The Effects of Diet and Cooler Aging on Specific Flavor Notes in Beef

Crossbred steers (n = 64) were grazed on warm- or cool-season grass-dominated pastures, without or with energy supplementation of wet distillers grains with solubles (WDGS), and were finished on a corn-based diet with or without 35% WDGS. Finishing on corn increased desirable flavor notes and decreasedundesirable flavor notes in both L. dorsi and B. femoris steaks. In addition, grazing on warm-season grasses increased the prevalence of undesirable flavors but was often dissipated by the addition WDGS supplementation. Longer aging periods tended to increase the prevalence of undesirable flavors, especially in B. femoris steaks. It is recommended producers provide WDGS supplementation, especially when grazing on warm-season grasses, and finish on an all corn diet in order to create a favorable flavor palate

Relationship of Metabolizable Protein Balance, Purine Derivative Excretion, and 3-Methyl Histidine Excretion to Feed Efficiency in Individually Fed Finishing Heifers

Individually fed heifers were used to determine the relationship of 3-methyl histidine, purine derivatives, and metabolizableprotein balance to feed efficiency. Heifers were fed finishing dietsthat were either deficient or sufficient in metabolizable protein. Urine samples were collected and analyzed for early, late, and entire feeding period concentrations of 3-methyl histidine, purine derivatives, and creatinine. Results from this study indicated a negative relationship between feed efficiency and metabolizable protein balance, and no relationship between 3-methyl histidine excretion and feed efficiency, suggesting that protein turnover and microbial protein synthesis are not related to feed efficienc

Relationship of Metabolizable Protein Balance, Purine Derivative Excretion, and 3-Methyl Histidine Excretion to Feed Efficiency in Individually Fed Finishing Heifers

Individually fed heifers were used to determine the relationship of 3-methyl histidine, purine derivatives, and metabolizableprotein balance to feed efficiency. Heifers were fed finishing dietsthat were either deficient or sufficient in metabolizable protein. Urine samples were collected and analyzed for early, late, and entire feeding period concentrations of 3-methyl histidine, purine derivatives, and creatinine. Results from this study indicated a negative relationship between feed efficiency and metabolizable protein balance, and no relationship between 3-methyl histidine excretion and feed efficiency, suggesting that protein turnover and microbial protein synthesis are not related to feed efficienc

Multi-Drug Resistance Transporters and a Mechanism-Based Strategy for Assessing Risks of Pesticide Combinations to Honey Bees

Annual losses of honey bee colonies remain high and pesticide exposure is one possible cause. Dangerous combinations of pesticides, plant-produced compounds and antibiotics added to hives may cause or contribute to losses, but it is very difficult to test the many combinations of those compounds that bees encounter. We propose a mechanism-based strategy for simplifying the assessment of combinations of compounds, focusing here on compounds that interact with xenobiotic handling ABC transporters. We evaluate the use of ivermectin as a model substrate for these transporters. Compounds that increase sensitivity of bees to ivermectin may be inhibiting key transporters. We show that several compounds commonly encountered by honey bees (fumagillin, Pristine, quercetin) significantly increased honey bee mortality due to ivermectin and significantly reduced the LC50 of ivermectin suggesting that they may interfere with transporter function. These inhibitors also significantly increased honey bees sensitivity to the neonicotinoid insecticide acetamiprid. This mechanism-based strategy may dramatically reduce the number of tests needed to assess the possibility of adverse combinations among pesticides. We also demonstrate an in vivo transporter assay that provides physical evidence of transporter inhibition by tracking the dynamics of a fluorescent substrate of these transporters (Rhodamine B) in bee tissues. Significantly more Rhodamine B remains in the head and hemolymph of bees pretreated with higher concentrations of the transporter inhibitor verapamil. Mechanism-based strategies for simplifying the assessment of adverse chemical interactions such as described here could improve our ability to identify those combinations that pose significantly greater risk to bees and perhaps improve the risk assessment protocols for honey bees and similar sensitive species

An examination of writing pauses in the handwriting of children with Developmental Coordination Disorder.

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Difficulties with handwriting are reported as one of the main reasons for the referral of children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) to healthcare professionals. In a recent study we found that children with DCD produced less text than their typically developing (TD) peers and paused for 60% of a free-writing task. However, little is known about the nature of the pausing; whether they are long pauses possibly due to higher level processes of text generation or fatigue, or shorter pauses related to the movements between letters. This gap in the knowledge-base creates barriers to understanding the handwriting difficulties in children with DCD. The aim of this study was to characterise the pauses observed in the handwriting of English children with and without DCD. Twenty-eight 8-14 year-old children with a diagnosis of DCD participated in the study, with 28 TD age and gender matched controls. Participants completed the 10 min free-writing task from the Detailed Assessment of Speed of Handwriting (DASH) on a digitising writing tablet. The total overall percentage of pausing during the task was categorised into four pause time-frames, each derived from the literature on writing (250 ms to 2 s; 2-4 s; 4-10 s and >10 s). In addition, the location of the pauses was coded (within word/between word) to examine where the breakdown in the writing process occurred. The results indicated that the main group difference was driven by more pauses above 10 s in the DCD group. In addition, the DCD group paused more within words compared to TD peers, indicating a lack of automaticity in their handwriting. These findings may support the provision of additional time for children with DCD in written examinations. More importantly, they emphasise the need for intervention in children with DCD to promote the acquisition of efficient handwriting skill

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Transporting children in SPICA casts in a safe, comfortable, and convenient manner so that the parents can feel more at ease

Handwriting speed in children with Developmental Coordination Disorder: Are they really slower?

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Research in Developmental Disabilities. The published article is available at the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2013 Elsevier B.V.Handwriting difficulties are often included in descriptions of Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD). They are cited as the most common reason for referral to health professionals following parent and teacher concerns about slow and untidy writing. The aim of this study was to compare handwriting performance in English children with and without DCD across a range of writing tasks, to gain a better understanding of the nature of ‘slowness’ so commonly reported. Twenty-eight 8–14 year-old children with a diagnosis of DCD participated in the study, with 28 typically developing age and gender matched controls. Participants completed the four handwriting tasks from the Detailed Assessment of Speed of Handwriting (DASH) and wrote their own name; all on a digitising writing tablet. The number of words written, speed of pen movements and the time spent pausing during the tasks were calculated. The findings confirmed what many professionals report, that children with DCD produce less text than their peers. However, this was not due to slow movement execution, but rather a higher percentage of time spent pausing. Discussion centres on the understanding of the pausing phenomenon in children with DCD and areas for further research.Oxford Brookes Universit

The ROTSE detection of early optical light from GRB 990123

An overview is given of the Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment, a ground-based observational astronomy project intended to detect visible radiation from gamma-ray bursts. The major result of the project was the detection of an early bright optical transient from a GRB. (AIP) © 1999 American Institute of Physics.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/87569/2/82_1.pd

Parthenon -- a performance portable block-structured adaptive mesh refinement framework

On the path to exascale the landscape of computer device architectures and corresponding programming models has become much more diverse. While various low-level performance portable programming models are available, support at the application level lacks behind. To address this issue, we present the performance portable block-structured adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) framework Parthenon, derived from the well-tested and widely used Athena++ astrophysical magnetohydrodynamics code, but generalized to serve as the foundation for a variety of downstream multi-physics codes. Parthenon adopts the Kokkos programming model, and provides various levels of abstractions from multi-dimensional variables, to packages defining and separating components, to launching of parallel compute kernels. Parthenon allocates all data in device memory to reduce data movement, supports the logical packing of variables and mesh blocks to reduce kernel launch overhead, and employs one-sided, asynchronous MPI calls to reduce communication overhead in multi-node simulations. Using a hydrodynamics miniapp, we demonstrate weak and strong scaling on various architectures including AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, Intel and AMD x86 CPUs, IBM Power9 CPUs, as well as Fujitsu A64FX CPUs. At the largest scale on Frontier (the first TOP500 exascale machine), the miniapp reaches a total of $1.7\times10^{13}$ zone-cycles/s on 9,216 nodes (73,728 logical GPUs) at ~92% weak scaling parallel efficiency (starting from a single node). In combination with being an open, collaborative project, this makes Parthenon an ideal framework to target exascale simulations in which the downstream developers can focus on their specific application rather than on the complexity of handling massively-parallel, device-accelerated AMR.Comment: 17 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in IJHPCA, Codes available at https://github.com/parthenon-hpc-la