Knockdown of zebrafish crim1 results in a bent tail phenotype with defects in somite and vascular development

The Crim1 gene encodes a transmembrane protein containing six cysteine-rich repeats similar to those found in the BMP antagonist, chordin (chd). To investigate its physiological role, zebrafish crim1 was cloned and shown to be both maternally and zygotically expressed during zebrafish development in sites including the vasculature, intermediate cell mass. notochord, and otic vesicle. Bent or hooked tails with U-shaped somites were observed in 85% of morphants from 12 hpf. This was accompanied by a loss of muscle pioneer cells. While morpholino knockdown of crim1 showed some evidence of ventralisation, including expansion of the intermediate cell mass (ICM), reduction in head size bent tails and disruption to the somites and notochord, this did not mimic the classically ventralised phenotype, as assessed by the pattern of expression of the dorsal markers chordin, otx2 and the ventral markers eve1, pax2.1, tall and gata1 between 75% epiboly and six-somites. From 24 hpf, morphants displayed an expansion of the ventral mesoderm-derived ICM, as evidenced by expansion of tall. Imo2 and crim1 itself. Analysis of the crim1 morphant phenotype in Tg(fli:EGFP) fish showed a clear reduction in the endothelial cells forming the intersegmental vessels and a loss of the dorsal longitudinal anastomotic vessel (DLAV). Hence, the primary role of zebrafish crim1 is likely to be the regulation of somitic and vascular development. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Numerical Comparison of the Drag Models of Granular Flows Applied to the Fast Pyrolysis of Biomass

The paper presents a comparison between the different drag models for granular flows developed in the literature and the effect of each one of them on the fast pyrolysis of wood. The process takes place on an 100 g/h lab scale bubbling fluidized bed reactor located at Aston University. FLUENT 6.3 is used as the modeling framework of the fluidized bed hydrodynamics, while the fast pyrolysis of the discrete wood particles is incorporated as an external user defined function (UDF) hooked to FLUENT’s main code structure. Three different drag models for granular flows are compared, namely the Gidaspow, Syamlal O’Brien, and Wen-Yu, already incorporated in FLUENT’s main code, and their impact on particle trajectory, heat transfer, degradation rate, product yields, and char residence time is quantified. The Eulerian approach is used to model the bubbling behavior of the sand, which is treated as a continuum. Biomass reaction kinetics is modeled according to the literature using a two-stage, semiglobal model that takes into account secondary reactions.

Practical network coding for two way relay channels in LTE networks

In this paper, the implementation aspects and constraints of the simplest network coding (NC) schemes for a two-way relay channel (TWRC) composed of a user equipment (mobile terminal), an LTE relay station (RS) and an LTE base station (eNB) are considered in order to assess the usefulness of the NC in more realistic scenarios. The information exchange rate gain (IERG), the energy reduction gain (ERG) and the resource utilization gain (RUG) of the NC schemes with and without subcarrier division duplexing (SDD) are obtained by computer simulations. The usefulness of the NC schemes are evaluated for varying traffic load levels, the geographical distances between the nodes, the RS transmit powers, and the maximum numbers of retransmissions. Simulation results show that the NC schemes with and without SDD, have the throughput gains 0.5% and 25%, the ERGs 7 - 12% and 16 - 25%, and the RUGs 0.5 - 3.2%, respectively. It is found that the NC can provide performance gains also for the users at the cell edge. Furthermore, the ERGs of the NC increase with the transmit power of the relay while the ERGs of the NC remain the same even when the maximum number of retransmissions is reduced.

Obtenção, caracterização e utilização de um compósito com matriz de resina poliéster e carga de fibras de sisal

The constant search for sustainable alternatives has earned great effort of researchers in research and obtaining new materials, encouraging the rise of eco-friendly productive development and providing simple and practical solutions to economic profitability. In this sense, the use of materials derived from natural renewable sources, vegetables, has great potential applicability to sustainable development. As alternative materials plant fibers can be applied to production of a range of composite materials easing the use of materials derived from non-renewable this thesis were sisal mats used for achieving a composite matrix having as one orthophthalic polyester resin. The webs were subjected to surface treatment in boiling water for 15 minutes. The webs of sisal fibers used were, respectively, 5%, 10% and 15% of the composite weight. The composite was obtained and characterized mechanically and thermally to the chosen formulations. several plates of the composite to obtain the body of evidence for the characterization tests complying with the relevant rules were made. The obtained composites showed strength tensile and bending lower than the array, so it can be used where are required low load requests. The most significant result of the composite studied given to the impact energy absorption, far superior to the matrix used. Other properties were highlighted in oil absorption, and density. It proved the feasibility of obtaining the composite for the three formulations studied C5, C10 and C15 being the most feasible to C10. To demonstrate the feasibility of using composite were made a wall clock, a bench, a chair and a shelf, low mechanical stress structures. It was concluded that the sisal rugs exercised the load function in the composite.

Obtenção, caracterização e utilização de um compósito com matriz de resina poliéster e carga de fibras de sisal

The constant search for sustainable alternatives has earned great effort of researchers in research and obtaining new materials, encouraging the rise of eco-friendly productive development and providing simple and practical solutions to economic profitability. In this sense, the use of materials derived from natural renewable sources, vegetables, has great potential applicability to sustainable development. As alternative materials plant fibers can be applied to production of a range of composite materials easing the use of materials derived from non-renewable this thesis were sisal mats used for achieving a composite matrix having as one orthophthalic polyester resin. The webs were subjected to surface treatment in boiling water for 15 minutes. The webs of sisal fibers used were, respectively, 5%, 10% and 15% of the composite weight. The composite was obtained and characterized mechanically and thermally to the chosen formulations. several plates of the composite to obtain the body of evidence for the characterization tests complying with the relevant rules were made. The obtained composites showed strength tensile and bending lower than the array, so it can be used where are required low load requests. The most significant result of the composite studied given to the impact energy absorption, far superior to the matrix used. Other properties were highlighted in oil absorption, and density. It proved the feasibility of obtaining the composite for the three formulations studied C5, C10 and C15 being the most feasible to C10. To demonstrate the feasibility of using composite were made a wall clock, a bench, a chair and a shelf, low mechanical stress structures. It was concluded that the sisal rugs exercised the load function in the composite.

BUILDING EFFICIENT AND COST-EFFECTIVE CLOUD-BASED BIG DATA MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

In today’s big data world, data is being produced in massive volumes, at great velocity and from a variety of different sources such as mobile devices, sensors, a plethora of small devices hooked to the internet (Internet of Things), social networks, communication networks and many others. Interactive querying and large-scale analytics are being increasingly used to derive value out of this big data. A large portion of this data is being stored and processed in the Cloud due the several advantages provided by the Cloud such as scalability, elasticity, availability, low cost of ownership and the overall economies of scale. There is thus, a growing need for large-scale cloud-based data management systems that can support real-time ingest, storage and processing of large volumes of heterogeneous data. However, in the pay-as-you-go Cloud environment, the cost of analytics can grow linearly with the time and resources required. Reducing the cost of data analytics in the Cloud thus remains a primary challenge. In my dissertation research, I have focused on building efficient and cost-effective cloud-based data management systems for different application domains that are predominant in cloud computing environments. In the first part of my dissertation, I address the problem of reducing the cost of transactional workloads on relational databases to support database-as-a-service in the Cloud. The primary challenges in supporting such workloads include choosing how to partition the data across a large number of machines, minimizing the number of distributed transactions, providing high data availability, and tolerating failures gracefully. I have designed, built and evaluated SWORD, an end-to-end scalable online transaction processing system, that utilizes workload-aware data placement and replication to minimize the number of distributed transactions that incorporates a suite of novel techniques to significantly reduce the overheads incurred both during the initial placement of data, and during query execution at runtime. In the second part of my dissertation, I focus on sampling-based progressive analytics as a means to reduce the cost of data analytics in the relational domain. Sampling has been traditionally used by data scientists to get progressive answers to complex analytical tasks over large volumes of data. Typically, this involves manually extracting samples of increasing data size (progressive samples) for exploratory querying. This provides the data scientists with user control, repeatable semantics, and result provenance. However, such solutions result in tedious workflows that preclude the reuse of work across samples. On the other hand, existing approximate query processing systems report early results, but do not offer the above benefits for complex ad-hoc queries. I propose a new progressive data-parallel computation framework, NOW!, that provides support for progressive analytics over big data. In particular, NOW! enables progressive relational (SQL) query support in the Cloud using unique progress semantics that allow efficient and deterministic query processing over samples providing meaningful early results and provenance to data scientists. NOW! enables the provision of early results using significantly fewer resources thereby enabling a substantial reduction in the cost incurred during such analytics. Finally, I propose NSCALE, a system for efficient and cost-effective complex analytics on large-scale graph-structured data in the Cloud. The system is based on the key observation that a wide range of complex analysis tasks over graph data require processing and reasoning about a large number of multi-hop neighborhoods or subgraphs in the graph; examples include ego network analysis, motif counting in biological networks, finding social circles in social networks, personalized recommendations, link prediction, etc. These tasks are not well served by existing vertex-centric graph processing frameworks whose computation and execution models limit the user program to directly access the state of a single vertex, resulting in high execution overheads. Further, the lack of support for extracting the relevant portions of the graph that are of interest to an analysis task and loading it onto distributed memory leads to poor scalability. NSCALE allows users to write programs at the level of neighborhoods or subgraphs rather than at the level of vertices, and to declaratively specify the subgraphs of interest. It enables the efficient distributed execution of these neighborhood-centric complex analysis tasks over largescale graphs, while minimizing resource consumption and communication cost, thereby substantially reducing the overall cost of graph data analytics in the Cloud. The results of our extensive experimental evaluation of these prototypes with several real-world data sets and applications validate the effectiveness of our techniques which provide orders-of-magnitude reductions in the overheads of distributed data querying and analysis in the Cloud.

Torpedo sinuspersici Olfers, 1831

Electric rays, thought to be the most primitive of the skates and rays, have stout tails but have rather expansive disc. This group is distinguished by the presence of powerful electric organs, derived from branchial muscles in head region. Torpedo sinuspersici found inshore in sandy bottoms, and well offshore from the surf zone down to 200 m. Also on or near coral reefs (like Kish Island in Persian Gulf). Common in shallow sandy areas. Occasionally hooked by anglers, more often seen by divers; can deliver a strong shock. Flesh is edible. T. sinuspersici can survive for hours after being stranded on the beach. Little is known of the life history of the Gulf torpedo. It is a sluggish predator of bony fishes. At night it actively hunts for food, sculling slowly through the water about a meter above the bottom; during the day it usually rests on the bottom and opportunistically ambushes unwary prey. It uses its broad pectoral fins to envelop the target fish before delivering an electric shock to stun it. Usually solitary, they may form groups during the mating season. Reproduction is a placental viviparous, with the developing embryos initially surviving on their yolk sacs, and then on enriched uterine fluid produced by the mother. Litters of 9-22 young are birthed in the summer. Newborns measure about 10 cm wide; males mature at a disc width of 39 cm and females at 45 cm.

Discharge patterns of human tensor palatini motor units during sleep onset

Study Objectives: Upper airway muscles such as genioglossus (GG) and tensor palatini (TP) reduce activity at sleep onset. In GG reduced muscle activity is primarily due to inspiratory modulated motor units becoming silent, suggesting reduced respiratory pattern generator (RPG) output. However, unlike GG, TP shows minimal respiratory modulation and presumably has few inspiratory modulated motor units and minimal input from the RPG. Thus, we investigated the mechanism by which TP reduces activity at sleep onset.

Design: The activity of TP motor units were studied during relaxed wakefulness and over the transition from wakefulness to sleep.

Setting: Sleep laboratory.

Participants: Nine young (21.4 ± 3.4 years) males were studied on a total of 11 nights.

Intervention: Sleep onset.

Measurements and Results: Two TP EMGs (thin, hooked wire electrodes), and sleep and respiratory measures were recorded. One hundred twenty-one sleep onsets were identified (13.4 ± 7.2/subject), resulting in 128 motor units (14.3 ± 13.0/subject); 29% of units were tonic, 43% inspiratory modulated (inspiratory phasic 18%, inspiratory tonic 25%), and 28% expiratory modulated (expiratory phasic 21%, expiratory tonic 7%). There was a reduction in both expiratory and inspiratory modulated units, but not tonic units, at sleep onset. Reduced TP activity was almost entirely due to de-recruitment.

Conclusions: TP showed a similar distribution of motor units as other airway muscles. However, a greater proportion of expiratory modulated motor units were active in TP and these expiratory units, along with inspiratory units, tended to become silent over sleep onset. The data suggest that both expiratory and inspiratory drive components from the RPG are reduced at sleep onset in TP.

Reduction of elasmobranch by-catch in the hake semipelagic near-bottom longline fishery in the Algarve (Southern Portugal)

Elasmobranch fish, particularly deep-sea sharks, are the most important component of the by-catch of the hake semipelagic near-bottom 'pedra-e-bola' longline fishery in the Algarve (South Portugal) and most of these fish are discarded. The effects of the removal of the lower hooks were evaluated, in terms of target and by-catch reductions, by quantifying the catches of each hook relative to the distance from the bottom. The analysis showed that most European hake (Merluccius merluccius), the target species of this fishery, were caught in the middle range of the hooks, with very few individuals caught near the bottom, whereas for sharks the situation was the opposite, with most hooked near the bottom. The removal of the lower three pairs of hooks would result in a small reduction in the catch of the target species, but a much more significant reduction in elasmobranch by-catch. In the specific case of the blackmouth catshark (Galeus melastomus), discard mortality would be further minimized due to the fact that the lower hooks capture significantly smaller animals that are always discarded compared with hooks that are more distant from the bottom.

Short-term hooking mortality of three marine fish species (Sparidae) caught by recreational angling in the south Portugal

Short-term hooking mortality was evaluated for three sparid species [Diplodus vulgaris (Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire), Spar-us aurata L. and Spondyliosoma cantharus (L.)] in the Algarve, south Portugal. Fishes were caught from the shore during October 2009 at a fish farm reservoir (Ria Formosa), using three different hook sizes. The relationships between hooking mortality and seven independent variables were analyzed using logistic regression models. In all,384 fishes representing the three target species were caught during the angling sessions. The most caught species was S. cantharus (n = 181; 100% undersized), followed by S. aurata (n = 137; 89% undersized) and D. vulgaris (n = 66; 97% undersized). Mortalities ranged between 0% for D. vulgaris and 12% for S. aurata (S. cantharus, 3%). For S. aurora, anatomical hooking location was the main predictor of mortality, with 63% of the fishes that died being deeply hooked. Our results support the current mandatory practices of releasing undersized fish for the studied species, given the low post-release mortality rates observed. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.