Red Flour Beetle Response to Traps with Prior Captures

The red flour beetle (Tribolium castaneum) is a major pest of food facilities such as flour mills and is often monitored using pitfall type traps with a food oil and pheromone attractant. Previous research had indicated that prior captures of beetles could increase beetle behavior captures in a trap. Here we used a more realistic bioassay to evaluate how the number of beetles previously captured include beetle captures in traps. Results showed no significant impact of prior captures on the number of red flour beetles captured in a trap. There were some trends suggested in the results that warrant further study to investigate, perhaps by focusing on individual beetle behavior at traps rather then using groups of beetles

Using yeast to implement DNA-based algorithms

In 1993, Leonard Adleman showed that synthetic strands of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) can be made to compute in test tube reactions and thus invented the DNA computer. The DNA computer scales with remarkable efficiency when used to solve computationally hard problems. Here, we show that the DNA computer can be recast using the common yeast Sacchromyces cerevisiae. The yeast computer retains the efficiency of Aldeman\u27s DNA computer but is much easier and far less costly to implement

The Effects That Non-Recommended Conditions Have on Residential Water Meter Accuracies

Every year, clean, readily available water becomes more and more scarce. Metering water usage is a way to make users more aware of how much water they use, which in turn will increase the desire to conserve water and to reduce their water bill. When meters are tested in their new condition, it is normally performed under ideal laboratory conditions at constant flow rates. Then when the meters are installed in the field, they often are installed in or experience non-recommended conditions that are quite different from the ideal laboratory setting. This study investigated several non-recommended conditions that can exist in a distribution system. The conditions that were simulated were endurance (the study of accuracy as a function of meter throughput), installation (the study of accuracy as a function of upstream piping and meter mounting effects), and flow profile (the study of accuracy as a result of dynamic real world flow variances over time). The meter types that were tested in this study were displacement piston, nutating disc, multi-jet, single-jet, fluidic oscillator, magnetic, and ultrasonic. When comparing the results between the meter types it was found that some meter types were more susceptible than others to the conditions that were simulated. Displacement piston and nutating disc meters had the best overall accuracy performance under the three non-recommended conditions that were simulated

Investigating the impact of the microbiome on beef steak color stability

Includes bibliographical references.2022 Fall.Meat color is the most influential characteristic for consumer purchasing decisions. In fact, consumer discrimination of discolored beef results in approximately $3.73 billion/year lost in revenue in the US. Interestingly, most often these products are not yet microbially spoiled, leading to unnecessary food waste. Complicating matters, different muscles originating from the same carcass discolor at different rates. Several studies have investigated the physiochemical, enzymatic, and intrinsic muscle properties of muscles with differing color stabilities such as color stabile beef longissimus lumborum (LL) and color labile psoas major (PM). However, the impact of microbial growth on the meat color stability has not been investigated yet. Therefore, the objective of this study was to characterize the microbial populations and their biochemical parameters of color labile and color stabile beef muscle cuts during aerobic retail display. Paired USDA Select LL and PM (n = 5) were collected from a local abattoir and aged for 14 days in darkness under vacuum at 3°C. After aging, the muscles were fabricated into 2.54-cm thick steaks and packaged aerobically in a foam tray wrapped with polyvinyl chloride film. Steaks were then placed into an open faced multi-decked retail display case for 7 days at 4°C ± 1°C. Each day, beginning day of fabrication, steaks were evaluated for visual color, percentage discoloration, instrumental color, water activity, pH, metmyoglobin reducing activity, microbial levels as determined by using culture-dependent methods (aerobic plate counts, lactic acid bacteria plate counts, Pseudomonas spp. plate counts and Enterobacteriaceae plate counts), and 16S rRNA bacterial gene sequencing (microbiome). Visual color was darker (P 0.05) in LL compared to PM for all days. The pH was greater (P 0.05) for both muscles across all display days. Microbiological analyses revealed that aerobic plate counts, and lactic acid bacteria plate count were greater (P 0.05) until day 2, after which PM was greater (P 0.05) in the alpha or beta diversities of the microbial communities between muscles. The results indicated that PM has less color stability and a greater amount of microbial growth than LL during retail display. Despite the increased number of bacteria on PM earlier during display, the microbiome analyses showed no major differences in the microbial communities between the muscles on the same display day. These data may suggest that microbial metabolic pathways, evidenced by faster microbial growth on PM compared to LL, may be a bigger contributor to color stability differences than the microbial community composition. Further work establishing these metabolic differences is needed to understand the biochemical interaction between the microbiota and the beef steaks

Rate and frequency of demands on children with autism

Applied Behavior Analytic (ABA) intervention seeks to improve deficits in children with autism by providing multiple planned opportunities for learners to develop and practice skills that are useful to them, and are effective alternatives to less acceptable behaviors. Throughout a given day, teachers give instruction to children. While the rate and frequency of these instructions occur in high numbers, there is little literature on just how often they occur. This project sought to find out the frequency of demands in one-hour increments for ten children in a behavior analytic school setting, and to test for differences between male and female students. Demands were tallied for any directive that was presented to the individual in which evokes a response. Results implicated that students averaged 173.47 demands per hour. These results indicate that a high number of demands are needed to keep the students engaged and maximize their learning opportunities

The Solar and Wind Economy in Ohio: Industry Analysis and Policy Implications

After historically being driven by coal and, in more recent years, natural gas, Ohio’s energy industry has experienced notable growth in installed solar and wind capacity. Due to changes in consumer tastes and preferences, an overall decline in expenses, and environmental concerns about coal mining and hydraulic fracturing, among others, both public and industry support for renewables has grown. However, Ohio’s renewable energy policies have not consistently aligned with this support. This paper synthesizes reports and analyzes energy industry employment and capacity data in order to summarize the trends within Ohio’s present-day energy industry. After a brief surge, wind activity has stagnated, in part due to expansion of the turbine property line setbacks law. Wind employment has also been relatively erratic, seeing spikes and rapid declines that average to a growth of 13.6% per year from 2013–2016. Conversely, solar energy capacity has grown a bit more steadily due to fewer regulatory restrictions as well as supportive state net metering policies. Correspondingly, solar employment has grown more consistently at a rate of 11.3% per year during our study years. This paper highlights these trends, discusses policy implications moving forward, and makes recommendations for Ohio to stimulate the deployment of additional renewable energy capacity in future years. To accomplish this task, and to enhance sustainable development via renewable energy, we suggest that Ohio ease its wind setbacks and continues to protect the state’s renewable portfolio standard and net metering laws

Danesh: Interactive Tools For Understanding Procedural Content Generators

In order to advance the field of procedural content generation, and transfer knowledge from academic research to everyday use, we need to develop tools that make generative systems easier to understand and control. In this paper we introduce Danesh, a plugin to the Unity game development environment. We describe Danesh's various features, including automatic analysis and visualisation tools, and provide reflections on both our development of the tool and our experiences of using it in educational contexts

Generative Design in Minecraft (GDMC), Settlement Generation Competition

This paper introduces the settlement generation competition for Minecraft, the first part of the Generative Design in Minecraft challenge. The settlement generation competition is about creating Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents that can produce functional, aesthetically appealing and believable settlements adapted to a given Minecraft map - ideally at a level that can compete with human created designs. The aim of the competition is to advance procedural content generation for games, especially in overcoming the challenges of adaptive and holistic PCG. The paper introduces the technical details of the challenge, but mostly focuses on what challenges this competition provides and why they are scientifically relevant.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, Part of the Foundations of Digital Games 2018 proceedings, as part of the workshop on Procedural Content Generatio

The composition of Ehrlich's salvarsan: Resolution of a century-old debate

Ehrlich introduced in 1910 the compound 3-amino-4-hydroxyphenylarsenic(I) [Salvarsan, arsphenamine, Ehrlich 606,] as a remedy for syphilis, a disease caused by the spirochaete bacterium Treponema pallidum. His methodical search for a specific curative for an identified disease can be regarded as the introduction of targeted chemotherapy