Routine health assessment of laboratory rodents can be improved using automated home cage monitoring. Continuous, non-stressful, objective assessment of rodents unaware that they are being watched, including during their active dark period, reveals behavioural and physiological changes otherwise invisible to human caretakers. We developed an automated feeder that tracks feed intake, body weight, and physical appearance of individual radio frequency identification-tagged mice in social home cages. Here, we experimentally induce illness via lipopolysaccharide challenge and show that this automated tracking apparatus reveals sickness behaviour (reduced food intake) as early as 2-4 hours after lipopolysaccharide injection, whereas human observers conducting routine health checks fail to detect a significant difference between sick mice and saline-injected controls. Continuous automated monitoring additionally reveals pronounced circadian rhythms in both feed intake and body weight. Automated home cage monitoring is a non-invasive, reliable mode of health surveillance allowing caretakers to more efficiently detect and respond to early signs of illness in laboratory rodent populations.
It was predicted that (a) Ss with an analytic cognitive style would out-perform Ss with a global cognitive style on compound-cue problems which could be learned by either a conditional rule or a color rule, and (b) global and analytic Ss would perform equally on a single-cue problem which could be solved only by a conditional rule. 36 analytic and 36 global Ss learned one of the two problems. Analysis showed that analytic Ss performed significantly better than global Ss only on the compound-cue problem. The results suggested that the better performance of analytic Ss is limited to problems which require some degree of stimulus differentiation. It was further suggested that additional research on hypothesis-testing might help clarify the differences in performance between analytic and global Ss.
AT least 15 per cent of all married couples are involuntarily infertile.1 During the past several decades, infertility due to peritoneal and endocrine factors has received the greatest attention, and specific treatments for many of these causes are now available. Previously, little credence was given to the possibility that low-grade, asymptomatic infection affects human fertility, but there is now a growing belief that such infections can influence the incidence of conception, implantation, and embryonal death.Considerable disagreement exists concerning the role of Ureaplasma urealyticum in human infertility.2 , 3 The inconclusive results of previous studies may be explained in part by failure . . .
