Minimization of cannibalism of African catfish (Clarias gariepinus Burchell) larvae in indoor culture system

For minimizing cannibalism of African catfish (Clarias gariepinus) larvae two trials for a period of 14 and 15 days respectively in four aquaria of size 120x49x32 cm³ were conducted. Seven days old African catfish larvae with an initial total length and weight of 7.84 (±0.40) mm and 4.40 (±1.18) mg respectively in the first trial and similarly 7.52(±0.61) mm and 3.98 (±0.56) mg in the second trial at the rate of same stocking densities of 2500 larvae in each aquarium were stocked in both trials. Cannibalistic larvae were separated by using grader frame from each treatment at 7 days and 5 days interval during first and second trial respectively. Two mesh sizes i.e., 5 mm and 7 mm were used in the grader frame in both trials. Survival rate was significantly higher in T1 than that of T2 in each trial. Grading of larvae with 5 days interval resulted higher survival rate than that of 7 days interval.

A combined nonfertile and UO2 PWR fuel assembly for actinide waste minimization

A new combined Non Fertile and Uranium (CONFU) fuel assembly is proposed to limit the actinides that need long-term high-level waste storage from the pressurized water reactor (PWR) fuel cycle. In the CONFU assembly concept, ∼20% of the UO2 fuel pins are replaced with fertile free fuel hosting the transuranic elements (TRUs) generated in the previous cycle. This leads to a fuel cycle sustainable with respect to net TRU generation, and the amount and radiotoxicity of the nuclear waste can be significantly reduced in comparison with the conventional once-through UO2 fuel cycle. It is shown that under the constraints of acceptable power peaking limits, the CONFU assembly exhibits negative reactivity feedback coefficients comparable in values to those of the reference UO2 fuel. Feasibility of the PWR core operation and control with complete TRU recycle has been shown based on full-core three-dimensional neutronic simulation. However, gradual buildup of small amounts of Cm and Cf challenges fuel reprocessing and fabrication due to the high spontaneous fission rates of these nuclides and heat generation by some Pu, Am, and Cm isotopes. Feasibility of the processing steps becomes more attainable if the time between discharge and reprocessing is 20 yr or longer.

Unconstrained monocular 3D human pose estimation by action detection and cross-modality regression forest

This work addresses the challenging problem of unconstrained 3D human pose estimation (HPE) from a novel perspective. Existing approaches struggle to operate in realistic applications, mainly due to their scene-dependent priors, such as background segmentation and multi-camera network, which restrict their use in unconstrained environments. We therfore present a framework which applies action detection and 2D pose estimation techniques to infer 3D poses in an unconstrained video. Action detection offers spatiotemporal priors to 3D human pose estimation by both recognising and localising actions in space-time. Instead of holistic features, e.g. silhouettes, we leverage the flexibility of deformable part model to detect 2D body parts as a feature to estimate 3D poses. A new unconstrained pose dataset has been collected to justify the feasibility of our method, which demonstrated promising results, significantly outperforming the relevant state-of-the-arts. © 2013 IEEE.