Symposer\u27s Dream

This is a creative writing project titled Symposer’s Dream. The first part is the novel itself (seventy pages) and the second part is a research paper (fifteen pages). The novel is about a young former wall street guy who goes through a journey of a lifetime in search of meaning and a sense of belonging. He ends up travelling to the Canary Islands and eventually finds himself in Morocco where he discovers new truths and realities that end up changing his life. Many events in the story intertwine fiction and reality in such a way that make it challenging for the reader to determine which one is which. In fact, this blend of the real and the fantastic is very much a part of the Symposer’s Dream narration which focuses on magic realism as the main style of narration

Encapsulación de extracto de cacao para evitar la degradación de polifenoles.

Treballs Finals de Grau d'Enginyeria Química, Facultat de Química, Universitat de Barcelona, Curs: 2015-2016, Tutors: Alicia Maestro Garriga i José María Gutierrez GonzalezCocoa is highly beneficial for health, because it contains a great deal of polyphenols, which are antioxidants, but also contains arginine, dopamine (neurotransmitter), magnesium, serotonin (neurotransmitter), tryptophan (which is essential to cause the release of the neurotransmitter serotonin), fenilethylamine, and flavones among many others. The term antioxidant is given to a type of molecules that have the ability to retard or even prevent the oxidation caused by oxygen. Oxidation is the transfer of electrons from one substance to another from an oxidizing agent. In consequence of this transfer of electrons, there is a release of radicals causing cell death. Polyphenols contained in food have stability problems, because they are sensitive to sun exposure and other environmental factors, such as high temperature, humidity, etc. Therefore it seems adequate to protect them from degradation. In this work, cocoa extract has been encapsulated into jellified alginate spheres and filaments in order to prevent degradation. However, although this technique has been proposed in the literature as a protection method, there is no published evidence of effective protection of polyphenols against degradation using this type of encapsulation. Therefore, the main aim of this work is to study the protective effect of encapsulation of cocoa extract into alginate gel against degradation, compared with degradation of free cocoa. In order to reach this objective, external gelation was used in order to prepare capsules (an external source of gelling agent, Ca2+, is chosen). A solution of alginate + cocoa was dropped into a conventionally stirred CaCl2 solution or, alternatively, introduced in the solution stirred by ultraturrax. In the first case, spheres were formed. In the second one, filament morphologies, due to the high shear, were found. Samples were subsequently lyophilized. Free cocoa extract was lyophilized for comparison..