Effect of replacing cottonseed meal with canola meal on growth performance, blood metabolites, thyroid function, and ruminal parameters of growing lambs.

The objective was to clarify the impact of replacing cottonseed meal with canola meal (CM) on growth performance, blood metabolites, thyroxin function, and ruminal parameters of growing lambs. Twenty-four growing Barki male lambs (4-5 months of age) were assigned randomly into four equal groups (6 lambs each). Four dietary treatments were the control group with 0% CM (CON) and three experimental groups where CM replaced 25% (CN1), 50% (CN2), and 75% (CN3) of cottonseed meal. There were no dietary effects (P > 0.05) on the lambs' feed intake, average daily gain, and feed conversion ratio of the lambs. The dietary CM linearly decreased the concentrations of serum total proteins (P = 0.003), albumin (P = 0.010), globulin (P = 0.011), AST (P = 0.041), and urea (P = 0.001) in growing lambs. The levels of ALT and creatinine, however, were not significantly affected by dietary treatments (P > 0.05). Furthermore, serum triiodothyronine, thyroxine, and electrolyte concentrations were similar (P > 0.05) in different dietary groups. Dietary treatments significantly affected the values of ruminal pH and ammonia at 0 h (P = 0.003 and 0.048, respectively) and 3 h (P = 0.033 and P = 0.006, respectively) postfeeding. The CN3 group showed significantly higher concentrations of ruminal ammonia at 0 and 3 h postfeeding. Furthermore, dietary CM (CN3) significantly reduced the ruminal pH values at 0 and 3 h postfeeding. Meanwhile, dietary treatments did not affect the concentration of total VFAs in the ruminal fluid. In conclusion, CM can replace the cottonseed meal (up to 75%) in lamb diets without compromising their growth performance, thyroid function, and ruminal fermentation parameters.

Effects of dietary supplementation of myco-fabricated zinc oxide nanoparticles on performance, histological changes, and tissues Zn concentration in broiler chicks.

A five weeks biological experiment was planned to investigate the impacts of dietary supplementation with zinc oxide nanoparticles (ZnONPs) synthesized by the endophytic fungus Alternaria tenuissima on productive performance, carcass traits, organ relative weights, serum biochemical parameters, histological alteration in some internal organs and concentration of this element in the serum, liver, thigh and breast muscle in broiler chicks. A total of 108 3-day-old commercial broiler chicks (Cobb 500) were individually weighed and equally distributed in a completely randomized design arrangement according to the dose of ZnONPs supplementation into 3 dietary experimental groups. There were 6 replications having 6 birds per replicate (n = 36/ treatment) for each treatment. The three experiential dietary treatments received corn-soybean meal-based diets enhanced with 0 (control), 40 and 60 mg/kg diet of ZnONPs respectively with feed and water were provided ad libitum consumption through 5 weeks life span. Present results indicated that after 5 weeks of feeding trial and as compared to control, the ZnONPs supplementation groups recorded higher body weight, improved feed consumption, feed conversion ratio and performance index. Serum biochemical analyses revealed that serum cholesterol, triglyceride, low density lipoprotein and uric acid decreased significantly, while high density lipoprotein and liver enzyme concentrations were increased significantly. Meanwhile, zinc accumulation in serum, liver and breast and thigh muscle were linearly increased with increasing zinc supplementation. It could be concluded that supplementation of ZnONPs to broiler diet at 40 or 60 mg/kg improved productive performance, birds' physiological status and the lower levels Zn (40 mg/kg diet) revealed promising results and can be used as an effective feed additive in broilers.

Towards Faster Execution of Ensemble ML Bootstrap Based Techniques.

Algorithms for ensemble methods (EM) based on bootstrap aggregation often perform copious amount of redundant computations (RC) thus limiting their practicality. Given this constraint, we propose a framework that views these algorithms as a collection of computational units (cu), a tightly coupled set of both mathematical operations and data. This view facilitates a reduction in RC (RRC), thereby allowing for faster execution plans. Inspired by the floor tiling approach in VLSI, we look to engineer solutions for RRC while possibly reconfiguring the underlying computing system's compiler technology stack. We start by showing that under the assumption that the computational system has unbounded but finite memory (i.e., the memory is large enough to hold all intermediate values) and that each cu has a uniform cost, our approach reduces to a well-studied directed bandwidth problem for the directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). Next, we consider a more realistic scenario where the computing system has limited memory and concurrent execution while still assuming a uniform cost. Using a new notion of (r,s) set cover of a DAG (nodes representing computational units and edges representing their interdependencies) we formulate the problem of reducing redundant computational steps in EM as a variation of a directed bandwidth problem. We show that the graph's minimum bandwidth is closely related to memory requirements for studying RRC. Finally, our preliminary experimental results are supportive of the proposed approach for RRC and promising that it can be applied to a broader set of algorithms in decision sciences.