18 research outputs found
Ventilation of small livestock trailers
A large number of livestock is transported to market in small box trailers. The welfare
of animals transported in this way is now assuming greater importance with the onset
of tougher EU legislation. This paper presents the first study into the ventilation of
small livestock trailers using experimental and computational methods. Wind tunnel
studies, using a 1/7th scale model, highlight the important influence of the towing
vehicle and trailer design on the airflow within the trailer. Detailed CFD analysis
agrees well with the wind tunnel data and offers the ability to assess the impact of
design changes
Chiral Analysis of Quenched Baryon Masses
We extend to quenched QCD an earlier investigation of the chiral structure of
the masses of the nucleon and the delta in lattice simulations of full QCD.
Even after including the meson-loop self-energies which give rise to the
leading and next-to-leading non-analytic behaviour (and hence the most rapid
variation in the region of light quark mass), we find surprisingly little
curvature in the quenched case. Replacing these meson-loop self-energies by the
corresponding terms in full QCD yields a remarkable level of agreement with the
results of the full QCD simulations. This comparison leads to a very good
understanding of the origins of the mass splitting between these baryons.Comment: 23 pages, 6 figure
Gene content evolution in the arthropods
Arthropods comprise the largest and most diverse phylum on Earth and play vital roles in nearly every ecosystem. Their diversity stems in part from variations on a conserved body plan, resulting from and recorded in adaptive changes in the genome. Dissection of the genomic record of sequence change enables broad questions regarding genome evolution to be addressed, even across hyper-diverse taxa within arthropods.
Using 76 whole genome sequences representing 21 orders spanning more than 500 million years of arthropod evolution, we document changes in gene and protein domain content and provide temporal and phylogenetic context for interpreting these innovations. We identify many novel gene families that arose early in the evolution of arthropods and during the diversification of insects into modern orders. We reveal unexpected variation in patterns of DNA methylation across arthropods and examples of gene family and protein domain evolution coincident with the appearance of notable phenotypic and physiological adaptations such as flight, metamorphosis, sociality, and chemoperception.
These analyses demonstrate how large-scale comparative genomics can provide broad new insights into the genotype to phenotype map and generate testable hypotheses about the evolution of animal diversity