Insulin resistance for glucose metabolism in disused soleus muscle of mice

Results of this study on mice provide the first direct evidence of insulin resistance for glucose metabolism in skeletal muscle that has undergone a previous period of reduced muscle usage. This lack of responsiveness to insulin developed in one day and in the presence of hypoinsulinemia. Future studies will utilize the model of hindlimb immobilization to determine the causes of these changes

Financial Performance Value-Added Dairy Operations in New York, Vermont and Wisconsin

Federal, state and local governments have funded various efforts to support value added agriculture, often implicitly assuming that the enterprises would be profitable and that the transition from commodity producer to producer-processor-marketer-distributor would be relatively easy. Some analysts (e.g., Streeter and Bills; 2003a, 2003b) have questioned both of these assumptions, noting that available aggregate data do not allow assessment of the financial performance of value-added enterprises. Our study collected detailed financial information from 27 value-added dairy enterprises with cows, goats or sheep in three states. These businesses processed and marketed cheese, fluid milk products and yogurt; 17 had begun processing during the previous three years. The financial information was used to develop income statements and balance sheets for both the milk production and the dairy processing and marketing enterprises. Our results suggest that value-added dairy is not a panacea: despite much higher revenues per unit milk produced or processed, mean net income for the processing enterprise and for the combined milk production and processing business were modest at best and often negative. More than half of the on-farm processors had negative net incomes from processing, and seven processing enterprises had negative net worth. On average, returns per cwt milk processed were $90 per cwt and$209 per cwt (for cow and goat/sheep milk producers, respectively) lower than the full economic costs of production and processing.small-scale dairy processing, value added, financial performance, profitability, Agricultural Finance,

What can Associative Learning do for Driving?

This is the final version of the paper. Available from Cognitive Science Society via the link in this record.To improve road safety, it is important to understand the impact that the contingencies around traffic lights have upon drivers’ behavior. There are formal rules that govern behavior at UK traffic lights (see The Highway Code, 2015), but what does experience of the contingencies do to us? While a green light always cues a go response and a singleton red a stop, the behavior linked to amber is ambiguous; in the presence of red it cues readiness to start, while on its own it cues "preparation" to stop. Could it be that the contingencies between stimuli and responses lead to implicit learning of responses that differ from those suggested by the rules of the road? This study used an incidental go/no-go task in which colored shapes were stochastically predictive of whether a response was required. The stimuli encoded the contingencies between traffic lights and their appropriate responses, for example, stimulus G was a go cue, mimicking the response to a green light. Evidence was found to indicate that G was a go cue, while A (which had the same contingencies as an amber light) was a weak go cue, and that R (a stop cue) was surprisingly responded to as a neutral cue.W.G.N. is supported by an ERSC studentship (ES/J50015X/1)

Livestock, Land Use Change, and Environmental Outcomes in the Developing World

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Amplitude dependent frequency, desynchronization, and stabilization in noisy metapopulation dynamics

The enigmatic stability of population oscillations within ecological systems is analyzed. The underlying mechanism is presented in the framework of two interacting species free to migrate between two spatial patches. It is shown that that the combined effects of migration and noise cannot account for the stabilization. The missing ingredient is the dependence of the oscillations' frequency upon their amplitude; with that, noise-induced differences between patches are amplified due to the frequency gradient. Migration among desynchronized regions then stabilizes a "soft" limit cycle in the vicinity of the homogenous manifold. A simple model of diffusively coupled oscillators allows the derivation of quantitative results, like the functional dependence of the desynchronization upon diffusion strength and frequency differences. The oscillations' amplitude is shown to be (almost) noise independent. The results are compared with a numerical integration of the marginally stable Lotka-Volterra equations. An unstable system is extinction-prone for small noise, but stabilizes at larger noise intensity

Soil, Plant and Cattle Nutrient Dynamics on Pastures of the Western Amazon of Brazil

Cattle production on Brachiaria pastures is a primary use of cleared forestland in the western Brazilian Amazon. About 6.8 million hectares in the States of Acre and Rondônia have been deforested, where 75% of land is now grazed (IBGE, 1998). The principal pasture species are B. brizantha and B. decumbens with the latter in decline from spittlebug susceptibility (Deois incompleta; Gonçalves et al., 1996). The general pattern of pasture establishment in the Amazon basin includes felling and burning forest biomass, planting annual crops for one to three years (especially on small farms), and then seeding to grasses. The conversion of tropical forest to pasture, the effects of that process on soil properties, and pasture degradation outcomes have been studied in the eastern Amazon region ( Serrao et al., 1978; Reiners et al., 1994; Sanchez and Salinas, 1981; Buschbacher et al., 1987; Moraes et al., 1996) but not in the remote western region. Most findings showed an initial increase in soil cation concentrations with pasture establishment, except P, which declined to nearly undetectable amounts; and losses in pasture productivity after about five years with little management and poorly matched grasses (Serrao et al., 1978). The extent to which this outcome is due to poor management practices (e.g., inappropriate grass species) is unknown, and few studies in the region have examined the impacts of stocking rates, soil-plant nutrient relationships and burning frequencies on pasture degradation. Strategies that account for the cycling of major nutrients are needed to improve management of grasses and grass-legume associations. The objective of this study was to evaluate the hypothesis that low-input pasture use of land with Brachiaria spp. effectively sustains cattle production in the western Brazilian Amazon without deteriorating soil nutrient stocks . Three pasture land cover types (B. decumbens, B. brizantha and a grass association with Pueraria phaseoloides) were compared to primary forest and crops (maize and rice). Temporal (i.e., time post-deforestation) effects on the physical and chemical properties of soils and forages were evaluated. The nutrient pools in soil, plants and cattle herds and nutrients extracted in animal products were approximated to help understand the essential management to enhance cattle productivity and to avoid land degradation

Xe films on a decagonal Al-Ni-Co quasicrystal surface

The grand canonical Monte Carlo method is employed to study the adsorption of Xe on a quasicrystalline Al-Ni-Co surface. The calculation uses a semiempirical gas-surface interaction, based on conventional combining rules and the usual Lennard-Jones Xe-Xe interaction. The resulting adsorption isotherms and calculated structures are consistent with the results of LEED experimental data. In this paper we focus on five features not discussed earlier (Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 136104 (2005)): the range of the average density of the adsorbate, the order of the transition, the orientational degeneracy of the ground state, the isosteric heat of adsorption of the system, and the effect of the vertical cell dimension.Comment: 6 pages, 5 pic

Critical behavior of repulsive linear kk-mers on triangular lattices

Monte Carlo (MC) simulations and finite-size scaling analysis have been carried out to study the critical behavior in a submonolayer two-dimensional gas of repulsive linear $k$-mers on a triangular lattice at coverage $k/(2k+1)$. A low-temperature ordered phase, characterized by a repetition of alternating files of adsorbed $k$-mers separated by $k+1$ adjacent empty sites, is separated from the disordered state by a order-disorder phase transition occurring at a finite critical temperature, $T_c$. The MC technique was combined with the recently reported Free Energy Minimization Criterion Approach (FEMCA), [F. Rom\'a et al., Phys. Rev. B, 68, 205407, (2003)], to predict the dependence of the critical temperature of the order-disorder transformation. The dependence on $k$ of the transition temperature, $T_c(k)$, observed in MC is in qualitative agreement with FEMCA. In addition, an accurate determination of the critical exponents has been obtained for adsorbate sizes ranging between $k=1$ and $k=3$. For $k>1$, the results reveal that the system does not belong to the universality class of the two-dimensional Potts model with $q=3$ ($k=1$, monomers). Based on symmetry concepts, we suggested that the behavior observed for $k=1, 2$ and 3 could be generalized to include larger particle sizes ($k \geq 2$).Comment: 17 pages, 13 figure