Consumer Preferences in Purchasing Beef and the Values they Attribute to Branded Beef Products

There have been significant changes in consumer demand at the retail counter, such as health, convenience, palatability preferences, and safety concerns. Branded programs offer a means for satisfying consumer demand for high quality and differentiated beef products. To help answer the question of who is purchasing branded beef market and why, an online survey was sent to interested beef consumers to determine their preferences of purchasing, as well as values they attribute to certain product characteristics. The total sample response from 13,000 contacted consumers was 502 responses, which according to Kreiche and Morgan, 1970 is a valid sample size. Decision variables ranked moderate and always important include guaranteed tender and satisfaction, low price, and low fat or lean. Differences in the strength of the decision values, such as always important, moderately important to seldom important were found with gender, purchasing frequency product differences. Results provide a better understanding of consumer decisions to buy branded beef and may assist producers with advertising decisions.Beef demand, consumer beef demand, demand preferences for beef, Agribusiness, Agricultural and Food Policy, Consumer/Household Economics,

Deciphering Chronometabolic Dynamics Through Metabolomics, Stable Isotope Tracers, And Genome-Scale Reaction Modeling

Synchrony across environmental cues, endogenous genetic clocks, sleep/wake cycles, and metabolism evoke physiological harmony for organismal health. Perturbation of this synchrony has been recently correlated with a growing list of pathologies, which is alarming given the ubiquity of sleep deprivation, mistimed light exposure, and altered eating schedules in modern society. Deeper insights into clocks, sleep, and metabolism are necessary to understand these outcomes. In this work, extensive metabolic profiles of circadian systems were obtained from the development of new liquid chromatography mass spectrometry (LC-MS) metabolomics methods. These methods were applied to Drosophila melanogaster to discern relative influences of environmental and genetic drivers of metabolic cycles. Unique sets of metabolites oscillated with 24-hour circadian periods under light:dark (LD) and constant darkness (DD) conditions, and ultradian rhythms were noted for clock mutant flies under LD, suggesting clock-independent metabolic cycles driven by environmental inputs. However, this metabolomic analysis does not fully capture the inherently dynamic nature of circadian metabolism. These LC-MS methods were adapted to analyze isotope enrichments from a novel 13C6 glucose injection platform in Drosophila. Metabolic flux cycles were noted from glucose carbons into serine, glutamine and reduced glutathione biosynthesis, and altered under sleep deprivation, demonstrating unique energy and redox demands in perturbed sleep/wake cycles. Global isotopolome shifts were most notable in WT flies after lights-on, suggesting a catabolic rush from glucose oxidation early in the active phase. As the scope of these isotope tracer-based metabolomic analyses expand, attributing labeling patterns to specific reactions requires consideration of genome-scale metabolic networks. A new computational approach was developed, called the IsoPathFinder, which uncovered biosynthetic paths from glucose to serine, and extends to glycine and glutathione production. Carbon flux into glutamine was predicted to occur through the TCA cycle, supported by enzyme thermodynamics and circadian expression datasets. This tool is presented as a new mechanism to simulate additional isotope tracer experiments, with broad applicability beyond circadian research. Collectively, a new set of analytical and computational tools are developed to both produce dynamic metabolomic data and improve data interpretability, with applications to uncover new chronometabolic connections

A fixed fuzzy point for fuzzy mapping in complete metric spaces

In this paper, we prove a fixed fuzzy point theorem for fuzzy mappings over a complete metric space

Precursory scale increase and long-term seismogenesis in California and Northern Mexico

A sudden increase in the scale of seismicity has occurred as a long-term precursor to twelve major earthquakes in California and Northern Mexico. These include all earthquakes along the San Andreas system during 1960-2000 with magnitude M •6.4. The full list is as follows: Colorado Delta, 1966, M 6.3; Borrego Mt., 1968, M 6.5; San Fernando, 1971, M 6.6; Brawley, 1979, M 6.4; Mexicali, 1980, M 6.1; Coalinga, 1983, M 6.7; Superstition Hills, 1987, M 6.6; Loma Prieta, 1989, M 7.0; Joshua Tree, 1992, M 6.1; Landers, 1992, M 7.3; Northridge, 1994, M 6.6; Hector Mine, 1999, M 7.1. Such a Precursory Scale Increase () was inferred from the modelling of long-term seismogenesis as a three-stage faulting process against a background of self-organised criticality. The location, onset-time and level of • are predictive of the location, time and magnitude of the future earthquake. Precursory swarms, which occur widely in subduction regions, are a special form of • ; the more general form is here shownto occur frequently in a region of continental transform. Other seismicity precursors, including quiescence and foreshocks, contribute to or modulate the increased seismicity that characterises • . The area occupied by • is small compared with those occupied by the seismicity precursors known as AMR, M8 and LURR. Further work is needed to formulate as a testable hypothesis, and to carry out the appropriate forecasting tests

Texas Christmas Trees Make Good "Scents".

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Asymptotic Normalization Coefficients for 13C+p->14N

The $^{13}C(^{14}N,^{13}C)^{14}N$ proton exchange reaction has been measured at an incident energy of 162 MeV. Angular distributions were obtained for proton transfer to the ground and low lying excited states in $^{14}N$. Elastic scattering of $^{14}N$ on $^{13}C$ also was measured out to the rainbow angle region in order to find reliable optical model potentials. Asymptotic normalization coefficients for the system $^{13}C+p\to {}^{14}N$ have been found for the ground state and the excited states at 2.313, 3.948, 5.106 and 5.834 MeV in $^{14}N$. These asymptotic normalization coefficients will be used in a determination of the S-factor for $^{7}Be(p,\gamma)^{8}B$ at solar energies from a measurement of the proton transfer reaction $^{14}N(^{7}Be,^{8}B)^{13}C$.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figure

An intelligent, free-flying robot

The ground based demonstration of the extensive extravehicular activity (EVA) Retriever, a voice-supervised, intelligent, free flying robot, is designed to evaluate the capability to retrieve objects (astronauts, equipment, and tools) which have accidentally separated from the Space Station. The major objective of the EVA Retriever Project is to design, develop, and evaluate an integrated robotic hardware and on-board software system which autonomously: (1) performs system activation and check-out; (2) searches for and acquires the target; (3) plans and executes a rendezvous while continuously tracking the target; (4) avoids stationary and moving obstacles; (5) reaches for and grapples the target; (6) returns to transfer the object; and (7) returns to base

Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Bird Harassment on Fish Ponds

The effects of aquaculture decline on piscivorous birds in the Mississippi Delta concern catfish farmers, with possible increases in fish loss and disease transmission. Piscivorous birds quickly habituate to most current methods of harassment (loud noises and visual disturbances) leading to increased depredation and disease. Our study was designed to test the efficacy of using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to effectively control piscivorous birds at fish farms. We hypothesized that a UAV would be more efficient at reducing the number of fish-eating birds on fish ponds than current forms of harassment. We conducted pre-treatment bird surveys, harassment observations, and post-treatment surveys at each experimental unit before and after each treatment on the same treatment days on 6 study sites in the Mississippi Alluvial Valley. The results of this study indicate that UAV harassment did not reduce piscivorous bird abundance more than human harassment in a 2-year field experiment

Numerical Simulation of the Trapping Reaction with Mobile and Reacting Traps

We study a variation of the trapping reaction, A+B→A, in which both the traps (A) and the particles (B) undergo diffusion, and the traps upon meeting react according to A+A→0 or A. This two-species reaction-diffusion system is known to exhibit a nontrivial decay exponent for the B particles, and recently renormalization group methods have predicted an anomalous dimension in the BB correlation function. To test these predictions, we develop a computer simulation method, motivated by the technique of Mehra and Grassberger [Phys. Rev. E 65, 050101(R) (2002)], that determines the complete probability distribution of the B particles for a given realization of the A-particle dynamics, thus providing a significant increase in the quality of statistics. Our numerical results indeed reveal the anomalous dimension predicted by the renormalization group, and compare well quantitatively to precisely known values in cases where the problem can be related to a four-walker problem