Effects of putrescine supplementation on growth performance, blood lipids and immune response in broiler chickens fed methionine deficient diet

The polyamines including putrescine (PUT), spemidine (SPD) and spermine (SPM) have been shown to play an important role in basic cellular processes. Methionine (Met) and arginine are required for polyamine biosynthesis. This experiment was carried out to study the effects of Met deficient diet with or without supplemental PUT on the performance, blood lipids and glucose and humoral immunity in broiler chickens. A total of 192 day-old chicks were allocated into factorial arrangement (2 × 2) of four dietary treatments including two Met levels (Normal and Low) and two PUT levels (0 and 0.03%). Body weight and feed intake were measured weekly. At the age of 28 d, 10 birds per treatment were challenged with infectious bursal disease vaccine orally (10 dosage/bird, 2 ml). Blood samples of the challenged birds were collected for antibody determination and white blood cell count. Blood cholesterol, triglyceride, glucose, hematocrit and protein of non-challenged birds were measured at the ages of 24, 33 and 40 d. Low Met decreased body weight gain, protein efficiency ratio and feed conversion ratio (P<0.05). In grower period, energy efficiency ratio was improved by PUT supplementation in the chicks fed with normal Met level. Feed conversion ratio was badly affected (P<0.05) by low Met during grower period. PUT decreased body weight gain of chickens fed low Met significantly (P<0.05), indicating the importance of adequate Met level when high dietary PUT is offered. Met deficient diet decreased plasma protein level significantly (P<0.05). Five days post challenged, PUT supplementation elevated antibody level significantly (P<0.05) in the chicks fed normal level of Met. However, Met deficient diet in challenged chicks, caused significantly (P<0.05) lower monocyte ratio. In conclusion, growth performance declined due to Met deficiency, particularly during starter period (0–21 d) and when dietary PUT was supplemented. PUT showed the potential to increase blood antibody level and better dietary energy efficiency ratio

Unsupervised user behavior representation for fraud review detection with cold-start problem

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019. Detecting fraud review is becoming extremely important in order to provide reliable information in cyberspace, in which, however, handling cold-start problem is a critical and urgent challenge since the case of cold-start fraud review rarely provides sufficient information for further assessing its authenticity. Existing work on detecting cold-start cases relies on the limited contents of the review posted by the user and a traditional classifier to make the decision. However, simply modeling review is not reliable since reviews can be easily manipulated. Also, it is hard to obtain high-quality labeled data for training the classifier. In this paper, we tackle cold-start problems by (1) using a user’s behavior representation rather than review contents to measure authenticity, which further (2) consider user social relations with other existing users when posting reviews. The method is completely (3) unsupervised. Comprehensive experiments on Yelp data sets demonstrate our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods

Simulation of Internal Undular Bores Propagating over a Slowly Varying Region

Internal undular bores have been observed in many parts of the world. Studies have shown that many marine structures face danger and risk of destruction caused by internal undular bores due to the amount of energy it carries. This paper looks at the transformation of internal undular bore in two-layer fluid flow under the influence of variable topography. Thus, the surface of the bottom is considered to be slowly varying. The appropriate mathematical model is the variable-coefficient extended Korteweg-de Vries equation. We are particularly interested in looking at the transformation of KdV-type and table-top undular bore over the variable topography region. The governing equation is solved numerically using the method of lines, where the spatial derivatives are first discretised using finite difference approximation so that the partial differential equation becomes a system of ordinary differential equations which is then solved by 4th order Runge-Kutta method. Our numerical results show that the evolution of internal undular bore over different types of varying depths regions leads to a number of adiabatic and non-adiabatic effects. When the depth decreases slowly, a solitary wavetrain is observed at the front of the transformed internal undular bore. On the other hand, when the depth increases slowly, we observe the generation of step-like wave and weakly nonlinear trailing wavetrain, the occurrence of multi-phase behaviour, the generation of transformed undular bore of negative polarity and diminishing transformed undular bore depending on the nature of the topography after the variable topography

Influence of dielectric stiffness, interface, and layer thickness on hysteresis loops of ferroelectric superlattices

We examined the influence of dielectric stiffness, interface, and layer thickness on the hysteresis loops, including the remanent polarization and coercive field of a superlattice comprising alternate layers of ferroelectric and dielectric, using the Landau-Ginzburg theory. An interface energy term is introduced in the free energy functional to describe the formation of interface "dead" layers that are mutually coupled through polarization (or induced-polarization). Our studies reveal that the hysteresis loop is strongly dependent on the stiffness of the dielectric layer, the strength of the interface coupling and layer thickness. The intrinsic coupling at the interface between two neighboring layers reduces the coercive field, though the corresponding remanent polarization is significantly enhanced by a soft dielectric layer. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3630016

The effect of strategy game types on inhibition

YesPast studies have shown evidence of transfer of learning in action video games, less so in other types e.g. strategy games. Further, the transfer of learning from games to inhibitory control has yet to be examined from the perspectives of time constraint and logic contradiction. We examined the effect of strategy games (puzzle, turn-based strategy ‘TBS’, real-time strategy ‘RTS’) on inhibition (response inhibition and distractor inhibition) and cerebral hemispheric activation over four weeks. We predicted that compared to RTS, puzzle and TBS games would (1) improve response and distractor inhibition, and (2) increase cerebral hemispheric activation demonstrating increased inhibitory control. A total of 67 non-habitual video game players (Mage = 21.63 years old, SD = 2.12) played one of three games; puzzle (n = 19), TBS (n = 24) or RTS (n = 24) for four weeks on their smartphones. Participants completed three inhibition tasks, working memory (WM), and had their tympanic membrane temperature (TMT) taken from each ear before and after playing the games. Results showed that only the puzzle game group showed an improved response inhibition while controlling for WM. There were no significant changes in the distractor inhibition tasks. We also found that there was an increase in left TMT while playing RTS, suggesting the presence of increased impulsivity in RTS. Our findings suggest that puzzle games involving logical contradiction could improve response inhibition, showing potential as a tool for inhibition training.Newton Fund Institutional Links grant ID: 331745333, under Newton-Ungku Omar Fund partnership. The grant is funded by the UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and Malaysian Industry-Government Group for High Technology (MIGHT) and delivered by the British CouncilResearch Development Fund Publication Prize Award winner, Dec 2021

Effect of a Gel Retainment Dam on Automated Ultrasound Coverage in a Dual‐Modality Breast Imaging System

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/135299/1/jum20102971075.pd