5,188 research outputs found
Fermentation of animal components in strict carnivores: a comparative study with cheetah fecal inoculum
The natural diet of felids contains highly digestible animal tissues but also fractions resistant to small intestinal digestion, which enter the large intestine where they may be fermented by the resident microbial population. Little information exists on the microbial degradability of animal tissues in the large intestine of felids consuming a natural diet. This study aimed to rank animal substrates in their microbial degradability by means of an in vitro study using captive cheetahs fed a strict carnivorous diet as fecal donors. Fresh cheetah fecal samples were collected, pooled, and incubated with various raw animal substrates (chicken cartilage, collagen, glucosamine-chondroitin, glucosamine, rabbit bone, rabbit hair, and rabbit skin; 4 replicates per substrate) for cumulative gas production measurement in a batch culture technique. Negative (cellulose) and positive (casein and fructo-oligosaccharides; FOS) controls were incorporated in the study. Additionally, after 72 h of incubation, short-chain fatty acids (SCFA), including branched-chain fatty acids (BCFA), and ammonia concentrations were determined for each substrate. Glucosamine and glucosamine-chondroitin yielded the greatest OM cumulative gas volume (OMCV) among animal substrates (P < 0.05), whereas total SCFA production was greatest for collagen (P < 0.05). Collagen induced an acetate production comparable to FOS and a markedly high acetate-to-propionate ratio (8.41:1) compared to all other substrates (1.67:1 to 2.97:1)
State space c-reductions for concurrent systems in rewriting logic
We present c-reductions, a state space reduction technique.
The rough idea is to exploit some equivalence relation on states (possibly capturing system regularities) that preserves behavioral properties, and explore the induced quotient system. This is done by means of a canonizer
function, which maps each state into a (non necessarily unique) canonical representative of its equivalence class. The approach exploits the expressiveness of rewriting logic and its realization in Maude to enjoy several advantages over similar approaches: exibility and simplicity in
the definition of the reductions (supporting not only traditional symmetry reductions, but also name reuse and name abstraction); reasoning support for checking and proving correctness of the reductions; and automatization
of the reduction infrastructure via Maude's meta-programming
features. The approach has been validated over a set of representative case studies, exhibiting comparable results with respect to other tools
Properties of 3-manifolds for relativists
In canonical quantum gravity certain topological properties of 3-manifolds
are of interest. This article gives an account of those properties which have
so far received sufficient attention, especially those concerning the
diffeomorphism groups of 3-manifolds. We give a summary of these properties and
list some old and new results concerning them. The appendix contains a
discussion of the group of large diffeomorphisms of the -handle 3-manifold.Comment: 20 pages. Plain-TeX, no figures, 1 Table (A4 format
Model-based Aeroservoelastic Design and Load Alleviation of Large Wind Turbine Blades
This paper presents an aeroservoelastic modeling approach for dynamic load alleviation
in large wind turbines with trailing-edge aerodynamic surfaces. The tower, potentially on a
moving base, and the rotating blades are modeled using geometrically non-linear composite
beams, which are linearized around reference conditions with arbitrarily-large structural
displacements. Time-domain aerodynamics are given by a linearized 3-D unsteady vortexlattice
method and the resulting dynamic aeroelastic model is written in a state-space
formulation suitable for model reductions and control synthesis. A linear model of a single
blade is used to design a Linear-Quadratic-Gaussian regulator on its root-bending moments,
which is finally shown to provide load reductions of about 20% in closed-loop on the full
wind turbine non-linear aeroelastic model
Projected free energies for polydisperse phase equilibria
A `polydisperse' system has an infinite number of conserved densities. We
give a rational procedure for projecting its infinite-dimensional free energy
surface onto a subspace comprising a finite number of linear combinations of
densities (`moments'), in which the phase behavior is then found as usual. If
the excess free energy of the system depends only on the moments used, exact
cloud, shadow and spinodal curves result; two- and multi-phase regions are
approximate, but refinable indefinitely by adding extra moments. The approach
is computationally robust and gives new geometrical insights into the
thermodynamics of polydispersity.Comment: 4 pages, REVTeX, uses multicol.sty and epsf.sty, 1 postscript figure
include
Children's Pronoun Interpretation Problems Are Related to Theory of Mind and Inhibition, But Not Working Memory
In several languages, including English and Dutch, children’s acquisition of the interpretation of object pronouns (e.g., him) is delayed compared to that of reflexives (e.g., himself). Various syntactic and pragmatic explanations have been proposed to account for this delay in children’s acquisition of pronoun interpretation. This study aims to provide more insight into this delay by investigating potential cognitive mechanisms underlying this delay. Dutch-speaking children between 6 and 12 years old with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 47), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD; n = 36) or typical development (TD; n = 38) were tested on their interpretation and production of object pronouns and reflexives and on theory of mind, working memory, and response inhibition. It was found that all three groups of children had difficulty with pronoun interpretation and that their performance on pronoun interpretation was associated with theory of mind and inhibition. These findings support an explanation of object pronoun interpretation in terms of perspective taking, according to which listeners need to consider the speaker’s perspective in order to block coreference between the object pronoun and the subject of the same sentence. Unlike what is predicted by alternative theoretical accounts, performance on pronoun interpretation was not associated with working memory, and the children made virtually no errors in their production of object pronouns. As the difficulties with pronoun interpretation were similar for children with ASD, children with ADHD and typically developing children, this suggests that certain types of perspective taking are unaffected in children with ASD and ADHD
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