Are specific emotions narrated differently?

Two studies test the assertion that anger, sadness, fear, pride, and happiness are typically narrated in different ways. Everyday events eliciting these 5 emotions were narrated by young women (Study 1) and 5- and 8-year-old girls (Study 2). Negative narratives were expected to engender more effort to process the event, be longer, more grammatically complex, more often have a complication section, and use more specific emotion labels than global evaluations. Narratives of Hogan’s (2003) juncture emotions anger and fear were expected to focus more on action and to contain more core narrative sections of orientation, complication, and resolution than narratives of the outcome emotions sadness and happiness. Hypotheses were confirmed for adults except for syntactic complexity, whereas children showed only some of these differences. Hogan’s theory that juncture emotions are restricted to the complication section was not confirmed. Finally, in adults, indirect speech was more frequent in anger narratives and internal monologue in fear narratives. It is concluded that different emotions should be studied in how they are narrated, and that narratives should be analyzed according to qualitatively different emotions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Welche Bedeutung besitzt die Mehrfachverwendung von Nahrungsergänzungsmitteln? Daten einer deutschlandweiten Verbraucherbefragung

Today the use of dietary supplements in the form of vitamin and mineral preparations is partially widespread. Apart from their importance in relation to health, wellbeing and prevention the risk assessment of dietary supplements and a safe total nutrient intake play a crucial role. The supply of various products with same ingredients and the associated cumulative intakes of substances can be seen as a potential problem. Data on this were not yet available. The aim of this present analysis was to capture and further characterize the multiple use of dietary supplements in adult men and women. The data for this study was obtained from a representative survey in cooperation with the Society for Consumer, market and sales research (GfK) in Germany with 1.070 dietary supplement users. In 94 % of the cases, the supply of a specific nutrient came from a single preparation. With an increasing number of dietary supplements used, the mean vitamin and mineral intake increased as expected, at the same time, the number of supplement users dropped significantly. An exceedance of the Tolerable Upper Intake Level (UL) was of relevance mainly in view of magnesium. 68 % of the magnesium users exceeded the UL with the intake of a single product. Overall, the data obtained here indicated that vitamins and minerals were not taken multiple via different preparations. In this collective, multiple exposures via different dietary supplements harbored no exposed risk.     

Pervaporative Separation of Methanol–Methyl Acetate Mixtures with Commercial PVA Membranes

Pervaporation may successfully be implemented for the separation of azeotropic mixtures which generally requires energy intensive separation procedures. Separation of methanol from methyl acetate by pervaporation is a representative application. In this study the commercial polyvinyl alcohol (PVA)-based membranes PERVAP^TM 4155-30, PERVAP^TM 4155-70, and PERVAP^TM 4155-80 were used to recover methanol from binary methanol–methyl acetate mixtures. The separation performance was investigated for various operating parameters such as feed composition, feed temperature, and permeate pressure and discussed in terms of permeance and selectivity. An empirical model was developed to quantify the effect of membrane swelling on the permeate flux.     

Polysiloxane‐Derived Ceramics Containing Nanowires with Catalytically Active Tips

By direct foaming of a Pt‐containing polysiloxane precursor, macroporous ceramics were generated by pyrolysis at 1400°C under nitrogen or argon. The growth of nanowires was induced via a vapor–liquid–solid mechanism in which the Pt particles acted as deposition site for the decomposition gases released upon pyrolyzing the preceramic polymer. SEM, HR‐SEM, TEM/EDX, and XRD investigations revealed that pyrolysis under argon atmosphere leads to short SiC nanowires of only a few micrometers length and under nitrogen atmosphere Si₃N₄ nanowires evolved, with length of several 10 μm. In both cases the tips of the nanowires mainly consisted of PtSi. In contrast to samples pyrolyzed at 600°C, the components after higher temperature pyrolysis showed moderate‐specific surface areas of 55–67 m²/g. In CO oxidation experiments, a good catalytic activity was found for the Pt silicide particles, suggesting that despite their relatively large size, their location at the tips of the nanowires affords them good reactivity.     

A Peltier cells differential calorimeter with kinetic correction for the measurement of cp(H,T) and Δs(H,T) of magnetocaloric materials

In this paper we describe and test a setup for the characterization of the magnetocaloric effect around room temperature. The setup is a differential calorimeter able to measure both the specific heat c(p)(H,T) under constant magnetic field H and the isothermal entropy change induced by changing H, Δs(H,T), in the room temperature range. The setup uses miniaturized Peltier cells to measure the heat flux, with resolution of about 1 μW, and power Peltier cells to regulate the temperature in the range from 243 K (-30 °C) to 343 K (+70 °C). The kinetic effects due to the heat capacity of the measuring cells are taken into account by a simple model of the heat flux diffusion in the calorimetric cell. As measurement examples, we show the characterization of the magnetocaloric effect in magnetic materials with a second order transition [without latent heat and without hysteresis, as in the La(1)(Fe(1-x-y)Co(y)Si(x))(13) alloy with x=0.077 and y=0.079] and with a first order transitions (with latent heat and hysteresis as in Ni(50)Mn(36)Co(1)Sn(13)). As a result we compare the entropy change Δs(H,T) derived from (i) the integration of the specific heat c(p)(H,T) and (ii) the direct isothermal measurements, obtaining an excellent agreement.     

Spectral calibration of radiometric detectors using tunable laser sources

This paper describes the analysis of laser-based responsivity measurements using the Tunable Lasers in Photometry setup at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt. An approach based on digital signal analysis is proposed to remove interference-caused oscillations in highly resolved spectral data from laser-based measurements, yielding an improved reproducibility and comparability of results. Digital filters are used to selectively suppress the frequency components of interference fringes visible in the measurement data. We describe the algorithm used and discuss the associated uncertainty components of laser-based measurements. Finally, we give examples of the calibration of different detectors with and without interference effects.     

Genotypic and climatic influences on the concentration and composition of flavonoids in kale (Brassica oleracea var. sabellica)

The aim of this study was to determine the composition and concentration of flavonoid aglycones in kale, the dependence on genotype and their interaction with decreasing temperature and global radiation. Eight kale cultivars, comprising hybrid and traditional, old cultivars, were grown in a field experiment and harvested four times at 4-week intervals. The traditional, old cultivars in particular contained high concentrations of flavonoids. In all of the investigated cultivars, kaempferol was the main flavonoid aglycone, followed by quercetin and isorhamnetin, which was quantified in six of the eight cultivars. Furthermore, in six of the eight cultivars, the total concentration of flavonoids remained unchanged with decreasing temperature and global radiation. The quercetin concentration increased in five of these six cultivars, whereas the kaempferol concentration decreased. Interestingly, the quercetin-to-kaempferol ratio increased in all of the investigated cultivars, despite the fact that the radiation level decreased, suggesting that the impact of the decline in temperature could be responsible for this effect.     

Genome engineering allows selective conversions of terephthalaldehyde to multiple valorized products in bacterial cells

Deconstruction of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic waste generates opportunities for valorization to alternative products. We recently designed an enzymatic cascade that could produce terephthalaldehyde (TPAL) from terephthalic acid. Here, we showed that the addition of TPAL to growing cultures of Escherichia coli wild-type strain MG1655 and an engineered strain for reduced aromatic aldehyde reduction (RARE) strain resulted in substantial reduction. We then investigated if we could mitigate this reduction using multiplex automatable genome engineering (MAGE) to create an E. coli strain with 10 additional knockouts in RARE. Encouragingly, we found this newly engineered strain enabled a 2.5-fold higher retention of TPAL over RARE after 24 h. We applied this new strain for the production of para-xylylenediamine (pXYL) and observed a 6.8-fold increase in pXYL titer compared with RARE. Overall, our study demonstrates the potential of TPAL as a versatile intermediate in microbial biosynthesis of chemicals that derived from waste PET.