Observation of Seeding Effects on Fat Bloom of Dark Chocolate

Surface microstructures and polymorphism of seeded dark chocolate were observed with cryo-SEM, to clarify the effects of seeding on fat bloom stability of dark chocolate. Two thermal tests, cycling between 32 adn 20C (32/20) and 38 and 20 C (38/20), were applied to examine the fat bloom stability of the chocolate. We used three crystalline powders: Form VI of cocoa butter; the most stable B1 form of SOS (1,3-distearoyl-2-oleoylglycerol); and the second stable B2 form of BOB (1,3,-dibehenoyl-2-oleoylglycerol) as seed materials. Seeding with cocoa butter (Form VI) and SOS (B1) at concentrations of 0.5 ~ 1 wt. % showed good fat bloom stability in the 32/20 test. In the case of the 38/20 test, however, fat bloom was not prevented. Seeding with BOB (B2) gave the best fat bloom stability in both thermo-cycles; in particular, 5 wt.% BOB (B2) completely prevented fat bloom after the 38/20 test

Fat Polymorphism and Crystal Seeding Effects on Fat Bloom Stability of Dark Chocolate

The effects of seeding with fine crystal powders on the physical properties of dark chocolate are re viewed in terms of the polymorphism and crystallization behavior of cocoa butter (CBJ and of its major fat constituents. The polymorphic structure of four symmetric mixed acids saturated -oleic-saturated (Sat-0- Sat) triacylglycerols (TAGs I [POP (1 ,3-dipalmitoyl-2- oleoyl-glyceroll ;SOS I 1 ,3-distearoyl-2-oleoyl-glycerol); AOA (1 ,3-diarachidoyl-2-oleoyl-glycerol); and BOB 11 ,3-dibehenoyl-2-oleoyl-glyceroi)J. and of tristearoylglycerol (SSSI are briefly explained. An attempt is made at replacing the currently used tempering meth ~ ad in the chocolate solidification process, by a simple cooling technique using fat seed crystals. CB (form VI). SOS 1/i11. BOB (pseudo-/i·l. BOB i/i2), and SSS 1/il are examined as seed materials. The addition of all powders accelerated the crystallization of dark chocolate. Fat bloom stability is also improved by the seed crystals, except w ith SSS. The effect is highly dependent on the physical properties of the seed material employed. The most influencing factors are the similarities in the polymorphic behavior between the seed material and cocoa butter, especially, chain length structure. Thermal stability of the seed crystal is also very important. In view of all physical properties examined, the present review concludes that the p2 form of BOB performs best as a seed material. In particular, it gives rise to an accelerated crystallization of form V of CB and moderates change in viscosity and antibloom effects after thermal incubation of dark chocolate below and above the melting point of CB

On the Steady Nature of Line-Driven Disk Winds: Application to Cataclysmic Variables

We apply the semi-analytical analysis of the steady nature of line-driven winds presented in two earlier papers to disk winds driven by the flux distribution of a standard Shakura & Sunyaev (1973) disk for typical cataclysmic variable (CV) parameters. We find that the wind critical point tends to be closer to the disk surface towards the inner disk regions. Our main conclusion, however, is that a line-driven wind, arising from a steady disk flux distribution of a standard Shakura-Sunyaev disk capable of locally supplying the corresponding mass flow, is steady. These results confirm the findings of an earlier paper that studied "simple" flux distributions that are more readily analyzable than those presented here. These results are consistent with the steady velocity nature of outflows observationally inferred for both CVs and quasi-stellar objects (QSOs). We find good agreement with the 2.5D CV disk wind models of Pereyra and collaborators. These results suggest that the likely scenario to account for the wind outflows commonly observed in CVs is the line-driven accretion disk wind scenario, as suggested early-on by Cordova & Mason (1982). For QSOs, these results show that the line-driven accretion disk wind continues to be a promising scenario to account for the outflows detected in broad absorption line (BAL) QSOs, as suggested early-on by Turnshek (1984), and analyzed in detail by Murray et al. (1995).Comment: 35 pages, 20 figure

APRIL: Active Preference-learning based Reinforcement Learning

This paper focuses on reinforcement learning (RL) with limited prior knowledge. In the domain of swarm robotics for instance, the expert can hardly design a reward function or demonstrate the target behavior, forbidding the use of both standard RL and inverse reinforcement learning. Although with a limited expertise, the human expert is still often able to emit preferences and rank the agent demonstrations. Earlier work has presented an iterative preference-based RL framework: expert preferences are exploited to learn an approximate policy return, thus enabling the agent to achieve direct policy search. Iteratively, the agent selects a new candidate policy and demonstrates it; the expert ranks the new demonstration comparatively to the previous best one; the expert's ranking feedback enables the agent to refine the approximate policy return, and the process is iterated. In this paper, preference-based reinforcement learning is combined with active ranking in order to decrease the number of ranking queries to the expert needed to yield a satisfactory policy. Experiments on the mountain car and the cancer treatment testbeds witness that a couple of dozen rankings enable to learn a competent policy

Study of electron anti-neutrinos associated with gamma-ray bursts using KamLAND

We search for electron anti-neutrinos ($\overline{\nu}_e$) from long and short-duration gamma-ray bursts~(GRBs) using data taken by the KamLAND detector from August 2002 to June 2013. No statistically significant excess over the background level is found. We place the tightest upper limits on $\overline{\nu}_e$ fluence from GRBs below 7 MeV and place first constraints on the relation between $\overline{\nu}_e$ luminosity and effective temperature.Comment: 16 pages and 5 figure

KamLAND Sensitivity to Neutrinos from Pre-Supernova Stars

In the late stages of nuclear burning for massive stars (M>8~M_{\sun}), the production of neutrino-antineutrino pairs through various processes becomes the dominant stellar cooling mechanism. As the star evolves, the energy of these neutrinos increases and in the days preceding the supernova a significant fraction of emitted electron anti-neutrinos exceeds the energy threshold for inverse beta decay on free hydrogen. This is the golden channel for liquid scintillator detectors because the coincidence signature allows for significant reductions in background signals. We find that the kiloton-scale liquid scintillator detector KamLAND can detect these pre-supernova neutrinos from a star with a mass of 25~M_{\sun} at a distance less than 690~pc with 3$\sigma$ significance before the supernova. This limit is dependent on the neutrino mass ordering and background levels. KamLAND takes data continuously and can provide a supernova alert to the community.Comment: 19 pages, 6 figures, 1 tabl

Murasaki: A Fast, Parallelizable Algorithm to Find Anchors from Multiple Genomes

BACKGROUND: With the number of available genome sequences increasing rapidly, the magnitude of sequence data required for multiple-genome analyses is a challenging problem. When large-scale rearrangements break the collinearity of gene orders among genomes, genome comparison algorithms must first identify sets of short well-conserved sequences present in each genome, termed anchors. Previously, anchor identification among multiple genomes has been achieved using pairwise alignment tools like BLASTZ through progressive alignment tools like TBA, but the computational requirements for sequence comparisons of multiple genomes quickly becomes a limiting factor as the number and scale of genomes grows. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Our algorithm, named Murasaki, makes it possible to identify anchors within multiple large sequences on the scale of several hundred megabases in few minutes using a single CPU. Two advanced features of Murasaki are (1) adaptive hash function generation, which enables efficient use of arbitrary mismatch patterns (spaced seeds) and therefore the comparison of multiple mammalian genomes in a practical amount of computation time, and (2) parallelizable execution that decreases the required wall-clock and CPU times. Murasaki can perform a sensitive anchoring of eight mammalian genomes (human, chimp, rhesus, orangutan, mouse, rat, dog, and cow) in 21 hours CPU time (42 minutes wall time). This is the first single-pass in-core anchoring of multiple mammalian genomes. We evaluated Murasaki by comparing it with the genome alignment programs BLASTZ and TBA. We show that Murasaki can anchor multiple genomes in near linear time, compared to the quadratic time requirements of BLASTZ and TBA, while improving overall accuracy. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Murasaki provides an open source platform to take advantage of long patterns, cluster computing, and novel hash algorithms to produce accurate anchors across multiple genomes with computational efficiency significantly greater than existing methods. Murasaki is available under GPL at http://murasaki.sourceforge.net