Orange juice residues as dietary fiber source for foods

Food snacks using powdered residues from the orange juice industry as a source of dietary fiber were formulated. Six formulations utilizing powdered orange residues with three different moisture levels (25%, 15% and 10%) were elaborated. There were used two basic blends. The first one was 33.3% of orange dry powder, 33.3% of honey, 16.6% of roasted peanut, 16.6% of raisins; the second one was 28.6% of orange powder, 35.7% of honey, 17.85% of roasted peanut, 17.85% of raisins. Snacks had spherical shape with 2.5 cm diameter and a weight close to 10g. The snack moisture was between 12.6 and 17.4%, and their aw between 0.65 and 0.71. The snack chemical composition, on dry matter basis, was 1.6 and 1.9% of ash; 12.3 and 15.2% of lipids; 6.1 and 7.1% of proteins; and 56.2 to 59.6% of carbohydrates; the caloric contribution (calculated) was between 326.8 and 342.9 kcal/100g. The powdered orange residue had 64% of total dietary fiber, 54% of insoluble dietary fiber and 10% of soluble dietary fiber. In the snack the fiber amount fluctuated between 20 and 26% of total dietary fiber; 18 and 22% of insoluble dietary fiber, and 3.0 and 4.5% of soluble dietary fiber. The snack with the higher content of orange residue presented the higher content of dietary fiber. The snacks were well accepted by a sensory panel, without showing differences among treatments.     

Use of nopal dietary fiber in a powder dessert formulation

The development of diverse types of foods of low caloric value and with high content in dietary fiber have occupied a preponderant place in the food industry in the last years, due to the growing interest of the consumers for a healthy and nutritious diet. Pre-cooked or quick to prepare foods are attractive for the time they save; if to this you add their nutritious value, the attractiveness is even greater. For this reason, this study analyzes different formulations of a powder to prepare a dessert (flan), with different percentages of incorporation of nopal flour, as a source of dietary fiber (16%, 18%, 20%). Two flavors (melon and banana) were tried. It was observed that the flan flavored with banana and with 16% of nopal flour, reached better sensorial characteristics. Greater percentages of nopal flour negatively affected the sensorial characteristics, mainly flavor, color and texture. The analysis showed that the powder presented 5.7% of moisture, low water activity (0.48) and therefore a low total recount of microorganisms. The content of protein was high (27.2%), the ether extract low (2.0%) similar to the caloric contribution (40 Kcal/portion). The flan showed a 9.8% of total dietary fiber, being greater the contribution of soluble fiber (6.1%) than that of insoluble fiber (3.7%). Due to these characteristics this formulation could be considered as a food that provides benefits for the human health.     

Radial distribution of porosity in spherical activated carbon particles

The radial distribution of porosity in spherical activated carbon particles and its relationship to both activation temperature and conversion of the reaction C-CO₂ are discussed. Char spheres, obtained by pelletizing Quercus agrifolia powdered char, were activated using CO₂ as activating agent at 820 and 860 °C. For both temperatures, the gasification reaction was run until the desired conversion (30, 50 and 70%) was reached. The activation process was performed using TGA apparatus. The porosity of the samples was measured by physical adsorption of nitrogen at −196 °C. BET and Dubinin-Raduskhevich equations were used to analyse the results. From each activated carbon sphere several samples were prepared, corresponding to different layers of the sphere; an outer layer, a middle layer and the core of the particle. From these results, the radial porosity evolution as a function of activation temperature and reaction conversion was obtained and a mathematical expression that correlates pore volume evolution and reaction conversion is proposed.     

Parking Availability Prediction with Coarse-Grained Human Mobility Data

Nowadays, the anticipation of parking-space demand is an instrumental service in order to reduce traffic congestion levels in urban spaces. The purpose of our work is to study, design and develop a parking-availability predictor that extracts the knowledge from human mobility data, based on the anonymized human displacements of an urban area, and also from weather conditions. Most of the existing solutions for this prediction take as contextual data the current road-traffic state defined at very high temporal or spatial resolution. However, access to this type of fine-grained location data is usually quite limited due to several economic or privacy-related restrictions. To overcome this limitation, our proposal uses urban areas that are defined at very low spatial and temporal resolution. We conducted several experiments using three Artificial Neural Networks: Multilayer Perceptron, Gated Recurrent Units and bidirectional Long Short Term Memory networks and we tested their suitability using different combinations of inputs. Several metrics are provided for the sake of comparison within our study and between other studies. The solution has been evaluated in a real-world testbed in the city of Murcia (Spain) integrating an open human-mobility dataset showing high accuracy. A MAPE between 4% and 10% was reported in horizons of 1 to 3 h.     

Plasmonic nanoparticle chain in a light field: a resonant optical sail

Optical trapping and driving of small objects has become a topic of increasing interest in multidisciplinary sciences. We propose to use a chain made of metallic nanoparticles as a resonant light sail, attached by one end point to a transparent object and propelling it by the use of electromagnetic radiation. Driving forces exerted on the chain are theoretically studied as a function of radiation's wavelength and chain's alignments with respect to the direction of radiation. Interestingly, there is a window in the frequency spectrum in which null-torque equilibrium configuration, with minimum geometric cross section, corresponds to a maximum in the driving force.     

Colitis cystica profunda. A case report]

Bad breath plagues millions of people in the US. Because breath malodor is viewed as a social, not medical, condition, bad breath usually is not part of dental school curriculums. Desperate halitosis sufferers looking for help are turning to the dental profession for answers.