Cookability of African yambean,Sphenostylis stenocrarpa (Hochst ex. A. Rich) Harma

Dry yambean seeds, prior to soaking and during storage treatments, were moist cooked and autoclaved. Seeds, presoaked in water, sodium chloride (brine), as filterate (alkali) and a mixture of brine and alkali (alkalibrine) were also similarly cooked. Water and alkali-soaked seeds became hydrated faster than those pre-soaked in brine and alkali-brine solution. When cooked under constant temperature conditions the untreated yambean took about 190 min to cook on a hot plate and kerosene stove and 65 min by autoclaving. Soaking treatments substantially rendered dry yambean more quick-cooking, especially when pre-contacted in brine or alkali-brine for which cooking time was about a third of that of un-soaked seeds. Yambean cook-ability declined by 9% after 3 months in storage under room temperature (29 °C).     

Chemical and biological evaluation of silk worm chrysalid protein

Dried and defatted, water extracted and hydrogen peroxide treated silk worm chrysalides (SWC) were analysed for gross composition as well as for energy, fatty acids and amino acids. The amino acid analyses showed well-balanced amino acid patterns. Water extraction and hydrogen peroxide treatment improved odour, taste and colour of the product. Tests with rats showed that raw and water extracted SWC were well utilised whereas hydrogen peroxide treated SWC showed reduced protein utilisation. It is concluded that the water extracted SWC is better suited for eventual use as a food component than the hydrogen peroxide treated SWC.     

Effect of Electrical Stimulation on Postmortem Property Change of Myofibrillar Proteins

Changes in biochemical properties of myofibrillar proteins of rabbit muscle, which had been subjected to electrical stimulation soon after slaughter, during postmortem storage at 0°C were investigated. Myofibrillar ATPase activity and the ATPase activity of acto-heavy meromyosin (HMM) complex, reconstituted from actin and HMM which had been prepared from at-death and postmortem muscles, decreased at first and then increased slightly during 7 days storage. In addition, the change of the dissociation constant of acto-HMM complex of electrically stimulated muscle during postmortem storage was quite small, i.e., 1.59 ± 10^?4M for at-death muscle, 1.70 ± 10^?4M for muscle stored for 1 day and 1.49 ± 10^?4M for muscle stored for 7 days. This indicates that electrical stimulation treatment minimized the postmortem change of actin-myosin interaction.     

Effect of frozen storage on the structure and enzymatic activities of myofibrillar proteins of rabbit skeletal muscle

The effect of frozen storage on the biochemical properties of myofibrils, and of their major constituents, actin and myosin, was investigated. Extractability of myofibrillar proteins increased slightly for 3 weeks during frozen storage of muscle, decreasing thereafter. The change in myofibrillar ATPase activity during frozen storage was consistent with that of a reconstituted acto-heavy meromyosin (HMM) complex prepared from frozen stored muscle at the same weight ratio of actin to myosin as in situ. However, myosin ATPase activity showed a different pattern of change when compared with myofibrillar ATPase activity. The maximum velocity of acto-HMM ATPase activity and the apparent dissociation constant of the acto-HMM complex decreased for 1 week during frozen storage, increasing thereafter, indicating that the affinity of actin for myosin was greatest in muscle which had been frozen for 1 week.     

Evaluation of Brassica species as leaf sources for extending the processing season of a leaf protein concentrate plant

Leaf protein concentrates (LPC) were prepared in large pilot plant equipment from seven Brassica varieties grown on plots of up to 0.06 ha. Plants were harvested about a month before and after the lucerne processing season. Best yields of LPC, from leafier or forage-type species, were up to 0.9 t ha^?1. Properties were as good as or better than those of LPC from lucerne. Lucerne processing procedures were modified to maximize yields from the more succulent Brassica plants.     

FlowMate: scalable on-line flow clustering

We design and implement an efficient on-line approach, FlowMate, for clustering flows (connections) emanating from a busy server, according to shared bottlenecks. Clusters can be periodically input to load balancing, congestion coordination, aggregation, admission control, or pricing modules. FlowMate uses in-band (passive) end-to-end delay measurements to infer shared bottlenecks. Delay information is piggybacked on feedback from the receivers, or, if impossible, TCP or application round-trip time estimates are used. We simulate FlowMate and examine the effects of network load, traffic burstiness, network buffer sizes, and packet drop policies on clustering correctness, evaluated via a novel accuracy metric. We find that coordinated congestion management techniques are more fair when integrated with FlowMate. We also implement FlowMate in the Linux kernel v2.4.17 and evaluate its performance on the Emulab testbed, using both synthetic and tcplib-generated traffic. Our results demonstrate that clustering of medium to long-lived flows is accurate, even with bursty background traffic. Finally, we validate our results on the Internet Planetlab testbed.     

On the temperature dependence of the thermoelectric power in disordered semiconductors

In the context of the thermodynamics of irreversible processes, general expressions for the temperature dependence of the thermoelectric power in the region of hopping conductivity in disordered materials at low temperatures are derived. The effect of degeneracy of impurity levels on the thermoelectric power is taken into account. On the basis of the results, the experimental data on the thermoelectric power in amorphous and impurity-containing semiconductors are discussed.     

Scaling Laws for One- and Two-Dimensional Random Wireless Networks in the Low-Attenuation Regime

The capacity scaling of extended two-dimensional wireless networks is known in the high-attenuation regime, i.e., when the power path loss exponent alpha is greater than 4. This has been accomplished by deriving information-theoretic upper bounds for this regime that match the corresponding lower bounds. On the contrary, not much is known in the so-called low-attenuation regime when 2lesalphales4. (For one-dimensional networks, the uncharacterized regime is 1lesalphales2.5.) The dichotomy is due to the fact that while communication is highly power-limited in the first case and power-based arguments suffice to get tight upper bounds, the study of the low-attenuation regime requires a more precise analysis of the degrees of freedom involved. In this paper, we study the capacity scaling of extended wireless networks with an emphasis on the low-attenuation regime and show that in the absence of small scale fading, the low attenuation regime does not behave significantly different from the high attenuation regime.     

New Organic Nonlinear Optical Polyene Crystals and Their Unusual Phase Transitions

A series of new nonlinear optical chromophores based on configurationally locked polyenes (CLPs) with chiral pyrrolidine donors are synthesized. All CLP derivatives exhibit high thermal stability with decomposition temperatures T_d at least > 270 °C. Acentric single crystals of enantiopure D ‐ and L ‐prolinol‐based chromophores with a monoclinic space group P2₁ exhibit a macroscopic second‐order nonlinearity that is twice as large than that of analogous dimethylamino‐based crystal. This is attributed to a strong hydrogen‐bonded polar polymer‐like chain built by these molecules, which is aligned along the polar crystallographic b‐axis. Five α‐phase CLP crystals with different donors grown from solution exhibit a reversible or irreversible thermally induced structural phase transition to a β‐phase. These phase transitions are unusual, changing the crystal symmetry from higher to lower at increasing temperatures, for example, from centrosymmetric to non‐centrosymmetric, enhancing their macroscopic second‐order nonlinear optical properties.