Effect of preoperative oral antibiotics in combination with mechanical bowel preparation on inflammatory response and short-term outcomes following left-sided colonic and rectal resections

This article is freely available via Open Access. Click on the Publisher URL to access it via the publisher's site.published version, accepted version, submitted versio

Butterfly pea - a legume success story in cropping lands of central Queensland

The central Queensland region is a major producer of wheat, sorghum and beef. Changes in relative values of cereals and beef, together with a market demand to finish steers at a younger age, has induced farmers to invest more resources into their beef enterprises. Soil fertility decline is seen as a major constraint to cereal production and one that can be overcome by use of pasture phases in crop rotations. Within this environment, butterfly pea (Clitoria ternatea) has emerged as a well-adapted summer-growing legume for the heavy textured cropping soils of the region. It is being sown into existing or new permanent pastures and in pasture phases within cropping rotations to improve animal production and soil nitrogen status. Butterfly pea is relatively inexpensive to establish and can provide liveweight gain of between 0.75 and 1.3 kg/head/day. The combination of farmer, extension and research inputs has resulted in widespread adoption with > 12,000 ha being successfully established over the past 3 years

WHAM Observations of H-alpha from High-Velocity Clouds: Are They Galactic or Extragalactic?

It has been suggested that high velocity clouds may be distributed throughout the Local Group and are therefore not in general associated with the Milky Way galaxy. With the aim of testing this hypothesis, we have made observations in the H-alpha line of high velocity clouds selected as the most likely candidates for being at larger than average distances. We have found H-alpha emission from 4 out of 5 of the observed clouds, suggesting that the clouds under study are being illuminated by a Lyman continuum flux greater than that of the metagalactic ionizing radiation. Therefore, it appears likely that these clouds are in the Galactic halo and not distributed throughout the Local Group.Comment: 12 pages, 5 eps figures, accepted for publication in ApJ Letter

An update on the global strategy for the conservation and utilisation of tropical and subtropical forage genetic resources

Tropical and sub-tropical forages (TSTF) are critically important for supplying livestock feed and environmental benefits in extensive and intensive livestock systems of developed and developing countries. There has been focused collection and conservation of forage genetic resources (FGR), and research on their diversity, adaptation and use for the past 60 years. This laid the foundations for the impacts TSTF have had, and continue to have. However, since about 1995 there has been significant reduction in forage science investment, and capability globally, and that has strangely coincided with the accelerated demand for livestock products. The status of TSTF germplasm conservation, capability and capacity are now at risk, and the decline must be reversed if the tropical and subtropical farming systems are to access the best genetic material and knowledge to meet the growing food/environmental needs. A strategy to reduce barriers to TSTF conservation, research and utilisation was developed under the Global Crop Diversity Trust in 2015 with input from across the TSTF-genetic resources community. Its aim was to build a functional network of national, regional and international genetic resource centres, introduce operational efficiencies, and enable genebanks to improve their role as knowledge managers and advisors for research and development programs. The strategy’s main objectives are: 1) Rebuild the community of TSTF genebanks and genebank users to develop closer collaboration and trust; 2) Ensure more efficient and rationalized conservation within and among genebanks; and 3) Actively support utilisation by anticipating germplasm needs and responding to users’ requests for information and seeds. Implementation of the strategy commenced in 2016, with the first aim being to win buy-in and cooperation of international and national genebanks. A new Newsletter, ‘Forages for the Future’, has >600 recipients and reports key implementation activities and the roles of forages across the tropics and subtropics. Making recent impacts more widely known indirectly helps build the body of evidence that improved forages deliver impacts and is the basis for growth in financial and human resources invested in TSTF. The CGIAR genebanks of ILRI and CIAT play key roles in TSTF research and use. In recognition of the need for greater efficiencies and better utilisation of the germplasm, ILRI and CIAT have undertaken an ambitious program to align collections to provide a one stop portal, with prioritised species/accessions for conservation and research, and a simplified germplasm request process. This change is occurring simultaneously with a TSTF strategy initiative encouraging some key national TSTF centres to work more closely together and with the CGIAR centres and with the update of the widely used TSTF database and selection tool, SoFT, with new content and ability to be used on smart phones. That new version will be released in 2019. Reversing the past downward trend requires the commitment and long-term engagement of partner countries and the donor community. The alternative is that 60 years of knowledge and expertise will have to be rebuilt, and generations of farmers and other users will not realize the production and environmental benefits that well-adapted and sustainably managed improved forages can attain

Photoevaporation of Protoplanetary Disks

We present HST/NICMOS Paschen alpha images and low and high resolution IRS spectra of photoevaporating disk-tail systems originally detected at 24 micron near O stars. We find no Paschen alpha emission in any of the systems. The resulting upper limits correspond to about 0.000002-0.000003 solar mass of mass in hydrogen in the tails suggesting that the gas is severely depleted. The IRAC data and the low resolution 5-12 micron IRS spectra provide evidence for an inner disk while high resolution long wavelength (14-30 micron) IRS spectra confirm the presence of a gas free ``tail'' that consists of ~ 0.01 to ~ 1 micron dust grains originating in the outer parts of the circumstellar disks. Overall our observations support theoretical predictions in which photoevaporation removes the gas relatively quickly (<= 100000 yrs) from the outer region of a protoplanetary disk but leaves an inner more robust and possibly gas-rich disk component of radius 5-10 AU. With the gas gone, larger solid bodies in the outer disk can experience a high rate of collisions and produce elevated amounts of dust. This dust is being stripped from the system by the photon pressure of the O star to form a gas-free dusty tail.Comment: 9 pages 5 figures, accepted for publication in Ap

Improving Predictions for Helium Emission Lines

We have combined the detailed He I recombination model of Smits with the collisional transitions of Sawey & Berrington in order to produce new accurate helium emissivities that include the effects of collisional excitation from both the 2 (3)S and 2 (1) S levels. We present a grid of emissivities for a range of temperature and densities along with analytical fits and error estimates. Fits accurate to within 1% are given for the emissivities of the brightest lines over a restricted range for estimates of primordial helium abundance. We characterize the analysis uncertainties associated with uncertainties in temperature, density, fitting functions, and input atomic data. We estimate that atomic data uncertainties alone may limit abundance estimates to an accuracy of 1.5%; systematic errors may be greater than this. This analysis uncertainty must be incorporated when attempting to make high accuracy estimates of the helium abundance. For example, in recent determinations of the primordial helium abundance, uncertainties in the input atomic data have been neglected.Comment: ApJ, accepte

Accurate Hydrogen Spectral Simulations with a Compact Model Atom

Many large scale numerical simulations of astrophysical plasmas must also reproduce the hydrogen ionization and the resulting emission spectrum, in some cases quite accurately. We describe a compact model hydrogen atom that can be readily incorporated into such simulations. It reproduces the recombination efficiency and line spectrum predicted by much larger calculations for a very broad range of densities and temperatures. Uncertainties in hydrogen collision data are the largest source of differences between our compact atom and predictions of more extensive calculations, and underscore the need for accurate atomic data.Comment: 18 pages, prepared in MS-Word, Postscript only, 12 Figures, also available at http://www.pa.uky.edu/~ferguson/bib/bib.html, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journa

Commercial chicken breeds exhibit highly divergent patterns of linkage disequilibrium

The analysis of linkage disequilibrium (LD) underpins the development of effective genotyping technologies, trait mapping and understanding of biological mechanisms such as those driving recombination and the impact of selection. We apply the Malécot-Morton model of LD to create additive LD maps that describe the high-resolution LD landscape of commercial chickens. We investigated LD in chickens (Gallus gallus) at the highest resolution to date for broiler, white egg and brown egg layer commercial lines. There is minimal concordance between breeds of fine-scale LD patterns (correlation coefficient &lt;0.21), and even between discrete broiler lines. Regions of LD breakdown, which may align with recombination hot spots, are enriched near CpG islands and transcription start sites (P&lt;2.2 × 10?16), consistent with recent evidence described in finches, but concordance in hot spot locations between commercial breeds is only marginally greater than random. As in other birds, functional elements in the chicken genome are associated with recombination but, unlike evidence from other bird species, the LD landscape is not stable in the populations studied. The development of optimal genotyping panels for genome-led selection programmes will depend on careful analysis of the LD structure of each line of interest. Further study is required to fully elucidate the mechanisms underlying highly divergent LD patterns found in commercial chickens