On the dynamic characteristics of a variable- mass slender elastic body under high accelerations

Differential equations of motion for determining dynamic characteristics of variable mass slender elastic body moving under high acceleration

Updating the Farm Bill Safety Net in an Expanding Sea of Risk

Agricultural and Food Policy, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, H10,

A FINANCIAL TRAINING PROGRAM FOR USDA/FSA BORROWERS: EVOLUTION AND IMPACTS

A financial training program designed by Cooperative Extension specialists was provided to over 2,000 USDA/FSA borrowers from the Northeast during the period 1994-1999. Key to the success of the workshops was an in-depth, user friendly curriculum that evolved over time, eventually replacing satellite-feed instruction with pre-taped videos. Cluster analysis classified nearly 70% of workshop participants as "Low Finance Priority" or "Low Finance Knowledge." Farmers in these clusters received a relatively greater educational benefit from the program than those not in these clusters. Impact analysis indicated that perceived annual gain in farm net worth from application of workshop tools ranged from approximately $5,000 to$10,000. The training addressed the needs of producers typically isolated from Cooperative Extension because the workshop was the only extension program attended that year by nearly two-thirds of them.Agricultural Finance,

The Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008 Summary and Possible Consequences

The primary purpose of this article is to provide a summary and briefly comment on key provisions of the Food, Conservation and Energy Act of 2008 (PL 110-246) and discuss possible consequences of the selected provisions. As passed by the House and Senate, the act contains 15 titles (the pdf version covering 683 pages). While most provisions will be at least briefly discussed, more attention will be devoted to the production-related provisions, especially substantive changes from the 2002 act. The general title of any new farm bill is telling in both what is significant in the bill and in what the authors want you to think is significant. The Conference report was titled as the Food, Conservation and Energy Act. “Food” refers to the importance of the consumers; “Conservation” calls attention to the importance of the environment and “Energy” calls attention to concerns over current high gas and food prices. As well as building coalitions for passage of the bill, concentration on these three issues also signify that farm prices and the farm safety net are not accorded as high a priority as in past farm bills. It is our opinion that opposition to commodity provisions had much to do with the focus of the bill

Future humidity trends over the western United States in the CMIP5 global climate models and variable infiltration capacity hydrological modeling system

Global climate models predict relative humidity (RH) in the western US will decrease at a rate of about 0.1–0.6 percentage points per decade, albeit with seasonal differences (most drying in spring and summer), geographical variability (greater declines in the interior), stronger reductions for greater anthropogenic radiative forcing, and notable spread among the models. Although atmospheric moisture content increases, this is more than compensated for by higher air temperatures, leading to declining RH. Fine-scale hydrological simulations driven by the global model results should reproduce these trends. It is shown that the MT-CLIM meteorological algorithms used by the Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) hydrological model, when driven by daily Tmin, Tmax, and precipitation (a configuration used in numerous published studies), do not preserve the original global model\u27s humidity trends. Trends are biased positive in the interior western US, so that strong RH decreases are changed to weak decreases, and weak decreases are changed to increases. This happens because the MT-CLIM algorithms VIC incorporates infer an overly large positive trend in atmospheric moisture content in this region, likely due to an underestimate of the effect of increasing aridity on RH. The result could downplay the effects of decreasing RH on plants and wildfire. RH trends along the coast have a weak negative bias due to neglect of the ocean\u27s moderating influence. A numerical experiment where the values of Tdew are altered to compensate for the RH error suggests that eliminating the atmospheric moisture bias could, in and of itself, decrease runoff up to 14% in high-altitude regions east of the Sierra Nevada and Cascades, and reduce estimated Colorado River runoff at Lees Ferry up to 4% by the end of the century. It could also increase the probability of large fires in the northern and central US Rocky Mountains by 13 to 60%

Intensive Working Memory Training Produces Functional Changes in Large-scale Frontoparietal Networks

Working memory is central to human cognition, and intensive cognitive training has been shown to expand working memory capacity in a given domain. It remains unknown, however, how the neural systems that support working memory are altered through intensive training to enable the expansion of working memory capacity. We used fMRI to measure plasticity in activations associated with complex working memory before and after 20 days of training. Healthy young adults were randomly assigned to train on either a dual n-back working memory task or a demanding visuospatial attention task. Training resulted in substantial and task-specific expansion of dual n-back abilities accompanied by changes in the relationship between working memory load and activation. Training differentially affected activations in two large-scale frontoparietal networks thought to underlie working memory: the executive control network and the dorsal attention network. Activations in both networks linearly scaled with working memory load before training, but training dissociated the role of the two networks and eliminated this relationship in the executive control network. Load-dependent functional connectivity both within and between these two networks increased following training, and the magnitudes of increased connectivity were positively correlat ed with improvements in task performance. These results provide insight into the adaptive neural systems that underlie large gains in working memory capacity through training.United States. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Contract W911QY09C0066)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant T90DA022759)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant R90DA023427)United States. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (2014-13121700007

Psychological and physiological correlates of sleep in HIV infection

Insomnia, a common problem associated with HIV disease, is most likely caused by a multitude of factors. This study investigated the correlations between a selected group of physiological and psychological factors and sleep quality in an HIV-infected population. A convenience sample of 79 ethnically diverse HIVpositive adults, ages 24 to 63, completed a number of questionnaires and released their laboratory records for CD4+ cell count and viral load information. Variables significantly related to sleep quality were HIV-related symptoms, total pain, fatigue, depression, state anxiety, and the number of adults in the household. Findings support the need for health care providers to consider factors that contribute to impaired sleep when developing effective care for HIV-infected individuals with sleep disturbance

Allele and dosage specificity of the Peg3 imprinted domain

© 2018 Bretz et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The biological impetus for gene dosage and allele specificity of mammalian imprinted genes is not fully understood. To address this, we generated and analyzed four sets of mice from a single breeding scheme with varying allelic expression and gene dosage of the Peg3 domain. The mutants with abrogation of the two paternally expressed genes, Peg3 and Usp29, showed a significant decrease in growth rates for both males and females, while the mutants with biallelic expression of Peg3 and Usp29 resulted in an increased growth rate of female mice only. The mutant cohort with biallelic expression of Peg3 and Usp29 tended to have greater numbers of pups compared to the other genotypes. The mutants with switched active alleles displayed overall similar phenotypes to the wild type, but did show some differences in gene expression, suggesting potential non-redundant roles contributed by the maternal and paternal alleles. Overall, this study demonstrates a novel in vivo approach to investigate the allele and dosage specificity of mammalian imprinted domains

Limonite – a weathered residual soil heterogeneous at all scales

Limonite is a residual soil produced by the decomposition of magnesium silicate (olivine) rocks in tropical environments. During weathering most of the original rock is leached away leaving only its iron content, which is precipitated out in the form of iron sesqui-oxides to create a soft and highly porous soil. The predominant mineral present in limonite is goethite, which forms acicular nanoparticles that agglomerate to produce a silty sand with porous particles. The void ratio varies from 2 to 6, with higher values being a consequence of structure-supported voids. An extensive set of laboratory tests have been performed on a limonite soil profile which extends 50 m to rock. These data show that there is no pattern to shear strength with depth, with the shear strength equally likely to be 50 or 200 kPa through much of the profile. It is argued that the shear strength parameters for failure mechanisms, having any significant length, should be based on average values. The letter presents scanning electron microscopy photographs showing the fundamental particles, the results of triaxial tests comparing natural and reconstituted behaviour which show the effects of microstructure on the meso-scale response, and field data to show site variability

Lithium bis­(2-methyl­lactato)borate monohydrate

The title compound {systematic name: poly[[aqua­lithium]-μ-3,3,8,8-tetra­methyl-1,4,6,9-tetra­oxa-5λ4-borataspiro­[4.4]nonane-2,7-dione]}, [Li(C8H12BO6)(H2O)]n (LiBMLB), forms a 12-membered macrocycle, which lies across a crystallographic inversion center. The lithium cations are pseudo-tetra­hedrally coordinated by three methyl­lactate ligands and a water mol­ecule. The asymmetric units couple across crystallographic inversion centers, forming the 12-membered macrocycles. These macrocycles, in turn, cross-link through the Li+ cations, forming an infinite polymeric structure in two dimensions parallel to (101)