Characterisation of potato crisp effective porosity using micro-CT

Background The effective porosity is an important quantitative parameter for food products that has a significant effect on taste and quality. It is challenging to quantify the apparent porosity of fried potato crisps as they have a thin irregularly shaped cross section containing oil and water. This study uses a novel micro-CT technique to determine the solid volume fraction and hence the effective porosity of three types of potato crisps: standard continuously fried crisps, microwaved crisps, and continuously fried ‘kettle’ crisps. Results It was found that continuously fried kettle crisps had the lowest effective porosity at 0.54, providing the desired crunchy taste and lower oil contents. Crisps produced using a microwave process designed to mimic the dehydration process of standard continuous fried crisps had an effective porosity of 0.65, which was very similar to the effective porosity of 0.63 for standard continuously fried crisps. The results were supported by the findings of a forced preference consumer test. Conclusion The effective porosity affects the product taste and is therefore a critical parameter. This study shows that micro-CT analysis can be used to characterise the change in effective porosity of a thin irregularly shaped food product, caused by a change of cooking procedure

The pre-inquisitorial career of Bernard Gui

I have tried to provide an account of Bernard Gui's early career, from his birth in 1261 to his appointment as inquisitor of Toulouse in 1307. Biographical accounts of Bernard are few and far between: a short obituary by his nephew in the early 1330s, entries in early-twentieth-century catalogues such as the Histoire littéraire de la France and Dictionnaire d'histoire et de géographie ecclésiastiques, and the sixteenth volume of the Cahiers de Fajeaux in 1981. This dearth belies the essential space Bernard's texts occupy in the modern study of medieval religious orders, the inquisition, and southern France. Bernard himself deserves a study. The worlds around him were changing quickly. Friars who had known Dominic personally were growing old and dying. Burgeoning royal power came into increasingly dramatic conflict with both religious and secular establishments. Southern France was still recovering (financially, politically, and psychologically) from the Albigensian Crusade and its inquisitions. The texts Bernard chose to produce responded to administrative, political, and social realities in dynamic ways. His written record tells modern historians much about contemporary anxieties and the man who faced them. This thesis utilizes Bernard's history of the Dominican Order to learn more about Bernard himself. The boy who will become inquisitor of Toulouse came of age infatuated with the Dominican Order and its attendant personalities, values, and network. The preservation of the order's institutional values and administrative organization animated his first noteworthy historical work. When the friars and their inquisition came under attack in the years immediately preceding his tenure as inquisitor, Bernard suppressed his sense of betrayal to preserve the order's most important relationships. I hope that through this thesis, readers may encounter Bernard and feel more confident in describing his values, anxieties, and personality

The relationship of dielectric response and water activity in food

This study has deduced a correlation between points of inflection of water activity and loss factor with respect to moisture content. A point of inflection in loss factor with respect to moisture content was found to coincide with the sorption isotherm point of inflection that defines the transition from multilayer to solution in every instance analysed, with an average difference of just 0.01kg.kg-1. Food can support microbial growth and chemical reactions in water activity levels above this critical transition. This correlation was discovered using published dielectric and sorption data for specific foods at similar temperatures. It was found that low sugar foods containing high levels of hydrocolloids generally exhibited different behaviour from fruits. This shows that microwave heating behaviour will be different in fruits compared to low sugar foods with high hydrocolloid content when drying to achieve a certain water activity and therefore shelf life

The Ciliate Paramecium Shows Higher Motility in Non-Uniform Chemical Landscapes

We study the motility behavior of the unicellular protozoan Paramecium tetraurelia in a microfluidic device that can be prepared with a landscape of attracting or repelling chemicals. We investigate the spatial distribution of the positions of the individuals at different time points with methods from spatial statistics and Poisson random point fields. This makes quantitative the informal notion of “uniform distribution” (or lack thereof). Our device is characterized by the absence of large systematic biases due to gravitation and fluid flow. It has the potential to be applied to the study of other aquatic chemosensitive organisms as well. This may result in better diagnostic devices for environmental pollutants.University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee (SURF (Salary for Undergraduate Research Fellows) Award)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (grant DMS-016214

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements

‘To prevent this disease, we have to stay at home, but if we stay at home, we die of hunger’ – livelihoods, vulnerability and coping with Covid-19 in rural Mozambique

Non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as social distancing and travel restrictions have been introduced to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus (hereinafter Covid). In many countries of the Global South, NPIs are affecting rural livelihoods, but in-depth empirical data on these impacts are limited. We traced the differentiated impacts of Covid NPIs throughout the start of the pandemic May to July 2020. We conducted qualitative weekly phone interviews (n=441) with 92 panelists from nine contrasting rural communities across Mozambique (3 to 7 study weeks), exploring how panelists’ livelihoods changed and how the NPIs intersected with, and often exacerbated, existing vulnerabilities, and created new exposures. The NPIs significantly re-shaped many livelihoods and placed greatest burdens on those with precarious incomes, women, children and the elderly, exacerbating existing vulnerabilities and creating new exposures. Travel and trading restrictions and rising prices for consumables including food meant some respondents were concerned about dying not of Covid, but of hunger because of the disruptions caused by NPIs. No direct health impacts of the pandemic were reported during our study period. Most market-orientated income diversification strategies largely failed to provide resilience to the NPI shocks. The exception was one specific case linked to a socially-minded value chain for baobab, where a strong duty of care helped avoid the collapse of incomes seen elsewhere. In contrast, agricultural and charcoal value chains either collapsed or saw producer prices and volumes reduced. The hyper-covariate, unprecedented nature of the shock caused significant restrictions on livelihoods through trading and transport limits and thus a region-wide decline in cash generation opportunities, which was seen as being unlike any prior shock. The scale of human-made interventions and their repercussions thus raises questions about the roles of institutional actors, diversification and socially-minded trading partners in addressing coping and vulnerability both conceptually and in policy-making

Results of the ADHERE upper airway stimulation registry and predictors of therapy efficacy.

OBJECTIVE/HYPOTHESIS: The ADHERE Registry is a multicenter prospective observational study following outcomes of upper airway stimulation (UAS) therapy in patients who have failed continuous positive airway pressure therapy for obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). The aim of this registry and purpose of this article were to examine the outcomes of patients receiving UAS for treatment of OSA. STUDY DESIGN: Cohort Study. METHODS: Demographic and sleep study data collection occurred at baseline, implantation visit, post-titration (6 months), and final visit (12 months). Patient and physician reported outcomes were also collected. Post hoc univariate and multivariate analysis was used to identify predictors of therapy response, defined as ≥50% decrease in Apnea-Hypopnea Index (AHI) and AHI ≤20 at the 12-month visit. RESULTS: The registry has enrolled 1,017 patients from October 2016 through February 2019. Thus far, 640 patients have completed their 6-month follow-up and 382 have completed the 12-month follow-up. After 12 months, median AHI was reduced from 32.8 (interquartile range [IQR], 23.6-45.0) to 9.5 (IQR, 4.0-18.5); mean, 35.8 ± 15.4 to 14.2 ± 15.0, P \u3c .0001. Epworth Sleepiness Scale was similarly improved from 11.0 (IQR, 7-16) to 7.0 (IQR, 4-11); mean, 11.4 ± 5.6 to 7.2 ± 4.8, P \u3c .0001. Therapy usage was 5.6 ± 2.1 hours per night after 12 months. In a multivariate model, only female sex and lower baseline body mass index remained as significant predictors of therapy response. CONCLUSIONS: Across a multi-institutional study, UAS therapy continues to show significant improvement in subjective and objective OSA outcomes. This analysis shows that the therapy effect is durable and adherence is high. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: 2 Laryngoscope, 130:1333-1338, 2020

Notarial Information and the Production of Knowledge in Rural Society

One of the most dramatic transformations of the lives of everyday people in medieval Europe was the sudden and widespread increase in the number of written contracts at the turn of fourteenth century. To give a sense of the magnitude of change, in the former county of Provence in southeastern France, the volume of contracts grew by several orders of magnitude from the thousands in 1300 to the millions just a century later. Everyday men and women from different socio-economic classes, professional backgrounds, and religious faiths all sought out the services of scribes known as public notaries to compose written documents. This dissertation explores how notaries managed the massive amounts of information that filled tens of thousands of registers and cartularies throughout the later Middle Ages. Drawing upon hundreds of unpublished manuscript codices and over 20,000 notarial contracts from southeastern France, the dissertation argues that an unintentional but powerful appeal of notarial contracts lay in their capacity to compress, store, and circulate the information that guaranteed a vast array of interpersonal and legal relationships. The effects of this information revolution transformed medieval social and economic life by expanding the possibilities for how individuals, families, ecclesiastical institutions, and political entities could form the relationships that constituted late medieval society