Effects of Gel Properties and Water Migration during Ultra-High Pressure Coupled Heat Treatment on Bighead Carp Surimi

In order to elucidate the mechanism of the changes in gel properties of bighead carp surimi during ultra-high pressure coupled heat treatment, this paper investigated the changes in gel properties, protein structure and water migration of bighead carp surimi during ultra-high pressure coupled heat treatments (300 MPa/5 min, 40 ℃/30 min, 90 ℃/20 min), and carried out clustered heat maps and Pearson correlation analyses. The results showed that ultra-high pressure coupled heat treatment significantly improved the gel properties of bighead carp surimi (P<0.05). The gel strength, texture and whiteness of bighead carp surimi gel showed an increasing trend with ultra-high pressure, ultra-high pressure combined with one-stage heat treatment, and ultra-high pressure combined with two-stage heat treatment. The gel strength and whiteness of the ultra-high pressure coupled heat treatment (300PSH) surimi gels increased by 477.75% and 43.38%, respectively, compared to the atmospheric pressure treated samples (0.1P). The proportion of β-folded structure in the proteins of bighead carp surimi gels increased significantly (P<0.05) during the different treatments, and myosin heavy chain cross-linked aggregation. Meanwhile, the content of active sulfhydryl groups and surface hydrophobicity of surimi gel were significantly reduced (P<0.05), and the proteins formed a denser and more ordered network structure through disulfide bonds and hydrophobic interaction, leading to the migration of immobile water to bound water, which ultimately resulted in significant improvements in the gel strength, texture properties, whiteness and water holding capacity of surimi gel. This study can provide theoretical basis for application of ultra-high pressure coupled heat treatment technology and development of bighead surimi products

Pregnancy Loss and Risk of All-Cause Mortality in Chinese Women: Findings From the China Kadoorie Biobank

Objectives: Pregnancy loss is a common obstetric complication that may be associated with maternal mortality. However, evidence is sparse and inconsistent. This study aims to investigate the association between pregnancy loss with the risk of all-cause mortality among Chinese women.Methods: Data on 299,582 women aged 30–79 years old from the China Kadoorie Biobank were used. Cox proportional hazard regression was conducted to investigate the association between the occurrence of pregnancy loss and all-cause mortality.Results: Two or more pregnancy losses was associated with long-term all-cause mortality (adjusted hazard ratio (aHR) of 1.10, 95% CI: 1.03–1.18). Specifically, more than one spontaneous abortion or stillbirth was associated with long-term all-cause mortality (aHR 1.10, 95% CI: 1.01–1.21 and 1.14, 95% CI: 1.04–1.25, respectively). When stratified by the presence of cardiovascular disease or diabetes, as well as age at baseline, two or more pregnancy losses in women aged ≥50 diagnosed with cardiovascular disease (aHR 1.32, 95% CI: 1.18–1.48) or diabetes (aHR 1.30, 95% CI: 1.06–1.60) was associated with all-cause mortality.Conclusion: Recurrent pregnancy loss, in particular two or more spontaneous abortions and stillbirths were associated with increased risk of all-cause mortality. The associations between recurrent pregnancy losses and all-cause mortality were more pronounced in women aged ≥50 with cardiovascular disease or diabetes at baseline

An Experimental Evaluation of Grounding Strategies for Conversational Agents

With the continuous development of technology, dialogue system’s technology penetrates into human’s life. Grounding also becomes more and more important for dialogue systems. It is important to choose a suitable grounding strategy in a conversational agent. Two grounding strategies are compared in this article, explicit feedback and implicit feedback. The explicit feedback in this article is different from interrogative explicit feedback. It has been modified to make a system says ”Ok, x” in response to utterance x. The aim of this paper is to compare two grounding strategies and to find out which one is better. Additionally, how users respond to false feedback is also the research question in this article. In order to draw a conclusion, a dialogue system was implemented. This article uses a mix of quantitative method and qualitative method. Questionnaires are used to investigate the subjective judgments of participants. Participants evaluated the dialogue system through questionnaires. In the questionnaire, users rate the system from two aspects, naturalness and ease. From June 8th to 14th, the system was officially available. The data were analyzed by t-test and the result was presented in this article with diagrams. Most participants mentioned that they prefer the system with explicit feedback in the evaluation. According to the average score, the system with explicit feedback in this paper is more natural and easier to communicate than the system with implicit feedback. However, there is no significant difference between these two grounding strategies according to the results of the T-test. This does not mean that there are no differences, but that such differences may not be obvious because of the little sample size. In addition, user’s response to the wrong feedback is summarized in this article. Four kinds of reactions are described in this article, hesitation, repetition, point out the wrong feedback and correction

Insight into the Effect of Ice Addition on the Gel Properties of Nemipterus virgatus Surimi Gel Combined with Water Migration

The effect of the amount of ice added (20–60%) on the gel properties and water migration of Nemipterus virgatus surimi gel obtained with two-stage heat treatment was studied. The gel strength and water-holding capability (WHC) of the surimi gel with 30% ice added were significantly higher than those of other treatment groups (p &lt; 0.05). The addition of 30% ice was conducive to the increase of protein β-sheet proportion during heat treatment, exposing more reactive sulfhydryl groups. These promoted the combination of protein-protein through disulfide bonds and hydrophobic-hydrophobic interactions, forming an ordered three-dimensional gel network structure. Meanwhile, the increase in hydrogen bonds promoted the protein-water interaction. Low-field nuclear magnetic resonance analysis showed that more bound water was locked in the gel system, reducing the migration of immobile water to free water and finally showing better gel properties. When the amount of ice added was insufficient (20%), the gel structure lacked the support of immobile water, resulting in deterioration of gel strength. However, excessive addition of ice (&gt;30%) was not conducive to the combination of protein-protein and protein-water, forming a large and rough gel structure, resulting in the migration of immobile water to free water and ultimately exhibited weak gel properties

Reservoir-Computing for Dispersion Compensation in Digital Filter Multiple Access PON

Chromatic dispersion (CD) is one of the key limitations of increasing the transmission performance for short-reach transmission. The available optical dispersion-compensation techniques are not favored due to their high complexity and other expenses such as power. Reservoir computing is reviewed as a promising technique to provide equalization with memory in an easily trainable fashion, and the properties of the reservoir network are directly linked to system performance. In this article, the digital reservoir computing (RC) based CD-compensation technique is investigated to enhance the transmission performance for digital filter multiple access passive optical network (PON). Numerical results show within 50-km single mode fiber transmission distance for 16 GHz signal bandwidth, the RC-based technique is effective for CD compensation to improve the capacity by 25&#x0025;

Probing the Electronic Structures of BaTiO3/SrTiO3 Multilayered Film with Spatially Resolved Electron Energy-Loss Spectroscopy

A multilayered film of BaTiO3/SrTiO3 was grown on a LaAlO3 substrate using dual-target pulsed laser deposition technique. High-resolution scanning transmission electron microscopy observations show that the nine unit-cell BaTiO3 layer and the three unit-cell SrTiO3 layer are alternatively arranged in the epitaxial film where a sharp interface exists between the BaTiO3 and SrTiO3 layers. Electron energy-loss spectroscopy analysis demonstrates that the O-K edge spectra of SrTiO3 and BaTiO3 layers are quite distinct; in particular, the energy-loss peak at 547 eV in the SrTiO3 spectrum splits into two peaks in the BaTiO3 spectrum. The multiple-scattering calculations of O-K edge spectra for BaTiO3 and SrTiO3 agree well with the experimental results. The low-energy region (<542 eV) of the O-K edge spectra for both BaTiO3 and SrTiO3 is mainly caused by the hybridization of the O 2p with Ti 3d orbitals. The splitting peaks between 542 and 552 eV in the O-K edge spectra of BaTiO3 are attributed to its complex crystal structure including two unequal oxygen sites and low site symmetry