Needle-free injection enhancement of beef improves tenderness but slightly increases microbial translocation

Blade tenderization has been used for decades to increase tenderness in beef cuts that are highly variable in tenderness or predicted to be “tough.” Injection enhancement also is commonly used in industry to increase tenderness, juiciness, and flavor of some beef muscles. These processes have the potential to translocate microbial organisms on the exterior to interior portions of whole muscles. One research study reported that 3 to 4% of surface bacteria are transferred into the interior of muscles but only penetrate an average of ¼ inch deep into the surface. Even though the frequency of subprimal surfaces being contaminated with pathogens is low, translocation of these contaminants into the interior of subprimals by tenderization or injection procedures poses a public health risk. Microbial contamination on beef surfaces generally is eliminated during typical cooking; however, given the low infectious doses of pathogens such as Escherichia coli O157:H7, internalized contamination may survive if adequate temperatures are not reached at the center of cuts (i.e., rare and medium rare endpoints) and lead to illness. Industry groups have developed a guide, Best Practices: Pathogen Control During Tenderizing/Enhancing of Whole Muscle Cuts to minimize any hazard that may be present with such technologies. Although needle injection enhancement currently is common in beef processing, there may be alternative, safer, or more effective means to apply these technologies. One potential method involves utilizing an air-pressured needle-free injection system similar to an instrument currently being investigated for use in vaccinating cattle. In theory, eliminating the need for physical penetration of the muscle with a needle-free instrument using air-pressure fluid streams would reduce the translocation of surface microbial contamination to the interior and would additionally minimize carryover contamination from subprimal to subprimal during continuous injection operations. Therefore, we investigated use of needle-free injection enhancement as an alternative strategy to needle injection enhancement. Our objectives were to determine the safety and efficacy of using needle-free injection for enhancing beef muscles and the application of needle-free injection enhancement for improving beef quality

Reclaiming revolutionary feminism

Generally, saying: ‘feminist’, is revolutionary enough in this day and age, it’s far more of a statement now than it was back in the eighties. And no, I wouldn’t say I was a Revolutionary Feminist now ‘cos I’m less separatist than I was at that time and I think it’s got overladen with such baggage that I’d have to spend about ten minutes defining what I meant. (Interview with Al Garthwaite, Leeds, 20 January 2012)In this article, I shall explore some understandings, and misunderstandings, of the school or type of feminism known as Revolutionary Feminism, a uniquely British school of feminism, founded in 1977. The quote above is taken from my interview with a prominent and influential British Revolutionary Feminist activist named Al Garthwaite. The interview forms the basis of this article and the research was part of my PhD on the British Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) from the 1970s to today. Among many of her legacies, Al founded the Reclaim the Night (RTN) marches in the United Kingdom in November 1977, traditionally women’s night-time, street protest marches against male violence against women (VAW). Also involved in the establishment and running of the UK WLM national newsletter ‘WIRES’,1 Al was at the hub of organising in the feminist hotbed that was Leeds, in Yorkshire in the North of England, in the 1970s and 1980s

Finite time singularities in a class of hydrodynamic models

Models of inviscid incompressible fluid are considered, with the kinetic energy (i.e., the Lagrangian functional) taking the form ${\cal L}\sim\int k^\alpha|{\bf v_k}|^2d^3{\bf k}$ in 3D Fourier representation, where $\alpha$ is a constant, $0<\alpha< 1$. Unlike the case $\alpha=0$ (the usual Eulerian hydrodynamics), a finite value of $\alpha$ results in a finite energy for a singular, frozen-in vortex filament. This property allows us to study the dynamics of such filaments without the necessity of a regularization procedure for short length scales. The linear analysis of small symmetrical deviations from a stationary solution is performed for a pair of anti-parallel vortex filaments and an analog of the Crow instability is found at small wave-numbers. A local approximate Hamiltonian is obtained for the nonlinear long-scale dynamics of this system. Self-similar solutions of the corresponding equations are found analytically. They describe the formation of a finite time singularity, with all length scales decreasing like $(t^*-t)^{1/(2-\alpha)}$, where $t^*$ is the singularity time.Comment: LaTeX, 17 pages, 3 eps figures. This version is close to the journal pape

Reproducibility in the absence of selective reporting : An illustration from large-scale brain asymmetry research

Altres ajuts: Max Planck Society (Germany).The problem of poor reproducibility of scientific findings has received much attention over recent years, in a variety of fields including psychology and neuroscience. The problem has been partly attributed to publication bias and unwanted practices such as p-hacking. Low statistical power in individual studies is also understood to be an important factor. In a recent multisite collaborative study, we mapped brain anatomical left-right asymmetries for regional measures of surface area and cortical thickness, in 99 MRI datasets from around the world, for a total of over 17,000 participants. In the present study, we revisited these hemispheric effects from the perspective of reproducibility. Within each dataset, we considered that an effect had been reproduced when it matched the meta-analytic effect from the 98 other datasets, in terms of effect direction and significance threshold. In this sense, the results within each dataset were viewed as coming from separate studies in an "ideal publishing environment," that is, free from selective reporting and p hacking. We found an average reproducibility rate of 63.2% (SD = 22.9%, min = 22.2%, max = 97.0%). As expected, reproducibility was higher for larger effects and in larger datasets. Reproducibility was not obviously related to the age of participants, scanner field strength, FreeSurfer software version, cortical regional measurement reliability, or regional size. These findings constitute an empirical illustration of reproducibility in the absence of publication bias or p hacking, when assessing realistic biological effects in heterogeneous neuroscience data, and given typically-used sample sizes

Needle-free injection enhancement of beef strip loins with phosphate and salt has potential to improve yield, tenderness, and juiciness but harm texture and flavor

Meat tenderness is the most important palatability attribute affecting consumers’ overall eating experience. Injection enhancement and blade tenderization have long been used to improve this important trait. Injection enhancement has been shown to improve tenderness, juiciness, color stability, and cooking yield, but not all solutions have been adequately evaluated. Thus, there is a need to conduct research on the effectiveness of common enhancement solutions. We published results from an extensive study comparing a solution of phosphate, salt, and rosemary with a solution of calcium lactate and rosemary injected by using traditional needle injection. There were no differences in Warner-Bratzler shear force values between treatments, but trained panelists scored steaks enhanced with calcium lactate and rosemary to be less tender and juicy than steaks enhanced with phosphate, salt, and rosemary. However, steaks enhanced with the phosphate solution had a higher incidence of metallic and salty off-flavors, a darker initial color, and more color deterioration. Because needle-free injection enhancement is relatively similar to traditional needle-injection enhancement with regard to food safety, it should be evaluated for its effects on meat color, instrumental tenderness, sensory traits, and yields. Objectives of this research were to determine the effects of injection method (needlefree vs. needle injection) and solution (calcium lactate vs. phosphate solution) on meat color, instrumental tenderness, sensory traits, pump yield, and cooking loss of beef Longissimus lumborum muscles