Standard metabolic rate predicts growth trajectory of juvenile Chinese crucian carp (Carassius auratus) under changing food availability

Phenotypic traits vary greatly within populations and can have a significant influence on aspects of performance. The present study aimed to investigate the effects of individual variation in standard metabolic rate (SMR) on growth rate and tolerance to food-deprivation in juvenile crucian carp (Carassius auratus) under varying levels of food availability. To address this issue, 19 high and 16 low SMR (individuals were randomly assigned to a satiation diet for 3 weeks, whereas another 20 high and 16 low SMR individuals were assigned to a restricted diet (approximately 50% of satiation) for the same period. Then, all fish were completely food-deprived for another 3 weeks. High SMR individuals showed a higher growth rate when fed to satiation, but this advantage of SMR did not exist in food-restricted fish. This result was related to improved feeding efficiency with decreased food intake in low SMR individuals, due to their low food processing capacity and maintenance costs. High SMR individuals experienced more mass loss during food-deprivation as compared to low SMR individuals. Our results here illustrate context-dependent costs and benefits of intraspecific variation in SMR whereby high SMR individuals show increased growth performance under high food availability but had a cost under stressful environments (i.e., food shortage)

PNC Enabled IIoT: A General Framework for Channel-Coded Asymmetric Physical-Layer Network Coding

This paper investigates the application of physical-layer network coding (PNC) to Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) where a controller and a robot are out of each other's transmission range, and they exchange messages with the assistance of a relay. We particularly focus on a scenario where the controller has more transmitted information, and the channel of the controller is stronger than that of the robot. To reduce the communication latency, we propose an asymmetric transmission scheme where the controller and robot transmit different amount of information in the uplink of PNC simultaneously. To achieve this, the controller chooses a higher order modulation. In addition, the both users apply channel codes to guarantee the reliability. A problem is a superimposed symbol at the relay contains different amount of source information from the two end users. It is thus hard for the relay to deduce meaningful network-coded messages by applying the current PNC decoding techniques which require the end users to transmit the same amount of information. To solve this problem, we propose a lattice-based scheme where the two users encode-and-modulate their information in lattices with different lattice construction levels. Our design is versatile on that the two end users can freely choose their modulation orders based on their channel power, and the design is applicable for arbitrary channel codes.Comment: Submitted to IEEE for possible publicatio

Ethyl 4-[(4-chloro­phen­oxy)meth­yl]-2-(4-nitro­phen­yl)-1,3-thia­zole-5-carboxyl­ate

The title compound, C19H15ClN2O5S, contains two mol­ecules (A and B) in the asymmetric unit. In mol­ecule A, the dihedral angles between the thia­zole ring and the pendant chloro­benzene and nitro­benzene rings are 72.14 (15) and 3.03 (15)°, respectively. The corresponding angles for mol­ecule B are 45.56 (16) and 1.51 (14)°, respectively. In the crystal, both mol­ecules form inversion dimers linked by pairs of weak C—H⋯O inter­actions

Study on Accuracy of Gough P.S and Guo Stress Formula in Calculating Propellant Bed Stress under Quasi-static Compaction

In order to verify Gough P.S and Guo stress formula and its accuracy in calculating propellant bed stress under quasi-static compaction, the paper adopted electronic universal testing machine to perform quasi-static compaction on propellant beds of two different diameters, and based on experimental data, the paper obtained stresses of the two beds in the process of compression. The paper used stress formula to calculate stresses of the two propellant beds respectively, based on the propellant bed feed and experimental configuration, and the results show that, during initial propellant compaction phase, the calculations are greater than experimental results, when it comes to certain compaction phase, the calculations of the formula are smaller than experimental results; the calculations of the formula are slightly smaller than experimental results

Neurochemical characterization of pERK-expressing spinal neurons in histamine-induced itch

Date of Acceptance: 08/07/2015 Acknowledgements This work was supported by grants from the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (2012CB966904, 2011CB51005), National Natural Science Foundation of China (31271182, 81200692, 91232724, 81200933, 81101026), Shanghai Natural Science Foundation (12ZR1434300), Key Specialty Construction Project of Pudong Health Bureau of Shanghai (PWZz2013-17), Shenzhen Key Laboratory for Molecular Biology of Neural Development (ZDSY20120617112838879), Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (1500219072) and Sino-UK Higher Education Research Partnership for PhD Studies.Peer reviewedPublisher PD