Impacts of Bleaching and Packed Column Steam Refining on Cocoa Butter Properties

Natural and alkalized cocoa butters were bleached and subsequently steam refined in a continuous packed column at temperatures ranging between 160 and 220 °C. None of the processes evaluated gave rise to any detectable formation of trans fatty acids, interesterification or polymerization. For the pressures and steam injection rates used, packed-column steam refining required a minimum temperature of 170 °C to achieve acceptable taste. Bleaching was highly effective in preventing darkening at high steam-refining temperatures, as well as in removing alkaloids, such as theobromine and caffeine, before steam refining. The impacts on the crystallization properties of cocoa butter were studied using DSC and P-NMR. The more significant changes in crystallization kinetics and equilibrium values can be reliably predicted on the basis of FFA removal from the butter.     

Recent advances in mass spectrometry analysis of phenolic endocrine disruptors and related compounds

This article reviews recent literature on current methodologies based on chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry to analyze phenolic compounds with endocrine‐disrupting capabilities. For this review we chose alkylphenol ethoxylates, bisphenol A, bisphenol F, and their degradation products and halogenated derivatives, which are considered important environmental contaminants. Additionally, some related compounds such as bisphenol diglycidylethers were included. Growing attention has been paid to the mass spectrometric characterization of these compounds and the instrumentation and strategies used for their quantification and confirmation. The current use of gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS) and liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC–MS) methodologies with different mass spectrometers and ionization and monitoring modes is discussed. Practical aspects with regards to the use of these analytical techniques, such as derivatizing reagents in GC–MS, ion suppression in LC–MS, and the most problematic aspects of quantification, are included in the discussion. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc., Mass Spec Rev 29:776–805, 2010     

The village within: an alternative genealogy of the urban village

The ‘urban village’, as it has come to be known since the 1980s, has very little to do with the rural. This coupling of terms, however, evokes a longer history of attempts to marry the urban with the rural, without either losing their distinctive attributes. This article traces this genealogy to Patrick Geddes's conceptualisation of the term in India, and focusses the analysis on two projects: the 1930 ‘Green City’ proposal by the constructivists Moisei Ginzburg and Mikhail Barshch, and the planning of Dodoma, Tanzania’a post-colonial capital, by the Canadian firm Project Planning Associates and the American James Rossant in the late 1970s. Both projects addressed nascent socialist societies, but the former was part of an industrialisation campaign while the latter was part of a villagisation campaign. By re-imagining the village as a component that can be integrated into the city, both aimed at a socio-economic reconfiguration of the town-country relationship on a territorial scale. Reconsidering the term ‘urban village’ as part of a broader history of urban-rural planning emphasises how experiments in the Global South, as well as other locations outside the professional hegemonic centre, shed new light on the discipline's core assumptions about the urban-rural divide.     

Welfare benefits in highly decentralized fiscal systems: Evidence on interregional mimicking

This paper analyses the determinants of welfare benefit levels within a highly fiscally decentralized context. More specifically, we analyse the role of mimicking as a driver of the institutional design of subnational government policies in the absence of federal co-ordination and financing. Empirically, we focus on the welfare benefit programmes of Spanish regional governments during the period 1996–2015. Our results strongly support the significant role played by mimicking: regional public agents observe what their peers are doing and act accordingly, and this holds even in a context of low mobility of households.     

System loss assessment of bridge networks accounting for multi-hazard interactions

This paper details an integrated method for the multi-hazard risk assessment of road infrastructure systems exposed to potential earthquake and flood events. A harmonisation effort is required to reconcile bridge fragility models and damage scales from different hazard types: this is achieved by the derivation of probabilistic functionality curves, which express the probability of reaching or exceeding a loss level given the seismic intensity measure. Such probabilistic tools are essential for the loss assessment of infrastructure systems, since they directly provide the functionality losses instead of the physical damage states. Multi-hazard interactions at the vulnerability level are ensured by the functionality loss curves, which result from the assembly of hazard-specific fragility curves for local damage mechanisms. At the hazard level, the potential overlap between earthquake and flood events is represented by a time window during which the effects of one hazard type on the infrastructure may still be present: the value of this temporal parameter is based on the repair duration estimates provided by the functionality loss curves. The proposed framework is implemented through Bayesian Networks, thus enabling the propagation of uncertainties and the computation of joint probabilities. The procedure is demonstrated on a bridge example and a hypothetical road network.     

An evaluation of the hybrid car technology for the Mexico Mega City

The introduction of hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) technology in the private car fleet of Mexico City is evaluated in terms of private costs, energy, public health and CO₂ emission benefits. In addition to constructing plausible scenarios for urban expansion, emission, car fleet, and fuel consumption for year 2026 and comparing them with a 2004 base case, a time series is built to obtain accumulated economic benefits. Experimental techniques were used to build a vehicle library for a car simulator that included a Prius 2002, chosen as the HEV technology representative for this work. The simulator is used to estimate the emissions and fuel consumption of the car fleet scenarios. In the context of an urban scenario for year 2026, a complex air quality model obtains the concentrations of criterion pollutants corresponding to these scenarios.Using a technology penetration model, the hybridized fleet starts unfolding in year 2009 reaching to 20% in 2026. In this year, the hybridized fleet resulted in reductions of about 10% of CO₂ emissions, and yielded reductions in daytime mean concentrations of up to 7% in ozone and 3.4% in PM_2.5 compared to the 2004 base case. These reductions are concentrated in the densely populated areas of Mexico City. By building a time series of costs and benefits it is shown that, depending on fuel prices and using a 5% return rate, positive accumulated benefits (CO₂ benefits + energy benefits + public health benefits − private costs) will start generating in year 2015 reaching between 2.8 and 4.5 billion US Dlls in 2026. Another modernized private fleet consisting exclusively of Tier I and II cars did not yield appreciable results, signaling that a change in private car technology towards HEV's is needed to obtain significant accumulated benefits.     

Cell division inhibition in Salmonella typhimurium histidine-constitutive strains: an ftsI-like defect in the presence of wild-type penicillin-binding protein 3 levels

Histidine-constitutive (Hisc) strains of Salmonella typhimurium undergo cell division inhibition in the presence of high concentrations of a metabolizable carbon source. Filaments formed by Hisc strains show constrictions and contain evenly spaced nucleoids, suggesting a defect in septum formation. Inhibitors of penicillin-binding protein 3 (PBP3) induce a filamentation pattern identical to that of Hisc strains. However, the Hisc septation defect is caused neither by reduced PBP3 synthesis nor by reduced PBP3 activity. Gross modifications of peptidoglycan composition are also ruled out. D-Cycloserine, an inhibitor of the soluble pathway producing peptidoglycan precursors, causes phenotypic suppression of filamentation, suggesting that the septation defect of Hisc strains may be caused by scarcity of PBP3 substrate.     

Role of the colchicine ring A and its methoxy groups in the binding to tubulin and microtubule inhibition

The roles of the methoxy substituents on ring A of two ring colchicine (COL) analogues were probed by the synthesis of a number of drugs and the examination of their effect on binding to tubulin, inhibition of microtubule assembly, and induction of GTPase activity. Selective elimination of ring A methoxy groups at positions 2, 3, and 4 weakened all three processes. The effects on binding and inhibition were independent of the nature of ring C (or C'). Specifically, excision of the 2- or 3-methoxy groups weakened binding by ca. 0.4 kcal mol-1, while that of the 4-methoxy group of ring A was weakened by 1.36 +/- 0.15 kcal mol-1. The effect on the inhibition of microtubule assembly, expressed as the equilibrium constant for the binding of the tubulin-drug complex to the end of a microtubule, was more complex and strongly dependent on the nature of ring C (or C'). This was attributed to the abilities of various groups on ring C' to overcome the wobbling in the tubulin-drug complex introduced by the weakening of the anchoring provided by ring A. It is concluded that ring A of COL is not germane to the mechanism of the inhibition of tubulin self-assembly. It serves only as a complex-stabilizing anchor. The control of this process resides in the interactions that key oxygen atoms of ring C of COL or C' of structural analogues establish with the protein. It is proposed that the 4-methoxy group of ring A serves as a key attachment point for immobilization of the drugs on the protein.