Effect of false flax oilcake in thermophilic biogas production

False flax oilcake has been found to be suitable for anaerobic fermentation in mixtures with cattle slurry and straw. In organic farms, digestion of cattle dung and wheat straw with 8 % dry matter content mixed with 5 % of total material weight false flax oilcake is a feasible option for utilizing false flax oilcake to produce farm-own renewable energy and offering farm-own high nitrogen (ammonia) content fertilizer (2.48 g kg-1 wet wt). In field digesters, the biogas yield of 8 % dry matter pure material under thermophilic condition was 0.24 l g-1 VS fed. The biogas yield could be increased by mixing 5 % false flax oilcake to get 0.37 l g-1 VS fed and a VS conversion efficiency with 0.83 l g-1 VS destroyed. Under laboratory controlled conditions, the biogas yield of slurry with 0.5 % oilcake was a little higher than biogas yield of the digestion of pure material, which was 0.26 and 0.24 l g-1 VS fed, respectively. Compared with the field experiment, only small amounts of biogas were produced in the lab-scale when 5 % oilcake was mixed in. The mixing can improve the biogas yield and substrate reduction in the digesters which have sufficient material. Further research is needed to find out the best controlled conditions (high-efficient bacteria, mixing frequency and time) and best equipment (for example: two phases digesters)

Energy input and output of a rural village in China - the cas of the "Beijing Man village" /District of Beijing

The rapid development of the economy has created an increasing demand for energy in China. The limited resources of fossil energy are a risk for the development of China. Sustainable agriculture like organic farming (Green AAA in China) with biomass energy - as done in developed countries like Germany - is an option to reduce these risks. In China, agriculture is not energy efficient, and the intensive farming is not sustainable. The scientific challenge is to develop sustainable farming systems which can fulfill national food security, food safety and considerable renewable energy production without harming the environment, and are acceptable to the people and the economy. The protection and intelligent utilization of resources is the core of rural village development. To explore the potential of recent Chinese agriculture for the development towards a multi-functional farm for food and energy production, a village in the adjacent area of Beijing has been selected: the “Beijing Man village”. About 1,900 people live in the village and 140 hectares of the 240 hectare total land are available for farming. The major agricultural activity is pork production (capacity of 10,000 pigs per year) and dairy farming (40 dairy cows). In 2004, the energy input and output of this village was evaluated and taken as a basis for a model of sustainable farming for food and biogas production. The study explored that the gross energy production from crops in the “Beijing man village” was about 19,103 GJ/year. It was obvious that the crop production was not sufficient for the feed demand of the animal husbandry (pigs and cows). 60% of the corn used as feed stuff was purchased on the market. The reason was, that the purchasing of corn was cheaper than the own production. The low competitive crop production due to the low efficiency resulted in the decrease of cultivated crop land from 140 ha to 80 ha in the past four years (two harvests per year). On the other hand, there was much more manure produced as suitable and applicable for crop production. Therefore manure was exposed in open air in a pond like waste. This is risky for public hazards like ground water contamination and zoonosis diseases. Therefore the farming system is not sustainable, risky and not efficient. There is a potential of the optimization of the cropping and animal husbandry interaction as well as the development of renewable energy production in the village. The main development chains are the improvement of the energy efficiency of crop production, the reduction of animal husbandry to a sustainable animal-land-ratio and the introduction of biogas production with manure and cropping by-products

RNA-seq with RNase H-based ribosomal RNA depletion specifically designed for C. elegans

Here we describe a rRNA depletion protocol based on RNase H digestion using antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) specifically designed for C. elegans cytoplasmic rRNA (Fig. 1A). We suggest that this rRNA depletion protocol is applicable to RNA-seq applications where the yield of mRNA enrichment should be independent of poly(A) status, or any application which benefits from the removal of rRNA sequences, such ribosome profiling, or sequencing of non-coding RNAs other than rRNA

Mechanical rolling formation of interpenetrated lithium metal/lithium tin alloy foil for ultrahigh-rate battery anode

To achieve good rate capability of lithium metal anodes for high-energy-density batteries, one fundamental challenge is the slow lithium diffusion at the interface. Here we report an interpenetrated, three-dimensional lithium metal/lithium tin alloy nanocomposite foil realized by a simple calendering and folding process of lithium and tin foils, and spontaneous alloying reactions. The strong affinity between the metallic lithium and lithium tin alloy as mixed electronic and ionic conducting networks, and their abundant interfaces enable ultrafast charger diffusion across the entire electrode. We demonstrate that a lithium/lithium tin alloy foil electrode sustains stable lithium stripping/plating under 30mAcm(-2) and 5mAhcm(-2) with a very low overpotential of 20mV for 200 cycles in a commercial carbonate electrolyte. Cycled under 6C (6.6mAcm(-2)), a 1.0mAhcm(-2) LiNi0.6Co0.2Mn0.2O2 electrode maintains a substantial 74% of its capacity by pairing with such anode

Biogas Production Potential and Kinetics of Microwave and Conventional Thermal Pretreatment of Grass

Pretreatment methods play an important role in the improvement of biogas production from the anaerobic digestion of energy grass. In this study, conventional thermal and microwave methods were performed on raw material, namely, Pennisetum hybrid, to analyze the effect of pretreatment on anaerobic digestion by the calculation of performance parameters using Logistic function, modified Gompertz equation, and transference function. Results indicated that thermal pretreatment improved the biogas production of Pennisetum hybrid, whereas microwave method had an adverse effect on the performance. All the models fit the experimental data with R-2&gt;0.980, and the Reaction Curve presented the best agreement in the fitting process. Conventional thermal pretreatment showed an increasing effect on maximum production rate and total methane produced, with an improvement of around 7% and 8%, respectively. With regard to microwave pretreatment, maximum production rate and total methane produced decreased by 18% and 12%, respectively.</p

AIR-DA: Adversarial Image Reconstruction for Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Object Detection

Unsupervised domain adaptive object detection is a challenging vision task where object detectors are adapted from a label-rich source domain to an unlabeled target domain. Recent advances prove the efficacy of the adversarial based domain alignment where the adversarial training between the feature extractor and domain discriminator results in domain-invariance in the feature space. However, due to the domain shift, domain discrimination, especially on low-level features, is an easy task. This results in an imbalance of the adversarial training between the domain discriminator and the feature extractor. In this work, we achieve a better domain alignment by introducing an auxiliary regularization task to improve the training balance. Specifically, we propose Adversarial Image Reconstruction (AIR) as the regularizer to facilitate the adversarial training of the feature extractor. We further design a multi-level feature alignment module to enhance the adaptation performance. Our evaluations across several datasets of challenging domain shifts demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms all previous methods, of both one- and two-stage, in most settings.Comment: Accepted at IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters 202

Polymorphism in Growth Hormone Gene and its Association with Growth Traits in Siniperca chuatsi

Growth hormone (GH) is a candidate gene for growth traits in fish. In this study, we assessed associations between single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in GH gene with growth traits in 357 Siniperca chuatsi individuals using high-resolution melting. Two SNPs were identified in GH gene, with one mutation in exon 5 (g.5045T>C), and one mutation in intron 5 (g.5234T>G). The corrections analysis of SNPs with the four growth traits was carried out using General Linear Model (GLM) estimation. Results showed that both of them were significantly associated with growth performance in S. chuatsi. For g.5234T>G, it was significantly associated with body weight (P＜0.01), body length (P＜0.05), body depth (P＜0.01), and body width (P＜0.01), and the individuals of genotype GG grew faster than those of genotypes TT and TG (P＜0.05). A further diplotype-trait association analysis confirmed that in fish with H3H2 (TC-GG) diplotype body weight, body length, and body width was greater than in those with other diplotypes (P＜0.05). These results demonstrated GH gene SNPs could be used as potential genetic markers in future marker assisted selection of S. chuatsi

Breakage in the SNRPN locus in a balanced 46,XY,t(15;19) Prader-Willi syndrome patient

A patient with Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS) was found to carry a de novo balanced reciprocal translocation, t(15;19)(q12;q13.41), which disrupted the small nuclear ribonucleoprotein N (SNRPN) locus. The translocation chromosome 15 was found to be paternal in origin. Uniparental disomy and abnormal DNA methylation were ruled out. The translocation breakpoint was found to have occurred between exon 0 (second exon) and 1 (third exon) of the SNRPN locus outside of the SmN open reading frame (ORF), which is intact. The transcriptional activities of ZNF127, IPW, PAR-1, and PAR-5 were detected with RT-PCR from fibroblasts of the patient, suggesting that these genes may not play a significant role in the PWS phenotype in this patient. Transcription from the first two exons and last seven exons of the SNRPN gene was also detected with RT-PCR; however, the complete mRNA (10 exons) was not detected. Thus, the PWS phenotype in the patient is likely to be the result of disruption of the SNRPN locus