Vitamin A fortification: Recent advances in encapsulation technologies

Vitamin A is an essential micronutrient whose deficiency is still a major health concern in many regions of the world. It plays an essential role in human growth and development, immunity, and vision, but may also help prevent several other chronic diseases. The total amount of vitamin A in the human diet often falls below the recommended dietary allowance of approximately 900–1000 $\mu$g/day for a healthy adult. Moreover, a significant proportion of vitamin A may be degraded during food processing, storage, and distribution, thereby reducing its bioactivity. Finally, the vitamin A in some foods has a relatively low bioavailability, which further reduces its efficacy. The World Health Organization has recommended fortification of foods and beverages as a safe and cost-effective means of addressing vitamin A deficiency. However, there are several factors that must be overcome before effective fortified foods can be developed, including the low solubility, chemical stability, and bioavailability of this oil-soluble vitamin. Consequently, strategies are required to evenly disperse the vitamin throughout food matrices, to inhibit its chemical degradation, to avoid any adverse interactions with any other food components, to ensure the food is palatable, and to increase its bioavailability. In this review article, we discuss the chemical, physical, and nutritional attributes of vitamin A, its main dietary sources, the factors contributing to its current deficiency, and various strategies to address these deficiencies, including diet diversification, biofortification, and food fortification.     

A socio-ecological analysis of hospital resilience to extreme weather events

Hospitals play a critical role in helping communities respond effectively to extreme weather events (EWEs). Despite predictions of more EWEs, little is known about the process by which hospital infrastructure resilience to such events can be built. Using Gunderson and Holling’s Adaptive Cycle, a new theoretical perspective based on socio-ecological resilience theory is provided to understand this process. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews, observations of disaster drills and disaster planning meetings, as well as additional documentary analysis of past incident reports. The research findings were then refined and validated in a focus group meeting with respondents. The findings indicate that there are significant organizational barriers which prevent facilities managers improving the resilience of hospital facilities to future EWEs. It was found that the disaster planning process is ad hoc and non-inclusive, focused on man-made disasters and compliance driven, top-down approach, under-resourced and is driven by a general ignorance of the importance of resilient-built facilities to health care delivery during an EWE. It is concluded that to produce more resilient hospital infrastructure, there needs to be a more well-resourced, integrated and collaborative approach to disaster management planning which enables health facilities managers to play a more central role in disaster planning decisions. There also need to be better systems, technologies and training implemented to manage information about health infrastructure performance before, during and after EWEs.     

Bioprocess Scale-up for Acetohydroxamic Acid Production by Hyperactive Acyltransferase of Immobilized Rhodococcus Pyridinivorans

Catalysis Letters - In this study, Rhodococcus pyridinivorans cells containing hyperactive acyltransferase was immobilized on various macromolecules based-polymeric matrices and used to improve...     

Overview of emerging nonvolatile memory technologies

Nonvolatile memory technologies in Si-based electronics date back to the 1990s. Ferroelectric field-effect transistor (FeFET) was one of the most promising devices replacing the conventional Flash memory facing physical scaling limitations at those times. A variant of charge storage memory referred to as Flash memory is widely used in consumer electronic products such as cell phones and music players while NAND Flash-based solid-state disks (SSDs) are increasingly displacing hard disk drives as the primary storage device in laptops, desktops, and even data centers. The integration limit of Flash memories is approaching, and many new types of memory to replace conventional Flash memories have been proposed. Emerging memory technologies promise new memories to store more data at less cost than the expensive-to-build silicon chips used by popular consumer gadgets including digital cameras, cell phones and portable music players. They are being investigated and lead to the future as potential alternatives to existing memories in future computing systems. Emerging nonvolatile memory technologies such as magnetic random-access memory (MRAM), spin-transfer torque random-access memory (STT-RAM), ferroelectric random-access memory (FeRAM), phase-change memory (PCM), and resistive random-access memory (RRAM) combine the speed of static random-access memory (SRAM), the density of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), and the nonvolatility of Flash memory and so become very attractive as another possibility for future memory hierarchies. Many other new classes of emerging memory technologies such as transparent and plastic, three-dimensional (3-D), and quantum dot memory technologies have also gained tremendous popularity in recent years. Subsequently, not an exaggeration to say that computer memory could soon earn the ultimate commercial validation for commercial scale-up and production the cheap plastic knockoff. Therefore, this review is devoted to the rapidly developing new class of memory technologies and scaling of scientific procedures based on an investigation of recent progress in advanced Flash memory devices.     

A Study on the Distances of Small Mobile Robot Moves towards Infants

In recent years, it is remarkable that various robots are being developed, and the development of robot technology is beginning to be taken into an actual living space. There are still many questions that we will have to answer for the harmonization of living together with a robot. This study is focused on ＂the study of how to plan and design a living space in harmonizing with robots＂, and focused on the effects of infants （subjects） along with the distance between robots and themselves. The study is to seek for the minimum distance for the subjects who felt that ＂I do not want a robot to be any closer being approached to me＂. This experiment was conducted among 30 infants at the kindergarten, utilizing a small experimental robot. A small robot whose dimension is 120 mm （W） ×130 mm （D） × 70 mm （H）, approaching infants as is to see if it would make any differences to the infant＇s reactions.     

Relationship between physicochemical and functional properties of amaranth (Amaranthus hypochondriacus) protein isolates

Protein isolates from six amaranth lines/cultivars (APIs) were evaluated to study their physicochemical (hunter colour, protein content and zeta potential), structural (thermal and conformational) and functional (emulsification, foaming, water and fat absorption) properties. APIs had protein content, whiteness index and gel temperature in range of 79.4–85.4%, 41.17–54.26 and 87.8–91.8 °C, respectively. The Fourier‐transform infrared spectra of APIs revealed α‐helix, β‐sheets and random coil conformations in the secondary structure. APIs with higher relative proportion of β‐sheets had higher Differential Scanning Calorimeter denaturation temperature and gel temperature. Minimum protein solubility (PS) was observed at pH 5.0, indicating isoelectric point (pI) of amaranth proteins. The PS, emulsifying activity index (EAI), emulsifying stability index (ESI), foaming capacity (FC) and foam stability (FS) of APIs at neutral pH were related to their zeta potential (ζ). The emulsifying and foaming properties were also determined at different pHs (between 2.0 and 9.0). The EAI‐pH profile of APIs confirmed close relationship between the emulsifying ability and PS.