Dewatering well assessment for the highway drainage system at four sites in the East St. Louis area, Illinois: FY 92 Phase 9

"Prepared for the Illinois Department of Transportation.

Dewatering well assessment for the highway drainage system at five sites in the East St. Louis area, Illinois: FY 94 Phase 11

"Prepared for the Illinois Department of Transportation.

Dewatering well assessment for the highway drainage system at four sites in the East St. Louis area, Illinois: FY 93 Phase 10

"Prepared for the Illinois Department of Transportation.

Rapidly rotating plane layer convection with zonal flow

The onset of convection in a rapidly rotating layer in which a thermal wind is present is studied. Diffusive effects are included. The main motivation is from convection in planetary interiors, where thermal winds are expected due to temperature variations on the core-mantle boundary. The system admits both convective instability and baroclinic instability. We find a smooth transition between the two types of modes, and investigate where the transition region between the two types of instability occurs in parameter space. The thermal wind helps to destabilise the convective modes. Baroclinic instability can occur when the applied vertical temperature gradient is stable, and the critical Rayleigh number is then negative. Long wavelength modes are the first to become unstable. Asymptotic analysis is possible for the transition region and also for long wavelength instabilities, and the results agree well with our numerical solutions. We also investigate how the instabilities in this system relate to the classical baroclinic instability in the Eady problem. We conclude by noting that baroclinic instabilities in the Earth's core arising from heterogeneity in the lower mantle could possibly drive a dynamo even if the Earth's core were stably stratified and so not convecting.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figure

Collecting genetic material from beef cattle (2005)

The beef cattle industry has long awaited the development of genetic tests to assist producers in breeding selection and management and to improve the marketability of cattle. Currently, there are only a handful of genetic tests commercially available for beef cattle. Beef producers interested in using genetic testing to improve their breeding stock need to know how to collect and store various genetic materials for testing.New February 2005 -- Extension website

Computing and applying atomic regulons to understand gene expression and regulation

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fmicb.2016.01819/full#supplementary-materialUnderstanding gene function and regulation is essential for the interpretation prediction and ultimate design of cell responses to changes in the environment. An important step toward meeting the challenge of understanding gene function and regulation is the identification of sets of genes that are always co-expressed. These gene sets Atomic Regulons ARs represent fundamental units of function within a cell and could be used to associate genes of unknown function with cellular processes and to enable rational genetic engineering of cellular systems. Here we describe an approach for inferring ARs that leverages large-scale expression data sets gene context and functional relationships among genes. We computed ARs for Escherichia coli based on 907 gene expression experiments and compared our results with gene clusters produced by two prevalent data-driven methods: hierarchical clustering and k-means clustering. We compared ARs and purely data-driven gene clusters to the curated set of regulatory interactions for E. coli found in RegulonDB showing that ARs are more consistent with gold standard regulons than are data-driven gene clusters. We further examined the consistency of ARs and data-driven gene clusters in the context of gene interactions predicted by Context Likelihood of Relatedness CLR analysis finding that the ARs show better agreement with CLR predicted interactions. We determined the impact of increasing amounts of expression data on AR construction and find that while more data improve ARs it is not necessary to use the full set of gene expression experiments available for E. coli to produce high quality ARs. In order to explore the conservation of co-regulated gene sets across different organisms we computed ARs for Shewanella oneidensis Pseudomonas aeruginosa Thermus thermophilus and Staphylococcus aureus each of which represents increasing degrees of phylogenetic distance from E. coli. Comparison of the organism-specific ARs showed that the consistency of AR gene membership correlates with phylogenetic distance but there is clear variability in the regulatory networks of closely related organisms. As large scale expression data sets become increasingly common for model and non-model organisms comparative analyses of atomic regulons will provide valuable insights into fundamental regulatory modules used across the bacterial domain.JF acknowledges funding from [SFRH/BD/70824/2010] of the FCT (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) PhD program. CH and PW were supported by the National Science Foundation under grant number EFRI-MIKS-1137089. RT was supported by the Genomic Science Program (GSP), Office of Biological and Environmental Research (OBER), U.S. Department of Energy(DOE),and his work is a contribution of the Pacific North west National Laboratory (PNNL) Foundational Scientific Focus Area. This work was partially supported by an award from the National Science Foundation to MD, AB, NT, and RO (NSFABI-0850546). This work was also supported by the United States National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Service [Contract No. HHSN272201400027C]

Phenotypic relationships between docility and reproduction in Angus heifers

Citation: White, K. L., Bormann, J. M., Olson, K. C., Jaeger, J. R., Johnson, S., Downey, B., . . . Weaber, R. L. (2016). Phenotypic relationships between docility and reproduction in Angus heifers. Journal of Animal Science, 94(2), 483-489. doi:10.2527/jas2015-9327The objective of this study was to elucidate the phenotypic relationships between docility and first-service AI conception rate in heifers. Data (n = 337) collected from 3 cooperator herds in Kansas at the start of synchronization protocol included exit velocity (EV), chute score (CS), fecal cortisol (FC), and blood serum cortisol (BC). Data were analyzed using logistic regression with 30-d pregnancy rate as the dependent variable. The model included the fixed effect of contemporary group and the covariates FC, BC, EV, CS, BW, and age. Correlation coefficients were calculated between all continuous traits. Pregnancy rate ranged from 34% to 60% between herds. Blood cortisol positively correlated with EV (r = 0.22, P < 0.01), negatively correlated with age (r = -0.12, P < 0.03), and tended to be negatively correlated with BW (r = -0.10, P = 0.09). Exit velocity was positively correlated with CS (r = 0.24, P < 0.01) and negatively correlated with BW (r = -0.15, P < 0.01) and age (r = -0.12, P < 0.03). Chute score negatively correlated with age (r = -0.14, P < 0.01), and age and BW were moderately positively correlated (r = 0.42, P < 0.01), as expected. Older, heavier animals generally had better temperament, as indicated by lower BC, EV, and CS. The power of our test could detect no significant predictors of 30-d pregnancy for the combined data from all ranches. When the data were divided by ranch, CS (P < 0.03) and BW (P < 0.01) were both significant predictors for 30-d pregnancy for ranch 1. The odds ratio estimate for CS has an inverse relationship with pregnancy, meaning that a 1-unit increase in average CS will reduce the probability of pregnancy at ranch 1 by 48.1%. Weight also has a negative impact on pregnancy because a 1-kg increase in BW will decrease the probability of pregnancy by 2.2%. Fertility is a complex trait that depends on many factors; our data suggest that docility is 1 factor that warrants further investigation

Liberal market economies, business, and political finance: Britain under New Labour

The extent and nature of business financing of parties is an important feature of political finance. Britain’s transparent and permissive regulatory system provides an excellent opportunity to study business financing of parties. Business donations have been very important to the Conservative party over the last decade, and of only marginal importance to Labour. Unlike other Conservative contributors, business donors are more likely to contribute when the party is popular. In contrast to the previous period of Conservative government, the biggest British businesses tended to abstain from political finance under New Labour. However, their bias towards the Conservatives is affected by the party’s popularity and the closeness of an election. Britain shares the political importance of business financing of parties and its mixture of ideological and pragmatic motivations with other liberal market economies. However, in Britain the bias towards the right is much stronger and the role of big business more marginal