Comparison of estrus response and pregnancy rates of beef cows synchronized with progesterone and prostaglandin-based protocols.

The aim of this study was to compare the estrus response and pregnancy rate between the indigenous beef cows of Malaysia; Kedah-Kelantan (KK) and the exotic beef cows; Brangus (BR) following progesterone and prostaglandin-based estrus synchronization treatments. A total of 40 KK and 30 BR open cows were selected and each breed group was randomly divided equally into two. Cows in KK1 and BR1 were treated with estradiol benzoate (Cidirol, 1 mg, im) each at the time CIDR® was inserted (Day 0). Cloprostenol (Estrumate, 250 μg,im) was administered at the time of CIDR® removal on Day 9 while 1 mg of Estradiol Benzoate (EB) was injected on Day 10. On the other hand, KK2 and BR2 cows received intramuscular injections of 500 and 250 ug of cloprostenol, on Day 0 and 11, respectively. All cows were then observed for estrus signs and scanned per rectum for ovulation followed by AI upon detection of estrus. Pregnancy status was diagnosed 45 days after AI. Both treatments were effective in inducing observable estrus in all groups with synchrony of ovulation resulting in CL development and pregnancy. In the progesterone4)ased treatment groups, 84.2% of KK1 and 78.8% of BR1 responded. In the prostaglandingsed treatment groups, KK2 responded with the highest proportion (80.0%) compared with BR2 (50.0%). However, there was no significant difference in rate of ovulation (84.2 vs. 64.3%; 70.0 vs. 42.9%) and pregnancy (31.6 vs. 14.3%; 45.0 vs. 21.4%) among all the four experimental groups. The interval to ovulation from the last treatment time varied significantly among all the treatment groups with a higher variation observed in BR, ranging from 48 h when treated with CIDR to 84 h after treatment with PGF2α. These variations could be explained by the difference in ovarian status at the time of treatment. In conclusion, the result of this data showed KK cows had a better rate of ovulation and pregnancy than BR cows in both treatments though not statistically significant. It can therefore be gathered that KK and BR responded effectively to estrus synchronization and produce acceptable pregnancy rates by both progesterone and prostaglandn-based protocols for breeding and genetic improvement

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Inclusive-photon production and its dependence on photon isolation in pp collisions at s√ = 13 TeV using 139 fb−1 of ATLAS data

Measurements of differential cross sections are presented for inclusive isolated-photon production in pp collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV provided by the LHC and using 139 fb−1 of data recorded by the ATLAS experiment. The cross sections are measured as functions of the photon transverse energy in different regions of photon pseudorapidity. The photons are required to be isolated by means of a fixed-cone method with two different cone radii. The dependence of the inclusive-photon production on the photon isolation is investigated by measuring the fiducial cross sections as functions of the isolation-cone radius and the ratios of the differential cross sections with different radii in different regions of photon pseudorapidity. The results presented in this paper constitute an improvement with respect to those published by ATLAS earlier: the measurements are provided for different isolation radii and with a more granular segmentation in photon pseudorapidity that can be exploited in improving the determination of the proton parton distribution functions. These improvements provide a more in-depth test of the theoretical predictions. Next-to-leading-order QCD predictions from JETPHOX and SHERPA and next-to-next-to-leading-order QCD predictions from NNLOJET are compared to the measurements, using several parameterisations of the proton parton distribution functions. The measured cross sections are well described by the fixed-order QCD predictions within the experimental and theoretical uncertainties in most of the investigated phase-space region

Measurements of Zγ+jets differential cross sections in pp collisions at s√ = 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector

Differential cross-section measurements of Zγ production in association with hadronic jets are presented, using the full 139 fb−1 dataset of s√ = 13 TeV proton–proton collisions collected by the ATLAS detector during Run 2 of the LHC. Distributions are measured using events in which the Z boson decays leptonically and the photon is usually radiated from an initial-state quark. Measurements are made in both one and two observables, including those sensitive to the hard scattering in the event and others which probe additional soft and collinear radiation. Different Standard Model predictions, from both parton-shower Monte Carlo simulation and fixed-order QCD calculations, are compared with the measurements. In general, good agreement is observed between data and predictions from MATRIX and MiNNLOPS, as well as next-to-leading-order predictions from MADGRAPH5_AMC@NLO and SHERPA

The ATLAS trigger system for LHC Run 3 and trigger performance in 2022

The ATLAS trigger system is a crucial component of the ATLAS experiment at the LHC. It is responsible for selecting events in line with the ATLAS physics programme. This paper presents an overview of the changes to the trigger and data acquisition system during the second long shutdown of the LHC, and shows the performance of the trigger system and its components in the proton-proton collisions during the 2022 commissioning period as well as its expected performance in proton-proton and heavy-ion collisions for the remainder of the third LHC data-taking period (2022–2025)

Search for the Zγ decay mode of new high-mass resonances in pp collisions at √s = 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector

This letter presents a search for narrow, high-mass resonances in the Zγ final state with the Z boson decaying into a pair of electrons or muons. The √s = 13 TeV pp collision data were recorded by the ATLAS detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider and have an integrated luminosity of 140 fb−1. The data are found to be in agreement with the Standard Model background expectation. Upper limits are set on the resonance production cross section times the decay branching ratio into Zγ. For spin-0 resonances produced via gluon–gluon fusion, the observed limits at 95% confidence level vary between 65.5 fb and 0.6 fb, while for spin-2 resonances produced via gluon–gluon fusion (or quark–antiquark initial states) limits vary between 77.4 (76.1) fb and 0.6 (0.5) fb, for the mass range from 220 GeV to 3400 GeV