Animals provide benefits to agriculture through the provision of ecosystem services, but also inflict costs such as damaging crops. These benefits and costs are mostly examined independently, rather than comparing the trade-offs of animal activity in the same system and quantifying the net return from beneficial minus detrimental activities. Here, I examine the net return associated with the ac...

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES Timing of almond intake during a day may result differently in the perspectives of body composition and changes of lipid profile. The current study was conducted to compare the effects of daily almond intake as a preload versus as a snack on body composition, blood lipid profile, and oxidative and inflammation indicators among young Korean adults aged 20-39 years old. SU...

A novel therapeutic scaffolding system of engineered nanocarriers within a foam matrix for the long-term and sequential delivery of growth factors is reported. Mesoporous silica nanospheres were first functionalized to have an enlarged mesopore size (12.2nm) and aminated surface, which was then shelled by a biopolymer, poly(lactic acid) (PLA) or poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG), via electrospraying....

Triple-shelled ZnFe2O4 hollow microspheres (ZFO) as anode materials for lithium ion battery are prepared through a one-pot hydrothermal reaction using the composite solution consisting of sucrose in water and metal ions in ethylene glycol (EG), followed by different calcination processes. The architectures of ZFO micro spheres are differently synthesized through a mutual cooperation of inward a...

Mollusca is an animal phylum with vast morphological diversity and includes worm-shaped aplacophorans, snails, bivalves, and the complex cephalopods. The interrelationships of these class-level taxa are still contentious, but recent phylogenomic analyses suggest a dichotomy at the base of Mollusca, resulting in a monophyletic Aculifera (comprising the shell-less, sclerite-bearing aplacophorans ...

Despite remarkable efforts have been put into the field of Pt-shelled catalysts containing an atomically thin Pt surface layer for the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) in the last decade, further development of new Pt-shelled catalysts is still necessary. Here, a new set of Pt-shelled catalysts by subsurface alloying with early transition metals such as Mn and Fe is predicted to be a good candid...

Chinese soft-shelled turtle (Pelodiscus sinensis) is commercially cultured in East and Southeast Asia for its nutritional and medicinal values. In this study, we identified interleukin-1β (IL-1β) from Chinese soft-shelled turtle. The full-length cDNA of Pelodiscus sinensis IL-1β (tIL-1β) consists of 1529 base pairs with an 831-base-pair open reading frame, encoding 277 amino acids. The guanine-...

This study evaluated the effect of coarse or fine grinding of three forms of corn on the performance of lactating cows. Six diets, fed as total mixed rations, were identical except for the corn portion of the diet. Corn treatments were dry shelled corn, high moisture ensiled ear corn, and high moisture ensiled shelled corn, either coarsely or finely ground. The experimental design was a 6 x 6 L...

Embrittlement of many important metal alloys has been related to the accumulation of undesirable materials at grain boundaries, a condition which may be detectable through measurement of ultrasonic scattering from the material’s microstructure. Grains with decorated grain boundaries are modeled as shelled microspheres embedded in an isotropic elastic host, and a practical means of predicting sc...

Skrjabinelazia rizzoi n. sp. (Seuratoidea), from Podarcis sicula captured at Cammarata, Agrigento Province, Sicily, is distinct from the 13 known species of the genus, including Skrjabinelazio sp. Rizzo from Catania. It is identified with the following set of characters: in the male, short spicules and gubernaculum, thin body; in the female, buccal cavity with a crown of leaflets, body cuticle ...