Experimental rearing of Nile tilapia fry (Oreochromis niloticus) for saltwater culture

Represents a preliminary evaluation of the utility of various approaches of early salinity exposure for saltwater culture of tilapias. Studies the reproductive performance of Nile tilapia under laboratory conditions at various salinities; salinity tolerance of progeny; survivorship of fertilized eggs, spawned in freshwater but removed from the mouth of the parent female and artificially incubated at various salinities.Rearing, Experimental culture, Tilapia culture, Salinity tolerance, Salinity effects Oreochromis niloticus

Salinity tolerance of the tilapias Oreochromis aureus, O. niloticus and an O. mossambicus X O. niloticus hybrid

Studies ontogenetic changes in salinity tolerance in tilapias spawned and reared in freshwater using the indices of median lethal salinity, mean survival time and median survival time. Discusses implications of findings for brackish - and seawater culture of tilapias.Salinity tolerance, Hybrids, Tilapia Oreochromis aureus, Oreochromis niloticus, Oreochromis mossambicus

Observational Evidence of Quasi-27-Day Oscillation Propagating from the Lower Atmosphere to the Mesosphere over 20° N

By using meteor radar, radiosonde and satellite observations over 20° N and NCEP/NCAR reanalysis data during 81 days from 22 December 2004 to 12 March 2005, a quasi-27-day oscillation propagating from the troposphere to the mesosphere is reported. A pronounced 27-day periodicity is observed in the raw zonal wind from meteor radar. Spectral analysis shows that the oscillation also occurs in the meridional wind and temperature and propagates westward with wavenumber s = 1; thus the oscillation is of Rossby wave type. The oscillation attains a large amplitude of about 12 m s−1 in the eastward wind shear region of the troposphere. When the wind shear reverses, its amplitude rapidly decays, and the background wind gradually evolves to be westward. However, the oscillation can penetrate through the weak westward wind field due to its relatively large phase speed. After this, the oscillation restrengthens with its upward propagation and reaches about 20 m s−1 in the mesosphere. Reanalysis data show that the oscillation can propagate to the mid and high latitudes from the low latitudes and has large amplitudes over there. There is another interesting phenomenon that a quasi-46-day oscillation appears simultaneously in the troposphere, but it cannot penetrate through the westward wind field because of its smaller phase speed. In the observational interval, a quasi-27-day periodicity in outgoing long-wave radiation (OLR) and specific humidity is found in a latitudinal zone of 5–20° N. Thus the quasi-27-day oscillation may be an atmospheric response to forcing due to the convective activity with a period of about 27 days in the tropical region

Optimal VM placement in data centres with architectural and resource constraints

Recent advance in virtualisation technology enables service provisioning in a flexible way by consolidating several virtual machines (VMs) into a single physical machine (PM). The inter-VM communications are inevitable when a group of VMs in a data centre provide services in a collaborative manner. With the increasing demands of such intra-data-centre traffics, it becomes essential to study the VM-to-PM placement such that the aggregated communication cost within a data centre is minimised. Such optimisation problem is proved NP-hard and formulated as an integer programming with quadratic constraints in this paper. Different from existing work, our formulation takes into consideration of data-centre architecture, inter-VM traffic pattern, and resource capacity of PMs. Furthermore, a heuristic algorithm is proposed and its high efficiency is extensively validated

Critical points of Wang-Yau quasi-local energy

In this paper, we prove the following theorem regarding the Wang-Yau quasi-local energy of a spacelike two-surface in a spacetime: Let $\Sigma$ be a boundary component of some compact, time-symmetric, spacelike hypersurface $\Omega$ in a time-oriented spacetime $N$ satisfying the dominant energy condition. Suppose the induced metric on $\Sigma$ has positive Gaussian curvature and all boundary components of $\Omega$ have positive mean curvature. Suppose $H \le H_0$ where $H$ is the mean curvature of $\Sigma$ in $\Omega$ and $H_0$ is the mean curvature of $\Sigma$ when isometrically embedded in $R^3$. If $\Omega$ is not isometric to a domain in $R^3$, then 1. the Brown-York mass of $\Sigma$ in $\Omega$ is a strict local minimum of the Wang-Yau quasi-local energy of $\Sigma$, 2. on a small perturbation $\tilde{\Sigma}$ of $\Sigma$ in $N$, there exists a critical point of the Wang-Yau quasi-local energy of $\tilde{\Sigma}$.Comment: substantially revised, main theorem replaced, Section 3 adde

Distinguishing between fake news and satire with transformers

Indiscriminate elimination of harmful fake news risks destroying satirical news, which can be benign or even beneficial, because both types of news share highly similar textual cues. In this work we applied a recent development in neural network architecture, transformers, to the task of separating satirical news from fake news. Transformers have hitherto not been applied to this specific problem. Our evaluation results on a publicly available and carefully curated dataset show that the performance from a classifier framework built around a DistilBERT architecture performed better than existing machine-learning approaches. Additional improvement over baseline DistilBERT was achieved through the use of non-standard tokenization schemes as well as varying the pre-training and text pre-processing strategies. The improvement over existing approaches stands at 0.0429 (5.2%) in F1 and 0.0522 (6.4%) in accuracy. Further evaluation on two additional datasets shows our framework\u27s ability to generalize across datasets without diminished performance

Spectral high resolution feature selection for retrieval of combustion temperature profiles

Proceeding of: 7th International Conference on Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning, IDEAL 2006 (Burgos, Spain, September 20-23, 2006)The use of high spectral resolution measurements to obtain a retrieval of certain physical properties related with the radiative transfer of energy leads a priori to a better accuracy. But this improvement in accuracy is not easy to achieve due to the great amount of data which makes difficult any treatment over it and it's redundancies. To solve this problem, a pick selection based on principal component analysis has been adopted in order to make the mandatory feature selection over the different channels. In this paper, the capability to retrieve the temperature profile in a combustion environment using neural networks jointly with this spectral high resolution feature selection method is studied.Publicad

A superior drug carrier – aponeocarzinostatin in partially unfolded state fully protects the labile antitumor enediyne

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Neocarzinostatin is a potent antitumor drug consisting of an enediyne chromophore and a protein carrier.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We characterized an intermediate in the equilibrium unfolding pathway of aponeocarzinostatin, using a variety of biophysical techniques including 1-anilino-8-napthalene sulfonate binding studies, size-exclusion fast protein liquid chromatography, intrinsic tryptophan fluorescence, circular dichroism, and ¹H-¹⁵N heteronuclear single quantum coherence spectroscopy.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The partially unfolded protein is in molten globule-like state, in which ~60% and ~20% tertiary and secondary structure is disrupted respectively. Despite lacking a fully coordinated tertiary structure for assembling a functional binding cleft, the protein in molten globule-like state is still able to fully protect the labile chromophore. Titration of chromophore leads the partially denatured apoprotein to fold into its native state.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>These findings bring insight into conserving mechanism of neocarzinostatin under harsh environment, where even the partially denatured apoprotein exhibits protective effect, confirming the superiority of the drug carrier.</p

Proteomic profiling of neuromas reveals alterations in protein composition and local protein synthesis in hyper-excitable nerves

Neuropathic pain may arise following peripheral nerve injury though the molecular mechanisms associated with this are unclear. We used proteomic profiling to examine changes in protein expression associated with the formation of hyper-excitable neuromas derived from rodent saphenous nerves. A two-dimensional difference gel electrophoresis ( 2D-DIGE) profiling strategy was employed to examine protein expression changes between developing neuromas and normal nerves in whole tissue lysates. We found around 200 proteins which displayed a > 1.75-fold change in expression between neuroma and normal nerve and identified 55 of these proteins using mass spectrometry. We also used immunoblotting to examine the expression of low-abundance ion channels Nav1.3, Nav1.8 and calcium channel alpha 2 delta-1 subunit in this model, since they have previously been implicated in neuronal hyperexcitability associated with neuropathic pain. Finally, S(35)methionine in vitro labelling of neuroma and control samples was used to demonstrate local protein synthesis of neuron-specific genes. A number of cytoskeletal proteins, enzymes and proteins associated with oxidative stress were up-regulated in neuromas, whilst overall levels of voltage-gated ion channel proteins were unaffected. We conclude that altered mRNA levels reported in the somata of damaged DRG neurons do not necessarily reflect levels of altered proteins in hyper-excitable damaged nerve endings. An altered repertoire of protein expression, local protein synthesis and topological re-arrangements of ion channels may all play important roles in neuroma hyper-excitability