Effect of Wean-to-Finish Management on Pig Performance

An experiment consisting of three trials was conducted to determine the effect of wean-to-finish management systems on pig performance. Treatments consisted of: 1) wean-to-finish single stock (WF) at 7.5 ft2/pig from weaning (17 day mean age) to slaughter in a fully slatted finishing facility; 2) double stock (DS) at 3.75 ft2/pig for eight weeks following weaning and then split into two pens at 7.5 ft2/pig each; and 3) nursery (NF) at 3.75 ft2/ pig for eight weeks in a conventional nursery followed by movement to the finisher and stocked at 7.5 ft2/pig to slaughter. All pens had one two-hole wean-finish dry feeder per 15 pigs and one cup-drinker per 15 pigs. While there were health related performance problems in Trials 1 and 2 due to PRRS, there were no trial by treatment interactions. At the end of eight weeks, WF pigs were heavier (P\u3c.01) than DS pigs with NF pigs intermediate in weight (63.1, 59.2, and 60.9 lbs, respectively). The heavier weight was due to a difference (P\u3c.01) in feed intake between the WF and DS treatments. There was no effect of nursery phase treatment on feed efficiency. There was no effect (P\u3e.1) of any management treatment on any grow-finish phase production parameter reported. These data suggest that the performance improvement associated with wean–to-finish production systems occurs during the first eight weeks post-weaning. They also suggest that the response can be expected even when health challenges occur in a production system

Effect of Wean-to-Finish Management on Pig Performance

An experiment consisting of three trials was conducted to determine the effect of wean-to-finish management systems on pig performance. Treatments consisted of: 1) wean-to-finish single stock (WF) at 7.5 ft2/pig from weaning (17 day mean age) to slaughter in a fully slatted finishing facility; 2) double stock (DS) at 3.75 ft2/pig for eight weeks following weaning and then split into two pens at 7.5 ft2/pig each; and 3) nursery (NF) at 3.75 ft2/ pig for eight weeks in a conventional nursery followed by movement to the finisher and stocked at 7.5 ft2/pig to slaughter. All pens had one two-hole wean-finish dry feeder per 15 pigs and one cup-drinker per 15 pigs. While there were health related performance problems in Trials 1 and 2 due to PRRS, there were no trial by treatment interactions. At the end of eight weeks, WF pigs were heavier (P\u3c.01) than DS pigs with NF pigs intermediate in weight (63.1, 59.2, and 60.9 lbs, respectively). The heavier weight was due to a difference (P\u3c.01) in feed intake between the WF and DS treatments. There was no effect of nursery phase treatment on feed efficiency. There was no effect (P\u3e.1) of any management treatment on any grow-finish phase production parameter reported. These data suggest that the performance improvement associated with wean–to-finish production systems occurs during the first eight weeks post-weaning. They also suggest that the response can be expected even when health challenges occur in a production system

East African lake evidence for Pliocene millennial-scale climate variability

Late Cenozoic climate history in Africa was punctuated by episodes of variability, characterized by the appearance and disappearance of large freshwater lakes within the East African Rift Valley. In the Baringo-Bogoria basin, a well-dated sequence of diatomites and fluviolacustrine sediments documents the precessionally forced cycling of an extensive lake system between 2.70 Ma and 2.55 Ma. One diatomite unit was studied, using the oxygen isotope composition of diatom silica combined with X-ray fluorescence spectrometry and taxonomic assemblage changes, to explore the nature of climate variability during this interval. Data reveal a rapid onset and gradual decline of deepwater lake conditions, which exhibit millennial-scale cyclicity of ∼1400–1700 yr, similar to late Quaternary Dansgaard-Oeschger events. These cycles are thought to reflect enhanced precipitation coincident with increased monsoonal strength, suggesting the existence of a teleconnection between the high latitudes and East Africa during this period. Such climatic variability could have affected faunal and floral evolution at the time

Chandra ACIS Survey of M33 (ChASeM33): A First Look

We present an overview of the Chandra ACIS Survey of M33 (ChASeM33): A Deep Survey of the Nearest Face-on Spiral Galaxy. The 1.4 Ms survey covers the galaxy out to R \approx 18\arcmin (\approx 4 kpc). These data provide the most intensive, high spatial resolution assessment of the X-ray source populations available for the confused inner regions of M33. Mosaic images of the ChASeM33 observations show several hundred individual X-ray sources as well as soft diffuse emission from the hot interstellar medium. Bright, extended emission surrounds the nucleus and is also seen from the giant \hii regions NGC 604 and IC 131. Fainter extended emission and numerous individual sources appear to trace the inner spiral structure. The initial source catalog, arising from $\sim$~2/3 of the expected survey data, includes 394 sources significant at the $3\sigma$ confidence level or greater, down to a limiting luminosity (absorbed) of $\sim$1.6\ergs{35} (0.35 -- 8.0 keV). The hardness ratios of the sources separate those with soft, thermal spectra such as supernova remnants from those with hard, non-thermal spectra such as X-ray binaries and background active galactic nuclei. Emission extended beyond the Chandra point spread function is evident in 23 of the 394 sources. Cross-correlation of the ChASeM33 sources against previous catalogs of X-ray sources in M33 results in matches for the vast majority of the brighter sources and shows 28 ChASeM33 sources within 10\arcsec of supernova remnants identified by prior optical and radio searches. This brings the total number of such associations to 31 out of 100 known supernova remnants in M33.Comment: accepted for publication ApJS, full resolution images and complete tables available at http://hea-www.harvard.edu/vlp_m33_public

The minimal computational substrate of fluid intelligence

The quantification of cognitive powers rests on identifying a behavioural task that depends on them. Such dependence cannot be assured, for the powers a task invokes cannot be experimentally controlled or constrained a priori, resulting in unknown vulnerability to failure of specificity and generalisability. Evaluating a compact version of Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (RAPM), a widely used clinical test of fluid intelligence, we show that LaMa, a self-supervised artificial neural network trained solely on the completion of partially masked images of natural environmental scenes, achieves human-level test scores a prima vista, without any task-specific inductive bias or training. Compared with cohorts of healthy and focally lesioned participants, LaMa exhibits human-like variation with item difficulty, and produces errors characteristic of right frontal lobe damage under degradation of its ability to integrate global spatial patterns. LaMa's narrow training and limited capacity -- comparable to the nervous system of the fruit fly -- suggest RAPM may be open to computationally simple solutions that need not necessarily invoke abstract reasoning.Comment: 26 pages, 5 figure

Metabolic effects of darunavir/ritonavir versus atazanavir/ritonavir in treatment-naive, HIV Type 1-infected subjects over 48 weeks

We assessed metabolic changes for darunavir/ritonavir (DRV/r) once daily (qd) versus atazanavir/ritonavir (ATV/r) qd with fixed-dose tenofovir/emtricitabine. This was a phase 4, multicenter, open-label, randomized exploratory study. Treatment-naive, HIV-1-infected adults received DRV/r 800/100 mg qd or ATV/r 300/100 mg qd, both with emtricitabine/tenofovir 200/300 mg qd. Primary end point: change in triglyceride levels from baseline to week 12. Secondary end points: week 12 and week 48 changes in lipid parameters, insulin sensitivity, inflammatory/coagulation/bacterial translocation biomarkers, viral load, CD4(+) cell count, and week 48 changes in adipose tissue distribution and subjects' perceptions of body changes. In the DRV/r arm, 32/34 and 29/34 subjects completed weeks 12 and 48, respectively; in the ATV/r arm, 30/31 and 25/31 subjects completed weeks 12 and 48, respectively. Small changes in lipid parameters from baseline to weeks 12 and 48 were observed in both arms. Differences were noted between arms in mean changes in total cholesterol (DRV/r, 20.3 mg/dl; ATV/r, 4.6 mg/dl) and apolipoprotein A1 (DRV/r, 10.7 mg/dl; ATV/r, –0.7 mg/dl) at week 12. At week 48, no clinically relevant differences between arms were noted for changes in any lipid parameter, fasting glucose, or insulin sensitivity. Biomarkers generally decreased and efficacy parameters improved in both arms over 48 weeks. Changes in adipose tissue were small and comparable between arms. Subjects' perceptions of body changes generally improved in both study arms. This first pilot comparison in HIV-1-infected subjects suggests that DRV/r has a metabolic profile similar to ATV/r over 48 weeks of treatment. Further randomized studies are warranted

Optimizing substitution matrix choice and gap parameters for sequence alignment

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>While substitution matrices can readily be computed from reference alignments, it is challenging to compute optimal or approximately optimal gap penalties. It is also not well understood which substitution matrices are the most effective when alignment accuracy is the goal rather than homolog recognition. Here a new parameter optimization procedure, POP, is described and applied to the problems of optimizing gap penalties and selecting substitution matrices for pair-wise global protein alignments.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>POP is compared to a recent method due to Kim and Kececioglu and found to achieve from 0.2% to 1.3% higher accuracies on pair-wise benchmarks extracted from BALIBASE. The VTML matrix series is shown to be the most accurate on several global pair-wise alignment benchmarks, with VTML200 giving best or close to the best performance in all tests. BLOSUM matrices are found to be slightly inferior, even with the marginal improvements in the bug-fixed RBLOSUM series. The PAM series is significantly worse, giving accuracies typically 2% less than VTML. Integer rounding is found to cause slight degradations in accuracy. No evidence is found that selecting a matrix based on sequence divergence improves accuracy, suggesting that the use of this heuristic in CLUSTALW may be ineffective. Using VTML200 is found to improve the accuracy of CLUSTALW by 8% on BALIBASE and 5% on PREFAB.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The hypothesis that more accurate alignments of distantly related sequences may be achieved using low-identity matrices is shown to be false for commonly used matrix types. Source code and test data is freely available from the author's web site at <url>http://www.drive5.com/pop</url>.</p

Sodium glucose co-transporter 2 inhibition increases epidermal growth factor expression and improves outcomes in patients with type 2 diabetes

Underlying molecular mechanisms of the kidney protective effects of sodium glucose co-transporter 2 (SGLT2) inhibitors are not fully elucidated. Therefore, we studied the association between urinary epidermal growth factor (uEGF), a mitogenic factor involved in kidney repair, and kidney outcomes in patients with type 2 diabetes (T2D). The underlying molecular mechanisms of the SGLT2 inhibitor canagliflozin on EGF using single-cell RNA sequencing from kidney tissue were examined. Urinary EGF-to-creatinine ratio (uEGF/Cr) was measured in 3521 CANagliflozin cardioVascular Assessment Study (CANVAS) participants at baseline and week 52. Associations of uEGF/Cr with kidney outcome were assessed using multivariable-adjusted Cox regression models. Single-cell RNA sequencing was performed using protocol kidney biopsy tissue from ten young patients with T2D on SGLT2i, six patients with T2D on standard care only, and six healthy controls (HCs). In CANVAS, each doubling in baseline uEGF/Cr was associated with a 12% (95% confidence interval 1-22) decreased risk of kidney outcome. uEGF/Cr decreased after 52 weeks with placebo and remained stable with canagliflozin (between-group difference +7.3% (2.0-12.8). In young persons with T2D, EGF mRNA was primarily expressed in the thick ascending loop of Henle. Expression in biopsies from T2D without SGLT2i was significantly lower compared to HCs, whereas treatment with SGLT2i increased EGF levels closer to the healthy state. In young persons with T2D without SGLT2i, endothelin-1 emerged as a key regulator of the EGF co-expression network. SGLT2i treatment was associated with a shift towards normal EGF expression. Thus, decreased uEGF represents increased risk of kidney disease progression in patients with T2D. Canagliflozin increased kidney tissue expression of EGF and was associated with a downstream signaling cascade linked to tubular repair and reversal of tubular injury.</p

Age-Related Differences and Reliability on Computerized and Paper-and-Pencil Neurocognitive Assessment Batteries

Neurocognitive testing is a recommended component in a concussion assessment. Clinicians should be aware of age and practice effects on these measures to ensure appropriate understanding of results