Despite normal eucrasia, mating desire and semen quality, sire bulls sometimes have spermatozoa with poor freezing tolerance. This study assessed effects of the addition of linoleic acid albumin ...(LAA) and long‐term (LT) equilibrium to frozen semen on their sperm freezing tolerance. Immediately after collection using an artificial vagina and a breeding mount, semen was diluted with yolk citrate buffer; then, it was cooled slowly to 4°C during more than 5 h. Equilibrium treatment at 4°C was applied using the same extender supplemented with glycerol. Semen of bull A, with low sperm freezing tolerance, was treated with 1 mg/ml of LAA added to the first extender. The equilibrium treatment at 4°C was prolonged to 30 h. Significantly higher motility rates were obtained for the LT + LAA‐treated sperm before and after freezing–thawing. However, for semen of bulls B and C with normal sperm freezing tolerance, the LT + LAA treatment barely exhibited a small effect on the motility rate. Almost no difference was found among bulls A, B and C in the motility rates of LT + LAA‐treated sperm after freezing–thawing. No difference of fertility was apparent on LT + LAA‐treated frozen sperm in comparison with normal sperm in embryonic collection and in vitro fertilization. It was not an aberration of fertility in vivo or in vitro. In addition, the conception rate of artificial insemination did not have a difference, and a normal calf was obtained. Results show that addition of LAA to an extender for frozen bovine spermatozoa and 30 h of low‐temperature equilibrium might improve the motility of freezing–thawing spermatozoa with poor freezability. Sperm exhibited normal fertilization capability and ontogenic capability.
•We examine transportation infrastructures with volatile facility.•We suppose risk-averse preference.•Investment in stable back-up infrastructure is not covered from congestion toll.•Optimal ...transportation system require subsidy.
This study examines cost recoverability, or whether or not the expected revenue from the optimal congestion toll exceeds the cost of optimal investment in transportation infrastructure, when its capacity is uncertain owing to significantly large disasters whose loss cannot be hedged, either by any saving or insurance. The government controls the degree of reliability of the entire transportation system by combining two types of infrastructure, namely, unstable infrastructure, whose capacity decreases when a disaster occurs, and stable infrastructure, whose capacity is constant regardless of the occurrence of disaster. Under the assumption of risk-averse preferences of households, the theorem of cost recovery does not hold even if the congestion toll is controlled in a completely flexible manner, given any incidents. The optimally designed unstable (stable) infrastructure is (not) cost recoverable because the benefit of investment mitigating the risk premium in social welfare is not covered by the revenue of the congestion toll. We also show that if the transportation cost is specified by a linear function, The entire transportation infrastructure is not cost recoverable, if price elasticity of transport demand is less than one, as many empirical studies have shown.
It was reported that a magnetic field perpendicular to a high temperature superconducting (HTS) tape induced a screening current in the HTS tape of an HTS magnet, and a central magnetic field ...decreased due to the screening current after the HTS magnet was charged. Hence, it is necessary to investigate the distribution of the screening current inside the HTS tape. This paper reports numerical simulation results about the current distribution and an electrical resistance inside the HTS tape of two HTS magnets, which have different shapes but generate the same central magnetic field, using the finite element method taking into account the E-J characteristic of the HTS tape. The results indicate that the distribution of the perpendicular magnetic field and the electrical resistivity are dependent on the coil shape. The current path in the HTS tape is determined from their distribution. It is concluded that the HTS magnet with a bad shape generates a little large electrical resistance.
The Belle II experiment at the Super KEKB storage ring at KEK will search New Physics beyond the Standard Model, with 40 times higher luminosity than at KEKB. Much higher event rates are accounted ...for by moving all front-end digitizers inside or near the detector, and the resulting data received by a common pipeline readout platform developed in KEK. There are about 200 such platforms in the Belle II experiment. We have developed a new Intel Atom based processor card to handle the data and send it to the event building system in three steps. We fully utilize the PCI bus bandwidth and meet the high data rate requirement. In this report, we describe this processor card and the results from testing it in a realistic setup.
The Belle collaboration has been trying for 10 years to reveal the mystery of the current matter-dominated universe. However, much more statistics is required to search for New Physics through ...quantum loops in decays of B mesons. In order to increase the experimental sensitivity, the next generation B-factory, SuperKEKB, is planned. The design luminosity of SuperKEKB is 8 x 1035cm−2s−1 a factor 40 above KEKB's peak luminosity. At this high luminosity, the level 1 trigger of the Belle II experiment will stream events of 300 kB size at a 30 kHz rate. To reduce the data flow to a manageable level, a high-level trigger (HLT) is needed, which will be implemented using the full offline reconstruction on a large scale PC farm. There, physics level event selection is performed, reducing the event rate by ∼ 10 to a few kHz. To execute the reconstruction the HLT uses the offline event processing framework basf2, which has parallel processing capabilities used for multi-core processing and PC clusters. The event data handling in the HLT is totally object oriented utilizing ROOT I/O with a new method of object passing over the UNIX socket connection. Also under consideration is the use of the HLT output as well to reduce the pixel detector event size by only saving hits associated with a track, resulting in an additional data reduction of ∼ 100 for the pixel detector. In this contribution, the design and implementation of the Belle II HLT are presented together with a report of preliminary testing results.
Illuminating gravitational waves Kasliwal, M. M.; Nakar, E.; Singer, L. P. ...
Science,
12/2017, Volume:
358, Issue:
6370
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Merging neutron stars offer an excellent laboratory for simultaneously studying strong-field gravity and matter in extreme environments. We establish the physical association of an electromagnetic ...counterpart (EM170817) with gravitational waves (GW170817) detected from merging neutron stars. By synthesizing a panchromatic data set, we demonstrate that merging neutron stars are a long-sought production site forging heavy elements by r-process nucleosynthesis. The weak gamma rays seen in EM170817 are dissimilar to classical short gamma-ray bursts with ultrarelativistic jets. Instead, we suggest that breakout of a wide-angle, mildly relativistic cocoon engulfing the jet explains the low-luminosity gamma rays, the high-luminosity ultraviolet-optical-infrared, and the delayed radio and x-ray emission. We posit that all neutron star mergers may lead to a wide-angle cocoon breakout, sometimes accompanied by a successful jet and sometimes by a choked jet.
Plant seeds sometimes do not germinate at elevated temperature. The thermoinhibition mechanisms of seed germination have yet not revealed. Here we describe a chemical approach to improve seed ...germination at high temperature. We compared the temperature response of germination between wild-type Arabidopsis thaliana and its T-DNA insertion mutant ΔAtGLB3 that lacks a functional gene encoding GLB3, a homologue of bacterial truncated Hb (trHb). Under optimal temperature conditions (e.g. 22°C), the seeds of ΔAtGLB3 and the wild type germinated at a frequency near 100%. In contrast, at 32°C the seeds of ΔAtGLB3 did not germinate while wild-type seeds retained the same high germination frequency. The germination of ΔAtGLB3 at 32°C was partially restored by supplementation with the nitric oxide-specific scavenger 2-(4-carboxyphenyl)-4,4,5,5-tetramethylimidazoline-1-oxyl-3-oxide (carboxy-PTIO; cPTIO), 3-(3,4-dihydroxycinnamoyl)quinic acid, bovine serum Hb, or isoprene. The results presented in this study suggest that chemical scavengers for reactive nitrogen species potentially improve seed germination at high temperature.
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