10,403 research outputs found
Effect of daily movement of dairy cattle to fresh grass in morning or afternoon on intake, grazing behaviour, rumen fermentation and milk production
Twenty Holstein cows were split into two equal groups to test the effect of daily move to a previously ungrazed strip after morning milking (MA) or afternoon milking (AA) on herbage intake, grazing behaviour, rumen characteristics and milk production using a randomized block design with three periods of 14 days each. Milking took place at 06.00 and 16.00 h. The chemical composition of grass was similar between treatments, but an interaction between treatment and time of sampling was found in all variables except acid detergent lignin (ADL). The most pronounced differences existed in sugar content. Grass sugar content was greatest following afternoon milking. However, the difference in sugar content in grass was much larger in MA (158 v 114 g/kg dry matter (DM) at 16.00 and 06.00 h, respectively) than in AA (147 v 129 g/kg DM at 16.00 and 06.00 h, respectively). Neutral detergent fibre (NDF) was significantly higher at 06.00 h than at 16.00 h (469 v 425 g/kg DM) in AA, but was equal between morning and afternoon in MA (453 g/kg DM). Herbage intake, determined using the n-alkane technique, did not differ between treatments. Grazing behaviour observed using IGER graze recorders were similar between treatments, except for ruminating time, bite rate and the number of ruminations and boli per period of the day. However, interactions between treatment and time in grazing behaviour variables were found. Grazing time was longer and number of bites was greater following allocation to a new plot (after milking in the morning in MA or milking in the afternoon in AA) when compared to allocation to the same plot after the subsequent milking per treatment (after milking in the afternoon or morning in MA and AA, respectively). In comparison to AA, grazing time in MA was more evenly distributed during the day but lower during the night. The combined effects of differences in grazing behaviour and chemical composition of the grass between treatments in different periods of the day probably caused higher intake of sugars in AA, resulting in a significantly higher non-glucogenic to glucogenic volatile fatty acid ratio (NGR) in the rumen in AA than MA. Milk fat content was lower in MA than AA, but milk production and milk protein and lactose content did not differ. In conclusion, time of allocation to a fresh plot altered the distribution of grazing behaviour variables over the day, and affected NGR and milk fat content, but herbage intake and milk production were not change
Correlated fluctuations in the exciton dynamics and spectroscopy of DNA
The absorption of ultraviolet light creates excitations in DNA, which
subsequently start moving in the helix. Their fate is important for an
understanding of photo damage, and is determined by the interplay of electronic
couplings between bases and the structure of the DNA environment. We model the
effect of dynamical fluctuations in the environment and study correlation,
which is present when multiple base pairs interact with the same mode in the
environment. We find that the correlations strongly affect the exciton
dynamics, and show how they are observed in the decay of the anisotropy as a
function of a coherence and a population time in a non-linear optical
experiment
Density Functional Theory for Chiral Nematic Liquid Crystals
Even though chiral nematic phases were the first liquid crystals
experimentally observed more than a century ago, the origin of the
thermodynamic stability of cholesteric states is still unclear. In this Letter
we address the problem by means of a novel density functional theory for the
equilibrium pitch of chiral particles. When applied to right-handed hard
helices, our theory predicts an entropy-driven cholesteric phase, which can be
either right- or left-handed, depending not only on the particle shape but also
on the thermodynamic state. We explain the origin of the chiral ordering as an
interplay between local nematic alignment and excluded-volume differences
between left- and right-handed particle pairs
Free Minimization of the Fundamental Measure Theory Functional: Freezing of Parallel Hard Squares and Cubes
Due to remarkable advances in colloid synthesis techniques, systems of
squares and cubes, once an academic abstraction for theorists and simulators,
are nowadays an experimental reality. By means of a free minimization of the
free-energy functional, we apply Fundamental Measure Theory to analyze the
phase behavior of parallel hard squares and hard cubes. We compare our results
with those obtained by the traditional approach based on the Gaussian
parameterization, finding small deviations and good overall agreement between
the two methods. For hard squares our predictions feature at intermediate
packing fraction a smectic phase, which is however expected to be unstable due
to thermal fluctuations. This implies that for hard squares the theory predicts
either a vacancy-rich second-order transition or a vacancy-poor weakly
first-order phase transition at higher density. In accordance with previous
studies, a second-order transition with a high vacancy concentration is
predicted for hard cubes
Depletion-induced biaxial nematic states of boardlike particles
With the aim of investigating the stability conditions of biaxial nematic
liquid crystals, we study the effect of adding a non-adsorbing ideal depletant
on the phase behavior of colloidal hard boardlike particles. We take into
account the presence of the depletant by introducing an effective depletion
attraction between a pair of boardlike particles. At fixed depletant fugacity,
the stable liquid crystal phase is determined through a mean-field theory with
restricted orientations. Interestingly, we predict that for slightly elongated
boardlike particles a critical depletant density exists, where the system
undergoes a direct transition from an isotropic liquid to a biaxial nematic
phase. As a consequence, by tuning the depletant density, an easy experimental
control parameter, one can stabilize states of high biaxial nematic order even
when these states are unstable for pure systems of boardlike particles
Mixing the stimulus list in bilingual lexical decision turns cognate facilitation effects into mirrored inhibition effects
To test the BIA+ and Multilink models’ accounts of how bilinguals process words with different degrees of cross-linguistic orthographic and semantic overlap, we conducted two experiments manipulating stimulus list composition. Dutch-English late bilinguals performed two English lexical decision tasks including the same set of cognates, interlingual homographs, English control words, and pseudowords. In one task, half of the pseudowords were replaced with Dutch words, requiring a ‘no’ response. This change from pure to mixed language list context was found to turn cognate facilitation effects into inhibition. Relative to control words, larger effects were found for cognate pairs with an increasing cross-linguistic form overlap. Identical cognates produced considerably larger effects than non-identical cognates, supporting their special status in the bilingual lexicon. Response patterns for different item types are accounted for in terms of the items’ lexical representation and their binding to ‘yes’ and ‘no’ responses in pure vs mixed lexical decision
Avatar: A Time- and Space-Efficient Self-Stabilizing Overlay Network
Overlay networks present an interesting challenge for fault-tolerant
computing. Many overlay networks operate in dynamic environments (e.g. the
Internet), where faults are frequent and widespread, and the number of
processes in a system may be quite large. Recently, self-stabilizing overlay
networks have been presented as a method for managing this complexity.
\emph{Self-stabilizing overlay networks} promise that, starting from any
weakly-connected configuration, a correct overlay network will eventually be
built. To date, this guarantee has come at a cost: nodes may either have high
degree during the algorithm's execution, or the algorithm may take a long time
to reach a legal configuration. In this paper, we present the first
self-stabilizing overlay network algorithm that does not incur this penalty.
Specifically, we (i) present a new locally-checkable overlay network based upon
a binary search tree, and (ii) provide a randomized algorithm for
self-stabilization that terminates in an expected polylogarithmic number of
rounds \emph{and} increases a node's degree by only a polylogarithmic factor in
expectation
Resonant line transfer in a fog: Using Lyman-alpha to probe tiny structures in atomic gas
Motivated by observational and theoretical work which both suggest very small
scale (pc) structure in the circum-galactic medium of galaxies
and in other environments, we study Lyman- (Ly) radiative
transfer in an extremely clumpy medium with many "clouds" of neutral gas along
the line of sight. While previous studies have typically considered radiative
transfer through sightlines intercepting clumps, we explore the
limit of a very large number of clumps per sightline (up to ). Our main finding is that, for covering factors greater than some
critical threshold, a multiphase medium behaves similar to a homogeneous medium
in terms of the emergent Ly spectrum. The value of this threshold
depends on both the clump column density and on the movement of the clumps. We
estimate this threshold analytically and compare our findings to radiative
transfer simulations with a range of covering factors, clump column densities,
radii, and motions. Our results suggest that (i) the success in fitting
observed Ly spectra using homogeneous "shell models" (and the
corresponding failure of multiphase models) hints towards the presence of very
small-scale structure in neutral gas, in agreement within a number of other
observations; and (ii) the recurrent problems of reproducing realistic line
profiles from hydrodynamical simulations may be due to their inability to
resolve small-scale structure, which causes simulations to underestimate the
effective covering factor of neutral gas clouds.Comment: 18 pages, 21 figures; submitted to A&A; animations available at
http://bit.ly/a-in-a-fo
The development of the representation of conceptual knowledge in memory and the design of instruction
Knowledge comprises facts, concepts and principles. Skills are categorized as either cognitive or motor skills, which are essential for solving problems. The acquisition of knowledge and skills is guided by instructions and by presenting problems to students. Firstly, the instructions for acquiring concepts, based on principles, are discussed and a model for teaching is presented. Further, the integration of class and relational concepts, together with principles, is shown to be necessary for solving problems
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