The potential for new donkey farming systems to supply the growing demand for hides

The demand for donkey hides for ejiao, a Traditional Chinese Medicine, has resulted in rapidly increasing prices for donkey hides and donkeys. This has put pressure on donkey populations globally and has implications for donkey welfare and the livelihoods of those who rely on donkeys as working animals. The aim of the research was to explore the feasibility of setting up new donkey farming systems to supply the rising demand for ejiao using a system dynamics model of donkey production. Results show that the size of the initial female breeding herd, reproductive performance, age of reproduction, percentage of female births and average breeding life of donkeys are key variables affecting the time to build up the donkey population to supply the demand for hides, which will be at least ten to fifteen years. The implications of this are: (i) prices for donkey hides will continue to increase, (ii) companies producing ejiao will use other ingredients, (iii) China will continue to source donkey hides from around the world, and (iv) there will be continued theft and illegal trade of donkeys and concerns for rural households reliant on donkeys for their livelihoods and adverse impacts on donkey welfare

High Energy Resummation of Drell-Yan Processes

We present a computation of the inclusive Drell-Yan production cross-section in perturbative QCD to all orders in the limit of high partonic centre-of-mass energy. We compare our results to the fixed order NLO and NNLO results in MSbar scheme, and provide predictions at NNNLO and beyond. Our expressions may be used to obtain fully resummed results for the inclusive cross-section.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figures: version to be published in NP

Multiple sessions of transcranial direct current stimulation to the intact hemisphere improves visual function after unilateral ablation of visual cortex

Damage to cerebral systems is frequently followed by the emergence of compensatory mechanisms, which serve to reduce the effects of brain damage and allow recovery of function. Intrinsic recovery, however, is rarely complete. Non-invasive brain stimulation technologies have the potential to actively shape neural circuits and enhance recovery from brain damage. In this study, a stable deficit for detecting and orienting to visual stimuli presented in the contralesional visual hemifield was generated by producing unilateral brain damage of the right posterior parietal and contiguous visual cortical areas. A long regimen of inhibitory non-invasive transcranial directcurrent stimulation (cathodal 2mA, 20 min) was applied to the contralateral (intact) posterior parietal cortex over 14 weeks (total of 70 sessions, one per day, five days per week) and behavioral outcomes were periodically assessed. In three out of four stimulated cats, lasting recovery of visuospatial function was observed. Recovery started after 2-3 weeks of stimulation, and recovered targets were located first in the periphery, and moved to more central visual field locations with the accrual of stimulation sessions. Recovery for moving tasks followed a biphasic pattern before reaching plateau levels. Recovery did not occur for more difficult visual tasks. These findings highlight the ability of multiple sessions of transcranial direct-current stimulation to produce recovery of visuospatial function after unilateral brain damage

A matrix representation of graphs and its spectrum as a graph invariant

We use the line digraph construction to associate an orthogonal matrix with each graph. From this orthogonal matrix, we derive two further matrices. The spectrum of each of these three matrices is considered as a graph invariant. For the first two cases, we compute the spectrum explicitly and show that it is determined by the spectrum of the adjacency matrix of the original graph. We then show by computation that the isomorphism classes of many known families of strongly regular graphs (up to 64 vertices) are characterized by the spectrum of this matrix. We conjecture that this is always the case for strongly regular graphs and we show that the conjecture is not valid for general graphs. We verify that the smallest regular graphs which are not distinguished with our method are on 14 vertices.Comment: 14 page

Disorder-Induced Stabilization of the Pseudogap in Strongly Correlated Systems

The interplay of strong interaction and strong disorder, as contained in the Anderson-Hubbard model, is addressed using two non-perturbative numerical methods: the Lanczos algorithm in the grand canonical ensemble at zero temperature and Quantum Monte Carlo. We find distinctive evidence for a zero-energy anomaly which is robust upon variation of doping, disorder and interaction strength. Its similarities to, and differences from, pseudogap formation in other contexts, including perturbative treatments of interactions and disorder, classical theories of localized charges, and in the clean Hubbard model, are discussed.Comment: 4.2 pages, 4 figure

A new species of Meligethes Stephens from China and additional data on members of the M. chinensis species-complex (Coleoptera: Nitidulidae, Meligethinae)

Meligethes (Odontogethes) inexpectatus sp. n. is described from China, Sichuan Province. The new species is based on a female specimen previously incorrectly referred to as Meligethes scrobescens Chen, Lin, Huang & Yang, 2015, which was recently described from a series of male specimens collected in the same area. Both species belong to the taxonomically difficult species-group related to M. chinensis Kirejtshuk, 1979, including a dozen closely related species distributed throughout Nepal and SW and Central China. The true female of Meligethes scrobescens is also described, based on recently collected material from China (Hubei and Chongqing), including a series of male and female specimens. Diagnostic characters distinguishing the new species from all other known members of the M. chinensis species-group and species-complex are discussed, and their overall range distribution are depicted. Additional data on geographic distribution and larval ecology of some of the closely related species are also reported

Magnetism and pairing of two-dimensional trapped fermions

The emergence of local phases in a trapped two-component Fermi gas in an optical lattice is studied using quantum Monte Carlo simulations. We treat temperatures that are comparable or lower than those presently achievable in experiments and large enough systems that both magnetic and paired phases can be detected by inspection of the behavior of suitable short-range correlations. We use the latter to suggest the interaction strength and temperature range at which experimental observation of incipient magnetism and d-wave pairing are more likely and evaluate the relation between entropy and temperature in two-dimensional confined fermionic systems.Comment: 4 pages + supplementary materia