Review of the Fishes of the Genus Kuhlia (Perciformes: Kuhliidae) of the Central Pacific

Ten species offishes of the genus Kuhlia are recognized from Palau to Hawai'i in the North Pacific and from Fiji to Easter Island in the South Pacific: K malo (Valenciennes) from fresh water in the Society Islands; K marginata (Cuvier) from fresh water in the western Pacific, east to Kosrae, Caroline Islands, and Fiji; K mugil (Forster) (K taeniura is a synonym) from most of the Indo-Pacific (not the Hawaiian Islands) and the tropical eastern Pacific; K munda (De Vis) from fresh and brackish water in Fiji, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, and Queensland (K proxima Kendall & Goldsborough and K bilunulata Herre are synonyms); K nutabunda Kendall & Radcliffe from Easter Island; K petiti Schultz from the Phoenix Islands, Malden Island, and the Marquesas Islands (Dules taeniurus marquesensis Fowler is a synonym); K sandvicensis (Steindachner) from the Hawaiian Islands and other islands of the central Pacific; K rupestris (Lacepede) from fresh water from East Africa to Samoa (K caerulescens Regan from the Solomon Islands is a new synonym); K saklea Schultz from fresh water in the Samoa Islands; and K xenura (Jordan & Gilbert) from the Hawaiian Islands, with a mistaken type locality of El Salvador, Central America. The name K sandvicensis has long been used for the common endemic species in the Hawaiian Islands; however, the original description leaves little doubt that it should apply to the species widely distributed in the central Pacific and only recently discovered in Hawai'i; it has usually been misidentified as K marginata. The endemic Hawaiian species therefore takes the only available name, K xenura (Jordan & Gilbert). Kuhlia sandvicensis differs from K xenura in having a smaller eye (3.0-3.45 in head length, compared with 2.55-2.95 for K xenura), straight dorsal profile of the head of adults (concave in xenura); usually 14 pectoral-fin rays (usually 15 in xenura), usually 50 lateral-line scales (usually 49 in xenura), gill rakers 38-43 (35-39 for xenura), and a dark reticular pattern dorsally on the head in life

Adaptation of The Doubly Labeled Water Method for Subjects Consuming Isotopically Enriched Water

The use of doubly labeled water (DLW) to measure energy expenditure is subject to error if the background abundance of the oxygen and hydrogen isotope tracers changes during the test period. This study evaluated the accuracy and precision of different methods by which such background isotope changes can be corrected, including a modified method that allows prediction of the baseline that would be achieved if subjects were to consume water from a given source indefinitely. Subjects in this study were eight women (4 test subjects and 4 control subjects) who consumed for 28 days water enriched to resemble drinking water aboard the United States space shuttle. Test subjects and control subjects were given a DLW dose on days 1 and 15, respectively. The change to an enriched water source produced a bias in expenditure calculations that exceeded 2.9 MJ/day (35%), relative to calculations from intake-balance. The proposed correction based on the predicted final abundance of 18O and deuterium after equilibration to the new water source eliminated this bias, as did the traditional use of a control group. This new modified correction method is advantageous under field conditions when subject numbers are limited

A REPORT BY THE ALL - PARTY PARLIAMENTARY GROUP ON A FIT AND HEALTHY CHILDHOOD THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC INEQUALITIES ON CHILDREN’S HEALTH

A child born into circumstances of social and economic inequality in the 21st century United Kingdom will start life with one hand tied behind their back. Nowhere is the disparity of experience more marked than in that of health and this, in turn, impacts the entire life course. In the same way that priority is given to securing the national infrastructure, prioritising the health of children from all areas and in all circumstances from the outset would therefore seem to be prudent rather than profligate. Yet as this Report demonstrates,successive Governments have skimped rather thansaved; failedto build upon existing policy and played a costly policy game of ‘catching up later’ instead of deploying the early ntervention me asures that are cheaper andmore effective in the long term

Representing kidney development using the gene ontology.

Gene Ontology (GO) provides dynamic controlled vocabularies to aid in the description of the functional biological attributes and subcellular locations of gene products from all taxonomic groups (www.geneontology.org). Here we describe collaboration between the renal biomedical research community and the GO Consortium to improve the quality and quantity of GO terms describing renal development. In the associated annotation activity, the new and revised terms were associated with gene products involved in renal development and function. This project resulted in a total of 522 GO terms being added to the ontology and the creation of approximately 9,600 kidney-related GO term associations to 940 UniProt Knowledgebase (UniProtKB) entries, covering 66 taxonomic groups. We demonstrate the impact of these improvements on the interpretation of GO term analyses performed on genes differentially expressed in kidney glomeruli affected by diabetic nephropathy. In summary, we have produced a resource that can be utilized in the interpretation of data from small- and large-scale experiments investigating molecular mechanisms of kidney function and development and thereby help towards alleviating renal disease

Approaches and challenges to the study of loess—Introduction to the LoessFest Special Issue

In September 2016, the annual meeting of the International Union for Quaternary Research's Loess and Pedostratigraphy Focus Group, traditionally referred to as a LoessFest, met in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, USA. The 2016 LoessFest focused on thin loess deposits and loess transportation surfaces. This LoessFest included 75 registered participants from 10 countries. Almost half of the participants were from outside the United States, and 18 of the participants were students. This review is the introduction to the special issue for Quaternary Research that originated from presentations and discussions at the 2016 LoessFest. This introduction highlights current understanding and ongoing work on loess in various regions of the world and provides brief summaries of some of the current approaches/strategies used to study loess deposits

Cosmic vorticity on the brane

We study vector perturbations about four-dimensional brane-world cosmologies embedded in a five-dimensional vacuum bulk. Even in the absence of matter perturbations, vector perturbations in the bulk metric can support vector metric perturbations on the brane. We show that during de Sitter inflation on the brane vector perturbations in the bulk obey the same wave equation for a massless five-dimensional field as found for tensor perturbations. However, we present the second-order effective action for vector perturbations and find no normalisable zero-mode in the absence of matter sources. The spectrum of normalisable states is a continuum of massive modes that remain in the vacuum state during inflation.Comment: 10 pages, latex with revtex. Expanded discussion of observational effects and minor corrections. Version to appear in Phys. Rev.

Genome editing to the rescue: sustainably feeding 10 billion global human population

Modern animal breeding strategies based on population genetics, molecular tools, artificial insemination, embryo transfer and related technologies have contributed to significant increases in the performance of domestic animals, and are the basis for a regular supply of high quality animal derived food at acceptable prices. However, the current strategy of marker- assisted selection and breeding of animals to introduce novel traits over multiple generations is too pedestrian in responding to unprecedented challenges such as climate change, global pandemics, and feeding an anticipated 33% increase in global population in the next three decades. Here, we propose site-specific genome editing technologies as a basis for “directed” or “rational selection” of agricultural traits. The animal science community envisions genome editing as an essential tool in addressing critical priorities for global food security and environmental sustainability, and seeks additional funding support for development and implementation of these technologies for maximum societal benefit

Cosmological perturbations in the bulk and on the brane

We study cosmological perturbations in a brane-world scenario where the matter fields live on a four-dimensional brane and gravity propagates in the five-dimensional bulk. We present the equations of motion in an arbitrary gauge for metric perturbations in the bulk and matter perturbations on the brane. Gauge-invariant perturbations are then constructed corresponding to perturbations in longitudinal and Gaussian normal gauges. Longitudinal gauge metric perturbations may be directly derived from three master variables (separately describing scalar, vector and tensor metric perturbations) which obey five-dimensional wave-equations. Gaussian normal gauge perturbations are directly related to the induced metric perturbations on the brane with the additional bulk degrees of freedom interpreted as an effective Weyl energy-momentum tensor on the brane. We construct gauge-invariant perturbations describing the effective density, momentum and pressures of this Weyl fluid at the brane and throughout the bulk. We show that there exist gauge-invariant curvature perturbations on the brane and in the bulk that are conserved on large-scales when three-dimensional spatial gradients are negligible.Comment: 26 pages, 1 figure; equations for 5D longitudinal gauge perturbations in terms of master variables corrected. Published versio