Infection of the mammary gland with environmental bacterial pathogens is the most significant udder health problem facing the dairy industry in North America. Forty years ago, Neave et al. (1966) stated that the rate of new intra-mammary infection is related to the number of bacteria that the teat end is exposed to, and several studies have made associations between clean housing, clean cows an...

The present study represents"The Fislab package of programs meant to develop the fuzzy regulators in the Scilab environment"in which we present some general issues, usage requirements and the working mode of the Fislab environment. In the second part of the article some features of the Scilab functions from the Fislab package are described.

Recent advances in biology and technology have significantly improved our ability to produce veterinary biologicals of high purity, efficacy and safety, virtually anywhere in the world. At the same time, increasing trade and comprehensive trade agreements, such as the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT: now the World Trade Organisation [WTO]), have put pressure on...

For reverse genetic approaches inactivation or selective modification of genes are required to elucidate their putative function. Sulfolobus acidocaldarius is a thermoacidophilic Crenarchaeon which grows optimally at 76°C and pH 3. As many antibiotics do not withstand these conditions the development of a genetic system in this organism is dependent on auxotrophies. Therefore we constructed a p...

R ecently, great technological progress has been achieved in spermatogonial stem cell (SSC) research. In this issue of PNAS, Kanatsu-Shinohara et al. (1) describe yet another important novel use for SSCs. Based on a successful long-term culture protocol for mouse SSCs, this group has designed a way to produce knockout mice from SSCs with an efficiency that is at least comparable with that of em...

Despite the extensive body of evidence about the health benefits and cost-savings of contraception coverage, women's health care advocates are bracing themselves for the possibility that contraceptive care will lose the political debate as a no cost-sharing preventive service under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). As a second alternative to no cost-sharing, the Health Resources and Services Admin...

The black box specification, developed by Harlan Mills, addresses the problem of software errors that result from failing to properly specify a response for an input scenario. Each black box models how an artifact responds to a particular input from its environment. This response depends on both the current input and the entire history of interactions it has had with the environment. We have ob...

We describe an integrated tool-box to identify regulatory RNA elements. The RNA analyzer collects general and specific information on any submitted RNA sequence or batch of sequences in FASTA format. It determines and rapidly scans the different regions of an RNA (including 5' UTR, CDS, 3' UTR in mRNA) and screens for specific RNA signals (in each of these regions, e.g. polyA-site, AU rich regi...

Cadastres are a core component of land administration systems and an important infrastructure which facilitates the implementation of land use policies. While most cadastral systems traditionally have a primary objective of supporting the operation of land markets, they increasingly play a key role in a broader land administration infrastructure which supports economic development, environmenta...