Effects of Bacillus subtilis on in vitro ruminal fermentation and methane production.

The objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of a proprietary strain of a Bacillus subtilis on in vitro ruminal fermentation and methane production in batch culture serum bottles. One hundred forty-nine batch culture bottles were used in a complete randomized block design. The arrangement of treatments was a 3 × 3 × 4 factorial to evaluate the effects of inoculum, time, diet, and their respective interactions. There were three experimental runs total, where the run was used as block. Inoculum treatments were 1.85 mg/mL of microcrystalline cellulose (CON); 10 billion B. subtilis plus microcrystalline cellulose (A1); and 60 billion B. subtilis plus microcrystalline cellulose (A2). Diet treatments were 0.50 g of early lactation diet (E, 30% starch), mid-lactation diet (M, 25% starch), or dry cow diet (D, 18% starch). The combination resulted in total of nine treatments. Each treatment had five replicates, two of which were used to determine nutrient degradability at 24 and 48 h after inoculation, and three were used to determine pH, ammonia nitrogen (NH3-N), volatile fatty acids, lactate, total gas, and methane production at 3, 6, 24, and 48 h after inoculation. Fixed effects of inoculum, diet, and their interaction were tested using the GLIMMIX procedure of SAS. Significance was declared at P ≤ 0.05. We observed that, compared to control, the supplementation of B. subtilis, decreased the production of acetate and propionate, while increasing the production of butyrate, iso-butyrate, valerate, iso-valerate, and caproate within each respective diet. Additionally, the total methane production exhibited mixed responses depending on the diet type. Overall, the inclusion of B. subtilis under in vitro conditions shows the potential to reduce ruminal methane production when supplemented with a mid-lactation diet, constituting a possible methane mitigation additive for dairy cattle diets.

Speed heterogeneity and accident reduction in mixed traffic.

Various studies have investigated the relationship between speed and accidents using different definitions of speed variation. This research considers the speed in mixed traffic as heterogeneous based on the vehicle categories. This research aims to develop a traffic safety model with speed heterogeneity as expressed in accident modification factor (AMF) index. The data types include traffic data, road volumes and geometrics from 18 roads in 8 provinces in Indonesia: Central Sulawesi, Southeast Sulawesi, South Sulawesi, West Kalimantan, Central Kalimantan, NTB, NTT and Bali. The power model is adopted to model the relationship between speed changes and the number of accidents and victims. Change in paratransit speed is significant in predicting all types of AMFs, but the effects are lower than those of the other categories. Truck speed change has the highest impact of fatalities. A 10% decrease in truck speed results in a 29.9% decrease in the number of fatalities, whilst the same 10% decrease in paratransit decreases 17.4% of fatalities. The study resulted in AMF models based on the vehicle speed heterogeneity that could be used in road safety evaluation by looking at the effects of vehicle speed changes in specific categories.