The impacts of cattle access points on deposited sediment levels in headwater streams in Ireland

Cattle access to streams has been linked globally with degradation of stream water quality, driven largely by bank erosion and resultant instream, fine sediment deposition. The majority of evidence on such effects is however based in arid and semiarid regions of the United States and Australia, with few studies relating to cool temperate climates such as Northwest Europe. In this study, “Quorer” resuspendable sediment samples were taken from riffle geomorphic units upstream (control) and at two points downstream (pressure and recovery) of cattle access points in headwater streams in agricultural catchments in Ireland to assess levels of deposited stream sediment. Samples were taken in April/May (2016) prior to the grazing season and in October (2016) at the end of the grazing season. Sites in good‐high ecological status catchments and less than good ecological status catchments were included in the study. Higher levels of sediment were found downstream of cattle access points in both good‐high status and less than good status catchments; however, the impacts of access points were spatially confined to, in most cases, the area immediately downstream of the point of access. There was a strong correlation between deposited sediment mass and organic matter (OM) mass, with levels of OM increasing linearly with deposited sediment mass. Levels of measured sediment were negatively correlated with riparian habitat health (measured using a qualitative habitat assessment). The results of this study highlight the need for measures to prevent cattle access to headwater streams where access points can be many in order to manage local habitat quality and downstream water quality issues.     

Hull-less Barley Varieties: Storage Proteins and Amino Acid Distribution in Relation to Nutritional Quality

Barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) has had an important impact on human nutrition. Hull-less barley is a genetically improved type that has been widely used in recent years. Six Brazilian hull-less barley varieties (IAC-IBON 214-82; IAC 8612-421; IAC 8501-31; IAC 8501-12; IAPAR 39-ACUMAI; IAC 8501-22) were analyzed for storage protein constituents, amino acid contents, and similarity among the hull-less barley varieties. Albumins, globulins, prolamins I and II, and glutelins were extracted and separated by SDS-PAGE. The total protein amino acid contents of the flour were also determined for each variety by TLC and HPLC. Variations in intensity and appearance and disappearance of protein bands were observed among the varieties suggesting genetic variability. However, the amino acid profile did not indicate any major variations in the amino acid concentrations. The high lysine and threonine total concentrations detected in the seeds of the hull-less barley varieties encouraged an investigation into the regulation of amino acid metabolism and storage protein synthesis.     

Determining the Tensile Stress-Crack Opening Curve of Concrete by Inverse Analysis

The determination of the fundamental stress versus crack opening (σ-w) response of concrete under uniaxial tension is performed in this study through inverse analysis using data from notched beam tests. The procedure used for optimizing the parameters of the σ-w relation using the load versus crack mouth opening displacement response of the notched beam is described. Satisfactory comparisons have been obtained between the σ-w curves obtained through the inverse analysis and those directly measured in uniaxial tension tests. The use of weighting functions in the inverse analysis may be necessary when large crack widths are to be considered.     

Genotoxic effect of Physalis angulata L. (Solanaceae) extract on human lymphocytes treated in vitro

Physalis angulata L (Solanaceae) is a medicinal plant from North of Brazil, whose different extracts and infusions are commonly used in the popular medicine for the treatment of malaria, asthma, hepatitis, dermatitis and rheumatism. However, the genotoxic effects of P. angulata on human cells is not well known. The main purpose of the present study was to evaluate the in vitro genotoxic effects of aqueous extract of P. angulata using the comet assay and the micronucleus assay in human lymphocytes provided from 6 healthy donors. Treatments with P. angulata extracts were performed in vitro in order to access the extent of DNA damage. The comet assay has shown that treatments with P. angulata at 0.5, 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 and 6.0 microg/mL in culture medium were genotoxic. Lymphocytes treated with P. angulata at the concentrations of 3.0 and 6.0 microg/mL in culture medium showed a statistically significant increase in the frequency of micronucleus (p<0.05), however, the cytokinesis blocked proliferation index (CBPI) was not decreased after P. angulata treatment. In conclusion, the present work demonstrated the genotoxic effects of P. angulata extract on human lymphocytes in vitro.     

A multimodal alignment framework for spoken documents

We present a multimodal document alignment framework, which highlights existing alignment relationships between documents that are discussed and recorded during multimedia events such as meetings. These relationships that should help indexing the archives of these events are detected using various techniques from natural language processing and information retrieval. The main alignment strategies studied are based on thematic, quotation and reference relationships. At the analysis level, the alignment framework was applied at several levels of granularity of documents, requiring specific document segmentation techniques. Our framework that is language independent was evaluated on corpora in French and English, including meetings and scientific presentations. The satisfactory evaluation results obtained at several stages show the importance of our approach in bridging the gap between meeting documents, independently from the language and domain. They highlight also the utility of the multimodal alignment in advanced applications, e.g. multimedia document browsing, content-based / temporal-based searching, etc.     

Tri-Reforming of Methane over NdM0.25Ni0.75O3 (M = Cr,Fe) Catalysts and the Effect of CO2 Composition

Catalysis Letters - The NdM0.25Ni0.75O3 (M?=?Cr, Fe) named NCN and NFN catalysts precursors were synthesized and characterized. The CO2 utilization in the feed was studied in the...     

On Hypotheses Testing for the Selection of Spatio‐Temporal Models

Abstract. Several models have been proposed in recent years for analysing spatial data and also, to some extent, spatio‐temporal data. One of the important problems, namely the choice of an appropriate model for describing real data sets, remains unsolved. Here we consider the analysis of spatio‐temporal processes from which observations over space and time are available. We propose statistical tests for discriminating between space–time autoregressive processes and multivariate autoregressive processes. The sampling properties of the proposed tests are considered. We illustrate the methods with a real example. We use the above tests to find the best model to describe spatio‐temporal variations of hourly carbon monoxide measurements at four locations in London in January 2004.