Comparison of a Calan gate and a conventional feed barrier system for dairy cows: feed intake and cow behaviour

peer-reviewedThere is little published information on comparisons of individual and group feeding systems for dairy cows. Twenty-four dairy cows were used in a three-period incompletely balanced, change-over design study, to examine food intake and feeding behaviour of dairy cows offered their food via group-access electronic Calan gates, or via a conventional feed-barrier system. The food offered was in the form of a complete diet, and comprised grass silage and concentrates (60:40 dry matter (DM) basis). With the conventional feed-barrier system a maximum of eight animals were able to feed at any one time, while the Calan-gate system allowed a maximum of three animals to feed at any one time. Method of offering the ration had no effect on daily DM intake. During the 8-h period after animals were given access to fresh food, the mean number of animals feeding at any one time was 5.4 and 3.0 for the conventional and Calan-gate systems, respectively, while total intake over this period was 11.0 and 9.2 kg DM per cow, respectively. When access to feed was restricted by the use of Calan gates, animals responded by increasing their intake rate. It is concluded that total DM intake was unaffected by the use of a group Calan-gate feeding system as animals modified their feeding behaviour to maintain food intake

Shape memory alloy actuators for active disassembly using ‘smart’ materials of consumer electronic products

This paper reports the preliminary to current development of Shape Memory Alloy (SMA) actuators within their application in ‘Active Disassembly using Smart Materials’ (ADSM). This non-destructive self-dismantling process is to aid recycling of consumer electronic products. Actuators were placed in single and multi-stage hierarchical temperature regimes after being embedded into macro and sub-assemblies of electronic product assemblies. Findings include active disassembly and a hierarchical dismantling regime for product dismantling using developed SMA actuators embedded into candidate products

Haemostatic problems in liver surgery: A review

No AbstractKeywords: liver surgery, bleeding, anaesthesia, coagulatio

Everything is connected: network thinking in entomology

Editorial

Optimally squeezed spin states

We consider optimally spin-squeezed states that maximize the sensitivity of the Ramsey spectroscopy, and for which the signal to noise ratio scales as the number of particles $N$. Using the variational principle we prove that these states are eigensolutions of the Hamiltonian $H(\lambda)=\lambda S_z^2-S_x,$ and that, for large $N$, the states become equivalent to the quadrature squeezed states of the harmonic oscillator. We present numerical results that illustrate the validity of the equivalence

The Intermediate Coupling Regime in the AdS/CFT Correspondence

The correspondence between the 't Hooft limit of N=4 super Yang-Mills theory and tree-level IIB superstring theory on AdS(5)xS(5) in a Ramond-Ramond background at values of lambda=g^2 N ranging from infinity to zero is examined in the context of unitarity. A squaring relation for the imaginary part of the holographic scattering of identical string fields in the two-particle channels is found, and a mismatch between weak and strong 't Hooft coupling is pointed out within the correspondence. Several interpretations and implications are proposed.Comment: 10 pages, LaTeX, reference adde

Non-Gaussianity from Inflation

Correlated adiabatic and isocurvature perturbation modes are produced during inflation through an oscillation mechanism when extra scalar degrees of freedom other than the inflaton field are present. We show that this correlation generically leads to sizeable non-Gaussian features both in the adiabatic and isocurvature perturbations. The non-Gaussianity is first generated by large non-linearities in some scalar sector and then efficiently transferred to the inflaton sector by the oscillation process. We compute the cosmic microwave background angular bispectrum, providing a characteristic feature of such inflationary non-Gaussianity,which might be detected by upcoming satellite experiments.Comment: Revised version accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. D. 19 pages, LaTeX fil

(Re)constructing Dimensions

Compactifying a higher-dimensional theory defined in R^{1,3+n} on an n-dimensional manifold {\cal M} results in a spectrum of four-dimensional (bosonic) fields with masses m^2_i = \lambda_i, where - \lambda_i are the eigenvalues of the Laplacian on the compact manifold. The question we address in this paper is the inverse: given the masses of the Kaluza-Klein fields in four dimensions, what can we say about the size and shape (i.e. the topology and the metric) of the compact manifold? We present some examples of isospectral manifolds (i.e., different manifolds which give rise to the same Kaluza-Klein mass spectrum). Some of these examples are Ricci-flat, complex and K\"{a}hler and so they are isospectral backgrounds for string theory. Utilizing results from finite spectral geometry, we also discuss the accuracy of reconstructing the properties of the compact manifold (e.g., its dimension, volume, and curvature etc) from measuring the masses of only a finite number of Kaluza-Klein modes.Comment: 23 pages, 3 figures, 2 references adde

On the growth of perturbations in interacting dark energy and dark matter fluids

The covariant generalizations of the background dark sector coupling suggested in G. Mangano, G. Miele and V. Pettorino, Mod. Phys. Lett. A 18, 831 (2003) are considered. The evolution of perturbations is studied with detailed attention to interaction rate that is proportional to the product of dark matter and dark energy densities. It is shown that some classes of models with coupling of this type do not suffer from early time instabilities in strong coupling regime.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures. v3: minor changes, typos fixe

Companion animals are spillover hosts of the Multidrug-resistant human extraintestinal escherichia coli pandemic Clones ST131 and ST1193

Escherichia coli sequence types 131 (ST131) and 1193 are multidrug-resistant extraintestinal pathogens that have recently spread epidemically among humans and are occasionally isolated from companion animals. This study characterized a nationwide collection of fluoroquinolone-resistant (FQR) E. coli isolates from extraintestinal infections in Australian cats and dogs. For this, 59 cat and dog FQR clinical E. coli isolates (representing 6.9% of an 855-isolate collection) underwent PCR-based phylotyping and whole-genome sequencing (WGS). Isolates from commensal-associated phylogenetic groups A (14/59, 24%) and B1 (18/59, 31%) were dominant, with ST224 (10/59, 17%), and ST744 (8/59, 14%) predominating. Less prevalent were phylogenetic groups D (12/59, 20%), with ST38 (8/59, 14%) predominating, and virulence-associated phylogenetic group B2 (7/59, 12%), with ST131 predominating (6/7, 86%) and no ST1193 isolates identified. In a WGS-based comparison of 20 cat and dog-source ST131 isolates with 188 reference human and animal ST131 isolates, the cat and dog-source isolates were phylogenetically diverse. Although cat and dog-source ST131 isolates exhibited some minor sub-clustering, most were closely related to human-source ST131 strains. Furthermore, the prevalence of ST131 as a cause of FQR infections in Australian companion animals was relatively constant between this study and the 5-year-earlier study of Platell et al. (2010) (9/125 isolates, 7.2%). Thus, although the high degree of clonal commonality among FQR clinical isolates from humans vs. companion animals suggests the possibility of bi-directional between-species transmission, the much higher reported prevalence of ST131 and ST1193 among FQR clinical isolates from humans as compared to companion animals suggests that companion animals are spillover hosts rather than being a primary reservoir for these lineages