Changes in tail posture detected by a 3D machine vision system are associated with injury from damaging behaviours and ill health on commercial pig farms

To establish whether pig tail posture is affected by injuries and ill health, a machine vision system using 3D cameras to measure tail angle was used. Camera data from 1692 pigs in 41 production batches of 42.4 (±16.6) days in length over 17 months at seven diverse grower/finisher commercial pig farms, was validated by visiting farms every 14(±10) days to score injury and ill health. Linear modelling of tail posture found considerable farm and batch effects. The percentage of tails held low (0°) or mid (1–45°) decreased over time from 54.9% and 23.8% respectively by -0.16 and -0.05%/day, while tails high (45–90°) increased from 21.5% by 0.20%/day. Although 22% of scored pigs had scratched tails, severe tail biting was rare; only 6% had tail wounds and 5% partial tail loss. Adding tail injury to models showed associations with tail posture: overall tail injury, worsening tail injury, and tail loss were associated with more pigs detected with low tail posture and fewer with high tails. Minor tail injuries and tail swelling were also associated with altered tail posture. Unexpectedly, other health and injury scores had a larger effect on tail posture- more low tails were observed when a greater proportion of pigs in a pen were scored with lameness or lesions caused by social aggression. Ear injuries were linked with reduced high tails. These findings are consistent with the idea that low tail posture could be a general indicator of poor welfare. However, effects of flank biting and ocular discharge on tail posture were not consistent with this. Our results show for the first time that perturbations in the normal time trends of tail posture are associated with tail biting and other signs of adverse health/welfare at diverse commercial farms, forming the basis for a decision support system

Representing Kernels of Perturbations of Toeplitz Operators by Backward Shift-Invariant Subspaces

It is well known the kernel of a Toeplitz operator is nearly invariant under the backward shift S∗. This paper shows that kernels of finite rank perturbations of Toeplitz operators are nearly S∗-invariant with finite defect. This enables us to apply a recent theorem by Chalendar–Gallardo–Partington to represent the kernel in terms of backward shift-invariant subspaces, which we identify in several important cases

Fatal Cases of Influenza A in Childhood

In the northern hemisphere winter of 2003–04 antigenic variant strains (A/Fujian/411/02 –like) of influenza A H3N2 emerged. Circulation of these strains in the UK was accompanied by an unusually high number of laboratory confirmed influenza associated fatalities in children. This study was carried out to better understand risk factors associated with fatal cases of influenza in children.Case histories, autopsy reports and death registration certificates for seventeen fatal cases of laboratory confirmed influenza in children were analyzed. None had a recognized pre-existing risk factor for severe influenza and none had been vaccinated. Three cases had evidence of significant bacterial co-infection. Influenza strains recovered from fatal cases were antigenically similar to those circulating in the community. A comparison of protective antibody titres in age stratified cohort sera taken before and after winter 2003–04 showed that young children had the highest attack rate during this season (21% difference, 95% confidence interval from 0.09 to 0.33, p = 0.0009). Clinical incidences of influenza-like illness (ILI) in young age groups were shown to be highest only in the years when novel antigenic drift variants emerged.This work presents a rare insight into fatal influenza H3N2 in healthy children. It confirms that circulating seasonal influenza A H3N2 strains can cause severe disease and death in children in the apparent absence of associated bacterial infection or predisposing risk factors. This adds to the body of evidence demonstrating the burden of severe illness due to seasonal influenza A in childhood

Adaptive Evolution of the Myo6 Gene in Old World Fruit Bats (Family: Pteropodidae)

PMCID: PMC3631194This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

All-sky search for short gravitational-wave bursts in the second Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo run

We present the results of a search for short-duration gravitational-wave transients in the data from the second observing run of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo. We search for gravitational-wave transients with a duration of milliseconds to approximately one second in the 32-4096 Hz frequency band with minimal assumptions about the signal properties, thus targeting a wide variety of sources. We also perform a matched-filter search for gravitational-wave transients from cosmic string cusps for which the waveform is well modeled. The unmodeled search detected gravitational waves from several binary black hole mergers which have been identified by previous analyses. No other significant events have been found by either the unmodeled search or the cosmic string search. We thus present the search sensitivities for a variety of signal waveforms and report upper limits on the source rate density as a function of the characteristic frequency of the signal. These upper limits are a factor of 3 lower than the first observing run, with a 50% detection probability for gravitational-wave emissions with energies of ∼10-9 Mc2 at 153 Hz. For the search dedicated to cosmic string cusps we consider several loop distribution models, and present updated constraints from the same search done in the first observing run

Search for Eccentric Binary Black Hole Mergers with Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo during Their First and Second Observing Runs

When formed through dynamical interactions, stellar-mass binary black holes (BBHs) may retain eccentric orbits (e > 0.1 at 10 Hz) detectable by ground-based gravitational-wave detectors. Eccentricity can therefore be used to differentiate dynamically formed binaries from isolated BBH mergers. Current template-based gravitational-wave searches do not use waveform models associated with eccentric orbits, rendering the search less efficient for eccentric binary systems. Here we present the results of a search for BBH mergers that inspiral in eccentric orbits using data from the first and second observing runs (O1 and O2) of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo. We carried out the search with the coherent WaveBurst algorithm, which uses minimal assumptions on the signal morphology and does not rely on binary waveform templates. We show that it is sensitive to binary mergers with a detection range that is weakly dependent on eccentricity for all bound systems. Our search did not identify any new binary merger candidates. We interpret these results in light of eccentric binary formation models. We rule out formation channels with rates ⪆100 Gpc-3 yr-1 for e > 0.1, assuming a black hole mass spectrum with a power-law index ≲2

Search for gravitational waves from Scorpius X-1 in the second Advanced LIGO observing run with an improved hidden Markov model

We present results from a semicoherent search for continuous gravitational waves from the low-mass X-ray binary Scorpius X-1, using a hidden Markov model (HMM) to track spin wandering. This search improves on previous HMM-based searches of LIGO data by using an improved frequency domain matched filter, the $\mathcal{J}$-statistic, and by analysing data from Advanced LIGO's second observing run. In the frequency range searched, from $60$ to $650\,\mathrm{Hz}$, we find no evidence of gravitational radiation. At $194.6\,\mathrm{Hz}$, the most sensitive search frequency, we report an upper limit on gravitational wave strain (at 95\% confidence) of $h_0^{95\%} = 3.47 \times 10^{-25}$ when marginalising over source inclination angle. This is the most sensitive search for Scorpius X-1, to date, that is specifically designed to be robust in the presence of spin wandering

Search for intermediate mass black hole binaries in the first and second observing runs of the Advanced LIGO and Virgo network

Gravitational-wave astronomy has been firmly established with the detection of gravitational waves from the merger of ten stellar-mass binary black holes and a neutron star binary. This paper reports on the all-sky search for gravitational waves from intermediate mass black hole binaries in the first and second observing runs of the Advanced LIGO and Virgo network. The search uses three independent algorithms: two based on matched filtering of the data with waveform templates of gravitational-wave signals from compact binaries, and a third, model-independent algorithm that employs no signal model for the incoming signal. No intermediate mass black hole binary event is detected in this search. Consequently, we place upper limits on the merger rate density for a family of intermediate mass black hole binaries. In particular, we choose sources with total masses M=m1+m2ϵ[120,800] M and mass ratios q=m2/m1ϵ[0.1,1.0]. For the first time, this calculation is done using numerical relativity waveforms (which include higher modes) as models of the real emitted signal. We place a most stringent upper limit of 0.20 Gpc-3 yr-1 (in comoving units at the 90% confidence level) for equal-mass binaries with individual masses m1,2=100 M and dimensionless spins χ1,2=0.8 aligned with the orbital angular momentum of the binary. This improves by a factor of ∼5 that reported after Advanced LIGO's first observing run