Search

The low fish meal (FM) diet commonly causes deteriorated palatability, and eventually leads to lowered feed consumption and growth performance of fish. This study was, therefore, designed to determine inclusion impact of the graded levels of jack mackerel meal (JMM) in olive flounder (P. olivaceus) diets replacing 50% FM with tuna by-product meal (TBM) on growth, feed availability, biochemical composition, blood chemistry, and economic efficiency. Six isonitrogenous (55.5%) and isolipidic (10.0%) diets were formulated. Sixty percent FM was incorporated in the control (Con) diet. In the Con diet, fifty percent of FM was replaced by TBM, and then 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50% JMM were included at the cost of FM, referred as the TJ10, TJ20, TJ30, TJ40, and TJ50 diets, respectively. Three hundred and sixty juvenile fish (18.0 ± 0.01g; mean ± SD) were delivered into 18, 50-L flow-through tanks. All diets were randomly assigned to triplicate groups of fish. Fish were hand-fed to apparent satiation twice daily for 56 days. Weight gain, specific growth rate, and feed consumption of fish fed the TJ30, TJ40, and TJ50 diets were significantly (P < 0.001, P < 0.001, and P < 0.002, respectively) greater than those of fish fed the Con and TJ10 diets, but not significantly (P > 0.05) different from those of fish fed the TJ20 diet. Feed utilization, proximate composition, amino acid profiles, and blood chemistry of fish were not significantly (P > 0.05) altered by dietary treatments. However, the TJ30 diet was the most recommendable to farmers in terms of economic profit index (EPI). Conclusively, 30% inclusion of JMM is the most recommendable in the olive flounder diet substituting 50% FM with TBM based on growth performance, feed availability, and EPI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bangladesh is located in Southeast Asia that has a high population density. It is a lower‐middle‐income country. The COVID‐19 pandemic severely impacted the nation that slowed its economic growth. It halted major industries, crippling the nation's economy. The students were uncertain after the declaration of school closures. Hospitals could not treat other patients properly due to the vast health burden of COVID‐19. Bangladesh put up a solid fight during COVID‐19 as a lower‐middle‐income country. Prompt action, early vaccination drives, effective awareness campaigns, and widespread public involvement have enabled Bangladesh to bring more than 90% of its population into COVID‐19 vaccination coverage. It was possible by the effective diplomatic and local health strategy implemented by the Bangladeshi government, the country's extensive prior experience, and its long history of achieving a high success rate in other vaccination campaigns. Bangladesh was able to flatten the curve sooner than other developed countries. Therefore, the cogs of everyday social life and the economy begin to turn once more. The strategy Bangladesh used to combat the COVID‐19 pandemic through vaccination and diplomatic policy by calling on its prior experience has the potential to serve as a model for other low‐ and middle‐income countries and an example for developed nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discovery of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron (B.1.1.529) variant has sparked alarm globally because of its rapid rate of infection and trespassing acquired immunity due to vaccination or natural infection. This heavily mutated variant is rapidly spreading around the world. Infected individuals with the Omicron variant may suffer from flu-like symptoms, and infected with the Delta variant frequently report low oxygen levels, high pulse rates, and a loss of smell and taste. Also, the Omicron variant causes asymptomatic or mild disease so far, and not any severe illness as like Delta, and this new variant has a 15% to 80% reduced risk of hospitalization than the Delta variant. Scientists are worried about the possibility of escaping the immunity by the Omicron variants and subvariants among fully vaccinated and recovered COVID-19 patients. Two doses of available vaccines are found to be partially ineffective in protecting this new variant, therefore, the third dose as a booster is recommended to enhance antibody level. Moreover, some antiviral drugs significantly reduce hospitalization or death among mild to severe COVID-19 patients. All authorized antiviral drugs are effective against viral replication for most SARS-CoV-2 variants, and particularly some monoclonal antibodies may not now be effective in treating COVID-19 patients. There is an urgent need to update existing vaccines, develop more effective and newer vaccines as well as additional monoclonal antibodies to counter Omicron. Therefore, along with close monitoring of Omicron characteristics, the present study suggests that health safety guidelines, mass immunization, early diagnosis, and search for effective antiviral drugs should be the approaches to fight against newer SARS-CoV-2 variants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than 170 countries have already established renewable energy targets to meet their national increasing energy demand and also to keep their environment sustainable. Due to a number of features, the use of the multi-megawatt solar photovoltaic (PV) power plants is becoming the preferred choice for escalating and updating the power systems all over the world. Moreover, the solar PV power plant is also the first choice for meeting rapidly growing demands; as it can be installed relatively quickly, say in 6–12 months, compared to that of the fossil-fuel-based plants that may require more than 4–5 years. The traditional low-voltage (288–690 V) converter-based system requires a step-up transformer and a line filter to interconnect a solar PV power plant with medium-voltage grids. Recently, the use of medium-voltage converters without a step-up transformer and a line filter has become more attractive for direct medium-voltage grid integration of solar PV power plants. This paper aims to review the necessity and the technical challenges in developing medium-voltage power electronic converters, including the converter circuit topologies and control techniques used in the development of medium-voltage converters to interconnect solar PV power plants to medium-voltage grids directly. In this paper, a comprehensive review of the current research activities and the possible future directions of research to develop medium-voltage converter technologies to provide for a cost-effective grid integration of solar PV power plants are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Tall fescue is a widely used cool season turfgrass and relatively sensitive to high temperature. Chemical compounds like melatonin (MT) and 24-epibrassinolide (EBL) have been reported to improve plant heat stress tolerance effectively. Results: In this study, we reported that MT and EBL pretreated tall fescue seedlings showed decreased reactive oxygen species (ROS), electrolyte leakage (EL) and malondialdehide (MDA), but increased chlorophyll (Chl), total protein and antioxidant enzyme activities under heat stress condition, resulting in improved plant growth. Transcriptomic profiling analysis showed that 4311 and 8395 unigenes were significantly changed after 2 h and 12 h of heat treatments, respectively. Among them, genes involved in heat stress responses, DNA, RNA and protein degradation, redox, energy metabolisms, and hormone metabolism pathways were highly induced after heat stress. Genes including FaHSFA3, FaAWPM and FaCYTC2 were significantly upregulated by both MT and EBL treatments, indicating that these genes might function as the putative target genes of MT and EBL. Conclusions: These findings indicated that heat stress caused extensively transcriptomic reprogramming of tall fescue and exogenous application of MT and EBL effectively improved thermotolerance in tall fescue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As renewable energy is widely integrated into the power system, the stochastic and intermittent power generation from renewable energy may cause system frequency deviating from the prescribed level, especially for a microgrid. In this paper, the load frequency control (LFC) of an island microgrid with photovoltaic (PV) power and electric vehicles (EVs) is investigated, where the EVs can be treated as distributed energy storages. Considering the disturbances from load change and PV power, an observer-based integral sliding mode (OISM) controller is designed to regulate the frequency back to the prescribed value, where the neural network observer is used to online estimate the PV power. Simulation studies on a benchmark microgrid system are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of OISM controller, and comparative results also demonstrate that the proposed method has a superior performance for stabilizing the frequency over the PID control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Improvement in yield quantity and quality of bitter gourd, Momordica charantia L., cannot be accomplished through traditional methods. Heterosis breeding may be used to achieve this goal. A partial diallel mating design was used to evaluate standard heterosis to increase yield and quality by identification of a unique cross combination with desirable heterosis in bitter gourd. Five parents and 16 hybrids were evaluated from Oct. 2009 to Mar. 2010. Heterotic vigor was present for earliness, yield, and quality characters among hybrids. Significant differences for all characters indicated presence of genetic variability. The heterosis was negative for days to first harvest, fruit length and diameter, and single fruit weight and positive for number of fruit/plant and fruit yield/plant. Average fruit weight ranged from 115 to 249 g; the heaviest fruit were from hybrids from the crosses P1 × P3, P2 × P3, P3 × P1, P3 × P5, and P5 × P2; hybrids from the crosses P3 × P4, P4 × P3, and P5 × P4 had the smallest fruit. The longest fruit were from hybrids from the crosses P3 × P1, P2 × P3, and P1 × P3; the shortest fruit were from hybrids from the crosses P4 × P3, P4 × P2, and P3 × P4. The highest yield was from the hybrid from the cross P3 × P5 followed by hybrids from the crosses P4 × P1 and P4 × P3. Hybrids from crosses P5 × P4, P3 × P5, and P2 × P5 had 102%, 82.6%, and 82.4% higher heterosis over the better parent, respectively, for fruit yield/plant. Based on yield contributing characters and heterotic performance hybrids from crosses P5 × P4, P3 × P5, and P2 × P5 can be used to exploit develop improved commercial lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the influence of quality-adjusted educational attainment on growth and tests whether it facilitates the transfer of technology developed at the frontier for a panel of 60 countries. Using outcomes of pathogen stress as instruments, the results show that quality-adjusted educational attainment and its interaction with distance to the frontier play important roles for growth. (JEL I20, O30, O40 ) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this work is to propose a new feature and score fusion based iris recognition approach where voting method on Multiple Classifier Selection technique has been applied. Four Discrete Hidden Markov Model classifiers output, that is, left iris based unimodal system, right iris based unimodal system, left-right iris feature fusion based multimodal system, and left-right iris likelihood ratio score fusion based multimodal system, is combined using voting method to achieve the final recognition result. CASIA-IrisV4 database has been used to measure the performance of the proposed system with various dimensions. Experimental results show the versatility of the proposed system of four different classifiers with various dimensions. Finally, recognition accuracy of the proposed system has been compared with existing N hamming distance score fusion approach proposed byMa et al., log-likelihood ratio score fusion approach proposed by Schmid et al., and single level feature fusion approach proposed by Hollingsworth et al. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the parameters of the proportional-integral (PI) controller of the wind turbine (WT) emulator, i.e., proportional and integral gain of the PI controller, are optimized using a black widow optimization algorithm (BWOA). The proposed system is developed and analyzed using MATLAB/Simulink environment. The performance of the BWOA optimized PI controller is compared with a BAT algorithm, particle swarm optimization, and genetic algorithm optimized PI controller to measure the effectiveness of the proposed control system. The developed system is tested for different operating conditions such as static wind speed settings, static pitch angle conditions, step-change in wind speed settings, and step-change in pitch angle settings. Finally, the proposed system is realized in real-time by hardware experimentations. The results of the experimentation are compared with simulation results as well. The presented simulation and hardware result shows good agreement, which confirms the effectiveness of the proposed method. Thereby, the proposed optimization-based PI-controlled wind emulator can be recommended for emulating the characteristics of any type of WT with a low-cost system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]