2,218 research outputs found
Early ontogeny and swimming behavior of larvae of the neotropical fish Prochilodus costatus Valenciennes 1850 and Prochilodus argenteus Spix & Agassiz 1829 (Characiformes: Prochilodontidae)
Early development of fish larvae is a highly dynamic process and its study may provide important information about ontogenetic development, bioenergetic growth, behaviour, taxonomic characteristics for identification in natural environments, identification of spawning areas, and population monitoring. With the aim to provide knowledge about their growth and behaviour, to support larval rearing, and also taxonomic purposes, we studied the life history of the Prochilodus argenteus and P. costatus from hatching until the complete absorption of the yolk. Larvae were obtained through artificial reproduction at the Hydrobiology and Aquaculture Station of TrĂȘs Marias, Minas Gerais, Brazil. Immediately after hatching, 100 larvae of each species were put in two plastic incubators for conditioning. On a daily basis, larvae behavior was recorded and 14 larvae of each species were collected to analyse body morphology. On the first day after hatching, larvae of P. costatus and P. argenteus showed an elongated and transparent body; the yolk sac was filled with individualized yolk globules. In both species, the embryonic fin rounded the caudal region of the body, the retina was non-pigmented and the gut was obliterated. At the second day post-hatching, larvae of both species dendritic chromatophores had emerged, the mouth was obliterated and the pectoral fin was observed. The larvae showed 38-43 myomeres in P. costatus and 42-43 in P. argenteus. For both species, the gas bladder was inflated and the lumen of the gut was already open. On the third day post-hatching, the mouth of P. costatus and P. argenteus was already open in a sub-terminal position; the retina was pigmented; the gill arches had lamellar protrusions and were partially covered by the operculum. On the fourth day post-hatching, the pigmentation pattern was maintained with greater intensity; the mouth occupied a terminal position, the yolk sac was almost completely reabsorbed, and the pectoral and caudal fins showed mesenchymal rays in both species. The gut showed a broad lumen with folded mucosa and epithelium with striated border. The larvae of both species showed similar swimming behaviour. Our study provided understanding about the morphophysiological aspects, species identification, larval development and growth, and the ontogenic characteristics of two Neotropical fishes with importance for commercial and sports fishing
The Role of Liquid Biopsy in Early Diagnosis of Lung Cancer
Liquid biopsy is an emerging technology with a potential role in the screening and early detection of lung cancer. Several liquid biopsy-derived biomarkers have been identified and are currently under ongoing investigation. In this article, we review the available data on the use of circulating biomarkers for the early detection of lung cancer, focusing on the circulating tumor cells, circulating cell-free DNA, circulating micro-RNAs, tumor-derived exosomes, and tumor-educated platelets, providing an overview of future potential applicability in the clinical practice. While several biomarkers have shown exciting results, diagnostic performance and clinical applicability is still limited. The combination of different biomarkers, as well as their combination with other diagnostic tools show great promise, although further research is still required to define and validate the role of liquid biopsies in clinical practice.This work is financed by the ERDFâEuropean Regional Development Fund through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and InternationalizationâCOMPETE 2020 Programme and by National Funds through the Portuguese funding agency, FCTâFundação para a CiĂȘncia e a Tecnologia within project POCI-01-0145-FEDER-030263.
Authors thank AbĂlio Cunha and Francisco Correia for the illustration work. NC-M acknowledges the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology under Horizon 2020 Program (PTDC/PSI-GER/28076/2017)
Three-body interactions with cold polar molecules
We show that polar molecules driven by microwave fields give naturally rise
to strong three-body interactions, while the two-particle interaction can be
independently controlled and even switched off. The derivation of these
effective interaction potentials is based on a microscopic understanding of the
underlying molecular physics, and follows from a well controlled and systematic
expansion into many-body interaction terms. For molecules trapped in an optical
lattice, we show that these interaction potentials give rise to Hubbard models
with strong nearest-neighbor two-body and three-body interaction. As an
illustration, we study the one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model with dominant
three-body interaction and derive its phase diagram.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure
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Dynamically tuned non-classical light emission from atomic defects in hexagonal boron nitride
AbstractLuminescent defects in hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) have recently emerged as a promising platform for non-classical light emission. On-chip solutions, however, require techniques for controllable in-situ manipulation of quantum light. Here, we demonstrate the dynamic spectral and temporal tuning of the optical emission from h-BN via moving acousto-mechanical modulation induced by stimulated phonons. When perturbed by the propagating acoustic phonon, the optically probed radiative h-BN defects are periodically strained and their sharp emission lines are modulated by the deformation potential coupling. This results in an acoustically driven spectral tuning within a 2.5-meV bandwidth. Our findings, supported by first-principles theoretical calculations, reveal exceptionally high elasto-optic coupling in h-BN of ~50âmeV/%. Temporal control of the emitted photons is achieved by combining the acoustically mediated fine-spectral tuning with spectral detection filtering. This study opens the door to the use of sound for scalable integration of h-BN emitters in nanophotonic and quantum information technologies.</jats:p
A Semi-Lagrangian scheme for a modified version of the Hughes model for pedestrian flow
In this paper we present a Semi-Lagrangian scheme for a regularized version
of the Hughes model for pedestrian flow. Hughes originally proposed a coupled
nonlinear PDE system describing the evolution of a large pedestrian group
trying to exit a domain as fast as possible. The original model corresponds to
a system of a conservation law for the pedestrian density and an Eikonal
equation to determine the weighted distance to the exit. We consider this model
in presence of small diffusion and discuss the numerical analysis of the
proposed Semi-Lagrangian scheme. Furthermore we illustrate the effect of small
diffusion on the exit time with various numerical experiments
Maternal social environment affects offspring cognition through behavioral and immune pathways in rats
The social environment of lactation is a key etiological factor for the occurrence of postpartum disorders affecting women and their children. Postpartum depression and anxiety disorders are highly prevalent in new mothers and negatively affect offspring's cognitive development through mechanisms which are still unclear. Here, using a rat model, we manipulated the maternal social environment during lactation and explored the pathways through which social isolation (vs. the opportunity for limited social interaction with another lactating female, from 1 day before parturition to postpartum day 16) and chronic social conflict (daily exposure to a male intruder from postpartum day 2 to day 16) affect offspring learning and memory, measured at 40 to 60 days of age. We specifically explored the consequences of these social treatments on two main hypothesized mediators likely to affect offspring neurophysiological development: the quality of maternal care and maternal inflammation factors (BDNF, GMâCSF, ICAMâ1, TIMPâ1 and VEGF) likely to influence offspring development through lactation. Maternal rats which had the opportunity to interact with another lactating female spent more time with their pups which, in turn, displayed improved working and reference memory. Social stress affected maternal plasma levels of cytokines that were associated with cognitive deficits in their offspring. However, females subjected to social stress were protected from these stressâinduced immune changes and associated offspring cognitive impairment by increased social affiliation. These results underscore the effects of social interaction for new mothers and their offspring and can be used to inform the development of clinical preventative measures and interventions
A Comprehensive Workflow for General-Purpose Neural Modeling with Highly Configurable Neuromorphic Hardware Systems
In this paper we present a methodological framework that meets novel
requirements emerging from upcoming types of accelerated and highly
configurable neuromorphic hardware systems. We describe in detail a device with
45 million programmable and dynamic synapses that is currently under
development, and we sketch the conceptual challenges that arise from taking
this platform into operation. More specifically, we aim at the establishment of
this neuromorphic system as a flexible and neuroscientifically valuable
modeling tool that can be used by non-hardware-experts. We consider various
functional aspects to be crucial for this purpose, and we introduce a
consistent workflow with detailed descriptions of all involved modules that
implement the suggested steps: The integration of the hardware interface into
the simulator-independent model description language PyNN; a fully automated
translation between the PyNN domain and appropriate hardware configurations; an
executable specification of the future neuromorphic system that can be
seamlessly integrated into this biology-to-hardware mapping process as a test
bench for all software layers and possible hardware design modifications; an
evaluation scheme that deploys models from a dedicated benchmark library,
compares the results generated by virtual or prototype hardware devices with
reference software simulations and analyzes the differences. The integration of
these components into one hardware-software workflow provides an ecosystem for
ongoing preparative studies that support the hardware design process and
represents the basis for the maturity of the model-to-hardware mapping
software. The functionality and flexibility of the latter is proven with a
variety of experimental results
Wettability of amorphous and nanocrystalline Fe78B13Si9 substrates by molten Sn and Bi
The wettability of amorphous and annealing-induced nanocrystalline Fe78B13Si9 ribbons by molten Sn and Bi at 600 K was measured using an improved sessile drop method. The results demonstrate that the structural relaxation and crystallization in the amorphous substrates do not substantially change the wettability with molten Bi because of their invariable physical interaction, but remarkably deteriorate the wettability and interfacial bonding with molten Sn as a result of changing a chemical interaction to a physical one for the atoms at the interface
Balanço e anålise da sustentabilidade energética na produção orgùnica de hortaliças.
Os insumos e serviços utilizados na produção vegetal representam custo energĂ©tico. Dependendo desses fatores e das produtividades obtidas, a conversĂŁo da produção em energia determinarĂĄ a eficiĂȘncia energĂ©tica do sistema. A agricultura orgĂąnica somente atingirĂĄ a missĂŁo de preservação ambiental se tiver comprovada sustentabilidade energĂ©tica. Neste trabalho, objetivou-se caracterizar os balanços energĂ©ticos dos cultivos orgĂąnicos e analisar sua sustentabilidade, em comparação aos sistemas convencionais. Monitoraram-se campos de produção de dez culturas, de 1991 a 2000 em Domingos Martins-ES. Os dados do sistema convencional foram obtidos pelas mĂ©dias dos coeficientes tĂ©cnicos da regiĂŁo. Quantificaram-se os coeficientes tĂ©cnicos, convertendo suas grandezas fĂsicas em equivalentes energĂ©ticos, expressos em kcal. O sistema orgĂąnico gastou 4.571.159 kcal ha-1 e apresentou 12.696.712 kcal ha-1 de energia inserida na colheita, mostrando balanço mĂ©dio de 2,78. Esse valor foi similar ao obtido no sistema convencional (1,93). As participaçÔes dos componentes nos gastos do sistema orgĂąnico foram embalagem (35,8%), composto orgĂąnico (17,2%), irrigação (12,6%), sementes/mudas (12,4%) e mĂŁo-de-obra (11,0%), serviços mecĂąnicos (5,0%) e frete (4,5%). Se os custos com embalagens fossem eliminados, os gastos do sistema orgĂąnico seriam reduzidos para 2.930.113 kcal ha-1, aumentando sua eficiĂȘncia. A maioria dos cultivos orgĂąnicos pode ser considerada sustentĂĄvel em transformação de energia, com balanços superiores a 1,00 e produção mĂ©dia diĂĄria de 80.421 kcal ha-1 por dia, superior Ă necessidade mĂnima de 58.064 kcal ha-1
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