Abstract: An object of the present invention is to increase a protein content in milk of a lactating cow. When 5-ALA, an amino acid, or ALAs which are derivatives thereof or salts thereof, are mixed with a feed and administered to a lactating cow without being treated such as coating, a lactation yield remained substantially unchanged but the obtained milk had significantly high proportion (%) of proteins, particularly casein, when compared with milk collected from milk cows who had consumed a conventional feed.

Abstract: An object of the present invention is to increase a protein content in milk of a lactating cow. When 5-ALA, an amino acid, or ALAs which are derivatives thereof or salts thereof, are mixed with a feed and administered to a lactating cow without being treated such as coating, a lactation yield remained substantially unchanged but the obtained milk had significantly high proportion (%) of proteins, particularly casein, when compared with milk collected from milk cows who had consumed a conventional feed.

Abstract: A method for raising poultry includes feeding poultry with a feed comprising oxidized glutathione during a period between hatching and 24 to 168 hours after the hatching.

Abstract: In a fingerprint image, this fingerprint matching method extracts as skeleton stability the area of a zone which is drawn around a pre-determined attention point and which does not contain any minutiae that are bifurcations or endpoints in ridges forming a fingerprint pattern, and calculates similarity by collating said skeleton stability thus extracted with skeleton stability already registered.

Abstract: In a fingerprint image, this fingerprint matching method extracts as skeleton stability the area of a zone which is drawn around a pre-determined attention point and which does not contain any minutiae that are bifurcations or endpoints in ridges forming a fingerprint pattern, and calculates similarity by collating said skeleton stability thus extracted with skeleton stability already registered.

Abstract: The present invention has the object of accurately detecting fingerprint fingertip orientation by a process of calculating inner products of ridge directions in the peripheral areas of an inputted fingerprint and radial line directions, finding an inner product sequence in which the inner products are sequenced upon making one revolution from a certain initial point, finding sequence errors between the inner product sequence and a plurality of inner product sequence patterns of differing fingertip orientations for a standard fingerprint, and establishing the fingertip orientation of the inputted fingerprint as the fingertip orientation of the standard fingerprint having the minimum sequence error.