Feeding China's Pigs: Implications for the Environment, China's Smallholder Farmers and Food Security

__Abstract__ In 1978, Deng Xiaoping introduced a program of economic reforms in China that began to move the country in the direction of becoming a market economy. The following year, pork started on the path to global domination as the world’s most produced and consumed meat. These two trajectories are intimately linked. While pork had been a key source of protein in China for thousands of years, it was only in the context of de-collectivizating the countryside, liberalizing agricultural markets, and adopting industrial production technologies and ideologies that China’s pork sector began to shift global statistics. Today, 30 years after Deng’s market reforms began, pigs—and what pigs are eating—in China have become big news and big business. The world, it seems, is watching

China's Pork Miracle?

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Agriculture has helped fuel the “China miracle.” Since 1978, agricultural and food output has soared, Chinese agribusiness firms have become key players in domestic and international markets, and by all accounts, China has been highly successful in overcoming land and resource constraints to feed its population of 1.3 billion people. The country is celebrated for its successes in reducing poverty and hunger over the last 30 years, and more recently, for creating an agrifood system that makes eating “high on the hog” a possibility and reality for many Chinese people. Pork is at the heart of this miracle. A hallmark of the post-1978 agricultural development model is ramping up the production, sale, and consumption of meat. Processed and packaged meats are the fastest growing market segments, reflecting the increasing influence and operation of pork processors, and the more general trend towards processed foods that can be shipped, stored, and sold with a longer shelf-life in super- and hyper-markets. These trends are also reflected in the Shuanghui (now called the WH Group to take on a more international identity) buyout of Smithfield Foods, a move that will increase China’s pork supplies, strengthen Shuanghui’s brand within China as “safer” meat with higher consumer status because of its US origin, and further generate and shape consumer demand for industrial pork. The Shuanghui-Smithfield deal is a matter of political and economic interest, but also signals a much more basic insight: pork, and the systems and actors that produce it, are central in China’s agrifood system with increasingly global inter-linkages and implications. etc. ..

Output from Bose condensates in tunnel arrays: the role of mean-field interactions and of transverse confinement

We present numerical studies of atomic transport in 3D and 1D models for a mode-locked, pulsed atom laser as realized by Anderson and Kasevich [Science 281 (1998) 1686] using an elongated Bose condensate of ${}^{87}$Rb atoms poured into a vertical optical lattice. From our 3D results we ascertain in a quantitative manner the role of mean-field interactions in determining the shape and the size of the pulses in the case of Gaussian transverse confinement. By comparison with 1D simulations we single out a best-performing 1D reduction of the mean-field interactions, which yields quantitatively useful predictions for all main features of the matter output.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figure

Progress on a gas-accepting ion source for continuous-flow accelerator mass spectrometry

Author Posting. © Elsevier B.V., 2007. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Elsevier B.V. for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section B: Beam Interactions with Materials and Atoms 259 (2007): 83-87, doi:10.1016/j.nimb.2007.01.189.A gas-accepting microwave-plasma ion source is being developed for continuous-flow Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS). Characteristics of the ion source will be presented. Schemes for connecting a gas or liquid chromatograph to the ion source will also be discussed

Ectodysplasin has a dual role in ectodermal organogenesis: inhibition of Bmp activity and induction of Shh expression.

Ectodermal organogenesis is regulated by inductive and reciprocal signalling cascades that involve multiple signal molecules in several conserved families. Ectodysplasin-A (Eda), a tumour necrosis factor-like signalling molecule, and its receptor Edar are required for the development of a number of ectodermal organs in vertebrates. In mice, lack of Eda leads to failure in primary hair placode formation and missing or abnormally shaped teeth, whereas mice overexpressing Eda are characterized by enlarged hair placodes and supernumerary teeth and mammary glands. Here, we report two signalling outcomes of the Eda pathway: suppression of bone morphogenetic protein (Bmp) activity and upregulation of sonic hedgehog (Shh) signalling. Recombinant Eda counteracted Bmp4 activity in developing teeth and, importantly, inhibition of BMP activity by exogenous noggin partially restored primary hair placode formation in Eda-deficient skin in vitro, indicating that suppression of Bmp activity was compromised in the absence of Eda. The downstream effects of the Eda pathway are likely to be mediated by transcription factor nuclear factor-kappaB (NF-kappaB), but the transcriptional targets of Edar have remained unknown. Using a quantitative approach, we show in cultured embryonic skin that Eda induced the expression of two Bmp inhibitors, Ccn2/Ctgf (CCN family protein 2/connective tissue growth factor) and follistatin. Moreover, our data indicate that Shh is a likely transcriptional target of Edar, but, unlike noggin, recombinant Shh was unable to rescue primary hair placode formation in Eda-deficient skin explants

Universal renormalization-group dynamics at the onset of chaos in logistic maps and nonextensive statistical mechanics

We uncover the dynamics at the chaos threshold $\mu_{\infty}$ of the logistic map and find it consists of trajectories made of intertwined power laws that reproduce the entire period-doubling cascade that occurs for $\mu <\mu_{\infty}$. We corroborate this structure analytically via the Feigenbaum renormalization group (RG) transformation and find that the sensitivity to initial conditions has precisely the form of a $q$-exponential, of which we determine the $q$-index and the $q$-generalized Lyapunov coefficient $\lambda _{q}$. Our results are an unequivocal validation of the applicability of the non-extensive generalization of Boltzmann-Gibbs (BG) statistical mechanics to critical points of nonlinear maps.Comment: Revtex, 3 figures. Updated references and some general presentation improvements. To appear published as a Rapid communication of PR

Progress with a gas-accepting ion source for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2010. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Elsevier B.V. for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section B: Beam Interactions with Materials and Atoms 269 (2011): 3192–3195, doi:10.1016/j.nimb.2011.04.017.The National Ocean Sciences AMS (NOSAMS) facility at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has developed a novel, gas-accepting microwave-plasma ion-source. The source is a key component of a compact Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) system built for the analysis of 14C in a continuously flowing gas stream. The gas source produces carbon currents from a stream of CO2 with currents typical of a traditional graphite source. Details of the gas source, including ion current achieved, optimal flow rate, efficiency, and memory are presented. Additionally, data obtained from coupling a gas chromatograph to the source to will be shown

Two-dimensional maps at the edge of chaos: Numerical results for the Henon map

The mixing properties (or sensitivity to initial conditions) of two-dimensional Henon map have been explored numerically at the edge of chaos. Three independent methods, which have been developed and used so far for the one-dimensional maps, have been used to accomplish this task. These methods are (i)measure of the divergence of initially nearby orbits, (ii)analysis of the multifractal spectrum and (iii)computation of nonextensive entropy increase rates. The obtained results strongly agree with those of the one-dimensional cases and constitute the first verification of this scenario in two-dimensional maps. This obviously makes the idea of weak chaos even more robust.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Immunotherapeutic targeting of LIGHT/LTβR/HVEM pathway fully recapitulates the reduced cytotoxic phenotype of LIGHT-deficient T cells.

Tumor necrosis factor (TNF)/TNF receptor (TNFR) superfamily members play essential roles in the development of the different phases of the immune response. Mouse LIGHT (TNFSF14) is a type II transmembrane protein with a C-terminus extracellular TNF homology domain (THD) that assembles in homotrimers and regulates the course of the immune responses by signaling through 2 receptors, the herpes virus entry mediator (HVEM, TNFSFR14) and the lymphotoxin β receptor (LTβR, TNFSFR3). LIGHT is a membrane-bound protein transiently expressed on activated T cells, natural killer (NK) cells and immature dendritic cells that can be proteolytically cleaved by a metalloprotease and released to the extracellular milieu. The immunotherapeutic potential of LIGHT blockade was evaluated in vivo. Administration of an antagonist of LIGHT interaction with its receptors attenuated the course of graft-versus-host reaction and recapitulated the reduced cytotoxic activity of LIGHT-deficient T cells adoptively transferred into non-irradiated semiallogeneic recipients. The lack of LIGHT expression on donor T cells or blockade of LIGHT interaction with its receptors slowed down the rate of T cell proliferation and decreased the frequency of precursor alloreactive T cells, retarding T cell differentiation toward effector T cells. The blockade of LIGHT/LTβR/HVEM pathway was associated with delayed downregulation of interleukin-7Rα and delayed upregulation of inducible costimulatory molecule expression on donor alloreactive CD8 T cells that are typical features of impaired T cell differentiation. These results expose the relevance of LIGHT/LTβR/HVEM interaction for the potential therapeutic control of the allogeneic immune responses mediated by alloreactive CD8 T cells that can contribute to prolong allograft survival

Assembly and covalent cross-linking of an amine-functionalised metal-organic cage

The incorporation of reactive functional groups onto the exterior of metal-organic cages (MOCs) opens up new opportunities to link their well-defined scaffolds into functional porous solids. Amine moieties offer access to a rich catalogue of covalent chemistry; however, they also tend to coordinate undesirably and interfere with MOC formation, particular in the case of Cu2 paddlewheel-based MOCs. We demonstrate that tuning the basicity of an aniline-functionalized ligand enables the self-assembly of a soluble, amine-functionalized Cu4L4 lantern cage (1). Importantly, we show control over the coordinative propensity of the exterior amine of the ligand, which enables us to isolate a crystalline, two-dimensional metal-organic framework composed entirely of MOC units (2). Furthermore, we show that the nucleophilicity of the exterior amine of 1 can be accessed in solution to generate a cross-linked cage polymer (3) via imine condensation.Matthew L. Schneider, Adrian W. Markwell-Heys, Oliver M. Linder-Patton and Witold M. Bloc