Influence of social status on the welfare of growing pigs housed in barren and enriched environments

One hundred and twenty-eight pigs were reared in barren or enriched environments from birth to slaughter at 21 weeks of age. Pigs remained as litter-mate groups until 8 weeks of age when they were mixed into groups of eight animals. These groups were balanced for gender and weight and contained two pigs from each of four different litters. Each pig was assigned high or low social status on the basis of relative success in aggressive interactions at mixing. Injury levels were assessed on a weekly basis from 8 to 2 1 weeks of age. Pigs were exposed to two group food competition tests after a period of food restriction at 10 weeks of age, and to an individual novel pen test at 11 weeks of age. Behavioural and plasma cortisol responses to both types of test were recorded. Low social status was associated with increased injuries to the head, neck and ears, and therefore reduced welfare. Pigs with low social status showed reduced resource-holding ability in the food competition test, and greater avoidance of a novel object during the novel pen test. It is suggested that avoidance of the novel object reflected 'learned' fearfulness in these individuals. Environmental enrichment did not negate the effect of low social status on injury levels, but did appear to reduce the negative influence of low social status on stress during food restriction, and led to a reduction in fearfulness in response to the novel pen test. These results suggest that environmental enrichment may improve the we/fare of growing pigs with low social status.

Providing QoS for networked peers in distributed haptic virtual environments

Haptic information originates from a different human sense (touch), therefore the quality of service (QoS) required to supporthaptic traffic is significantly different from that used to support conventional real-time traffic such as voice or video. Each type ofnetwork impairment has different (and severe) impacts on the user’s haptic experience. There has been no specific provision of QoSparameters for haptic interaction. Previous research into distributed haptic virtual environments (DHVEs) have concentrated onsynchronization of positions (haptic device or virtual objects), and are based on client-server architectures.We present a new peerto-peer DHVE architecture that further extends this to enable force interactions between two users whereby force data are sent tothe remote peer in addition to positional information. The work presented involves both simulation and practical experimentationwhere multimodal data is transmitted over a QoS-enabled IP network. Both forms of experiment produce consistent results whichshow that the use of specific QoS classes for haptic traffic will reduce network delay and jitter, leading to improvements in users’haptic experiences with these types of applications.

Heterogeneous mixed-layer clays from the Cretaceous greensand, Isle of Wight, southern England

The sea-cliffs of the Isle of Wight were deposited during a period of overall sea-level rise starting in the Barremian (Lower Cretaceous) and continuing into the Aptian and Albian. They consist of fluvial, coastal and lagoonal sediments including greensands and clays. Numerous episodes of erosion, deposition and faunal colonization reflect condensation and abandonment of surfaces with firmgrounds and hardgrounds. This study focused mainly on shallow marine cycles where variations in clay mineralogy would not be expected, because overall system composition, sediment source, and thermal history are similar for all the samples in the studied section. Instead we found a wide variety of clay assemblages even in single samples within a 200 in interval.

Molecular diagnosis for heterogeneous genetic diseases with high-throughput DNA sequencing applied to retinitis pigmentosa

BACKGROUND:
The genetic heterogeneity of many Mendelian disorders, such as retinitis pigmentosa which results from mutations in over 40 genes, is a major obstacle to obtaining a molecular diagnosis in clinical practice. Targeted high-throughput DNA sequencing offers a potential solution and was used to develop a molecular diagnostic screen for patients with retinitis pigmentosa.
METHODS:
A custom sequence capture array was designed to target the coding regions of all known retinitis pigmentosa genes and used to enrich these sequences from DNA samples of five patients. Enriched DNA was subjected to high-throughput sequencing singly or in pools, and sequence variants were identified by alignment of up to 10 million reads per sample to the normal reference sequence. Potential pathogenicity was assessed by functional predictions and frequency in controls.
RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS:
Known homozygous PDE6B and compound heterozygous CRB1 mutations were detected in two patients. A novel homozygous missense mutation (c.2957A?T; p.N986I) in the cyclic nucleotide gated channel ß1 (CNGB1) gene predicted to have a deleterious effect and absent in 720 control chromosomes was detected in one case in which conventional genetic screening had failed to detect mutations. The detection of known and novel retinitis pigmentosa mutations in this study establishes high-throughput DNA sequencing with DNA pooling as an effective diagnostic tool for heterogeneous genetic diseases.

Manipulating and protecting entanglement by means of spin environments

We study the dynamical behavior of two initially entangled qubits, each locally coupled to an environment embodied by an interacting spin chain. We consider energy-exchange qubit-environment couplings resulting in rich and highly non-trivial entanglement dynamics. We obtain exact results for the time evolution of the concurrence between the two qubits and find that, by tuning the interaction parameters, one can freeze the dynamics of entanglement, therefore inhibiting their relaxation into the spin environments, as well as activate a sudden-death phenomenon. We also discuss the effects of an environmental quantum phase transition on the features of the two-qubit entanglement dynamics.

CsF and alumina: A mixed homogeneous-heterogeneous catalytic system for the transesterification of sunflower oil with methanol

The activity and nature (i e heterogeneous and/or homogeneous) of catalysts based on CsF supported on alpha-Al2O3 were investigated for the transesterification of vegetable oil with methanol. The effect of the activation temperature, CsF loading and the reusability in a recirculating reactor were first studied CsF/alpha-Al2O3 exhibited the highest activity for a CsF loading of 0 6 mmol/g and when activated at 120 degrees C An important aspect of this study is the effect of CsF leaching into the reaction mixture, which is attributed to the high solubility of CsF in methanol, leading to a complete loss of activity after one run It was Identified that the activity of the catalyst resulted from a synergy between alumina and dissolved CsF, the presence of both compounds being absolutely necessary to observe any conversion The use of an alumina with a higher surface area resulted in a far greater reaction rate, showing that the concentration of surface site on the oxide (probably surface hydroxyl) was rate-limiting in the case of the experiments using the low surface area alpha-Al2O3 This work emphasizes that combined homogeneous-heterogeneous catalytic systems made from the blending of the respective catalysts can be used to obtain high conversion of vegetable oil to biodiesel. Despite the homogeneous/heterogeneous dual character, such a catalytic system may prove valuable in developing a simple and cost-effective continuous catalytic process for biodiesel production (C) 2010 Elsevier B V All rights reserved

A framework for collaborative working environments

To utilize the advantages of existing and emerging Internet techniques and to meet the demands for a new generation of collaborative working environments, a framework with an upperware–middleware architecture is proposed, which consists of four layers: resource layer, middleware layer, upperware layer and application layer. The upperware contains intelligent agents and plug/play facilities; the former coordinates and controls multiple middleware techniques such as Grid computing, Web-services and mobile agents, while the latter are used for the applications, such as semantic CAD, to plug and loose couple into the system. The method of migrating legacy software using automatic wrapper generation technique is also presented. A prototype mobile environment for collaborative product design is presented to illustrate the utilization of the CWE framework in collaborative design and manufacture.