Effects of a feeding strategy to increase intramuscular fat content of pork under the conditions of organic farming

In an ongoing study, the effect of the implementation of a specific feeding strategy using a high portion of home-grown grain legumes on the intramuscular fat (IMF) content of pork, is assessed under different conditions on organic farms in Germany and Austria. Preliminary results indicate that variation in the IMF content seems to be higher between farms than between treatments within each farm

Drosophila olfactory receptors as classifiers for volatiles from disparate real world applications

Olfactory receptors evolved to provide animals with ecologically and behaviourally relevant information. The resulting extreme sensitivity and discrimination has proven useful to humans, who have therefore co-opted some animals' sense of smell. One aim of machine olfaction research is to replace the use of animal noses and one avenue of such research aims to incorporate olfactory receptors into artificial noses. Here, we investigate how well the olfactory receptors of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, perform in classifying volatile odourants that they would not normally encounter. We collected a large number of in vivo recordings from individual Drosophila olfactory receptor neurons in response to an ecologically relevant set of 36 chemicals related to wine ('wine set') and an ecologically irrelevant set of 35 chemicals related to chemical hazards ('industrial set'), each chemical at a single concentration. Resampled response sets were used to classify the chemicals against all others within each set, using a standard linear support vector machine classifier and a wrapper approach. Drosophila receptors appear highly capable of distinguishing chemicals that they have not evolved to process. In contrast to previous work with metal oxide sensors, Drosophila receptors achieved the best recognition accuracy if the outputs of all 20 receptor types were used

Wide range and tunable linear TMR sensor using two exchange pinned electrodes

A magnetic tunnel junction sensor is proposed, with both the detection and the reference layers pinned by IrMn. Using the differences in the blocking temperatures of the IrMn films with different thicknesses, crossed anisotropies can be induced between the detection and the reference electrodes. The pinning of the sensing electrode ensures a linear and reversible output. It also allows tuning both the sensitivity and the linear range of the sensor. The authors show that the sensitivity varies linearly with the ferromagnetic thickness of the detection electrode. It is demonstrated that an increased thickness leads to a rise of sensitivity and a reduction of the operating range

Associations between Depressive Symptoms, Rumination, Overgeneral Autobiographical Memory and Interpretation Bias within a Clinically Depressed Sample

__Abstract__ There is ample research demonstrating that biases in cognitive processes, such as a negative interpretation bias, rumination, and overgeneral autobiographical memory, are potential vulnerability factors for depression. However, a key limitation is that most studies conducted so far have studied cognitive biases in depression in isolation. Therefore our goal was to explore whether or not interpretation bias, overgeneral autobiographical memory, and rumination are present and interrelated in depressive outpatients. In this explorative study we examined the relationship between negative interpretation bias, rumination, overgeneral autobiographical memory, and severity of depression in clinically depressed outpatients. According to our expectations a negative interpretation bias and rumination were associated with severity of depression. Moreover, overgeneral autobiographical memory was not associated with severity of depression, but seemed to be associated with diagnosis of depression. A negative interpretation bias, overgeneral autobiographical memory, and rumination were not significantly related with each other in this study. This finding suggests they are not strongly related and might be largely distinct vulnerability factors for depression. The study presents an important yet preliminary finding which warrants further replication with a larger sample size

Asymmetries in speech articulation as reflected on palatograms: a meta-study

This paper presents the results from an investigation of asymmetries in speech articulation on the basis of 1,502 previously published palatograms of a wide variety of speech sounds in a range of languages. For each palatogram, the direction and degree of tongue-palate contact was quantified by means of an index capturing the degree of lateral asymmetry. The results of this investigation show that lingual asymmetry in the articulation of speech sounds is substantial: 83% of the palatograms are asymmetrical. With respect to the direction of the asymmetry it is found that the asymmetry is more often towards the left side of the palate (45%) than to the right side (38%). Further analysis reveals that there are significant differences in both the direction and the degree of the asymmetry as a function of manner and place of articulation