937 research outputs found
Effects of live-bait shrimp trawling on seagrass beds and fish bycatch in Tampa Bay, Florida
The use of live shrimp for bait in
recreational fishing has resulted in
a controversial fishery for shrimp in
Florida. In this fishery, night collections
are conducted over seagrass
beds with roller beam trawls to capture
live shrimp, primarily pink
shrimp, Penaeus duorarum. These
shrimp are culled from the catch on
sorting tables and placed in onboard
aerated βliveβ wells. Beds of
turtlegrass, Thalassia testudinum,
a species that has highest growth
rates and biomass during summer
and lowest during the winter (Fonseca
et al., 1996) are predominant
areas for live-bait shrimp trawling
(Tabb and Kenny, 1969).
Our study objectives were 1) to
determine effects of a roller beam
trawl on turtlegrass biomass and
morphometrics during intensive
(up to 18 trawls over a turtlegrass
bed), short-term (3-hour duration)
use and 2) to examine the mortality
of bycatch finfish following capture
by a trawl
Actor-Critic Policy Learning in Cooperative Planning
In this paper, we introduce a method for learning and adapting cooperative control strategies in real-time stochastic domains. Our framework is an instance of the intelligent cooperative control architecture (iCCA)[superscript 1]. The agent starts by following the "safe" plan calculated by the planning module and incrementally adapting its policy to maximize the cumulative rewards. Actor-critic and consensus-based bundle algorithm (CBBA) were employed as the building blocks of the iCCA framework. We demonstrate the performance of our approach by simulating limited fuel unmanned aerial vehicles aiming for stochastic targets. In one experiment where the optimal solution can be calculated, the integrated framework boosted the optimality of the solution by an average of %10, when compared to running each of the modules individually, while keeping the computational load within the requirements for real-time implementation.Boeing Scientific Research LaboratoriesUnited States. Air Force Office of Scientific Research (Grant FA9550-08-1-0086
Osteosarcoma of the rib
This case describes the radiological-surgical correlation of a rare case of osteosarcoma of the rib in a 15-year-old boy. Successful repair of his chest wall defect using a wire mesh following extensive surgical resection of the tumour is highlighted, such a procedure being the first instituted at our centre
Hamilton-Jacobi Theory for Degenerate Lagrangian Systems with Holonomic and Nonholonomic Constraints
We extend Hamilton-Jacobi theory to Lagrange-Dirac (or implicit Lagrangian)
systems, a generalized formulation of Lagrangian mechanics that can incorporate
degenerate Lagrangians as well as holonomic and nonholonomic constraints. We
refer to the generalized Hamilton-Jacobi equation as the Dirac-Hamilton-Jacobi
equation. For non-degenerate Lagrangian systems with nonholonomic constraints,
the theory specializes to the recently developed nonholonomic Hamilton-Jacobi
theory. We are particularly interested in applications to a certain class of
degenerate nonholonomic Lagrangian systems with symmetries, which we refer to
as weakly degenerate Chaplygin systems, that arise as simplified models of
nonholonomic mechanical systems; these systems are shown to reduce to
non-degenerate almost Hamiltonian systems, i.e., generalized Hamiltonian
systems defined with non-closed two-forms. Accordingly, the
Dirac-Hamilton-Jacobi equation reduces to a variant of the nonholonomic
Hamilton-Jacobi equation associated with the reduced system. We illustrate
through a few examples how the Dirac-Hamilton-Jacobi equation can be used to
exactly integrate the equations of motion.Comment: 44 pages, 3 figure
Therapeutic DNA vaccine induces broad T cell responses in the gut and sustained protection from viral rebound and AIDS in SIV-infected rhesus macaques.
Immunotherapies that induce durable immune control of chronic HIV infection may eliminate the need for life-long dependence on drugs. We investigated a DNA vaccine formulated with a novel genetic adjuvant that stimulates immune responses in the blood and gut for the ability to improve therapy in rhesus macaques chronically infected with SIV. Using the SIV-macaque model for AIDS, we show that epidermal co-delivery of plasmids expressing SIV Gag, RT, Nef and Env, and the mucosal adjuvant, heat-labile E. coli enterotoxin (LT), during antiretroviral therapy (ART) induced a substantial 2-4-log fold reduction in mean virus burden in both the gut and blood when compared to unvaccinated controls and provided durable protection from viral rebound and disease progression after the drug was discontinued. This effect was associated with significant increases in IFN-Ξ³ T cell responses in both the blood and gut and SIV-specific CD8+ T cells with dual TNF-Ξ± and cytolytic effector functions in the blood. Importantly, a broader specificity in the T cell response seen in the gut, but not the blood, significantly correlated with a reduction in virus production in mucosal tissues and a lower virus burden in plasma. We conclude that immunizing with vaccines that induce immune responses in mucosal gut tissue could reduce residual viral reservoirs during drug therapy and improve long-term treatment of HIV infection in humans
Complement-Mediated Virus Infectivity Neutralisation by HLA Antibodies Is Associated with Sterilising Immunity to SIV Challenge in the Macaque Model for HIV/AIDS.
Sterilising immunity is a desired outcome for vaccination against human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and has been observed in the macaque model using inactivated simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV). This protection was attributed to antibodies specific for cell proteins including human leucocyte antigens (HLA) class I and II incorporated into virions during vaccine and challenge virus preparation. We show here, using HLA bead arrays, that vaccinated macaques protected from virus challenge had higher serum antibody reactivity compared with non-protected animals. Moreover, reactivity was shown to be directed against HLA framework determinants. Previous studies failed to correlate serum antibody mediated virus neutralisation with protection and were confounded by cytotoxic effects. Using a virus entry assay based on TZM-bl cells we now report that, in the presence of complement, serum antibody titres that neutralise virus infectivity were higher in protected animals. We propose that complement-augmented virus neutralisation is a key factor in inducing sterilising immunity and may be difficult to achieve with HIV/SIV Env-based vaccines. Understanding how to overcome the apparent block of inactivated SIV vaccines to elicit anti-envelope protein antibodies that effectively engage the complement system could enable novel anti-HIV antibody vaccines that induce potent, virolytic serological response to be developed
- β¦