An XO chromosome constitution in a sterile Mare (Equus caballus)

One case of 63, XO chromosome constitution is described in a phenotypically normal but sterile mare with gonadal dysgenesis.Une jument stérile, phénotypiquement normale mais présentant une dysgénie gonadique a été trouvée porteuse d’une monosomie pour le chromosome sexuel X

Young neutron stars with soft gamma ray emission and anomalous X-ray pulsar

The observational properties of Soft Gamma Repeaters and Ano\-malous X-ray Pulsars (SGR/AXP) indicate to necessity of the energy source different from a rotational energy of a neutron star. The model, where the source of the energy is connected with a magnetic field dissipation in a highly magnetized neutron star (magnetar) is analyzed. Some observational inconsistencies are indicated for this interpretation. The alternative energy source, connected with the nuclear energy of superheavy nuclei stored in the nonequilibrium layer of low mass neutron star is discussed.Comment: 29 pages, 13 figures, Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 A.W. Alsabti, P. Murdin (eds.), Handbook of Supernova

Associative Planning As the Economic Backbone of Farmers in the Canton of Tisaleo During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The great health crisis in Ecuador has caused an economic decline in the agricultural sector. Therefore, associative planning as an economic axis of the farmers of the Tisaleo canton during the COVID-19 is important for analyzing the problem of the low existence of levels of associativity, which entails lost opportunities to work integrally, achieving thematic marketing strategies for strengthening the productivity, competitiveness, and economic sustainability and improve the living conditions of the inhabitants of the agricultural sector considering that they are forgotten without having any support. In this way, they can introduce their products in new markets. To obtain all the necessary information, surveys were conducted on all farmers, which showed that the COVID-19 pandemic affected the commercialization of agricultural production by 92%. Farmers recognize that the sector has not grown economically for different reasons, such as individual work, ignorance of associative aspects and adequate ways to plan their activities, and the few existing associative institutions that do not maintain training and do not apply the solidarity economy based on the adequate management of strategies such as an alliance of entrepreneurs as a thematic axis for strengthening ties of agricultural associative work within the canton and eradicate poverty. Keywords: associativity, planning, development, strategies, productivity, marketin. Resumen En Ecuador surge una gran crisis sanitaria que ha provocado un declive económico en el sector agropecuario, afectado por la disminución económica de los productores agrícolas. Por lo tanto la planificación asociativa como eje económico de los agricultores del cantón Tisaleo en pandemia (Covid- 19) es importante analizar la problemática sobre la baja existencia de niveles de asociatividad lo que conlleva perdidas de oportunidades para trabajar integradamente logrando alcanzar estrategias temáticas de comercialización, con el fin de alcanzar un óptimo desarrollo de fortalecimiento a la productividad, la competitividad y la sostenibilidad económica para mejorar las condiciones de vida de los habitantes del sector agrícola considerando que son olvidados sin tener apoyo alguno y de esta forma sean capaces de introducir sus productos en nuevos mercados. Para obtener todo la información necesaria se realizaron encuestas a todos los agricultores, en el cual, se evidencio que la pandemia del Covid-19 afecto a la comercialización de la producción agrícola en un 92%, los agricultores reconocen que el sector no ha crecido económicamente por diferentes razones, tales como: el trabajo individual, desconocimiento de aspectos asociativos y la forma adecuada de planificar sus actividades, las pocas intuiciones asociativas existentes no mantiene capacitaciones, no aplican la economía solidaria basado en el manejo adecuado de estrategias como una alianza de emprendedores considerado el eje temático para fortalecer lazos de trabajo asociativo agrícola dentro del cantón y erradicar la pobreza. Palabras Clave: asociatividad, planificación, desarrollo, estrategias, productividad, comercialización

Activity of bovine parainfluenza type 3 virus in cattle in North Eastern Nigeria -A short communication

Parainfluenza type 3 virus (PI3V) is a primary agent of Bovine Shipping Fever worldwide. The activity of the virus was accessed through a sero-survey using the haemagglutination inhibition (HI) test. Out of 656 cattle sampled from Adamawa, Bauchi, Taraba and Borno States, 51.37% were seropositive. The reciprocal of HI titres ranged between 21 and 212. The geometric mean HI titres ranged from 106 in Borno State to 686 in Adamawa State. The  implication of these findings to the possible occurance of shipping fever along cattle routes is discussed

Symmetric informationally complete positive operator valued measure and probability representation of quantum mechanics

Symmetric informationally complete positive operator valued measures (SIC-POVMs) are studied within the framework of the probability representation of quantum mechanics. A SIC-POVM is shown to be a special case of the probability representation. The problem of SIC-POVM existence is formulated in terms of symbols of operators associated with a star-product quantization scheme. We show that SIC-POVMs (if they do exist) must obey general rules of the star product, and, starting from this fact, we derive new relations on SIC-projectors. The case of qubits is considered in detail, in particular, the relation between the SIC probability representation and other probability representations is established, the connection with mutually unbiased bases is discussed, and comments to the Lie algebraic structure of SIC-POVMs are presented.Comment: 22 pages, 1 figure, LaTeX, partially presented at the Workshop "Nonlinearity and Coherence in Classical and Quantum Systems" held at the University "Federico II" in Naples, Italy on December 4, 2009 in honor of Prof. Margarita A. Man'ko in connection with her 70th birthday, minor misprints are corrected in the second versio

Electrochemotherapy with cisplatin enhances local control after surgical ablation of fibrosarcoma in cats: an approach to improve the therapeutic index of highly toxic chemotherapy drugs

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Cancer is one of the most difficult current health challenges, being responsible for millions of deaths yearly. Systemic chemotherapy is the most common therapeutic approach, and the prevailing orientation calls for the administration of the maximum tolerated dose; however, considerable limitations exist including toxicities to healthy tissues and low achievable drug concentrations at tumor sites. Electrochemotherapy (ECT) is a tumor treatment that combines the systemic or local delivery of anticancer drugs with the application of permeabilizing electric pulses. In this article we evaluate the capability of ECT to allow the use of cisplatin despite its high toxicity in a spontaneous feline model of soft tissue sarcoma.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A cohort of sixty-four cats with incompletely excised sarcomas were treated with cisplatin-based adjuvant ECT and monitored for side effects. Their response was compared to that of fourteen cats treated with surgery alone.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The toxicities were minimal and mostly treated symptomatically. ECT resulted in increased local control (median not reached at the time of writing) with a mean time to recurrence of 666 days versus 180 of controls.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>We conclude that ECT is a safe and efficacious therapy for solid tumors; its use may be considered as part of strategies for the reintroduction of drugs with a narrow therapeutic index in the clinical protocols.</p

A Variational Method in Out of Equilibrium Physical Systems

A variational principle is further developed for out of equilibrium dynamical systems by using the concept of maximum entropy. With this new formulation it is obtained a set of two first-order differential equations, revealing the same formal symplectic structure shared by classical mechanics, fluid mechanics and thermodynamics. In particular, it is obtained an extended equation of motion for a rotating dynamical system, from where it emerges a kind of topological torsion current of the form $\epsilon_{ijk} A_j \omega_k$, with $A_j$ and $\omega_k$ denoting components of the vector potential (gravitational or/and electromagnetic) and $\omega$ is the angular velocity of the accelerated frame. In addition, it is derived a special form of Umov-Poynting's theorem for rotating gravito-electromagnetic systems, and obtained a general condition of equilibrium for a rotating plasma. The variational method is then applied to clarify the working mechanism of some particular devices, such as the Bennett pinch and vacuum arcs, to calculate the power extraction from an hurricane, and to discuss the effect of transport angular momentum on the radiactive heating of planetary atmospheres. This development is seen to be advantageous and opens options for systematic improvements.Comment: 22 pages, 1 figure, submitted to review, added one referenc

Polymorphisms in the SAA1/2 Gene Are Associated with Carotid Intima Media Thickness in Healthy Han Chinese Subjects: The Cardiovascular Risk Survey

BACKGROUND: Serum amyloid A protein (SAA) is not only an inflammatory factor, but also an apolipoprotein that can replace apolipoprotein A1 (apoA1) as the major apolipoprotein of high-density lipoprotein (HDL), which has been linked to atherosclerosis. However, the relationship between genetic polymorphisms of SAA and the intima-media thickness (IMT) of the common carotid artery in healthy subjects remains unclear. We investigated the role of SAA1 and SAA2 gene polymorphisms with IMT in a cohort of healthy subjects participating in the Cardiovascular Risk Survey (CRS) study. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Anthropometric and B-mode ultrasound of the carotid IMT were measured in 1914 subjects (849 men; 1065 women) recruited from seven cities in Xinjiang province, (western China). Four SNPs (rs12218, rs2229338, rs1059559, and rs2468844) were genotyped by use of the polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP) method. The SNP rs12218 was associated with carotid IMT by analyses of a dominate model (P<0.001) and additive model (P = 0.003), and the difference remained significant after multivariate adjustment (P = 0.008, P<0.001, respectively). This relationship was also observed in rs2468844 after multivariate adjustment by recessive model analysis (P = 0.011) but this was not observed in rs2229338 and rs1059559 before and after multivariate adjustment. These associations were not modified by serum HDL concentration. Furthermore, there were significant interactions between rs2468844 and rs12218 (interaction P<0.001) and rs2229338 (interaction P = 0.001) on carotid IMT. CONCLUSION/SIGNIFICANCE: Both rs12218 of the SAA1 gene and rs2468844 of SAA2 gene are associated with carotid IMT in healthy Han Chinese subjects

Effective action in a higher-spin background

We consider a free massless scalar field coupled to an infinite tower of background higher-spin gauge fields via minimal coupling to the traceless conserved currents. The set of Abelian gauge transformations is deformed to the non-Abelian group of unitary operators acting on the scalar field. The gauge invariant effective action is computed perturbatively in the external fields. The structure of the various (divergent or finite) terms is determined. In particular, the quadratic part of the logarithmically divergent (or of the finite) term is expressed in terms of curvatures and related to conformal higher-spin gravity. The generalized higher-spin Weyl anomalies are also determined. The relation with the theory of interacting higher-spin gauge fields on anti de Sitter spacetime via the holographic correspondence is discussed.Comment: 40 pages, Some errors and typos corrected, Version published in JHE

The Noncommutative Harmonic Oscillator based in Simplectic Representation of Galilei Group

In this work we study symplectic unitary representations for the Galilei group. As a consequence the Schr\"odinger equation is derived in phase space. The formalism is based on the non-commutative structure of the star-product, and using the group theory approach as a guide a physical consistent theory in phase space is constructed. The state is described by a quasi-probability amplitude that is in association with the Wigner function. The 3D harmonic oscillator and the noncommutative oscillator are studied in phase space as an application, and the Wigner function associated to both cases are determined.Comment: 7 pages,no figure