Investigation on the Effect of Shapes on the Drying Kinetics and Sensory Evaluation Study of Dried Jackfruit

Jackfruits are seasonal and highly nutritional fruits indigenous to the Southwestern rainforests of India. However much of the produce are spoilt annually due to poor preservation techniques. Minimal studies have been conducted on the drying kinetics of jackfruit and the effect of shapes on the drying kinetics. In this research, drying curves of three different shaped jackfruit slices were obtained using a convective oven at 40oC, 50oC, 60oC and 70oC. Modified Midilli-Kucuk Model was found to be the best kinetic model for drying of jackfruits. At all temperatures, effective moisture diffusivity values and activation energy varied from 2.66 x 10-10 - 4.85 x 10-10 m2/s and 16.08 - 20.07 kJ/mol respectively. Drying was found to be most efficient at 50oC using the square shaped slices with a R2, RMSE and SSE value of 0.9984, 0.01127 and 0.002668 respectively. Sensory evaluation of untreated and additive-added dried jackfruit slices was conducted by 40 untrained sensory panelists. Jackfruit with ascorbic acid and sugar coating had highest aesthetics value due to better retention of colour by ascorbic acid. However sugar coated jackfruit had the most favorable taste and smell. Further optimization must be done to satisfy consumers collectively to enable a highly marketable product

A multistep continuous flow synthesis machine for the preparation of pyrazoles via a metal-free amine-redox process.

A versatile multistep continuous flow setup is reported for the four-step conversion of anilines into pyrazole products. The synthesis machine incorporates the use of amine-redox chemistry through diazotization and a metal-free vitamin C mediated reduction. The machine can be used for the synthesis of an array of analogues or the scale up of an individual target.We are grateful to the Cambridge Home and European Scholarship Scheme (JSP) and EPSRC (DLB and SVL, grant numbers EP/K0099494/1 and EP/K039520/1) for financial support.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from the Royal Society of Chemistry via http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/C5RE00082

Determinants of the use of family planning methods among rural women in Plateau state, Nigeria

This study aimed at determining the factors that influence family planning practice among rural women of Pankshin district in Plateau state, Nigeria. A cross-sectional study using a simple random sampling method was conducted from October to December 2019. A self-administered questionnaire was used for data collection among 302 respondents. Among respondents, 48.3% had practised family planning and the most popular family planning method ever practised was injectables (57.5%). The determinants of family planning practice were age group 29-39 and 40-49 years old (AOR=4.373, p<0.001; AOR=5.862, p<0.001), discussion with partner (AOR=9.192, p<0.001) and partner’s approval (AOR=2.791, p=0.007). Findings showed an encouraging family planning prevalence with the main determinants involving male partners. Further efforts need to be made to promote family planning practice among male partners and to empower women of all reproductive age groups by providing them with relevant information that is needed for them to make informed decisions

The impact of equilibrium assumptions on tests of selection

With the increasing availability and quality of whole genome population data, various methodologies of population genetic inference are being utilized in order to identify and quantify recent population-level selective events. Though there has been a great proliferation of such methodology, the type-I and type-II error rates of many proposed statistics have not been well-described. Moreover, the performance of these statistics is often not evaluated for different biologically relevant scenarios (e.g., population size change, population structure), nor for the effect of differing data sizes (i.e., genomic vs. sub-genomic). The absence of the above information makes it difficult to evaluate newly available statistics relative to one another, and thus, difficult to choose the proper toolset for a given empirical analysis. Thus, we here describe and compare the performance of four widely used tests of selection: SweepFinder, SweeD, OmegaPlus, and iHS. In order to consider the above questions, we utilize simulated data spanning a variety of selection coefficients and beneficial mutation rates. We demonstrate that the LD-based OmegaPlus performs best in terms of power to reject the neutral model under both equilibrium and non-equilibrium conditions-an important result regarding the relative effectiveness of linkage disequilibrium relative to site frequency spectrum based statics. The results presented here ought to serve as a useful guide for future empirical studies, and provides a guide for statistical choice depending on the history of the population under consideration. Moreover, the parameter space investigated and the Type-I and Type-II error rates calculated, represent a natural benchmark by which future statistics may be assessed

Facilitating Mechanical Design with Augmented Reality

By enhancing a real scene with computer generated objects, Augmented Reality (AR), has proven itself as a valuable Human-Computer Interface (HCI) in numerous application areas such as medical, military, entertainment and manufacturing. It enables higher performance of on-site tasks with seamless presentation of up-to-date, task-related information to the users during the operation. AR has potentials in design because the current interface provided by Computer-aided Design (CAD) packages is less intuitive and reports show that the presence of physical objects help design thinking and communication. This research explores the use of AR to improve the efficiency of a design process, specifically in mechanical design.Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA

Recent Progress in Polymorphism-Based Population Genetic Inference

The recent availability of whole-genome sequencing data affords tremendous power for statistical inference. With this, there has been great interest in the development of polymorphism-based approaches for the estimation of population genetic parameters. These approaches seek to estimate, for example, recently fixed or sweeping beneficial mutations, the rate of recurrent positive selection, the distribution of selection coefficients, and the demographic history of the population. Yet despite estimating similar parameters using similar data sets, results between methodologies are far from consistent. We here summarize the current state of the field, compare existing approaches, and attempt to reconcile emerging discrepancies. We also discuss the biases in selection estimators introduced by ignoring the demographic history of the population, discuss the biases in demographic estimators introduced by assuming neutrality, and highlight the important challenge to the field of achieving a true joint estimation procedure to circumvent these confounding effect