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This study was carried out to determine the pathogen-causing diarrhoea in sheep Ovis aries in the Qinghai Tibetan Plateau Area, China. A trophozoite was identified as species of ciliate alveolates infecting the sheep based on morphological characteristics examined by microscope. It was mostly spherical, colourless and transparent, with many vesicles. Macronucleus and contractile vacuoles could not be distinguished. Size of the trophozoite was 80-180×70-150 µm and its surface was covered with cilia. Molecular analysis based on sequences of 18S rRNA and ITS genes confirmed the ciliate species as Balantidium coli. According to the literature, there have been many epidemiological investigations of B. coli infection in pigs, monkeys and humans. To our knowledge, this was the first report of B. coli infections in sheep in the Qinghai Tibetan Plateau Area of China, or eleswhere around the world. Importantly, the sheep case was rare but raised our concern that B. coli may spread across species and expand its host range. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Six cystic metacestodes were found in the abdominal muscles of a wild rabbit, Lepus sinensis, in China. The coenurus contained one or more scolices armed with hooklets. Mitochondrial cox1 (1,623 bp) confirmed 98% homology with cox1 of Taenia serialis. This is the first report of T. serialis infection in an intermediate host in the Qinghai Tibetan Plateau Area, China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the Boussinesq approximation, the vortex in the boundary layer is assumed to be axisymmetrical and thermal-wind balanced system forced by diabatic heating and friction, and is solved as an initial-value problem of linearized vortex equation set in cylindrical coordinates. The impacts of thermal forcing on the flow field structure of vortex are analyzed. It is found that thermal forcing has significant impacts on the flow field structure, and the material representative forms of these impacts are closely related to the radial distribution of heating. The discussion for the analytical solutions for the vortex in the boundary layer can explain some main structures of the vortex over the Tibetan Plateau. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A hydrocyclone, as a common liquid/solid grading instrument, was chosen to separate calcium sulfate particles from crude carnallite during the KCl production process on the Tibetan Plateau in China, because CaSO4particles are independent of KCl particles and have a smaller particle size distribution. The local altitude on the Tibetan Plateau in China is over 3000 m, so the effects of low atmospheric pressure on the separation performance of the hydrocyclone should be considered. In this article, the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation technique was used to investigate the hydrodynamics and particles separation performance of an industrial hydrocyclone with a 428-mm diameter at both plain and plateau atmospheric pressures. In this CFD approach, the Reynolds stress model (RSM) was used to describe the turbulent fluid flow, the volume of fluid (VOF) multiphase model was used to simulate the interface between the liquid phase and the air core, and the stochastic Lagrangian model was used to track the particle flow. The mathematical models deveoped for the industrial hydrocyclone were tested by comparing the predicted results with the flow fields measured by Hsieh (Ph.D. Thesis, The University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, 1988). According to the simulation results, the environmental atmospheric pressures on the plain and plateau had effects mainly on the flow field inside the air core and near the interface between the air core and the liquid phase. It was found the direction of the axial velocity on the cylinder part and the values of the tangential velocity changed under the different environmental atmospheric pressures. When the industrial hydrocyclone was operated in the plateau environment, the separation efficiency for small particles decreased about 10% at the overflow, which was not good for CaSO4removal, but there was no effect on the particles size larger than 350 μm, and more energy was consumed, although the difference in the split ratio was small. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]