Genetic and environmental effects on chemical composition related to sensory traits in common beans (Phaseolus vulgaris L.)

The chemical composition determines plant-derived foods’ sensory traits; genetic and environmental effects and their interactions determine chemical composition. Understanding the importance of each factor should help characterise foodstuffs according to the variety and place of cultivation. We studied the effects of variety (five landraces + two checks) and environment (five locations and two years) on some molecules important for beans’ (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) sensory value. The greatest location effects were on protein and starch content and variety effects were due to combinations of traits (mainly sucrose, protein, and malic acid). The variety × location interactions detected in protein, sucrose, citric acid, and malic acid were difficult to associate to the gastronomic success of a particular variety cultivated at a particular location. Our results showed that protected designation of origin (PDO) in beans could be delimited on the basis of chemical composition, derived from the particular environmental characteristics of a region and the genetic characteristics of the varieties admitted.     

Metal flux and dynamic speciation at (bio)interfaces. Part III: MHEDYN, a general code for metal flux computation; application to simple and fulvic complexants

Metal flux at consuming interfaces (e.g., sensors or microorganisms) is simulated in environmental multiligand systems using a new numerical code, MHEDYN (Multispecies HEterogeneous DYNamics), based on the lattice Boltzmann method. The attention is focused on the computation of the maximum flux of Cu(II), that is, the flux controlled by diffusion-reaction in solution, irrespective of processes occurring at the interface. In parts III and IV of this series, three types of typical environmental complexants are studied: (a) simple ligands (OH- and C03(2-)), (b) fulvic or humic substances including many sites with broadly varying rate constants, and (c) aggregates including a broad range of sizes and diffusion coefficients. Part III focuses on computations in the presence of simple ligands and fulvic/humic substances separately, and part IV discusses the case of aggregate complexes alone and the mixtures of all ligands in typical natural waters. These papers describe the dynamic contribution of the various types of sites for fulvic and aggregate Cu(II) complexes for the first time. Whenever possible, the metal fluxes computed by MHEDYN are compared with those given by another code, FLUXY, based on a fully different mathematical approach, and very good agreement between these codes is obtained. In all cases, MHEDYN computes the concentration profile of each complex and its time evolution, as well as the steady-state flux and the corresponding contribution of each complex to the flux. The metal fluxes can be computed at a planar consuming surface such as an organism or a sensor surface, in presence of an unlimited number of complexation reactions of the metal M, and for any metal/ligand concentration ratio, with values of the physicochemical parameters ranging over many orders of magnitude.     

Quantification of heterocyclic amines from thermally processed meats selected from a small-scale population-based study

Heterocyclic amines (HAs) are potent mutagens that form at high temperatures in cooked, protein-rich food. Due to their frequent intake, these compounds are considered a risk factor for human cancer. Cooking conditions and eating habits strongly influence the level of HA exposure. Thus, it is difficult to assess the intake of HAs in a large population. Food-frequency questionnaires (FFQs), designed to provide data on parameters that affect HA formation, were used to survey a small population (459 persons) from Barcelona (NE Spain). Subsequently, the most-consumed food items named were cooked according to the preferences of the population surveyed and analyzed for HAs using SPE and LC-MS/MS. In the population studied, the estimated intake via consumption of 13 meat dishes was 285.6 ng of mutagenic HAs per capita and day. PhIP (2-amino-1-methyl-6-phenylimidazo[4,5-b]pyridine) was the HA to which the population was most exposed, mainly from fried chicken and griddled beef. When the co-mutagens norharman and harman are included, the mean daily intake of HAs rises to 475.6 ng per capita and day. A novel putative DMIP regioisomer was detected in the cooked meats, which was analyzed in the present study by multistage MS.     

ServiceSs: An Interoperable Programming Framework for the Cloud

The rise of virtualized and distributed infrastructures has led to new challenges to accomplish the effective use of compute resources through the design and orchestration of distributed applications. As legacy, monolithic applications are replaced with service-oriented applications, questions arise about the steps to be taken in order to maximize the usefulness of the infrastructures and to provide users with tools for the development and execution of distributed applications. One of the issues to be solved is the existence of multiple cloud solutions that are not interoperable, which forces the user to be locked to a specific provider or to continuously adapt applications. With the objective of simplifying the programmers challenges, ServiceSs provides a straightforward programming model and an execution framework that helps on abstracting applications from the actual execution environment. This paper presents how ServiceSs transparently interoperates with multiple providers implementing the appropriate interfaces to execute scientific applications on federated clouds.     

The joint effects of an evaporation duct and high k-factor conditions on a microwave transhorizon path over the sea

The simultaneous presence of an evaporation duct and high k-factor conditions in a 156 km multi-link path over the English Channel (La Manche) are investigated using the solutions from the parabolic equation. The two propagation conditions with various levels of relative importance are analysed in detail and shown to explain well the signal levels observed beyond the horizon. The study complements and extends conventional duct leakage explanation.     

Biometric recognition using online uppercase handwritten text

This paper presents a handwritten text biometric recognition system suitable to be applied to short sequences of text (words). Strokes are considered the structural units of handwriting with words being regarded as two separate sequences: one of pen-down and one of pen-up strokes. Unsupervised categorization by means of a self-organized map allows mapping strokes to integers and the efficient comparison of the sequences by means of dynamic time warping. Measures obtained from each sequence are combined in a later step. This separation gives us the opportunity to show that pen-up strokes possess a surprisingly high discriminative power, while the performance of the combination suggests they may carry non-redundant information with respect to pen-down strokes.A writer identification rate of 92.38% and a minimum of detection cost function of 0.046 (4.6%) is achieved with 370 users and just one word. Results are improved up to 96.46% and 0.033 (3.3%) when combining two words.     

Recursive alignment block classification technique for word reordering in statistical machine translation

Statistical machine translation (SMT) is based on alignment models which learn from bilingual corpora the word correspondences between source and target language. These models are assumed to be capable of learning reorderings. However, the difference in word order between two languages is one of the most important sources of errors in SMT. In this paper, we show that SMT can take advantage of inductive learning in order to solve reordering problems. Given a word alignment, we identify those pairs of consecutive source blocks (sequences of words) whose translation is swapped, i.e. those blocks which, if swapped, generate a correct monotonic translation. Afterwards, we classify these pairs into groups, following recursively a co-occurrence block criterion, in order to infer reorderings. Inside the same group, we allow new internal combination in order to generalize the reorder to unseen pairs of blocks. Then, we identify the pairs of blocks in the source corpora (both training and test) which belong to the same group. We swap them and we use the modified source training corpora to realign and to build the final translation system. We have evaluated our reordering approach both in alignment and translation quality. In addition, we have used two state-of-the-art SMT systems: a Phrased-based and an Ngram-based. Experiments are reported on the EuroParl task, showing improvements almost over 1 point in the standard MT evaluation metrics (mWER and BLEU).     

An essay on the linguistic roots of fuzzy sets

This paper mainly tries to show that the membership function of a fuzzy set labeled P does show some intrinsic property related with how P is actually managed in the universe of discourse. Its final goal is to analyze an answer to the question, which intrinsic but simple property allows a function to represent a fuzzy set labeled P? The presented property exhibits that the membership function just ‘measures’ in some scale the extent up to which x is P in language, for all x in the universe of discourse.Such study is done in a form allowing to consider how to represent the ‘collective’ originated by a predicate reflecting a collective noun. As particular cases of what is presented, and when the degrees can be some kinds of numerical subsets, the Zadeh’s fuzzy sets, the interval-valued, the intuitionistic, and the type-2 fuzzy sets, appear as particular cases and to some extent are discussed. A ‘unification’ of all different kinds of fuzzy sets based on a linguistic origin is achieved.     

Mineralization of salicylic acid in acidic aqueous medium by electrochemical advanced oxidation processes using platinum and boron-doped diamond as anode and cathodically generated hydrogen peroxide

Solutions containing 164 mg L(-1) salicylic acid of pH 3.0 have been degraded by electrochemical advanced oxidation processes such as anodic oxidation, anodic oxidation with electrogenerated H(2)O(2), electro-Fenton, photoelectro-Fenton and solar photoelectro-Fenton at constant current density. Their oxidation power has been comparatively studied in a one-compartment cell with a Pt or boron-doped diamond (BDD) anode and a graphite or O(2)-diffusion cathode. In the three latter procedures, 0.5mM Fe(2+) is added to the solution to form hydroxyl radical (()OH) from Fenton's reaction between Fe(2+) and H(2)O(2) generated at the O(2)-diffusion cathode. Total mineralization is attained for all methods with BDD and for photoelectro-Fenton and solar photoelectro-Fenton with Pt. The poor decontamination achieved in anodic oxidation and electro-Fenton with Pt is explained by the slow removal of most pollutants by ()OH formed from water oxidation at the Pt anode in comparison to their quick destruction with ()OH produced at BDD. ()OH generated from Fenton's reaction oxidizes rapidly all aromatic pollutants, but it cannot destroy final Fe(III)-oxalate complexes. Solar photoelectro-Fenton treatments always yield quicker degradation rate due to the very fast photodecarboxylation of these complexes by UVA irradiation supplied by solar light. The effect of current density on the degradation rate, efficiency and energy cost of all methods is examined. The salicylic acid decay always follows a pseudo-first-order kinetics. 2,3-Dihydroxybenzoic, 2,5-dihydroxybenzoic, 2,6-dihydroxybenzoic, alpha-ketoglutaric, glycolic, glyoxylic, maleic, fumaric, malic, tartronic and oxalic acids are detected as oxidation products. A general reaction sequence for salicylic acid mineralization considering all these intermediates is proposed.