“Got milk alternatives?” Understanding key factors determining U.S. consumers’ willingness to pay for plant-based milk alternatives

Milk is an important dairy product in U.S. food retail. Lifestyle changes toward climate-conscious consumption, animal welfare, and food safety concerns have increased the popularity of plant-based milk alternatives. This study is focused on such beverages and provides insights and best practice recommendations for marketing managers in the U.S. food retail sector. An online survey was distributed to explore factors explaining the intentions of U.S. consumers to purchase and pay a premium for plant-based milk alternatives. Food curiosity and food price inflation were identified as relevant for both willingness to buy and willingness to pay a price premium. In addition, animal welfare concerns and the green and clean product image of plant-based alternatives were relevant to the willingness to pay a premium for plant-based milk

Microscopic universality with dynamical fermions

It has recently been demonstrated in quenched lattice simulations that the distribution of the low-lying eigenvalues of the QCD Dirac operator is universal and described by random-matrix theory. We present first evidence that this universality continues to hold in the presence of dynamical quarks. Data from a lattice simulation with gauge group SU(2) and dynamical staggered fermions are compared to the predictions of the chiral symplectic ensemble of random-matrix theory with massive dynamical quarks. Good agreement is found in this exploratory study. We also discuss implications of our results.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, minor modifications, to appear in Phys. Rev. D (Rapid Commun.

The ethically conscious flower consumer

The entry discusses key factors which are relevant to consumers that are interested in buying fairtrade cut flowers and builds on the work of Meike Rombach, David Dean, Nicole Widmar and Vera Bitsch

The microscopic spectrum of the QCD Dirac operator with finite quark masses

We compute the microscopic spectrum of the QCD Dirac operator in the presence of dynamical fermions in the framework of random-matrix theory for the chiral Gaussian unitary ensemble. We obtain results for the microscopic spectral correlators, the microscopic spectral density, and the distribution of the smallest eigenvalue for an arbitrary number of flavors, arbitrary quark masses, and arbitrary topological charge.Comment: 11 pages, RevTeX, 2 figures (included), minor typos corrected and discussion extended, version to appear in Phys. Rev.

Biological and Pharmacokinetic Studies with β-Peptides

Interactions and cleavage reactions of β-amino acids and β-oligopeptides (up to nine residues, carrying the side chains of Ala, Val, Leu, Ile, Phe, Ser, Lys, and Hop) with biological systems, such as the most potent peptidases (pronase, proteinase K, 20S proteasome), microorganisms (Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Pseudomonas putida), and mammalian blood (intravenous application to rats) have been investigated and compared with ?-peptides. The results are: i) the three peptidases do not cleave β-peptides at all (within 24 h), and they are not inhibited by a β-peptide; ii) except for certain 3-aminobutanoic-acid (β-HAla) derivatives, neither free, nor N-acetyl-β-amino acids, nor β-peptides (offered as sole N and C source) lead to growth of the two bacteria tested; iii) two water-soluble β-heptapeptides (with Lys side chains) were shown to have elimination half-lives t1/2(β) of 3 and 10 h at 100- and 30-ng/ml levels, respectively, in the rodent blood – much larger than those of α-peptides. Thus, the preliminary results described here confirm the much greater stability of β-peptides, as compared to α-peptides, towards metabolization processes, but they also suggest that there may be interactions (by hitherto unknown mechanisms) between the worlds of α- and β-peptides

“Oh, you shouldn’t have!” Understanding key factors impacting cut flowers gifting preferences in Germany

Cut flower gifting preferences are relatively unexplored in Germany. This study proposes a model that investigates the impact of attitudinal, experiential, and socio-demographic factors on the cut flower gifting preferences of German consumers. For this purpose, an online survey with a representative sample of 978 German residents was conducted. Partial least squares structural equation modelling shows that active and passive engagement with plants and nature positively impact cut flower giving preferences through cut flower knowledge, cut flower fondness, and perceived versatility of cut flowers. For German women and men, the largest driver of cut flower giving preferences is the versatility of cut flowers. For women, cut flower fondness is the second largest driver of cut flower gifting preferences, whereas for men subjective knowledge was the second largest driver. Other socio-demographic factors (age, income, education) were not found to impact cut flower giving preferences

Microscopic universality in the spectrum of the lattice Dirac operator

Large ensembles of complete spectra of the Euclidean Dirac operator for staggered fermions are calculated for SU(2) lattice gauge theory. The accumulation of eigenvalues near zero is analyzed as a signal of chiral symmetry breaking and compared with parameter-free predictions from chiral random matrix theory. Excellent agreement for the distribution of the smallest eigenvalue and the microscopic spectral density is found. This provides direct evidence for the conjecture that these quantities are universal functions.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures (included), REVTeX 3.1; updated version to appear in Phys. Rev. Let