Potential Use of Ascorbic Acid–Based Surfactants as Skin Penetration Enhancers

ABSTRACT

6-O-Ascorbic acid alkanoates (ASCn) are amphiphilic molecules having physical-chemical properties that depend on the alkyl chain length. The derivatives of low molecular weight (n < 11) have enough aqueous solubility to produce self-assemblies at room temperature (≈25°C), while those with longer alkyl chains possess a critical micellar temperature (CMT) higher than 30°C. At higher temperatures (T° > CMT), ASCn aqueous suspensions turn into either micellar solutions or gel phases, depending on the length of the hydrophobic chain. On cooling, coagels are produced, which possess a lamellar structure that exhibit sharp X-ray diffraction patterns and optical birefringence. The semisolid consistency of such coagels is an interesting property to formulate dermatological pharmaceutical dosage forms able to solubilize and stabilize different drugs. The objective of the present study was the evaluation of the enhancing permeation effect of ASCn with different chain lengths and to correlate permeability changes with histological effects. With this purpose, ASCn coagels containing anthralin (antipsoriasic drug) or fluorescein isothiocyanate (FITC, hydrophobic fluorescent marker) were assayed on rat skin (ex vivo) and mice skin (in vivo), respectively. Also, histological studies were performed aimed at detecting some possible side effects of ASCn. No inflammatory cellular response was observed in the skin when ASCn coagels were applied, suggesting non-irritating properties. Light microscopy indicated slight disruption and fragmentation of stratum corneum. The penetration of ASCn through rat skin epidermis was very fast and quantitatively significant. The permeation of anthralin was significantly increased when the drug was vehiculized in ASCn coagels, compared to other pharmaceutical systems. The results indicated that ASC12 seems to have the highest enhancing effect on FITC permeation. ASC12 appears to be the compound that possesses the highest capacity to enhance the penetration of the drugs. Furthermore, it has the highest permeation of the serie.     

Composite hydrogeological investigation and characterisation methods applied at a nuclear power plant site in Taiwan

Drawing from the lessons learnt from the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, the assessment of subsurface environmental hazard around nuclear power plants has emerged as a critical task. Consequently, aiming to better understand the possible environmental impact of radiation leaks into the groundwater, a prescreening programme was initiated in 2011 by the Taiwanese government. As part of this programme, this study conducted various borehole prospecting techniques to identify in situ hydrogeological characteristics at Chin‐Shan Nuclear Power Plant. Borehole electrical log, sonic log and temperature/conductivity log were conducted to explain the regional lithologic conditions and permeability of the formation. In conjunction with this, the interwell tracer and pumping test was carried out to simultaneously determine the hydraulic parameters. In our opinion, the implementation of such in situ end‐to‐end investigations is essential in interpreting in situ fluid and solute transport dynamics prior to programming any numerical scheme for early warning, vulnerability assessment and regular monitoring of a nuclear power plant site.     

Evaluation of ascorbic acid and sugar degradation products during fruit dessert processing under conventional or ohmic heating treatment

The effects of conventional heating (C) or ohmic heating (O) treatment on the degradation of sugar and ascorbic acid (AA) were evaluated in chunky fruit desserts prepared with apple puree (Golden Delicious var.) and chunky peach (Panavi var.) pieces. Concentrations of 5-HMF, furfural (F), 3-hydroxy-2-pyrone (3H2P) and 2-furoic acid (FA) were determined to assess the importance of oxidative and/or thermal reactions during processing. Depending on the thermal processing, 5-HMF and F levels in samples ranged from not detected to 3260 and from not detected to 570 μg/100 g FW respectively. Production of 3H2P and FA ranged from 480 to 2670 and from 84 to 420 μg/100 g FW respectively. Results showed that the impact of final heating treatment on the formation of AA degradation products (3H2P and FA) was minor, if any. Thus, AA degradation during apple products processing mainly depended on oxidative reactions pathway. Likewise, ohmic heating processing had very little effect on the formation of 5-HMF and F, in opposite to conventional heating.     

Electricity rates for the zero marginal cost grid

The electricity industry is rapidly changing: costs are increasingly dominated by capital and technology is turning loads into resources. This is similar to the early days of the Internet. Building on rate-structures used in the communications industry, utilities of the future should offer customers a portfolio of service contract options that provide a signal to the utility regarding the type and amount of infrastructure that should be deployed.     

Thermal Conductivity and Viscosity of Nanofluids Having Nanoencapsulated Phase Change Material

In this study, the thermal conductivity and viscosity of nanofluids, composed of a base fluid and nanoencapsulated phase change material (NEPCM), were investigated experimentally. The NEPCM was prepared by the encapsulation of n-nonadecane as phase change material with diethylenetriamine and toluene-2,4-diisocyanate using interfacial polymerization method. The NEPCM was characterized using scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) analyses. In the preparation of the nanofluids containing NEPCM, two different base fluids, water and ethylene glycol (EG), were used. The concentration of NEPCM and the working temperature were selected as the main parameters. It was found that the viscosity of the nanofluids decreases with increasing temperature and increases with increasing solid concentration. The viscosity was also expressed as a function of the solid concentration and temperature. The thermal conductivity of the nanofluids was found to increase with increasing temperature. Thermal conductivity exhibited an increasing tendency with increasing solid concentration, but the changes in thermal conductivity according to base fluid are in the range of uncertainty of the measurement for both nanofluids with a solid volumetric fraction lower than 1.68%.     

A New Quality Improving Scheme for VQ Decompressed Images Based on DWT

The better compression rate can be achieved by the traditional vector quantization (VQ) method, and the quality of the recovered image can also be accepted. But the decompressed image quality can not be promoted efficiently, so how to balance the image compression rate and image recovering quality is an important issue. In this paper, an image is transformed by discrete wavelet transform (DWT) to generate its DWT transformed image which can be compressed by the VQ method further. Besides, we compute the values between the DWT transformed image and decompressed DWT transformed image as the difference matrix which is the adjustable basis of the decompressed image quality. By controlling the deviation of the difference matrix, there can be nearly lossless compression for the VQ method. Experimental results show that when the number of compressed bits by our method is equal to the number of those bits compressed by the VQ method, the quality of our recovered image is better. Moreover, the proposed method has more compression capability comparing with the VQ scheme.     

Coping knowledge boundaries between information system and business disciplines: An intellectual capital perspective

Information system development can be considered a collaboration between users and developers. The inability to leverage the localized knowledge embedded in these two stakeholders hinders software development work to achieve high performance. Exploring the ways to counter this difficulty is then critical. This study applies an intellectual capital perspective to address the issues around spanning the knowledge boundary between developers and users. Our findings highlighted how important effective knowledge boundary spanning is to both product and project quality. Furthermore, three dimensions of intellectual capital increased the degree to which knowledge boundary spanning was effective.     

Antennas for next generation mobile communications

In future mobile communications many antennas will coexist on the device. This creates a number of problems related to bandwidth, efficiency, and correlation. Remedies are discussed in the paper, and attention is called to the promising area of adaptive matching, which also can solve problems related to the user.     

A Multiphase Pore Scale Network Model of Gas Exchange in Apple Fruit

A multiphase pore scale network model was developed to describe mass transfer in apple fruit. The 3D microscale geometry of the tissue was reconstructed from synchrotron radiation tomography images. Individual cells and pores were identified using a watershed segmentation procedure on a Euclidean distance map of the tissue microstructure. Further morphological characteristics of each individual pore, including its volume, connections to the neighbors and the connected area between the pore and its neighbors, were determined. The tissue was represented by a network of nodes (simplified individual pores and cells) that were interconnected by tubes. The transport of the respiratory gases O₂ and CO₂ between two nodes was modelled using diffusion laws and irreversible thermodynamics, while respiration was taken into account in the individual cellular nodes. A numerical procedure was applied to simulate the gas transport within the discrete network and to compute the local diffusivities of the links in the network. The predicted overall gas diffusivities compared well to experimental data and results computed from a microscale continuum model, thereby validating the pore scale network model. This approach is a computationally attractive alternative to a continuum multiphase approach for modelling gas transport in fruit.     

Performance evaluation of an efficient reduced-complexity time synchronization approach for OFDM systems

This paper presents a performance analysis of a recently proposed preamble-based reduced-complexity (RC) two-stage synchronization technique. The preamble, composed of two identical subsequences, is first used to determine an uncertainty interval based on Cox and Schmidl algorithm. Then, a differential correlation-based metric is carried using a new sequence obtained by element wise multiplication of the preamble subsequence and a shifted version of it. This second step is performed to fine tune the coarse time estimate, by carrying the differential correlation-based metric over the uncertainty interval of limited width around the coarse estimate, thus leading to low computational load. In this paper, we first discuss some complexity issues of the RC approach compared to previously proposed algorithms. Then, we study the effect of the training sequence class and length choices on the synchronization performance in the case of multipath channels. The impact of the uncertainty interval width on the trade-off between performance and complexity is also studied. The two-stage approach was found to provide almost equal performance to those obtained by the most efficient differential correlation-based benchmarks. However, it has a very reduced computational load, equivalent to that of sliding correlation-based approaches.