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Connecting post-release mortality to the physiological stress response of large coastal sharks in a commercial longline fishery
Get PDFBycatch mortality is a major factor contributing to shark population declines. Post-release mortality (PRM) is particularly difficult to quantify, limiting the accuracy of stock assessments. We paired blood-stress physiology with animal-borne accelerometers to quantify PRM rates of sharks caught in a commercial bottom longline fishery. Blood was sampled from the same individuals that were tagged, providing direct correlation between stress physiology and animal fate for sandbar (Carcharhinus plumbeus, N = 130), blacktip (C. limbatus, N = 105), tiger (Galeocerdo cuvier, N = 52), spinner (C. brevipinna, N = 14), and bull sharks (C. leucas, N = 14). PRM rates ranged from 2% and 3% PRM in tiger and sandbar sharks to 42% and 71% PRM in blacktip and spinner sharks, respectively. Decision trees based on blood values predicted mortality with >67% accuracy in blacktip and spinner sharks, and >99% accuracy in sandbar sharks. Ninety percent of PRM occurred within 5 h after release and 59% within 2 h. Blood physiology indicated that PRM was primarily associated with acidosis and increases in plasma potassium levels. Total fishing mortality reached 62% for blacktip and 89% for spinner sharks, which may be under-estimates given that some soak times were shortened to focus on PRM. Our findings suggest that no-take regulations may be beneficial for sandbar, tiger, and bull sharks, but less effective for more susceptible species such as blacktip and spinner sharks
Effects of an Oroxylum indicum extract (Sabroxy®) on cognitive function in adults with Self-reported mild cognitive impairment: A Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Study
Get PDFBackground: Oroxylum indicum has been used in traditional Ayurvedic medicine for the prevention and treatment of several diseases and may have neuroprotective effects.
Purpose: Examine the effects of Oroxylum indicum on cognitive function in older adults with self-reported cognitive complaints.
Study Design: Two-arm, parallel-group, 12-week, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial.
Methods: Eighty-two volunteers received either 500 mg, twice daily of a standardized Oroxylum indicum extract or placebo. Outcome measures included several computer-based cognitive tasks, the Control, Autonomy, Self-Realization, and Pleasure scale (CASP-19), Cognitive Failures Questionnaire (CFQ), and the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA). Changes in the concentration of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) were also examined.
Results: Compared to the placebo, Oroxylum indicum was associated with greater improvements in episodic memory, and on several computer-based cognitive tasks such as immediate word recall and numeric working memory, and a faster rate of learning on the location learning task. However, there were no other significant differences in performance on the other assessed cognitive tests, the MoCA total score, or other self-report questionnaires. BDNF concentrations increased significantly in both groups, with no statistically-significant between-group differences. Oroxylum indicum was well tolerated except for an increased tendency for mild digestive complaints and headaches.
Conclusion: The results of this first human trial on the cognitive-enhancing effects of Oroxylum indicum suggest that it is a promising herbal candidate for the improvement of cognitive function in older adults with self-reported cognitive complaints
New and emerging insect pest and disease threats to forest plantations in Vietnam
Get PDFThe planted forest area in Vietnam increased from 3.0 to 4.4 million hectares in the period 2010–2020, but the loss of productivity from pests and diseases continues to be a problem. During this period, frequent and systematic plantation forest health surveys were conducted on 12 native and 4 exotic genera of trees as well as bamboo across eight forest geographic regions of Vietnam. Damage caused by insects and pathogens was quantified in the field and laboratory in Hanoi. The threats of greatest concern were from folivores (Antheraea frithi, Arthroschista hilaralis, Atteva fabriciella, Hieroglyphus tonkinensis, Lycaria westermanni,Krananda semihyalina, and Moduza procris), wood borers (Batocera lineolata, Euwallacea fornicatus, Tapinolachnus lacordairei, Xyleborus perforans, and Xystrocera festiva), sap-sucking insects (Aulacaspis tubercularis and Helopeltis theivora) and pathogens (Ceratocystis manginecans, Fusarium solani, and Phytophthora acaciivora). The number of new and emerging pests and pathogens increased over time from 2 in 2011 to 17 in 2020, as the damage became more widespread. To manage these pests and diseases, it is necessary to further invest in the selection and breeding of resistant genotypes, improve nursery hygiene and silvicultural operations, and adopt integrated pest management schemes. Consideration should be given to developing forest health monitoring protocols for forest reserves and other special-purpose forests
The epidemiology of swine influenza
Get PDFGlobally swine influenza is one of the most important diseases of the pig industry, with various subtypes of swine influenza virus co-circulating in the field. Swine influenza can not only cause large economic losses for the pig industry but can also lead to epidemics or pandemics in the human population. We provide an overview of the pathogenic characteristics of the disease, diagnosis, risk factors for the occurrence on pig farms, impact on pigs and humans and methods to control it. This review is designed to promote understanding of the epidemiology of swine influenza which will benefit the control of the disease in both pigs and humans
Adversarial point cloud perturbations against 3D object detection in autonomous driving systems
No full textDeep learning models have been demonstrated vulnerable to adversarial attacks even with imperceptible perturbations. As such, the reliability of existing deep neural networks-based autonomous driving systems can suffer. However, deep 3D models have applications in various Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) with safety-critical requirements, particularly autonomous driving systems. In this paper, the robustness of deep 3D object detection models under adversarial point cloud perturbations has been investigated. A novel method is developed to generate 3D adversarial examples from point cloud perturbations, which are common due to the intrinsic characteristics of the data captured by 3D sensors, e.g., LiDAR. The generation of adversarial samples is supervised by a dual loss, which constitutes an adversarial loss and a perturbation loss. The adversarial loss produces a point cloud with the property of aggressiveness, while the perturbation loss enforces the produced point cloud subject to visual imperception. We demonstrate that the method can successfully attack 3D object detection models in most cases, and expose their vulnerability to physical-world attacks in the form of point cloud perturbations. We perform a thorough evaluation of popular deep 3D object detectors in an adversarial setting on the KITTI vision benchmark. Experimental results show that current deep 3D object detection models are susceptible to adversarial attacks in the context of autonomous driving, and their performances are degraded by a large margin in the presence of adversarial point clouds generated by the proposed method
Current and future considerations for shark conservation in the Northeast and Eastern Central Pacific Ocean
No full textSharks are iconic and ecologically important predators found in every ocean. Because of their ecological role as predators, some considered apex predators, and concern over the stability of their populations due to direct and indirect overfishing, there has been an increasing amount of work focussed on shark conservation, and other elasmobranchs such as skates and rays, around the world. Here we discuss many aspects of current shark science and conservation and the path to the future of shark conservation in the Northeastern and Eastern Central Pacific. We explore their roles in ecosystems as keystone species; the conservation measures and laws in place at the international, national, regional and local level; the conservation status of sharks and rays in the region, fisheries for sharks in the Northcentral Pacific specifically those that target juveniles and the implications to shark conservation; a conservation success story: the recovery of Great White Sharks in the Northeast Pacific; public perceptions of sharks and the roles zoos and aquariums play in shark conservation; and the path to the future of shark conservation that requires bold partnerships, local stakeholders and innovative measures
Improved Scalable Green Synthesis of Noble Metallic Polygonal Micro/Nano particles from Waste Macadamia Nut Shells
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Computed tomographic assessment of lung aeration at different positive end-expiratory pressures in a porcine model of intra-abdominal hypertension and lung injury
No full textBackground
Intra-abdominal hypertension (IAH) is common in critically ill patients and is associated with increased morbidity and mortality. High positive end-expiratory pressures (PEEP) can reverse lung volume and oxygenation decline caused by IAH, but its impact on alveolar overdistension is less clear. We aimed to find a PEEP range that would be high enough to reduce atelectasis, while low enough to minimize alveolar overdistention in the presence of IAH and lung injury.
Methods
Five anesthetized pigs received standardized anesthesia and mechanical ventilation. Peritoneal insufflation of air was used to generate intra-abdominal pressure of 27 cmH2O. Lung injury was created by intravenous oleic acid. PEEP levels of 5, 12, 17, 22, and 27 cmH2O were applied. We performed computed tomography and measured arterial oxygen levels, respiratory mechanics, and cardiac output 5 min after each new PEEP level. The proportion of overdistended, normally aerated, poorly aerated, and non-aerated atelectatic lung tissue was calculated based on Hounsfield units.
Results
PEEP decreased the proportion of poorly aerated and atelectatic lung, while increasing normally aerated lung. Overdistension increased with each incremental increase in applied PEEP. “Best PEEP” (respiratory mechanics or oxygenation) was higher than the “optimal CT inflation PEEP range” (difference between lower inflection points of atelectatic and overdistended lung) in healthy and injured lungs.
Conclusions
Our findings in a large animal model suggest that titrating a PEEP to respiratory mechanics or oxygenation in the presence of IAH is associated with increased alveolar overdistension
PD-Net: Point Dropping Network for Flexible Adversarial Example Generation with Lo Regularization
No full textIt is a challenging task to generate adversarial point clouds, considering the irregular structure of a point cloud, the large search space, and the requirement of imperception to humans. In this paper, a flexible adversarial point cloud generation method, named Point Dropping Network (PD-Net), is proposed, which can be trained to craft adversarial examples in a single forward pass. The network is designed to launch untargeted black-box attacks to deep 3D models through point dropping regularized by the L0 norm, in contrast to the widely adopted point perturbation methods. To enable incorporation into a deep neural network, the probability of a point to be dropped, which can be described by a Bernoulli distribution, is approximated by a hard concrete distribution. The network of PD-Net consists of an encoder and a decoder, where the former encodes geometric information of each point and the latter learns to drop points from their local features in an unsupervised way. Experiments on two popular deep 3D models (including PointNet and PointNet++) show that the proposed PD-Net degrades the recognition accuracy to a large extent and achieves a high flexibility at the same time