Influence of packaging attributes on perception of juice: Eye-tracking study

Today, consumers are increasingly aware of the impact that the fast and stressful way of life has on their health. They focus not only on physical activity, but also on a diet filled with fruits and vegetables. As a result, they often choose a tasty alternative which is one of the main sources of vitamins and nutrients - fruit juices. However, these products are often labeled as drinks with high amounts of sugar. Therefore, it is very important for these drinks to be perceived by the consumers as healthy and tasty, which is one of the most important features of their packages. Their goal is to appeal to customers, catch their attention and make them buy the product. One of the most convenient methods to study how packages appeal to customers is the eye-tracking method. The aim of this article is to find out how different attributes of packages can influence customers' perception of the juice. The research was carried out in a form of eye-tracking experiment (A/B testing), which involved 38 participants at the age from 20 to 29 (generation Y). Results showed that lower color saturation significantly reduces the attention of individual packages and also reduces the influence of craving the juice as opposed to brighter colors. The importance of information on the back side was also confirmed, since moving the information from back to the front side did not show any significant decrease of the back side's attention span. Last but not least, it has been found out that the image type used on the orange juice package holds importance too, since photography of oranges led to a higher craving of the juice in comparison to the illustration of oranges. However, it was not proven that photographs of oranges held a higher attention span compared to the illustrations. The article contains demonstrable proof of individual package attributes' influence on how generation Y consumers perceive the juice.O

Water balance disorders after neurosurgery: the triphasic response revisited

Water balance disorders after neurosurgery are well recognized, but detailed reports of the triphasic response are scarce. We describe a 55-year-old woman, who developed the triphasic response with severe hyper- and hyponatraemia after resection of a suprasellar meningioma. The case illustrates how sudden and dramatic the changes in water balance after neurosurgery can be. The biochemical profile suggested central diabetes insipidus and the syndrome of inappropriate antidiuretic hormone secretion. The underlying pathophysiology was further analysed using fractional excretions, measurements of renin, aldosterone and vasopressin and a metyrapone test. Diagnostic, therapeutic and preventive strategies for these intriguing but complex cases are proposed

Insights and inferences about integron evolution from genomic data

Research articl

Microbes as engines of ecosystem function : When does community structure enhance predictions of ecosystem processes?

FUNDING This work was supported by NSF grant DEB-1221215 to DN, as well as grants supporting the generation of our datasets as acknowledged in their original publications and in Supplementary Table S1. ACKNOWLEDGMENT We thank the USGS Powell Center ‘Next Generation Microbes’ working group, anonymous reviews, Brett Melbourne, and Alan Townsend for valuable feedback on this project.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Biogeochemical Consequences of Rapid Microbial Turnover and Seasonal Succession in Soil

Soil microbial communities have the metabolic and genetic capability to adapt to changing environmental conditions on very short time scales. In this paper we combine biogeochemical and molecular approaches to reveal this potential, showing that microbial biomass can turn over on time scales of days to months in soil, resulting in a succession of microbial communities over the course of a year. This new understanding of the year-round turnover and succession of microbial communities allows us for the first time to propose a temporally explicit N cycle that provides mechanistic hypotheses to explain both the loss and retention of dissolved organic N (DON) and inorganic N (DIN) throughout the year in terrestrial ecosystems. In addition, our results strongly support the hypothesis that turnover of the microbial community is the largest source of DON and DIN for plant uptake during the plant growing season. While this model of microbial biogeochemistry is derived from observed dynamics in the alpine, we present several examples from other ecosystems to indicate that the general ideas of biogeochemical fluxes being linked to turnover and succession of microbial communities are applicable to a wide range of terrestrial ecosystems

Direct sequencing of the human microbiome readily reveals community differences

Future sequencing of the human microbiota will require greater breadth rather than depth

Carbon, Metals, and Grain Size Correlate with Bacterial Community Structure in Sediments of a High Arsenic Aquifer

Bacterial communities can exert significant influence on the biogeochemical cycling of arsenic (As). This has globally important implications since As in drinking water affects the health of over 100 million people worldwide, including in the Ganges–Brahmaputra Delta region of Bangladesh where geogenic arsenic in groundwater can reach concentrations of more than 10 times the World Health Organization’s limit. Thus, the goal of this research was to investigate patterns in bacterial community composition across gradients in sediment texture and chemistry in an aquifer with elevated groundwater As concentrations in Araihazar, Bangladesh. We characterized the bacterial community by pyrosequencing 16S rRNA genes from aquifer sediment samples collected at three locations along a groundwater flow path at a range of depths between 1.5 and 15 m. We identified significant differences in bacterial community composition between locations in the aquifer. In addition, we found that bacterial community structure was significantly related to sediment grain size, and sediment carbon (C), manganese (Mn), and iron (Fe) concentrations. Deltaproteobacteria and Chloroflexi were found in higher proportions in silty sediments with higher concentrations of C, Fe, and Mn. By contrast, Alphaproteobacteria and Betaproteobacteria were in higher proportions in sandy sediments with lower concentrations of C and metals. Based on the phylogenetic affiliations of these taxa, these results may indicate a shift to more Fe-, Mn-, and humic substance-reducers in the high C and metal sediments. It is well-documented that C, Mn, and Fe may influence the mobility of groundwater arsenic, and it is intriguing that these constituents may also structure the bacterial community