Alginate inhibits iron absorption from ferrous gluconate in a randomized controlled trial and reduces iron uptake into Caco-2 cells

Previous in vitro results indicated that alginate beads might be a useful vehicle for food iron fortification. A human study was undertaken to test the hypothesis that alginate enhances iron absorption. A randomised, single blinded, cross-over trial was carried out in which iron absorption was measured from serum iron appearance after a test meal. Overnight-fasted volunteers (n=15) were given a test meal of 200g cola-flavoured jelly plus 21 mg iron as ferrous gluconate, either in alginate beads mixed into the jelly or in a capsule. Iron absorption was lower from the alginate beads than from ferrous gluconate (8.5% and 12.6% respectively, p=0.003). Sub-group B (n=9) consumed the test meals together with 600 mg calcium to determine whether alginate modified the inhibitory effect of calcium. Calcium reduced iron absorption from ferrous gluconate by 51%, from 11.5% to 5.6% (p=0.014), and from alginate beads by 37%, from 8.3% to 5.2% (p=0.009). In vitro studies using Caco-2 cells were designed to explore the reasons for the difference between the previous in vitro findings and the human study; confirmed the inhibitory effect of alginate. Beads similar to those used in the human study were subjected to simulated gastrointestinal digestion, with and without cola jelly, and the digestate applied to Caco-2 cells. Both alginate and cola jelly significantly reduced iron uptake into the cells, by 34% (p=0.009) and 35% (p=0.003) respectively. The combination of cola jelly and calcium produced a very low ferritin response, 16.5% (p<0.001) of that observed with ferrous gluconate alone. The results of these studies demonstrate that alginate beads are not a useful delivery system for soluble salts of iron for the purpose of food fortification

Build orientation optimization problem in additive manufacturing

Additive manufacturing (AM) is an emerging type of production technology to create three-dimensional objects layer-by-layer directly from a 3D CAD model. AM is being extensively used by engineers and designers. Build orientation is a critical issue in AM since it is associated with the object accuracy, the number of supports required and the processing time to produce the object. Finding the best build orientation in the AM will reduced significantly the building costs and will improve the object accuracy. This paper presents an optimization approach to solve the part build orientation problem considering the staircase effect, support area characteristics and the build time. Two global optimization methods, the Electromagnetism-like and the Stretched Simulated Annealing algorithms, are used to study the optimal orientation of four models. Preliminary experiments show that both optimization methods can effectively solve the build orientation problem in AM, finding several global solutions.This work has been supported and developed under the FIBR3D project - Hybrid processes based on additive manufacturing of composites with long or short fibers reinforced thermoplastic matrix (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-016414), supported by the Lisbon Regional Operational Programme 2020, under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). This work was also supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Interfacing and Verifying ALHAT Safe Precision Landing Systems with the Morpheus Vehicle

The NASA Autonomous precision Landing and Hazard Avoidance Technology (ALHAT) project developed a suite of prototype sensors to enable autonomous and safe precision landing of robotic or crewed vehicles under any terrain lighting conditions. Development of the ALHAT sensor suite was a cross-NASA effort, culminating in integration and testing on-board a variety of terrestrial vehicles toward infusion into future spaceflight applications. Terrestrial tests were conducted on specialized test gantries, moving trucks, helicopter flights, and a flight test onboard the NASA Morpheus free-flying, rocket-propulsive flight-test vehicle. To accomplish these tests, a tedious integration process was developed and followed, which included both command and telemetry interfacing, as well as sensor alignment and calibration verification to ensure valid test data to analyze ALHAT and Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC) performance. This was especially true for the flight test campaign of ALHAT onboard Morpheus. For interfacing of ALHAT sensors to the Morpheus flight system, an adaptable command and telemetry architecture was developed to allow for the evolution of per-sensor Interface Control Design/Documents (ICDs). Additionally, individual-sensor and on-vehicle verification testing was developed to ensure functional operation of the ALHAT sensors onboard the vehicle, as well as precision-measurement validity for each ALHAT sensor when integrated within the Morpheus GNC system. This paper provides some insight into the interface development and the integrated-systems verification that were a part of the build-up toward success of the ALHAT and Morpheus flight test campaigns in 2014. These campaigns provided valuable performance data that is refining the path toward spaceflight infusion of the ALHAT sensor suite

The Effects of an Adaptive and Distributed Transmission Power Control on the Performance of Energy Harvesting Sensor Networks

The design of routing protocols for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has been traditionally tackled by assuming battery-powered sensors, in which minimizing the power consumption was the main objective. Advances in technology and the ability to harvest energy from the environment has enabled self-sustaining systems and thus diminish the significance of network lifetime considerations in the design of WSNs. Although WSNs operated by energy-harvesting sensors are not limited by network lifetime, they still pose new design challenges due to the unstable and uncertain amount of energy that can be harvested from the environment. In this paper, we propose a new protocol for energy-harvesting sensor networks that uses adaptive transmission power to maintain the network connectivity, and distributes the traffic load on the network. Based on local information, each node dynamically adjusts its transmission power in order to maximize the network’s end-to-end performance. The simulation results indicate that the proposed protocol keeps the network connected at most of the times by using an efficient power management, outperforming greedy forwarding and dynamic duty cycle protocols in terms of packet delivery ratio, delay, and power management

Dependence of polytetrafluoroethylene reflectance on thickness at visible and ultraviolet wavelengths in air

[EN] Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) is an excellent diffuse reflector widely used in light collection systems for particle physics experiments. However, the reflectance of PTFE is a function of its thickness. In this work, we investigate this dependence in air for light of wavelengths 260 nm and 450 nm using two complementary methods. We find that PTFE reflectance for thicknesses from 5 mm to 10 mm ranges from 92.5% to 94.5% at 450 nm, and from 90.0% to 92.0% at 260 nm We also see that the reflectance of PIFE of a given thickness can vary by as much as 2.7% within the same piece of material. Finally, we show that placing a specular reflector behind the PTFE can recover the loss of reflectance in the visible without introducing a specular component in the reflectance.The NEXT Collaboration acknowledges support from the following agencies and institutions: the European Research Council (ERC) under the Advanced Grant 339787-NEXT; the European Union's Framework Programme for Research and Innovation Horizon 2020 (2014-2020) under the Grant Agreements No. 674896, 690575 and 740055; the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad and the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovacion y Universidades of Spain under grants FIS2014-53371-C04, RTI2018-095979, the Severo Ochoa Program grants SEV-2014-0398 and CEX2018-000867-S, and the Maria de Maeztu Program MDM-2016-0692; the Generalitat Valenciana under grants PROMETEO/2016/120 and SEJI/2017/011; the Portuguese FCT under project PTDC/FIS-NUC/2525/2014 and under projects UID/04559/2020 to fund the activities of LIBPhys-UC; the U.S. Department of Energy under contracts No. DE-AC02-06CH11357 (Argonne National Laboratory), DE-AC0207CH11359 (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory), DE-FG02-13ER42020 (Texas A&M) and DE-SC0019223/DE-SC0019054 (University of Texas at Arlington); and the University of Texas at Arlington (USA). DGD acknowledges Ramon y Cajal program (Spain) under contract number RYC2015-18820. JM-A acknowledges support from Fundacion Bancaria "la Caixa" (ID 100010434), grant code LCF/BQ/PI19/11690012. Finally, we thank Brendon Bullard, Paolo Giromini and Neeraj Tata for helpful discussions and assistance with preliminary measurements.Ghosh, S.; Haefner, J.; Martín-Albo, J.; Guenette, R.; Li, X.; Loya Villalpando, A.; Burch, C.... (2020). Dependence of polytetrafluoroethylene reflectance on thickness at visible and ultraviolet wavelengths in air. Journal of Instrumentation. 15(11):1-17. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-0221/15/11/P11031S1171511Auger, M., Auty, D. J., Barbeau, P. S., Bartoszek, L., Baussan, E., Beauchamp, E., … Cleveland, B. (2012). The EXO-200 detector, part I: detector design and construction. Journal of Instrumentation, 7(05), P05010-P05010. doi:10.1088/1748-0221/7/05/p05010Martín-Albo, J., Muñoz Vidal, J., Ferrario, P., Nebot-Guinot, M., Gómez-Cadenas, J. J., … Cárcel, S. (2016). Sensitivity of NEXT-100 to neutrinoless double beta decay. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2016(5). doi:10.1007/jhep05(2016)159Rogers, L., Clark, R. A., Jones, B. J. P., McDonald, A. D., Nygren, D. R., Psihas, F., … Azevedo, C. D. . (2018). High voltage insulation and gas absorption of polymers in high pressure argon and xenon gases. Journal of Instrumentation, 13(10), P10002-P10002. doi:10.1088/1748-0221/13/10/p10002Silva, C., Pinto da Cunha, J., Pereira, A., Chepel, V., Lopes, M. I., Solovov, V., & Neves, F. (2010). Reflectance of polytetrafluoroethylene for xenon scintillation light. Journal of Applied Physics, 107(6), 064902. doi:10.1063/1.3318681Haefner, J., Neff, A., Arthurs, M., Batista, E., Morton, D., Okunawo, M., … Lorenzon, W. (2017). Reflectance dependence of polytetrafluoroethylene on thickness for xenon scintillation light. Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment, 856, 86-91. doi:10.1016/j.nima.2017.01.057Kravitz, S., Smith, R. J., Hagaman, L., Bernard, E. P., McKinsey, D. N., Rudd, L., … Sakai, M. (2020). Measurements of angle-resolved reflectivity of PTFE in liquid xenon with IBEX. The European Physical Journal C, 80(3). doi:10.1140/epjc/s10052-020-7800-6Geis, C., Grignon, C., Oberlack, U., García, D. R., & Weitzel, Q. (2017). Optical response of highly reflective film used in the water Cherenkov muon veto of the XENON1T dark matter experiment. Journal of Instrumentation, 12(06), P06017-P06017. doi:10.1088/1748-0221/12/06/p06017Allison, J., Amako, K., Apostolakis, J., Arce, P., Asai, M., Aso, T., … Barrand, G. (2016). Recent developments in Geant4. Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment, 835, 186-225. doi:10.1016/j.nima.2016.06.12

Development, standardization and refinement of procedures for evaluating effects of endocrine active compounds on development and sexual differentiation of Xenopus laevis

Xenopus laevis has been introduced as a model to study effects of endocrine-active compounds (EAC) on development and sexual differentiation. However, variable and inconsistent data have raised questions about the reliability of the test methods applied. The current study was conducted in two laboratories to develop, refine, and standardize procedures and protocols. Larvae were exposed in flow-through systems to 17β-estradiol (E2), at concentrations from 0.2 to 6.0 μg E2 L−1 in Experiment 1A, and 0.015 to 2.0 μg E2 L−1 in Experiment 1B. In both studies survival (92%, 99%) and percentage of animals that completed metamorphosis (97%, 99%) indicated reproducible biological performance. Furthermore, minor variations in husbandry led to significant differences in snout-to-vent length, weight, and gonad size. In Experiment 1A, almost complete feminization occurred in all E2 treatment groups whereas a concentration response was observed in Experiment 1B resulting in an EC50 of 0.12 μg E2 L−1. The final verified protocol is suitable for determining effects of EAC on development and sexual differentiation in X. laevis

Impact of common cardio-metabolic risk factors on fatal and non-fatal cardiovascular disease in Latin America and the Caribbean: an individual-level pooled analysis of 31 cohort studies

Background: Estimates of the burden of cardio-metabolic risk factors in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) rely on relative risks (RRs) from non-LAC countries. Whether these RRs apply to LAC remains un- known. Methods: We pooled LAC cohorts. We estimated RRs per unit of exposure to body mass index (BMI), systolic blood pressure (SBP), fasting plasma glucose (FPG), total cholesterol (TC) and non-HDL cholesterol on fatal (31 cohorts, n = 168,287) and non-fatal (13 cohorts, n = 27,554) cardiovascular diseases, adjusting for regression dilution bias. We used these RRs and national data on mean risk factor levels to estimate the number of cardiovascular deaths attributable to non-optimal levels of each risk factor. Results: Our RRs for SBP, FPG and TC were like those observed in cohorts conducted in high-income countries; however, for BMI, our RRs were consistently smaller in people below 75 years of age. Across risk factors, we observed smaller RRs among older ages. Non-optimal SBP was responsible for the largest number of attributable cardiovascular deaths ranging from 38 per 10 0,0 0 0 women and 54 men in Peru, to 261 (Dominica, women) and 282 (Guyana, men). For non-HDL cholesterol, the lowest attributable rate was for women in Peru (21) and men in Guatemala (25), and the largest in men (158) and women (142) from Guyana. Interpretation: RRs for BMI from studies conducted in high-income countries may overestimate disease burden metrics in LAC; conversely, RRs for SBP, FPG and TC from LAC cohorts are similar to those esti- mated from cohorts in high-income countries