Effects of electrical stimulation on physical, chemical and palatability characteristics of beef produced from three feeding regimens

Part I: Effects of Electrical Stimulation Carcass Characteristics and Palatability Attributes of Beef Produced From Three Feeding Regimens. Twenty forage finished, 20 limited grain finished (low energy) and 19 grain finished (high energy, ad libitum) steers were slaughtered in a commercial meat packing firm. A randomly selected side from each carcass was electrically stimulated (625 volts, 3-5 amps, 20 impulses of 1 sec duration each) within one hour post-exsanguination. All sides were chilled in a 0 C cooler, ribbed at 18-21 hrs postmortem (PM) and evaluated. Five short loin steaks (2.5cm) were removed after 60, 120, 180 and 240 hr PM aging periods for Warner-Bratzler shear (WBS) force and palatability (240 hr only) determinations. Carcasses from steers finished on forage were rated lower for lean color, lean firmness, lean texture, fat color, sensory flavor and sensory tenderness than grain finished steercarcasses. For comparisons between electrical stimulation (ES) and controls (combined feeding regimens, n = 59), ES improved (P \u3c .01) lean color, firmness, texture scores and reduced heat-ring formation. ES sides from grain finished steers exhibited higher (P \u3c .10) marbling scores (Small 30% vs Slight 90%) than control sides, however, ES did not significantly increase the marbling degree in forage finished or limit grain finished steer carcasses. ES steaks broiled to an internal temperature of 70 C for palatability determinations received higher (P \u3c .05) tenderness ratings (5.1 vs 4.8) and had lower (P \u3c .01) WBS force values at 60hr (3.4 vs 4.1 kg), 120hr (3.1 vs 3.8 kg), 180hr (3.0 vs 3.4kg) and 240 hr (2.8 vs 3.2 kg) PM aging periods. Aged (240hr) steaks from all ES sides were less (P \u3c .05) variable (s.d. .79 vs .63 kg of WBS) in tenderness. These data indicate that ES coupled with 5 days cooler aging results in an equal level of tenderness than carcasses (forage of grain) aged 10 days. Part II: Effects of Postmortem Aging on Fragmentation Index Values. A total of 472 loin steaks were removed from short loins (n = 118) from electrically stimulated (ES) and non-electrically stimulated (NES) sides cooler aged for 60, 120, 180 and 240 hrs postmortem. Following each aging period, Warner-Bratzlershear (WBS) and Fragmentation Index (FI) samples were removed. Palatability, proximate analysis and histological samples were removed after the 240 hr aging period. FI of frozen longissimus muscle was recorded at two drying times (0 min and 10 min). No difference (P \u3c .01) in correlation of FI residue to WBS force values for drying periods of 0 or 10 min was observed. Simple correlation coefficients (P \u3c .01) of NES and ES muscle relating FI (0 min) of muscle at 60 hr postmortem to WBS force values were (.50 and .44), (.48 and .39), (38 and .36) and (.39 and .31) for steaks aged 60, 120, 180 and 240 hrs PM, respectively. FI of NES muscle accounted for approximately 23, 42, 38 and 15% of the observed variation in WBS force values not explained by selected carcass traits for steaks aged 60, 120, 180 and 240 hrs PM, respectively. USDA beef quality factors accounted for approximately 7% of the variation in shear force value,while FI (0 min drying time) accounted for an additional 10-37% of the variation in shear force for steaks aged 60-240 hours. By omitting the residue drying step, the FI procedure may be reduced by 10min, thus creating a more time efficient procedure for tenderness evaluation using raw muscle cooler aged for 60 hrs. These data indicate that this procedure has potential for commercial application

A long-term record of early to mid-Paleozoic marine redox change

The extent to which Paleozoic oceans differed from Neoproterozoic oceans and the causal relationship between biological evolution and changing environmental conditions are heavily debated. Here, we report a nearly continuous record of seafloor redox change from the deep-water upper Cambrian to Middle Devonian Road River Group of Yukon, Canada. Bottom waters were largely anoxic in the Richardson trough during the entirety of Road River Group deposition, while independent evidence from iron speciation and Mo/U ratios show that the biogeochemical nature of anoxia changed through time. Both in Yukon and globally, Ordovician through Early Devonian anoxic waters were broadly ferruginous (nonsulfidic), with a transition toward more euxinic (sulfidic) conditions in the mid–Early Devonian (Pragian), coincident with the early diversification of vascular plants and disappearance of graptolites. This ~80-million-year interval of the Paleozoic characterized by widespread ferruginous bottom waters represents a persistence of Neoproterozoic-like marine redox conditions well into the Phanerozoic

Measurements of elliptic and triangular flow in high-multiplicity 3^{3}He++Au collisions at sNN=200\sqrt{s_{_{NN}}}=200 GeV

We present the first measurement of elliptic ($v_2$) and triangular ($v_3$) flow in high-multiplicity $^{3}$He$+$Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{_{NN}}}=200$ GeV. Two-particle correlations, where the particles have a large separation in pseudorapidity, are compared in $^{3}$He$+$Au and in $p$$+$$p$ collisions and indicate that collective effects dominate the second and third Fourier components for the correlations observed in the $^{3}$He$+$Au system. The collective behavior is quantified in terms of elliptic $v_2$ and triangular $v_3$ anisotropy coefficients measured with respect to their corresponding event planes. The $v_2$ values are comparable to those previously measured in $d$$+$Au collisions at the same nucleon-nucleon center-of-mass energy. Comparison with various theoretical predictions are made, including to models where the hot spots created by the impact of the three $^{3}$He nucleons on the Au nucleus expand hydrodynamically to generate the triangular flow. The agreement of these models with data may indicate the formation of low-viscosity quark-gluon plasma even in these small collision systems.Comment: 630 authors, 9 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables. v2 is the version accepted for publication by Physical Review Letters. Plain text data tables for the points plotted in figures for this and previous PHENIX publications are (or will be) publicly available at http://www.phenix.bnl.gov/papers.htm

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead