Proposed changes in milk pricing to be introduced on 1 April 1984 will make milk fat payments 53% of total milk returns. Current breed averages indicate that Jersey returns will show the greatest improvement at £40 per cow but will still be £100 lower than Friesian returns. Additionally, the higher calf and barren cow values enhance the Friesian, although this can be offset if Jerseys achieve a 50% increase in longevity compared with Friesians.

The proposed seasonal differentials give a milk price variation around the mean of 29%, compared with the present 13%. However, in 1969/70, the variation was 36%. Milk values by month of calving on the new proposals vary by a maximum of £87 at a yield of 5000 1. August to October calving gives the highest and February to May the lowest milk income after seasonal adjustment.

Farm examples show that block-calving herds have seasonal quality trends that will be highlighted by contemporary payment. In the past, arithmetic averages have put block-calving herds into higher-quality classes than was warranted. Contemporary payment penalizes lapses in quality immediately. Conversely, improvements will be immediately rewarded. Summer-milk producers will have a dramatic decrease in their traditional cash flow in May and June. Comparison of weekly sample results and monthly averages with the same period last year, and with the England and Wales monthly average, enables economic corrective management steps to be taken.

The cost of computerized out-of-parlour feeders depends on herd size. Justification of their cost can be based on changes in milk sales by volume and/or compositional quality.

This paper discusses the composition and nutritional values of a limited number of materials of tropical or sub-tropical origin encountered in advisory work. These products have emerged in recent years chiefly as minor components of compounds and to a lesser extent as ‘straights’. These by-products are olive pulp, grape pulp pellets, grape seed meal, dried coffee residues, citrus pulp pellets, cocoa shell meal, extracted cocoa meal, shea-nut pellets and shea expeller meal, guar meal, illipe meal and cassava meal. Other foods such as cereal by-products and sugar cane molasses are discussed elsewhere, whilst materials that may originally have been by-products of oil extraction such as soya, ground nut and palm kernel, etc., are now such significant parts of the modern sophisticated feed compounding industry that it may be unfair to classify them as by-products in the usually accepted sense. In any case information on them is well documented and readily available and hence they will not be discussed here.

The by-products listed above form only a small proportion of the imported feeding stuffs bill but nevertheless can be of economic and nutritional significance in isolated circumstances. Some idea of their overall monetary significance is as follows. The total quantity of imported feeding stuffs other than cereals in 1977 was 1 495 973 tonnes. Of the above list of by-products, only olive pulp and grape residues are listed separately on official lists and each account for less than 1% of the total. Olive pulp imports were 33 457 tonnes and grape residues 11 276 tonnes. Undefined residues from oil extraction, which presumably includes some of the above listed products, amounted to 58 791 tonnes, whilst ‘Other products of vegetable origin’ would account for some other imported products totalling 45 013 tonnes.

Social facilitation has been observed in the stabled horse with access to forage (Sweeting et al. 1985). Socially facilitated feeding behaviour has not been investigated through the provision of concentrates. It is likely that the motivation to ingest a concentrate feed is different to that of forage. In a variety of species social facilitation will only occur when presented with a novel food. Therefore it has been proposed that a function of social facilitation is to increase the acceptance of novel feeds. The first objective of this study therefore, was to investigate if social facilitation occurs with the horse’s standard concentrate feed and or a standard concentrate feed plus a novel flavour.

Visual contact has been found to be a necessary component in the facilitation of forage ingestion. Increasing visual contact between stables improves awareness of conspecifics, which has been linked to a decrease in abnormal behaviour. There has, however, been limited investigation into the relationship between neighbouring stabled horses especially during potentially stressful periods such as meal times. The second objective of this study was to investigate the effects on behaviour of the presence or absence of a familiar horse during meal times.

We need to improve our understanding of the factors that are important for the control of food intake on high bulk foods. The study of short term feeding behaviour (STFB) may help to do this. The objective of this experiment was to study the effects of giving foods differing in bulk content on the STFB of growing pigs. It was expected that the foods would result in different levels of daily intake and that this would be reflected as differences in STFB between the foods. Two hypotheses were developed based on ideas about the way in which a physical constraint to intake could arise. H1; there would be less diurnal variation in feeding on high bulk foods that limit intake. H2; feeding patterns on bulky foods would be less flexible than those on a control food when feeding time is limited by reducing time of access to the feeder.

We present techniques developed to calibrate and correct Murchison Widefield Array low-frequency (72–300 MHz) radio observations for polarimetry. The extremely wide field-of-view, excellent instantaneous (u, v)-coverage and sensitivity to degree-scale structure that the Murchison Widefield Array provides enable instrumental calibration, removal of instrumental artefacts, and correction for ionospheric Faraday rotation through imaging techniques. With the demonstrated polarimetric capabilities of the Murchison Widefield Array, we discuss future directions for polarimetric science at low frequencies to answer outstanding questions relating to polarised source counts, source depolarisation, pulsar science, low-mass stars, exoplanets, the nature of the interstellar and intergalactic media, and the solar environment.

The current generation of experiments aiming to detect the neutral hydrogen signal from the Epoch of Reionisation (EoR) is likely to be limited by systematic effects associated with removing foreground sources from target fields. In this paper, we develop a model for the compact foreground sources in one of the target fields of the MWA’s EoR key science experiment: the ‘EoR1’ field. The model is based on both the MWA’s GLEAM survey and GMRT 150 MHz data from the TGSS survey, the latter providing higher angular resolution and better astrometric accuracy for compact sources than is available from the MWA alone. The model contains 5 049 sources, some of which have complicated morphology in MWA data, Fornax A being the most complex. The higher resolution data show that 13% of sources that appear point-like to the MWA have complicated morphology such as double and quad structure, with a typical separation of 33 arcsec. We derive an analytic expression for the error introduced into the EoR two-dimensional power spectrum due to peeling close double sources as single point sources and show that for the measured source properties, the error in the power spectrum is confined to high k ⊥ modes that do not affect the overall result for the large-scale cosmological signal of interest. The brightest 10 mis-modelled sources in the field contribute 90% of the power bias in the data, suggesting that it is most critical to improve the models of the brightest sources. With this hybrid model, we reprocess data from the EoR1 field and show a maximum of 8% improved calibration accuracy and a factor of two reduction in residual power in k-space from peeling these sources. Implications for future EoR experiments including the SKA are discussed in relation to the improvements obtained.

The Siwalik sequence, particularly the interval from 18 to 7 Ma, provides one of the few terrestrial data sets that allows direct measurement of temporal durations of mammalian species. Its data are drawn from a single biogeographic subprovince and superposed collections likely represent successive samples of single lineages. Observed temporal ranges underestimate total species longevities if (1) species existed in other biogeographic provinces before or after the temporal ranges recorded in the Siwaliks, or (2) the fossil record inadequately samples species durations in the Siwalik subprovince. Some data, notably from Afghanistan, China, and Thailand, bear on the first variable. The second can be controlled by considering data quality, in this case the temporal distribution of good data sets, to assess the scale of accuracy available for defining range endpoints. In general, range endpoints can be estimated to the nearest 0.1 million years.

The diverse Rodentia give a mean species longevity of 2.2 million years for the Miocene Siwaliks. This includes single records, but of course ignores unretrieved rare or short-lived taxa. The diverse Artiodactyla yield 3.1 million years. The difference may reflect greater body size and longer generation time; large Perissodactyla and Proboscidea have longer temporal ranges. Carnivorous mammals also show about 3 million year durations. Given these data, the average longevity for Sivapithecus species (1.6 million years) is modest. The deposits of the Clarks Fork Basin, Wyoming, offer a Paleogene data set comparable to that of the Neogene Siwaliks. Paleocene-Eocene mammals of North America yield shorter longevities (most less than one million years).

Extinction is the dominant mode of species termination for Siwalik mammals. Most taxa originated by immigration (as at about 13.5 Ma) or abrupt speciation. There are some cases for in situ transformation of lineages, for example in the genera Punjabemys, Antemus, Percrocuta, Dorcatherium, Giraffokeryx, and Selenoportax. The rodent Kanisamys shows a rate of increase in tooth size of 0.5 darwins. This overall rate is moderate by Paleogene standards, but includes an interval of more rapid change between 9.0 and 8.5 Ma.

The fluvial Neogene Siwalik formations of northern Pakistan contain one of the longest and richest sequences of terrestrial vertebrate faunas known. The complete sequence extends from ca. 18 Ma to 1 Ma, with the interval between 18 and 7 Ma being best sampled. Throughout this best known interval vertebrate remains are frequently abundant in channel fills and less common in large channel sands, levees, and paleosols. Although the abundance and quality of fossil preservation varies, all stratigraphic levels have some fossils and the record of most subintervals is good to excellent. As a consequence the patterns of faunal turnover and changes in diversity can be documented and analyzed for 0.5 my long subintervals.

Thirteen orders of Siwalik mammals have been identified, with well sampled subintervals typically having 50 or more species. Despite the ordinal diversity, however, most Siwalik mammal species belong to just three orders: rodents, artiodactyls, and perissodactyls. Among the larger mammals, the bovids and equids are the most common and have the most species, while the murid and cricetid rodents dominate the small mammal assemblages. These Siwalik abundance and diversity patterns differ markedly from those of the Paleogene and are a result of Neogene radiations in these four families and extinction of Paleogene groups.

Between 18 and 7 Ma species diversity varies considerably. Among artiodactyls and rodents the number of species first increases between 15 and 13 Ma and then falls after 12 Ma. Significant changes in relative abundance are also known, including an increase in the abundance of bovids between 16.5 and 15 Ma and a very abrupt increase of murids at 12 Ma.

Data on stratigraphic ranges of rodents and artiodactyls show that faunal change in the Siwaliks was episodic, occurring as short intervals with high turnover, followed by longer periods with considerably less change. Maxima of first appearances occur at approximately 13.5 and 8.5 Ma, while maxima of last appearances come at 12.0, 9.5, and 8.0 Ma. It is thus apparent that in the Siwaliks increased extinction did not accompany or closely follow maxima of first appearances.

Correlations of these faunal events to global climatic trends are ambiguous. However, it is apparent that the middle Miocene diversification of Siwalik faunas occurred during a period of global cooling, while the late Miocene decline in diversity preceded a second episode of cooling and increasing aridity.

Around 70% of total seed phosphorus is represented by phytate which must be hydrolysed to be bioavailable in non-ruminant diets. The limited endogenous phytase activity in non-ruminant animals make it common practice to add an exogenous phytase source to most poultry and pig feeds. The mature grain phytase activity (MGPA) of cereal seeds provides a route for the seeds themselves to contribute to phytate digestion, but MGPA varies considerably between species and most varieties in current use make negligible contributions. Currently, all phytases used for feed supplementation and transgenic improvement of MGPA are derived from microbial enzymes belonging to the group of histidine acid phosphatases (HAP). Cereals contain HAP phytases, but the bulk of MGPA can be attributed to phytases belonging to a completely different group of phosphatases, the purple acid phosphatases (PAPhy). In recent years, increased MGPAs were achieved in cisgenic barley holding extra copies of barley PAPhy and in the wheat HIGHPHY mutant, where MGPA was increased to ~6200 FTU/kg. In the present study, the effect of replacing 33%, 66% and 100% of a standard wheat with HIGHPHY wheat was compared with a control diet with and without 500 FTU of supplemental phytase. Diets were compared by evaluating broiler performance, ileal Ca and P digestibility and tibia development, using nine replicate pens of four birds per diet over 3 weeks from hatch. There were no differences between treatments in any tibia or bird performance parameters, indicating the control diet did not contain sufficiently low levels of phosphorus to distinguish effect of phytase addition. However, in a comparison of the two wheats, the ileal Ca and P digestibility coefficients for the 100% HIGHPHY wheat diets are 22.9% and 35.6% higher, respectively, than for the control diet, indicating the wheat PAPhy is functional in the broiler digestive tract. Furthermore, 33% HIGHPHY replacement of conventional wheat, significantly improved Ca and P digestibility over the diet-supplemented exogenous phytase, probably due to the higher phytase activity in the HIGHPHY diet (1804 v. 1150 FTU). Full replacement by HIGHPHY gave 14.6% and 22.8% higher ileal digestibility coefficients for Ca and P, respectively, than for feed supplemented with exogenous HAP phytase at 500 FTU. This indicates that in planta wheat PAPhys has promising potential for improving P and mineral digestibility in animal feed.

The stellar associations are defined as loose unbound concentrations of young stars with a bright OB stellar component, mainly located at the most recent star forming regions, representing the smallest units in the hierarchy of stellar systems in galaxies. The definition of the associations is discussed and the main properties of their stellar content are summarized. Using plates taken with the 1.2m UK Schmidt Telescope a method is developed to detect all stellar associations in the LMC and to find their spatial distribution relative to the LMC's recent star formation history. In 40% of the LMC region, the number of “single peak” associations has increased considerably (~ 3x). A very interesting result is that the faint limit, where the identified associations are revealed, varies by about 3 mag. This indicates not only extinction differences but also the presence of pre-main sequence stars at a wide range of masses.

A method has been developed for the detection of stellar complexes and the derivation of their fundamental properties in the LMC. We have used digitized UKST plates in order to perform star counts and produce isodensity contour maps in various colours and luminosity slices. About 50 large stellar groupings have been revealed. Their properties favour a “top-down” mechanism acting in star forming regions.

We have compiled a catalogue of H ii regions detected with the Murchison Widefield Array between 72 and 231 MHz. The multiple frequency bands provided by the Murchison Widefield Array allow us identify the characteristic spectrum generated by the thermal Bremsstrahlung process in H ii regions. We detect 306 H ii regions between 260° < l < 340° and report on the positions, sizes, peak, integrated flux density, and spectral indices of these H ii regions. By identifying the point at which H ii regions transition from the optically thin to thick regime, we derive the physical properties including the electron density, ionised gas mass, and ionising photon flux, towards 61 H ii regions. This catalogue of H ii regions represents the most extensive and uniform low frequency survey of H ii regions in the Galaxy to date.

Des classifications spectrales et des mesures photométriques ont été faites dans de nombreux Observatoires.

La classification à un seul paramètre, comme celle de Harvard, a été remplacée dans la plupart des cas par une classification bidimensionelle. La classification simplifiée est réservée aux étoiles faibles. Les classifications dans le système MK ont été faites dans de nombreux Observatoires et nous signalons les importantes listes d’Abastumani.

De nombreux astronomes ont recherché les étoiles riches ou pauvres en métaux, ce qui est l’amorce des classifications à trois paramètres. Des listes d’étoiles Am et Ap ont été publiées.

Large complexes of young objects are common features in galaxies and are called superassociations, complexes and supercomplexes according to their size. They contain HII regions, early-type stars, associations and young clusters. Such large structures are expected to trace the star formation regions within galaxies. Star counts and spectral classification over extended areas, using direct and objective prism Schmidt telescope plates are good methods of determining the boundaries of these complexes and supercomplexes where the spatial density of early-type stars is enhanced. A project of tracing the supercomplexes in the Magellanic Clouds has started using plates taken with the UK 1.2 m Schmidt Telescope.

The capabilities of the X-ray Timing Explorer (XTE) are described with particular attention paid to current scientific problems it will address from galactic neutron star systems to active galactic nuclei. It features a low-background continuous 2-200 keV response with large apertures (a 0.63-m2 proportional counter array and a 0.16-m2 dual rocking NaI/CsI scintillation array). Rapid response (in hours) to temporal phenomena, e.g. transients, is obtained by virtue of a scanning all-sky monitor and rapid maneuverability. XTE will carry out detailed energy-resolved studies of phenomena close to neutron stars (e.g. QPO’s) because of its sub-millisecond timing (to 10 μs), its high telemetry rates (to 256 kb/s), and the high throughput of its data system (to ≳ 2 × 105 c s−1).

MOST (Microvariability & Oscillations of STars / Microvariabilite et Oscillations STellaire) is a Canadian microsatellite mission intended to detect rapid photometric oscillations at the μmag level in stars brighter than V ∼ 6. This limit is set primarily by the 15-cm aperture of the MOST telescope. The small size and mass of the MOST bus (similar to a suitcase) sets a limit on the pointing accuracy of about ±10 arcsec. To achieve the required photometric precision under these conditions, the MOST focal plane features a set of Fabry microlenses which can spread the target starlight into a pupil image of the telescope onto a CCD. The large size (∼1600 pixels) and positional stability (±0.1 pixel) of these images makes MOST insensitive to CCD flat-fielding errors. MOST is currently on schedule to be launched in early 2002.

Grazing season length (GSL) on grassland farms with ruminant production systems can influence farm economics, livestock disease transmission, environmental impact, milk and meat quality, and consumer choice. Bioclimatic variables are biologically meaningful climate variables that may enable predictions of the impact of future climate change on GSL on European farms. The present study investigated the spatial relationship between current GSL (months) measured by EUROSTAT on dairy, beef and sheep farms in 706, 774 and 878 regions, respectively, and bioclimatic variables. A stepwise multiple regression model revealed a highly significant association between observed GSL and bioclimatic variables across Europe. Mean GSL was positively associated with the mean temperature of the coldest quarter and isothermality, and negatively associated with precipitation in the wettest month. Extrapolating these relationships to future climate change scenarios, most European countries were predicted to have a net increase in GSL with the increase being largest (up to 2·5 months) in the north-east of Europe. However, there were also predictions of increased variability between regions and decreases in GSL of up to 1·5 months in some areas such as the west of France, the south-west of Norway and the west coast of Britain. The study quantified and mapped the potential impact of climate change on GSL for dairy, beef and sheep farms across Europe.

Problems of stratigraphic completeness and poor temporal resolution make analysis of faunal change in terrestrial sequences difficult. The fluvial Neogene Siwalik formations of India and Pakistan are an exception. They contain a long vertebrate record and have good chronostratigraphic control, making it possible to assess the influence of biotic interchange on Siwalik fossil communities. In Pakistan, the interval between 18 and 7 Ma has been most intensively studied and changes in diversity and relative abundance of ruminant artiodactyls and muroid rodents are documented with temporal resolution of 200,000 years. Within this interval, diversity varies considerably, including an abrupt rise in species number between 15 and 13 Ma, followed by a decline in ruminant diversity after 12 Ma and a decline in muroid diversity in two steps at 13 and 10 Ma. Significant changes in relative abundance of taxa include an increase in bovids between 16.5 and 15 Ma, a decrease in tragulids after 9 Ma, and a very abrupt increase in murids at 12 Ma. Megacricetodontine rodents also decrease significantly at 12 Ma, and smaller declines are recorded among myocricetodontine and copemyine rodents after 16 Ma. An increase of dendromurine rodents at 15.5 Ma is also observed. There is also a trend of progressive size increase among giraffoids and bovids throughout the sequence.

We have also investigated relationships between biotic interchange and diversity, body size, and relative abundance, concluding that (1) the rapid increase in ruminant and muroid diversity was largely due to immigration, whereas in situ speciation had only a secondary role; (2) during intervals of increasing diversity, resident lineages did not have higher than average rates of in situ speciation; (3) during intervals with rising diversity, greater extinction did not accompany increased immigration; (4) during intervals with falling diversity, there may have been greater extinction in recently invading lineages; and (5) change in diversity was independent of changes in relative abundance and body size.