FARM POLICY FOR THE 1970'S

Agricultural and Food Policy,

Comparisons of sperm storage tubule distribution and number in 4 strains of mature broiler breeders and in turkey hens before and after the onset of photostimulation

The biological basis of sustained fertility in broiler and turkey hens is their capacity to store sperm in the oviductal sperm storage tubules (SST) located in the uterovaginal junction. The objectives of this study were to determine if the numbers of SST varied between 4 strains of broiler breeders and determine the number of SST in the turkey before (less than 9 d of photostimulation) and after (up to 22 d of photostimulation and laying) photostimulation. No statistical differences were observed in SST numbers in the 4 strains of broilers examined or in turkey hens before and after the onset of egg production. The mean numbers of SST for broilers and turkeys were 4,893 and 30,566, respectively. We conclude that any differences between the fertility of the 4 broiler breeder strains examined cannot be explained by differences in SST numbers. However, differences in the duration of fertility between broilers and turkeys are, in part, related to their respective numbers of number of SST. Furthermore, we conclude that turkey SST are morphologically differentiated and functional before the onset of photostimulation and while the oviduct is morphologically undeveloped

Farm Policy for the 70's

Agricultural and Food Policy,

Non-Gaussianity and CMB aberration and Doppler

The peculiar motion of an observer with respect to the CMB rest frame induces a deflection in the arrival direction of the observed photons (also known as CMB aberration) and a Doppler shift in the measured photon frequencies. As a consequence, aberration and Doppler effects induce non trivial correlations between the harmonic coefficients of the observed CMB temperature maps. In this paper we investigate whether these correlations generate a bias on non-Gaussianity estimators fNL. We perform this analysis simulating a large number of temperature maps with Planck-like resolution (lmax = 2000) as different realizations of the same cosmological fiducial model (WMAP7yr). We then add to these maps aberration and Doppler effects employing a modified version of the HEALPix code. We finally evaluate a generalization of the Komatsu, Spergel and Wandelt non-Gaussianity estimator for all the simulated maps, both when peculiar velocity effects have been considered and when these phenomena have been neglected. Using the value v/c = 1.23 7 10-3 for our peculiar velocity, we found that the aberration/Doppler induced non-Gaussian signal is at most of about half of the cosmic variance \u3c3 for fNL both in a full-sky and in a cut-sky experimental configuration, for local, equilateral and orthogonal estimators. We conclude therefore that when estimating fNL it is safe to ignore aberration and Doppler effects if the primordial map is already Gaussian. More work is necessary however to assess whether a map which contains non-Gaussianity can be significantly distorted by a peculiar velocity

Photonic Imaging with Optical Coherence Tomography for Quality Monitoring in the Poultry Industry: a Preliminary Study

ABSTRACTA photonic imaging method that gives the possibility to measure egg quality was applied. Since the method is non-contact and non-destructive we believe that this photonic imaging method may be successfully integrated in the automated inspection systems in the poultry industry. The method involves scanning an invisible infrared light beam over the eggshell, allowing to detect possible cracks and reveal information about the structure of the eggshell. The high resolution, high quality measurements obtained through optical coherence tomography (OCT) make it feasible to be utilized as part of an automated inspection system. In this paper we present an OCT scan image of the egg tip and reconstructed volumetric images of the eggshell surface. The method enables the detection of small cracks on eggs and reveals the detailed inner structures of the cracks