Sustainable Tourism: A Case Study on Salt Spring Island

Over the past few decades, tourism hasbecome one of the mainstay industries for manycommunities. Salt Spring Island, an island thesouth of Vancouver Island, is no exception to thebenefits of tourism. Sustainable tourism is anecessary and useful pattern to Salt Spring Island.Under this perspective, there are some challengesthat exist on Salt Spring Island regarding thetourism industry. Seasonality and inconvenienttransportation are the major challenges, forseasonality will cause unstable revenue and underorunemployment issues, which will affectresidents’ quality of life; the inconvenienttransportation will not only influence the locals’daily life, but also reduce tourists’ interest intravelling. The paper contains three sections: thechallenges that exist on Salt Spring Island tourismindustries, the measures are using on Salt SpringIsland, and innovative approaches from outside theregion to help Salt Spring Island to improve itstourism development and sustainability. Despitethe local people’s efforts to come up with solutionsto the issues, these solutions cannot solve theproblems because these solutions do not addressthe root of the problems. Therefore, the authorssuggest three innovations to solve these twoproblems, including building greenways andautomatic rental bicycle system, creating a themefor events, and developing wellness tourism

SSTA: Salient Spatially Transformed Attack

Extensive studies have demonstrated that deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which brings a huge security risk to the further application of DNNs, especially for the AI models developed in the real world. Despite the significant progress that has been made recently, existing attack methods still suffer from the unsatisfactory performance of escaping from being detected by naked human eyes due to the formulation of adversarial example (AE) heavily relying on a noise-adding manner. Such mentioned challenges will significantly increase the risk of exposure and result in an attack to be failed. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the Salient Spatially Transformed Attack (SSTA), a novel framework to craft imperceptible AEs, which enhance the stealthiness of AEs by estimating a smooth spatial transform metric on a most critical area to generate AEs instead of adding external noise to the whole image. Compared to state-of-the-art baselines, extensive experiments indicated that SSTA could effectively improve the imperceptibility of the AEs while maintaining a 100\% attack success rate

Antioxidant Activities of Total Pigment Extract from Blackberries

Total pigment has been extracted from blackberries and its antioxidant activity against lipid peroxidation and scavenging capacities towards superoxide anion radicals, hydroxyl radicals and nitrite in different in vitro systems have been investigated. The total pigment extract from blackberries (TPEB) exhibited strong antioxidant activity against lipid peroxidation in a linoleic acid model system and scavenging capacities towards superoxide anion radicals, generated by a pyrogallol autoxidation system or by an illuminating riboflavin system, hydroxyl radicals generated by Fenton reaction, and nitrite. Furthermore, the antioxidant activities were correlated with the concentrations of the TPEB. In the test concentration range, the maximum inhibition percentage against linoleic acid peroxidation was 98.32 % after one week’s incubation, and the maximum scavenging percentages for the free radicals and nitrite inhibition in the above reactive systems reached 90.48, 96.48, 93.58 and 98.94 %, respectively. The TPEB is a natural, edible colorant with excellent antioxidant activities and health benefits and it seems to be applicable in both healthy food and medicine

Identification of SNPs associated with muscle yield and quality traits using allelic-imbalance analyses of pooled RNA-Seq samples in rainbow trout

Coding/functional SNPs change the biological function of a gene and, therefore, could serve as “large-effect” genetic markers. In this study, we used two bioinformatics pipelines, GATK and SAMtools, for discovering coding/functional SNPs with allelic-imbalances associated with total body weight, muscle yield, muscle fat content, shear force, and whiteness. Phenotypic data were collected for approximately 500 fish, representing 98 families (5 fish/family), from a growth-selected line, and the muscle transcriptome was sequenced from 22 families with divergent phenotypes (4 low- versus 4 high-ranked families per trait). Results GATK detected 59,112 putative SNPs; of these SNPs, 4798 showed allelic imbalances (\u3e2.0 as an amplification and \u3c0.5 as loss of heterozygosity). SAMtools detected 87,066 putative SNPs; and of them, 4962 had allelic imbalances between the low- and high-ranked families. Only 1829 SNPs with allelic imbalances were common between the two datasets, indicating significant differences in algorithms. The two datasets contained 7930 non-redundant SNPs of which 4439 mapped to 1498 protein-coding genes (with 6.4% non-synonymous SNPs) and 684 mapped to 295 lncRNAs. Validation of a subset of 92 SNPs revealed 1) 86.7–93.8% success rate in calling polymorphic SNPs and 2) 95.4% consistent matching between DNA and cDNA genotypes indicating a high rate of identifying SNPs with allelic imbalances. In addition, 4.64% SNPs revealed random monoallelic expression. Genome distribution of the SNPs with allelic imbalances exhibited high density for all five traits in several chromosomes, especially chromosome 9, 20 and 28. Most of the SNP-harboring genes were assigned to important growth-related metabolic pathways. Conclusion These results demonstrate utility of RNA-Seq in assessing phenotype-associated allelic imbalances in pooled RNA-Seq samples. The SNPs identified in this study were included in a new SNP-Chip design (available from Affymetrix) for genomic and genetic analyses in rainbow trout

A review on self-reporting mechanochromic composites: an emerging technology for structural health monitoring

Recently emerging mechanochromic systems are becoming highly attractive for structural health monitoring (SHM) purposes in various industries, such as civil, wind, and aerospace, to improve the safety and performance of structures. These are based on self-reporting polymer composites which provide a light-weight sensor with an easy-to-read visual cue for SHM purposes. The present paper reports a critical overview of mechanochromic self-reporting approaches and discusses the outlook for future development in the field. Design principles and cutting-edge applications of the main physical- and chemical-based self-reporting mechanisms, i.e., mechanochromism based on dye-filled materials, modified polymers, structural color materials, and smart hybrid composite sensors, are presented with special attention to SHM. These emerging sensors create a new generation of user-friendly, cheap, and power-free SHM systems, guaranteeing economic and technological advantages that will open up new horizons for innovative, safer, and lighter composite products with significantly lower maintenance costs

Complete Genome Sequencing of Lactobacillus plantarum ZLP001, a Potential Probiotic That Enhances Intestinal Epithelial Barrier Function and Defense Against Pathogens in Pigs

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Swine-Derived Probiotic Lactobacillus plantarum Inhibits Growth and Adhesion of Enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli and Mediates Host Defense

Weaning stress renders piglets susceptible to pathogen infection, which leads to post-weaning diarrhea, a severe condition characterized by heavy diarrhea and mortality in piglets. Enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli (ETEC) is one of typical strains associated with post-weaning diarrhea. Thus, prevention and inhibition of ETEC infection are of great concern. Probiotics possess anti-pathogenic activity and can counteract ETEC infection; however, their underlying mechanisms and modes of action have not yet been clarified. In the present study, the direct and indirect protective effects of Lactobacillus plantarum ZLP001 against ETEC infection were investigated by different methods. We found that bacterial culture and culture supernatant of L. plantarum ZLP001 prevented ETEC growth by the Oxford cup method, and ETEC growth inhibition was observed in a co-culture assay as well. This effect was suggested to be caused mainly by antimicrobial metabolites produced by L. plantarum ZLP001. In addition, adhesion capacity of L. plantarum ZLP001 to IPEC-J2 cells were observed using microscopy and counting. L. plantarum ZLP001 also exhibited a concentration-dependent ability to inhibit ETEC adhesion to IPEC-J2 cells, which mainly occurred via exclusion and competition mode. Furthermore, quantitative real time polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) analysis showed that L. plantarum ZLP001 upregulated the expression of host defense peptides (HDPs) but did not trigger an inflammatory response. In addition, L. plantarum ZLP001 induced HDP secretion, which enhanced the potential antimicrobial activity of IPEC-J2 cell-culture supernatant after incubation with L. plantarum ZLP001. Our findings demonstrate that L. plantarum ZLP001, an intestinal Lactobacillus species associated with piglet health, possesses anti-ETEC activity. L. plantarum ZLP001 might prevent ETEC growth, inhibit ETEC adhesion to the intestinal mucosa, and activate the innate immune response to secret antimicrobial peptides. L. plantarum ZLP001 is worth investigation as a potential probiotics