Improving beef color stability: Practical strategies and underlying mechanisms

This paper overviewed the current literature on strategies to improve beef color and attempted to logically explain the fundamental mechanisms involved. Surface color and its stability are critical traits governing the marketability of fresh beef when sold, whereas internal cooked color is utilized as an indicator for doneness at the point of consumption. A multitude of exogenous and endogenous factors interact with the redox biochemistry of myoglobin in post-mortem skeletal muscles. The scientific principles of these biomolecular interactions are applied by the meat industry as interventions for pre-harvest (i.e. diet, animal management) and post-harvest (i.e. packaging, aging, antioxidants) strategies to improve color stability in fresh and cooked beef. Current research suggests that the effects of several of these strategies are specific to type of animal, feeding regimen, packaging system, and muscle source. Meat scientists should explore novel ways to manipulate these factors using a biosystems approach to achieve improved beef color stability, satisfy consumer perception, and increase market profitability.     

Identification of ultraviolet radiation induced gallic acid and caffeic acid formation in palm juice (Borassus flabellifer) by HPLC & mass spectra technique

Palm juice, a common-cheap-antioxidants rich natural plant juice has been investigated for optimizing the effect of UV-radiation on the antioxidant activity using a DPPH free radical scavenging activity method. In this study separate set of samples of raw palm juice has been treated with 365 and 254 nm UV-lights (UVL) respectively for different exposure time. When exposed for 15 min with 365 nm UVL induces concentration factor of caffeic acid, whereas, 254 nm UVL induces gallic acid accumulation, but overall antioxidant activity was higher for 365 nm UV-radiation. Caffeic acid and other polyphenol compounds are increased by 5.5 ± 0.5 % than normal palm juice, observed after irradiation with 365 nm UVL. Even after the exposure of UV irradiation for 15 min, did not affect on peptide bond modification of protein molecules present in palm juice, therefore a green effect of UVL is explored for the effective increase of antioxidant activity.     

Fluorescence Polarization Immunoassay for Rapid, Accurate and Sensitive Determination of Ochratoxin A in Wheat

A sensitive and accurate fluorescence polarization (FP) immunoassay has been developed for the determination of ochratoxin A (OTA) in naturally contaminated wheat samples. A fluorescein-labeled OTA tracer was synthesized, and its binding response with three monoclonal antibodies was tested. The most sensitive competitive FP immunoassay showed an IC₅₀ value of 0.48 ng/mL with a negligible cross-reactivity for ochratoxin B (1.7 %) and no cross-reactivity with other mycotoxins commonly occurring in wheat. The wheat sample was extracted with acetonitrile/water (60:40, v/v) and purified by a rapid solid-phase extraction procedure using an aminopropyl column prior to the FP immunoassay. The overall time of analysis was less than 20 min. The average recovery from spiked wheat samples (3 to 10 μg/kg) was 87 %, with relative standard deviations generally lower than 6 %. Limits of detection and quantification were 0.8 and 2.0 μg/kg, respectively. The trueness of the method was assessed by using two reference materials for OTA showing good accuracy and precision. A good correlation (r?=?0.995) was observed between OTA contamination of 19 naturally contaminated wheat samples analyzed by both FP immunoassay and high-performance liquid chromatography/immunoaffinity clean-up used as reference method. These results show that the developed FP method is suitable for high-throughput screening, as well as for reliable quantitative determination of OTA in wheat at level far below the EU regulatory limits.     

Effect of variations in thermophysical properties and design parameters on the performance of a V-shaped micro grooved heat pipe

The paper presents a detailed simulation of a V-shaped micro heat pipe. The effect of the substrate temperature on the model has been considered. A new method for calculating dry-out length has been proposed. The sensitivity of the model to variations in thermophysical properties and design parameters has been studied. The variations in the contact angle for the substrate-coolant liquid system, surface tension and viscosity of the coolant liquid, inclination, groove angle, length of adiabatic section and radius of ungrooved substrate have been considered. The effect of design and operating parameters on the performance of the heat pipe has been studied. The variations in contact angle have been found to significantly affect the performance of a micro heat pipe. The performance of a micro heat pipe is susceptible to ungrooved area of a V-shaped micro heat pipe. If the groove is not sharp enough i.e., the radius of ungrooved substrate is more; the micro heat pipe may cease to work even before it reaches its other operating limits. The various sensitivity studies made in this work gives better understanding of variations in thermophysical properties and design parameters of a micro heat pipe.     

Empagliflozin Treatment Attenuates Hepatic Steatosis by Promoting White Adipose Expansion in Obese TallyHo Mice

Sodium-glucose co-transporters (SGLTs) serve to reabsorb glucose in the kidney. Recently, these transporters, mainly SGLT2, have emerged as new therapeutic targets for patients with diabetes and kidney disease; by inhibiting glucose reabsorption, they promote glycosuria, weight loss, and improve glucose tolerance. They have also been linked to cardiac protection and mitigation of liver injury. However, to date, the mechanism(s) by which SGLT2 inhibition promotes systemic improvements is not fully appreciated. Using an obese TallyHo mouse model which recapitulates the human condition of diabetes and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), we sought to determine how modulation of renal glucose handling impacts liver structure and function. Apart from an attenuation of hyperglycemia, Empagliflozin was found to decrease circulating triglycerides and lipid accumulation in the liver in male TallyHo mice. This correlated with lowered hepatic cholesterol esters. Using in vivo MRI analysis, we further determined that the reduction in hepatic steatosis in male TallyHo mice was associated with an increase in nuchal white fat indicative of “healthy adipose expansion”. Notably, this whitening of the adipose came at the expense of brown adipose tissue. Collectively, these data indicate that the modulation of renal glucose handling has systemic effects and may be useful as a treatment option for NAFLD and steatohepatitis.     

A secure and efficient ECC-based user anonymity-preserving session initiation authentication protocol using smart card

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a signaling communications protocol, which has been chosen for controlling multimedia communication in 3G mobile networks. The proposed authentication in SIP is HTTP digest based authentication. Recently, Tu et al. presented an improvement of Zhang et al.’s smart card-based authenticated key agreement protocol for SIP. Their scheme efficiently resists password guessing attack. However, in this paper, we analyze the security of Tu et al.’s scheme and demonstrate their scheme is still vulnerable to user’s impersonation attack, server spoofing attack and man-in-the middle attack. We aim to propose an efficient improvement on Tu et al.’s scheme to overcome the weaknesses of their scheme, while retaining the original merits of their scheme. Through the rigorous informal and formal security analysis, we show that our scheme is secure against various known attacks including the attacks found in Tu et al.’s scheme. Furthermore, we simulate our scheme for the formal security analysis using the widely-accepted AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool and show that our scheme is secure against passive and active attacks including the replay and man-in-the-middle attacks. Additionally, the proposed scheme is comparable in terms of the communication and computational overheads with Tu et al.’s scheme and other related existing schemes.     

Low complexity hybrid layered tabu-likelihood ascent search for large MIMO detection with perfect and estimated channel state information

In this work, we proposed a low-complexity hybrid layered tabu-likelihood ascent search (LTLAS) algorithm for large multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system. The conventional layered tabu search (LTS) approach involves many partial reactive tabu searches (RTSs), and each RTS requires an initialization and searching phase. In the proposed algorithm, we restricted the upper limit of the number of RTS operations. Once RTS operations exceed the limit, RTS will be replaced by low-complexity likelihood ascent search (LAS) operations. The block-based detection approach is considered to maintain a higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) detection performance. An efficient precomputation technique is derived, which can suppress redundant computations. The simulation results show that the bit error rate (BER) performance of the proposed detection method is close to the conventional LTS method. The complexity analysis shows that the proposed method has significantly lower computational complexity than conventional methods. Also, the proposed method can reduce almost 50% of real operations to achieve a BER of 10⁻³.     

Mechanical and microstructural investigation of dissimilar joints of Al-Cu and Cu-Al metals using nanosecond laser

Laser beam welding (LBW) has found wide applications in several fields, including electronics, aerospace, and automobile industries, owing to its inherent capabilities over existing welding techniques. Dissimilar laser welding is one of the challenging fabrication processes. However, joining of different materials poses challenging issues because material properties of each material interacts to give rise to hybrid system performance. In present study weld of Al-Cu and Cu-Al has been performed using Ytterbium pulsed fibre laser with a maximum laser power of 300 W. The scanning electron microscope (SEM), and energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy (EDS) has been employed to investigate the microstructural and chemical composition of the welded joints. The EDS analysis showed the presence of possible intermetallic compounds (IMCs) like AlCu and Cu2Al in the fusion zone. The Al-Cu and Cu-Al welded joints had maximum shear strength of 295 N and 84 N, respectively. The results showed the efficacy of Al-Cu joints over Cu-Al joints. The study further demonstrated that the Al-Cu weld had a better microstructure with fewer pores and cracks than the Cu-Al welds by varying the laser powers.

     

Cyber Forensic Investigation in IoT Using Deep Learning Based Feature Fusion in Big Data

International Journal of Wireless Information Networks - The Internet of Things (IoT) device is becoming universal domain and its success cannot be ignored, but its threats on IoT devices increases...