Corn Grain and Liquid Feed as Non-Fiber Carbohydrate Sources in Diets for Lactating Dairy Cows: Production Trial

We hypothesized that adding liquid feed (LF; source of rapidly available sugar) would maintain or improve measures of dairy cattle performance to a greater degree when corn grain is more coarsely ground as compared to finely ground. The more rapidly available source of carbohydrates provided by the LF may compensate for the more slowly degradable carbohydrates of the coarsely ground corn (CGC); therefore, the performance of the dairy cattle provided the LF (Quality Liquid Feeds, Dodgeville, WI) and coarsely ground corn could be comparable to feeding finely ground corn (FGC). The study was conducted on 60 Holstein cows milked twice a day. The cows began the study at 60 days in milk (DIM), where they began a two-week covariate period (fed the FGC diet), followed by random assignment to one of five diets. The five diets were: steam-flaked corn (SFC) (control), FGC, CGC, FGC plus LF, and CGC plus LF. All diets were formulated to contain 16% alfalfa, 24% corn silage, 6% grass hay, and 54% grain. The diets were adjusted to maintain 36% neutral detergent fiber (NDF), 20.3% forage NDF, and 36% non-structural carbohydrates (NSC). For the diets which contained LF, 3.5% of the grain was removed from the diet, and 3.5% of the diet was LF. The FGC + LF and CGC + LF treatments contained 50.5% grain and 3.5% LF. No differences were observed in dry matter intake (DMI) among diets; however, the SFC diet produced the least efficient milk production. Feeding SFC decreased milk fat percentage (P < 0.10), and yield (P <0.05). Milk protein yield was similar among diets; however, milk protein percentage was higher for ground corn diets not supplemented with LF (P 0.05), with no differences among other diets. Observations from this study revealed that supplementing LF in the diet with either FGC or CGC did not affect the performance of lactating dairy cows.No embarg

FPGA-Based Tracklet Approach to Level-1 Track Finding at CMS for the HL-LHC

During the High Luminosity LHC, the CMS detector will need charged particle tracking at the hardware trigger level to maintain a manageable trigger rate and achieve its physics goals. The tracklet approach is a track-finding algorithm based on a road-search algorithm that has been implemented on commercially available FPGA technology. The tracklet algorithm has achieved high performance in track-finding and completes tracking within 3.4 $\mu$s on a Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA. An overview of the algorithm and its implementation on an FPGA is given, results are shown from a demonstrator test stand and system performance studies are presented.Comment: Submitted to proceedings of Connecting The Dots/Intelligent Trackers 2017, Orsay, Franc

Multiple low-temperature thermochronology constraints on exhumation of the Tatra Mountains: New implication for the complex evolution of the Western Carpathians in the Cenozoic

The tectonothermal evolution of the highest mountain range in the Carpathian arc—the Tatra Mountains— is investigated by zircon and apatite fission track and zircon (U-Th)/He (ZHe) dating methods in order to unravel the disputed exhumation and geodynamic processes in the Western Carpathians. Our data in combination with geological evidences reveal a complex Cenozoic history, with four major tectonothermal events: (i) a very low grade metamorphism of the crystalline basement at temperatures >240°C due to tectonic burial during the Eo-Alpine collision in the Late Cretaceous (~80 Ma); (ii) exhumation and cooling of the basement to temperatures 150°C after burial to 5–9 km depths by the Paleogene fore-arc basin; (iv) final exhumation of the segmented basement blocks during Oligocene-Miocene (32–11 Ma) owing to lateral extrusion of the North Pannonian plate and its collision with the European foreland. The spatial pattern of thermochronological data suggests asymmetric exhumation of the Tatra Mountains, beginning in the northwest at ~30–20 Ma with low cooling rates (~1–5°C/Ma) and propagating toward the major fault bounding the range in the south, where the youngest cooling ages (16–9 Ma) and fastest cooling rates (~10–20°C/Ma) are found. Our data prove that the Tatra Mountains shared Cenozoic evolution of other crystalline core mountains in the Western Carpathians. However, the Miocene ZHe ages suggest that the Tatra Mountains were buried to the greatest depths in the Paleogene-Early Miocene and experienced the greatest amount of Miocene exhumation

Constraints on the χ_(c1) versus χ_(c2) polarizations in proton-proton collisions at √s = 8 TeV

The polarizations of promptly produced χ_(c1) and χ_(c2) mesons are studied using data collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC, in proton-proton collisions at √s=8  TeV. The χ_c states are reconstructed via their radiative decays χ_c → J/ψγ, with the photons being measured through conversions to e⁺e⁻, which allows the two states to be well resolved. The polarizations are measured in the helicity frame, through the analysis of the χ_(c2) to χ_(c1) yield ratio as a function of the polar or azimuthal angle of the positive muon emitted in the J/ψ → μ⁺μ⁻ decay, in three bins of J/ψ transverse momentum. While no differences are seen between the two states in terms of azimuthal decay angle distributions, they are observed to have significantly different polar anisotropies. The measurement favors a scenario where at least one of the two states is strongly polarized along the helicity quantization axis, in agreement with nonrelativistic quantum chromodynamics predictions. This is the first measurement of significantly polarized quarkonia produced at high transverse momentum