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This study evaluated different herbage allowances from mid to late pregnancy on pre- and postpartum physiological responses, milk production, and the performance of Nellore cows and the preweaning growth of their female offspring. Sixty multiparous Nellore cows were blocked by their body weight (BW; 425 ± 36 kg) and body condition score (BCS; 3.67 ± 0.23, scale 1-5) and randomly allocated to twelve pastures. Treatments consisted of two different herbage allowances (HA) during pregnancy: low HA (LHA; 2.80 kg DM/kg of BW) and high HA (HHA; 7.60 kg DM/kg of BW). Both treatment groups were fed 1 g/kg BW of a protein supplement. After calving, all cow-calf pairs were combined in a single group. The effects of maternal treatment × day of the study were detected for herbage mass and allowance, the stocking rate and forage crude protein, and for cow BW, BCS, and carcass measures ( p < 0.01). Milk yield corrected to 4% fat, while the levels of fat total solids and cow plasma IGF-1 and urea were different ( p ≤ 0.04) between treatments. HHA offspring was heavier ( p ≤ 0.05) at 120 days and at weaning. A high herbage allowance can be implemented from mid-gestation until calving to increase cow prepartum performance, post-partum milk yield and composition, and positively modulate female offspring preweaning growth.

Two experiments were conducted to determine the potential for the essential oil blend Agolin Ruminant L (Agolin) to reduce enteric methane (CH4) emissions from beef cattle when delivered via drinking water. Experiment 1 evaluated aqueous solutions of Agolin (50 mg/L) and a nonprotein nitrogen and mineral solution (uPRO ORANGE [uPRO]; 1.7 mL/L) individually and in combination, where Agolin was added to concentrated uPRO at 3%, 4.5%, and 6% Agolin (w/w) prior to dilution with water at 1.7 mL/L, for a total of 5 treatments. These were incubated for 48 h with a medium-quality Rhodes grass (Chloris gayana) hay substrate, with gas production, CH4 concentration in gas, and digestibility measured in vitro. In experiment 2, Droughtmaster steers (n = 24) were fed a basal diet of Rhodes grass hay and were allocated to 1 of 3 water treatments (n = 8 per treatment) supplemented with either uPRO (2.27 mL uPRO/L water), or 1 of 2 inclusion rates of Agolin in combination with uPRO (2.27 mL uPRO and 6 µL Agolin/L water or 2.27 mL uPRO and 24 µL Agolin/L water) with enteric CH4 emissions, feed and water intake, and live-weight gain (LWG) measured over 56 d. In experiment 1, the inclusion of Agolin in uPRO at 6% (w/w) resulted in a reduction in CH4 production (15.8%; P = 0.003) and the proportion of CH4 in the gas produced (24.5%; P < 0.001). In experiment 2, steers consuming the lower quantity of Agolin via drinking water had a 16.4% (P = 0.0027) reduction in CH4 production over the experiment, declining from 140 g/d during week 1 to 117 g/d in week 8. This inclusion rate of Agolin in the drinking water also resulted in a 25 g (17.6%) CH4/d decrease in emissions by steers compared to control steers (P = 0.0205). However, no significant differences in CH4 yield (g CH4/kg dry matter intake), or CH4 intensity (g CH4/kg LWG) by steers were observed between treatments. These results demonstrated that Agolin reduces CH4 emissions when mixed in an aqueous solution under in vitro and in vivo conditions, providing a potential method to reduce enteric CH4 emissions from cattle in extensive production systems., (© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Society of Animal Science.)

Multiple-spin coupling is a key tool for investigating magnetic quantum systems. In particular, models with four-spin interactions became of great interest since they have been applied to describe material properties such as superconductivity. In this framework, the dynamics of the spin-1/2 Ising two-leg ladder with four-spin plaquette interaction in a transverse field is investigated. By means of the recurrence relations method, the first four recurrants are determined exactly for the general model, while five exact recurrants are calculated for two particular models. In all cases, higher-order recurrants are computed through extrapolation to obtain time-dependent autocorrelation functions and spectral densities in the long-time regime and infinite-temperature limit. It is found that the relaxation functions decay slower than the expected behavior of the one-dimensional transverse Ising model. The spectral lines, characterized by a Lorentzian behavior in the central body and a Gaussian shape in the tails, display exchange narrowing as the coupling intensities increase.

Background and Objective: In Pervasive Healthcare, novel information and communication technologies are applied to support the provision of health services anywhere, at anytime and to anyone. Since health systems may offer their health records in different electronic formats, the openEHR Foundation prescribes the use of archetypes for describing clinical knowledge in order to achieve semantic interoperability between these systems. Software agents have been applied to simulate human skills in some healthcare procedures. This paper presents a methodology, based on the use of openEHR archetypes and agent technology, which aims to overcome the weaknesses typically found in legacy healthcare systems, thereby adding value to the systems., Methods: This methodology was applied in the design of an agent-based system, which was used in a realistic healthcare scenario in which a medical staff meeting to prepare a cardiac surgery has been supported. We conducted experiments with this system in a distributed environment composed by three cardiology clinics and a center of cardiac surgery, all located in the city of Marília (São Paulo, Brazil). We evaluated this system according to the Technology Acceptance Model., Results: The case study confirmed the acceptance of our agent-based system by healthcare professionals and patients, who reacted positively with respect to the usefulness of this system in particular, and with respect to task delegation to software agents in general. The case study also showed that a software agent-based interface and a tools-based alternative must be provided to the end users, which should allow them to perform the tasks themselves or to delegate these tasks to other people., Conclusions: A Pervasive Healthcare model requires efficient and secure information exchange between healthcare providers. The proposed methodology allows designers to build communication systems for the message exchange among heterogeneous healthcare systems, and to shift from systems that rely on informal communication of actors to a more automated and less error-prone agent-based system. Our methodology preserves significant investment of many years in the legacy systems and allows developers to extend them adding new features to these systems, by providing proactive assistance to the end-users and increasing the user mobility with an appropriate support., (Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.)