A fixed agreement—consequences of brood size manipulation on alternation in blue tits

Recent studies have proposed that conditional cooperation may resolve sexual conflict over the amount of care provided by each parent. Such conditional cooperation may allow parents to equalize their investment by alternating their provisioning visits. This alternated pattern of male and female visits, that is, alternation, is thought to stimulate each other’s investment leading to higher levels of provisioning and potential benefits for offspring development. However, experimental studies testing the role of alternation as an adaptive parental strategy to negotiate the level of investment are still absent. Therefore, we manipulated blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus) parents by temporarily changing their brood sizes to induce changes in demand and thus visit rates. Parents were expected to visit more—assuming that prey sizes were constant—and alternate at higher levels when confronted with an enlarged brood given the greater potential for sexual conflict. In contrast, in reduced broods visit rates and alternation may become lower due to the smaller investment that is needed for reduced broods. We show that the level of alternation did not differ in response to the manipulated brood sizes, despite a directional change in visit rates for enlarged and reduced broods as expected. Nestlings did not benefit from high levels of alternation as no effects on nestling mass gain were present in either of the different manipulations. These findings indicate that alternation does not serve as a mechanism to motivate each other to feed at higher rates. Parents hence appeared to be inflexible in their level of alternation. We therefore suggest that the level of alternation might reflect a fixed agreement about the relative investment by each of the caring parents

Size matters but hunger prevails—begging and provisioning rules in blue tit families

It is commonly observed in many bird species that dependent offspring vigorously solicit for food transfers provided by their parents. However, the likelihood of receiving food does not only depend on the parental response, but also on the degree of sibling competition, at least in species where parents raise several offspring simultaneously. To date, little is known about whether and how individual offspring adjusts its begging strategy according to the entwined effects of need, state and competitive ability of itself and its siblings. We here manipulated the hunger levels of either the two heaviest or the two lightest blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus) nestlings in a short-term food deprivation experiment. Our results showed that the lightest nestlings consistently begged more than the heaviest nestlings, an effect that was overruled by the tremendous increase in begging behaviour after food deprivation. Meanwhile, the amplified begging signals after food deprivation were the only cue for providing parents in their decision process. Furthermore, we observed flexible but state-independent begging behaviour in response to changes in sibling need. As opposed to our expectations, nestlings consistently increased their begging behaviour when confronted with food deprived siblings. Overall, our study highlights that individual begging primarily aims at increasing direct benefits, but nevertheless reflects the complexity of a young birds’ family life, in addition to aspects of intrinsic need and state

Industrial Segment Anything -- a Case Study in Aircraft Manufacturing, Intralogistics, Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul

Deploying deep learning-based applications in specialized domains like the aircraft production industry typically suffers from the training data availability problem. Only a few datasets represent non-everyday objects, situations, and tasks. Recent advantages in research around Vision Foundation Models (VFM) opened a new area of tasks and models with high generalization capabilities in non-semantic and semantic predictions. As recently demonstrated by the Segment Anything Project, exploiting VFM's zero-shot capabilities is a promising direction in tackling the boundaries spanned by data, context, and sensor variety. Although, investigating its application within specific domains is subject to ongoing research. This paper contributes here by surveying applications of the SAM in aircraft production-specific use cases. We include manufacturing, intralogistics, as well as maintenance, repair, and overhaul processes, also representing a variety of other neighboring industrial domains. Besides presenting the various use cases, we further discuss the injection of domain knowledge

Identification of Rosellinia species as producers of cyclodepsipeptide PF1022 A and resurrection of the genus Dematophora as inferred from polythetic taxonomy

Rosellinia (Xylariaceae) is a large, cosmopolitan genus comprising over 130 species that have been defined based mainly on the morphology of their sexual morphs. The genus comprises both lignicolous and saprotrophic species that are frequently isolated as endophytes from healthy host plants, and important plant pathogens. In order to evaluate the utility of molecular phylogeny and secondary metabolite profiling to achieve a better basis for their classification, a set of strains was selected for a multi-locus phylogeny inferred from a combination of the sequences of the internal transcribed spacer region (ITS), the large subunit (LSU) of the nuclear rDNA, beta-tubulin (TUB2) and the second largest subunit of the RNA polymerase II (RPB2). Concurrently, various strains were surveyed for production of secondary metabolites. Metabolite profiling relied on methods with high performance liquid chromatography with diode array and mass spectrometric detection (HPLC-DAD/MS) as well as preparative isolation of the major components after re-fermentation followed by structure elucidation using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and high resolution mass spectrometry (HR-MS). Two new and nine known isopimarane diterpenoids were identified during our mycochemical studies of two selected Dematophora strains and the metabolites were tested for biological activity. In addition, the nematicidal cyclodepsipeptide PF1022 A was purified and identified from a culture of Rosellinia corticium, which is the first time that this endophyte-derived drug precursor has been identified unambiguously from an ascospore-derived isolate of a Rosellinia species. While the results of this first HPLC profiling were largely inconclusive regarding the utility of secondary metabolites as genus-specific chemotaxonomic markers, the phylogeny clearly showed that species featuring a dematophora-like asexual morph were included in a well-defined clade, for which the genus Dematophora is resurrected. Dematophora now comprises all previously known important plant pathogens in the genus such as D. arcuata, D. bunodes, D. necatrix and D. pepo, while Rosellinia s. str. comprises those species that are known to have a geniculosporium-like or nodulisporium-like asexual morph, or where the asexual morph remains unknown. The extensive morphological studies of L.E. Petrini served as a basis to transfer several further species from Rosellinia to Dematophora, based on the morphology of their asexual morphs. However, most species of Rosellinia and allies still need to be recollected in fresh state, cultured, and studied for their morphology and their phylogenetic affinities before the infrageneric relationships can be clarified.Fil: Wittstein, Kathrin. Helmholtz-Zentrum für Infektionsforschung GmbH; Alemania. German Centre for Infection Research; AlemaniaFil: Cordsmeier, Arne. Helmholtz-Zentrum für Infektionsforschung GmbH; Alemania. Universitat Erlangen Nuremberg; AlemaniaFil: Lambert, Christopher. Helmholtz-Zentrum für Infektionsforschung GmbH; Alemania. German Centre for Infection Research; AlemaniaFil: Wendt, L.. Helmholtz-Zentrum für Infektionsforschung GmbH; Alemania. German Centre for Infection Research; AlemaniaFil: Sir, Esteban Benjamin. Universidad Nacional de Tucumán. Instituto de Bioprospección y Fisiología Vegetal. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet Noa Sur. Instituto de Bioprospección y Fisiología Vegetal; ArgentinaFil: Weber, J.. Helmholtz-Zentrum für Infektionsforschung GmbH; Alemania. German Centre for Infection Research; AlemaniaFil: Wurzler, N.. Helmholtz-Zentrum für Infektionsforschung GmbH; Alemania. German Centre for Infection Research; AlemaniaFil: Petrini, Liliane E.. Via al Perato 15c; SuizaFil: Stadler, Marc. Helmholtz-Zentrum für Infektionsforschung GmbH; Alemania. German Centre for Infection Research; Alemani

Isolation of Metals from Liquid Wastes: Reactive Scavenging in Turbulent Thermal Reactors

The Overall project demonstrated that toxic metals (cesium Cs and strontium Sr) in aqueous and organic wastes can be isolated from the environment through reaction with kaolinite based sorbent substrates in high temperature reactor environments. In addition, a state-of-the art laser diagnostic tool to measure droplet characteristic in practical 'dirty' laboratory environments was developed, and was featured on the cover of a recent edition of the scientific journal ''applied Spectroscopy''. Furthermore, great strides have been made in developing a theoretical model that has the potential to allow prediction of the position and life history of every particle of waste in a high temperature, turbulent flow field, a very challenging problem involving as it does, the fundamentals of two phase turbulence and of particle drag physics

Isolation of Metals from Liquid Wastes: Reactive Scavenging by Sorbents in Turbulent Reactors

The objective of this work is to develop the fundamental knowledge base for the design of a broad class of high temperature reactive capture processes to treat metals-bearing liquid waste in the DOE inventory. The major thrust is devoted to understanding phenomena that govern process performance and are critical to achieving emission specifications

Isolation of Metals from Liquid Wastes: Reactive Scavenging by Sorbets in Turbulent Reactors

The objective of this work is to develop the fundamental knowledge base for the design of a broad class of high-temperature reactive capture processes to treat metals-bearing liquid waste in the DOE inventory. The major thrust is devoted to understanding phenomena that govern process performance and are critical to achieving emission specifications

Isolation of Metals from Liquid Wastes: Reactive Scavenging in Turbulent Thermal Reactors

A large portion of the Department of Energy (DOE) radioactive waste inventory is composed of metal-bearing liquid wastes, which may or may not also contain organics. It is highly desirable to concentrate the metals in order to reduce the volume of these wastes and to render them into an environmentally benign form. One method for doing this is to exploit high-temperatures to reactively capture metals by sorbents, and thus to isolate them from the environment. The objective of this research is to provide the background information necessary to design a process that accomplishes this on a large scale, namely in hot turbulent flows, into which are injected the wastes to be treated and, also the sorbents that scavenge the metals. The current work focuses on cesium and strontium, which are present in the DOE inventory as radioactive isotopes. The project involves five investigators at three institutions, and is comprised of the following parts: (1) Experimental research at the University of Arizona focuses on the chemistry of cesium and strontium sorption on kaolinite and lime sorbents in a laminar flow environment. (2) Theoretical research pursued jointly by the University of Arizona and Sandia Laboratories, Livermore, focuses on prediction of droplet trajectories in a turbulent flow environment. (3) Experimental research at the Air Pollution Technology Branch of the US Environmental Protection Agency, to investigate the process in turbulent flows. (4) Experimental research at the University of Illinois focuses on design, construction, and application of a laser based LIBS system for measuring droplet size, metal concentration in the gas phase, and metal concentration in the vapor phase. This analysis procedure will be used both at the University Of Arizona laminar flow reactor and the EPA turbulent flow reactor. (5) Theoretical research at the University of Illinois to provide input into the drag model to be used to predict droplet trajectories in hot turbulent flows

Relatório de estágio em farmácia comunitária

Relatório de estágio realizado no âmbito do Mestrado Integrado em Ciências Farmacêuticas, apresentado à Faculdade de Farmácia da Universidade de Coimbr