Molecular structure and granule morphology of native and heat‐moisture‐treated pinhão starch

Pinhão seed is an unconventional source of starch and the pines grow up in native forests of southern Latin America. In this study, pinhão starch was adjusted at 15, 20 and 25% moisture content and heated to 100, 110 and 120 °C for 1 h. A decrease in λ max (starch/iodine complex) was observed as a result of increase in temperature and moisture content of HMT. The ratio of crystalline to amorphous phase in pinhão starch was determined via Fourier transform infra red by taking 1045/1022 band ratio. A decrease in crystallinity occurred as a result of HMT. Polarised light microscopy indicated a loss of birefringence of starch granules under 120 °C at 25% moisture content. Granule size distribution was further confirmed via scanning electron microscopy which showed the HMT effects. These results increased the understanding on molecular and structural properties of HMT pinhão starch and broadened its food and nonfood industrial applications.     

Chemical-Shift Perturbations Reflect Bile Acid Binding to Norovirus Coat Protein: Recognition Comes in Different Flavors

Bile acids have been reported as important cofactors promoting human and murine norovirus (NoV) infections in cell culture. The underlying mechanisms are not resolved. Through the use of chemical shift perturbation (CSP) NMR experiments, we identified a low-affinity bile acid binding site of a human GII.4 NoV strain. Long-timescale MD simulations reveal the formation of a ligand-accessible binding pocket of flexible shape, allowing the formation of stable viral coat protein–bile acid complexes in agreement with experimental CSP data. CSP NMR experiments also show that this mode of bile acid binding has a minor influence on the binding of histo-blood group antigens and vice versa. STD NMR experiments probing the binding of bile acids to virus-like particles of seven different strains suggest that low-affinity bile acid binding is a common feature of human NoV and should therefore be important for understanding the role of bile acids as cofactors in NoV infection.     

Acculturation, Familism, Parental Monitoring, and Knowledge as Predictors of Marijuana and Inhalant Use in Adolescents.

The authors investigated relationships between marijuana and inhalant use and several cultural and demographic factors in Anglo American and Hispanic American adolescents (N=1,094). Outcome measures assessed lifetime and 30-day marijuana and inhalant use. Predictors and covariates used in logistic regression analyses were region, grade, gender, knowledge, acculturation, familism, and parental monitoring. Hispanic Americans exhibited higher usage across all measures. In this group, high acculturation was associated with low marijuana, but high inhalant, use. Across all participants, positive family relations and parental monitoring were strongly associated with attenuated marijuana use hut only among those most knowledgeable about drugs. Familism and monitoring were not associated with diminished usage among the less knowledgeable. For inhalants, monitoring combined with high knowledge or high familism was associated with diminished usage. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Stability analysis of network-based cooperative resource allocation strategies

Resource allocation involves deciding how to divide a resource of limited availability among multiple demands in a way that optimizes current objectives. In this brief paper we focus on one type of distributed resource allocation problem where via an imperfect communication network multiple processors can share the load presented by multiple task types. We introduce asynchronous “cooperative” resource allocation strategies, and show that they lead to a bounded cumulative demand.     

An Algebraic Approach for Compiling Real-Time Programs

Compiler Verification has been identified as a vital process in the implementation of correct safety-critical systems. We extend here Hoare's refinement-algebra approach to compilation in order to include real-time languages in which processes interact asynchronously via communication queues. The existence of unique fixed-points is exploited to verify the implementation of crucial operators such as asynchronous input, delay and timeout.     

Language disturbances following vascular lesions restricted to the left basal ganglia, thalamus, and white matter.

Examined the relationship between aphasia type and lesion site in 80 subcortical stroke patients. Ss were classified as affected by aphasia, dysarthria, and nonaphasia, nondysarthria. Sites of lesions were identified by means of computerized tomography (CT) scan. No correlation between site of lesions and category group was found. Lesions of the same subcortical structures yielded different neurolinguistic impairment, whereas comparable linguistic patterns were observed with lesions of different deep areas. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Abnormal behavior detection using dominant sets

Smart surveillance systems are increasingly being used to detect potentially dangerous situations. To do so, the common and easier way is to model normal human behaviors and consider as abnormal any new strange behavior in the scene. In this article, Dominant Sets is adapted to model most frequent behaviors and to detect any unknown event to trigger an alarm. It is proved that after an unsupervised training, Dominant Sets can robustly detect abnormal behaviors. The method is tested in several different cases and compared to other usual clusterization methods such as KNN, mixture of Gaussians or Fuzzy \(K\) -Means to confirm its robustness and performance. The overall performance of abnormal behavior detection based on Dominant Sets is better, being the error ratio at least \(1.5\) points lower than the others.     

Pattern recognition for characterization of pharmaceutical powders

A large part of pharmaceutical manufacturing involves the use of particulate materials. It is well known that both particle size and shape affect the physical characteristics of tablets. An image processing and analysis algorithm based on the invariant image moment technique was developed in this work to determine the particle shape by comparing features (moments) extracted from templates to those extracted from each of the objects in the image. First it determines the particle shape (rectangle, circle, etc.) and then calculates its specific dimensions (diameter, aspect ratio).The statistical validation of the vision system obtained a repeatability of 0.0012 in and 0.5% relative standard deviation and accuracy within 0.1 to 0.9% of the average value considered as true value. Also the pattern recognition technique indicated high precision and accuracy for images containing particles with some level of contact between them. The shape recognition of microcrystalline cellulose (MCC) indicated that particles of equant and acicular shape as defined by USP are predominant. The results suggest that image processing and analysis would be a suitable tool for pharmaceutical process analytical technologies (PAT) and process optimization.     

Synthesis of UHMW-PE by a Highly Active Homogeneous System: η5-(C5H5)2Ti(η1-OC(O)C6H5)2/MAO

Summary The complex ⁵-(C₅H₅)₂Ti (¹-OC(O)C₆H₅)₂ was synthesized and activated with MA0 for ethylene polymerization. The resultant polymer is UHMW-PE with a viscosimetric molecular weight of Mv = 6.8 x 10⁶ to 0.7 x 10⁶ g/mol dependent on the temperature of the reaction. The effects of the Al/Ti molar ratio and temperature of the reaction on the catalytic activity and polymer properties were studied.