by controlling internal parasites, which are one of the major constraints to sheep and goat production in the tropics. Control of internal parasites also provides an avenue for general improvement in husbandry methods. The three objectives of the project are: to prevent the spread of resistance to anthelmintics (dewormers) used for control of nematode parasites of sheep and goats in Asia; to assess genetic variation in resistance to gastrointestinal nematode parasites in different breeds of sheep and goats; and to disseminate information about control of internal parasites in the tropics. This publication and the accompanying CD draw together information from a number of sources to describe the state of research and development on worm control in sheep and goats in Asia and the Pacific. Topics of discussion include worm control; economic impacts of worm control; integrated approaches to sustainable parasite control; anthelmintic resistance; appropriate breeds and breeding schemes; options to overcome worm infection; impact of parasitism on the development of small ruminant populations; worm control methods; improving small ruminant productivity; and prevalence of internal parasites

Testing the nature of gravitational wave propagation using dark sirens and galaxy catalogues

The dark sirens method enables us to use gravitational wave events without electromagnetic counterparts as tools for cosmology and tests of gravity. Furthermore, the dark sirens analysis code gwcosmo can now robustly account for information coming from both galaxy catalogues and the compact object mass distribution. We present here an extension of the gwcosmo code and methodology to constrain parameterized deviations from General Relativity that affect the propagation of gravitational waves. We show results of our analysis using data from the GWTC-3 gravitational wave catalogues, in preparation for application to the O4 observing run. After testing our pipelines using the First Two Years mock data set, we reanalyse 46 events from GWTC-3, and combine the posterior for BBH and NSBH sampling results for the first time. We obtain joint constraints on H0 and parameterized deviations from General Relativity in the Power Law + Peak BBH population model. With increased galaxy catalogue support in the future, our work sets the stage for dark sirens to become a powerful tool for testing gravity

Realistic protein-protein association rates from a simple diffusional model neglecting long-range interactions, free energy barriers, and landscape ruggedness

We develop a simple but rigorous model of protein-protein association kinetics based on diffusional association on free energy landscapes obtained by sampling configurations within and surrounding the native complex binding funnels. Guided by results obtained on exactly solvable model problems, we transform the problem of diffusion in a potential into free diffusion in the presence of an absorbing zone spanning the entrance to the binding funnel. The free diffusion problem is solved using a recently derived analytic expression for the rate of association of asymmetrically oriented molecules. Despite the required high steric specificity and the absence of long-range attractive interactions, the computed rates are typically on the order of 10^4-10^6 M-1 s-1, several orders of magnitude higher than rates obtained using a purely probabilistic model in which the association rate for free diffusion of uniformly reactive molecules is multiplied by the probability of a correct alignment of the two partners in a random collision. As the association rates of many protein-protein complexes are also in the 10^5-10^6 M-1 s-1, our results suggest that free energy barriers arising from desolvation and/or side-chain freezing during complex formation or increased ruggedness within the binding funnel, which are completely neglected in our simple diffusional model, do not contribute significantly to the dynamics of protein-protein association. The transparent physical interpretation of our approach that computes association rates directly from the size and geometry of protein-protein binding funnels makes it a useful complement to Brownian dynamics simulations.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, 1 table. One figure and a few comments added for clarificatio

Intra-session and inter-day reliability of the Myon 320 electromyography system during sub-maximal contractions

Electromyography systems are widely used within the field of scientific and clinical practices. The reliability of these systems are paramount when conducting research. The reliability of Myon 320 Surface Electromyography System is yet to be determined. This study aims to determine the intra-session and inter-day reliability of the Myon 320 Surface Electromyography System. Muscle activity from fifteen participants was measured at the anterior deltoid muscle during a bilateral front raise exercise, the vastus lateralis muscle during a squat exercise and the extensor carpi radialis brevis (ECRB) muscle during an isometric handgrip task. Intra-session and inter-day reliability was calculated by intraclass correlation coefficient, standard error of measurement and coefficient of variation (CV). The normalized root mean squared (RMS) surface electromyographic signals produced good intra-session and inter-day testing intraclass correlation coefficient values (range: 0.63-0.97) together with low standard error of measurement (range: 1.49-2.32) and CV (range: 95% Confidence Interval = 0.36-12.71) measures for the dynamic-and-isometric contractions. The findings indicate that the Myon 320 Surface Electromyography System produces good to fair reliability when examining intra-session and inter-day reliability. Findings of the study provide evidence of the reliability of electromyography between trials which is essential during clinical testing.</p

Algae for biofuel:will the evolution of weeds limit the enterprise?

Algae hold promise as a source of biofuel. Yet the manner in which algae are most efficiently propagated and harvested is different from that used in traditional agriculture. In theory, algae can be grown in continuous culture and harvested frequently to maintain high yields with a short turnaround time. However, the maintenance of the population in a state of continuous growth will likely impose selection for fast growth, possibly opposing the maintenance of lipid stores desiriable for fuel. Any harvesting that removes a subset of the population and leaves the survivors to establish the next generation may quickly select traits that escape harvesting. An understanding of these problems should help identify methods for retarding the evolution and enhancing biofuel production

Almost sure exponential stability of backward Euler–Maruyama discretizations for hybrid stochastic differential equations

This is a continuation of the first author's earlier paper [1] jointly with Pang and Deng, in which the authors established some sufficient conditions under which the Euler-Maruyama (EM) method can reproduce the almost sure exponential stability of the test hybrid SDEs. The key condition imposed in [1] is the global Lipschitz condition. However, we will show in this paper that without this global Lipschitz condition the EM method may not preserve the almost sure exponential stability. We will then show that the backward EM method can capture the almost sure exponential stability for a certain class of highly nonlinear hybrid SDEs