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Earthquake prediction is an extraordinarily stochastic process. Determining the occurrence time, location of epicenter and magnitude of a coming earthquake in the following month is an extremely difficult task. Nowadays, some geophysical, statistical and machine learning methods are adopted to predict earth-quakes, however, for the insufficient medium-large seismic data, their results are not satisfactory. Due to there is no obvious empirical relationship between seismicity features, magnitude and location of a coming earthquake in a particular time window, an earthquake prediction approach based on danger theory is proposed in this paper. It extracts eight indicators calculated from earthquake data for recent years in Sichuan and surroundings by Gutenberg-Richter(GR) inverse power-law, and predicts quakes with magnitude lager than 4.5 during the following month by numerical differential based Dendritic Cell Algorithm (ndDCA). We compare this approach with six state-of-art earthquake prediction algorithms. Overall our algorithm yields the encouraging results in all the qualified parameters assessed, and it provides technical support for the application of earthquake prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feeding a high concentrate (HC) diet is a widely used strategy for supporting high milk yields, yet it may cause certain metabolic disorders. This study aimed to investigate the changes in milk production and hepatic metabolism in goats fed different proportions of concentrate in the diet for 10 weeks. In total, 12 mid-lactating goats were randomly assigned to an HC diet (65% concentrate of dry matter, n=6) or a low concentrate (LC) diet (35% concentrate of dry matter, n=6). Compared with LC, HC goats produced greater amounts of volatile fatty acids and produced more milk and milk lactose, fat and protein (P<0.01). HC goats showed a greater concentration of ATP, NAD, plasma non-esterified fatty acids and hepatic triglycerides than LC goats (P<0.05). Real-time PCR results showed that messenger RNA (mRNA) expression of gluconeogenic genes, namely, glucose-6-phosphatase, pyruvate carboxylase and phosphoenolpyruvate carboxykinase were significantly up-regulated and accompanied greater gluconeogenic enzyme activities in the liver of HC goats. Moreover, the expression of hepatic lipogenic genes including sterol regulatory element-binding protein 1c, fatty acid synthase and diacylglycerol acyltransferase mRNA was also up-regulated by the HC diet (P<0.05). HC goats had greater hepatic phosphorylation of AMP-activated protein kinase than LC (P<0.05). Furthermore, histone-3-lysine-27-acetylation contributed to this elevation of gluconeogenic gene expression. These results indicate that lactating goats fed an HC diet for 10 weeks produced more milk, which was associated with up-regulated gene expression and enzyme activities involved in hepatic gluconeogenesis and lipogenesis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]