ALBERT

Description: This study aimed to investigate the effects of dietary fibre sources on the gut microbiota in suckling piglets, and to test the hypothesis that a moderate increase of dietary fibre may affect the gut microbiota during the suckling period. Suckling piglets were fed different fibre-containing diets or a control diet from postnatal day 7 to 22. Digesta samples from cecum, proximal colon and distal colon were used for Pig Intestinal Tract Chip analysis. The data showed that the effects of fibre-containing diet on the gut microbiota differed in the fibre source and gut location. The alfalfa diet increased Clostridium cluster XIVb and Sporobacter termitidis in the cecum compared to the pure cellulose diet. Compared to the control diet, the alfalfa diet also increased Coprococcus eutactus in the distal colon, while the pure cellulose diet decreased Eubacterium pyruvativorans in the cecum. The pure cellulose diet increased Prevotella ruminicola compared to the wheat bran diet. Interestingly, the alfalfa group had the lowest abundance of the potential pathogen Streptococcus suis in the cecum and distal colon. These results indicated that a moderate increase in dietary fibres affected the microbial composition in suckling piglets, and that the alfalfa inclusion produced some beneficial effects on the microbial communities.

Description: Dynamic epigenetic modifications play a key role in mediating the expression of genes required for neuronal development. We previously identified nitric oxide (NO) as a signaling molecule that mediates S-nitrosylation of histone deacetylase 2 (HDAC2) and epigenetic changes in neurons. Here, we show that HDAC2 nitrosylation regulates neuronal radial migration...

Description: Efficient irrigation technologies, which seem to promise reduced production costs and water consumption in heavily irrigated areas, may instead be driving increased irrigation use in areas that were not traditionally irrigated. As a result, the total dependence on supplemental irrigation for crop production and revenue is steadily increasing across the contiguous United States. Quantifying this dependence has been hampered by a lack of comprehensive irrigated and dryland yield and harvested area data outside of major irrigated regions, despite the importance and long history of irrigation applications in agriculture. This study used a linear regression model to disaggregate lumped agricultural statistics and estimate average irrigated and dryland yields at the state level for five major row crops: corn, cotton, hay, soybeans, and wheat. For 1945–2015, we quantified crop production, irrigation enhancement revenue, and irrigated and dryland areas in both intensively irrigated and marginally-dependent states, where both irrigated and dryland farming practices are implemented. In 2015, we found that irrigating just the five commodity crops enhanced revenue by ~$7 billion across all states with irrigation. In states with both irrigated and dryland practices, 23% of total produced area relied on irrigation, resulting in 7% more production than from dryland practices. There was a clear response to increasing biofuel demand, with the addition of more than 3.6 million ha of irrigated corn and soybeans in the last decade in marginally-dependent states. Since 1945, we estimate that yield enhancement due to irrigation has resulted in over $465 billion in increased revenue across the contiguous United States (CONUS). Example applications of this dataset include estimating historical water use, evaluating the effects of environmental policies, developing new resource management strategies, economic risk analyses, and developing tools for farmer decision making.

Description: Extragalactic background light (EBL) anisotropy traces variations in the total production of photons over cosmic history and may contain faint, extended components missed in galaxy point-source surveys. Infrared EBL fluctuations have been attributed to primordial galaxies and black holes at the epoch of reionization (EOR) or, alternately, intrahalo light (IHL) from stars tidally stripped from their parent galaxies at low redshift. We report new EBL anisotropy measurements from a specialized sounding rocket experiment at 1.1 and 1.6 micrometers. The observed fluctuations exceed the amplitude from known galaxy populations, are inconsistent with EOR galaxies and black holes, and are largely explained by IHL emission. The measured fluctuations are associated with an EBL intensity that is comparable to the background from known galaxies measured through number counts and therefore a substantial contribution to the energy contained in photons in the cosmos.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Zemcov, Michael -- Smidt, Joseph -- Arai, Toshiaki -- Bock, James -- Cooray, Asantha -- Gong, Yan -- Kim, Min Gyu -- Korngut, Phillip -- Lam, Anson -- Lee, Dae Hee -- Matsumoto, Toshio -- Matsuura, Shuji -- Nam, Uk Won -- Roudier, Gael -- Tsumura, Kohji -- Wada, Takehiko -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2014 Nov 7;346(6210):732-5. doi: 10.1126/science.1258168.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA. Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Pasadena, CA 91109, USA. ; Theoretical Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, USA. ; Department of Space Astronomy and Astrophysics, Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS), Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Sagamihara, Kanagawa 252-5210, Japan. Department of Physics, Graduate School of Science, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan. ; Department of Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA. Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Pasadena, CA 91109, USA. jjb@astro.caltech.edu. ; Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, USA. ; Department of Physics and Astronomy, Seoul National University, Seoul 151-742, Korea. ; Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Pasadena, CA 91109, USA. Department of Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA. ; Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA. Department of Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA. ; Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI), Daejeon 305-348, Korea. ; Department of Space Astronomy and Astrophysics, Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS), Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Sagamihara, Kanagawa 252-5210, Japan. Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica, Taipei 10617, Taiwan, Republic of China. ; Department of Space Astronomy and Astrophysics, Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS), Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Sagamihara, Kanagawa 252-5210, Japan. ; Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Pasadena, CA 91109, USA. ; Frontier Research Institute for Interdisciplinary Science, Tohoku University, Sendai, Miyagi, 980-8578, Japan.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25378620" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉

Description: Unresolved anisotropies of the cosmic near-infrared background radiation are expected to have contributions from the earliest galaxies during the epoch of reionization and from faint, dwarf galaxies at intermediate redshifts. Previous measurements were unable to pinpoint conclusively the dominant origin because they did not sample spatial scales that were sufficiently large to distinguish between these two possibilities. Here we report a measurement of the anisotropy power spectrum from subarcminute to one-degree angular scales, and find the clustering amplitude to be larger than predicted by the models based on the two existing explanations. As the shot-noise level of the power spectrum is consistent with that expected from faint galaxies, a new source population on the sky is not necessary to explain the observations. However, a physical mechanism that increases the clustering amplitude is needed. Motivated by recent results related to the extended stellar light profile in dark-matter haloes, we consider the possibility that the fluctuations originate from intrahalo stars of all galaxies. We find that the measured power spectrum can be explained by an intrahalo light fraction of 0.07 to 0.2 per cent relative to the total luminosity in dark-matter haloes of 10(9) to 10(12) solar masses at redshifts of about 1 to 4.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Cooray, Asantha -- Smidt, Joseph -- De Bernardis, Francesco -- Gong, Yan -- Stern, Daniel -- Ashby, Matthew L N -- Eisenhardt, Peter R -- Frazer, Christopher C -- Gonzalez, Anthony H -- Kochanek, Christopher S -- Kozlowski, Szymon -- Wright, Edward L -- England -- Nature. 2012 Oct 25;490(7421):514-6. doi: 10.1038/nature11474.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Irvine, California 92697, USA. acooray@uci.edu〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23099405" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉