Physicochemical Properties of Egg Yolk Powder from Eggs of Different Types of Bird

The goal of this study was to determine whether the physicochemical properties of egg yolk powders produced from eggs from different types of bird (Fighting chicken, Kampung chicken, Serama chicken, Leghorn chicken, Guineafowl, and Turkey) differ from each other and from those of commercial egg yolk powder. The powders were analysed to determine yield; proximate composition; colour, solubility; water holding capacity (WHC); and emulsion activity and stability. Egg yolk powders were prepared by separating the egg yolk manually followed by blast freezing and freeze drying. The weight of the egg ranged from 22.16 g for Serama to 66.25 g for Turkey. The lowest yield of egg yolk liquid was found in Leghorn egg (27.63) and highest in Serama egg (44.31).  Egg yolk powder yield was also lowest for Leghorn eggs (12.85%) , followed by Turkey (15.85%), Guineafowl (16.22%), Kampung (16.48%), Fighting (16.62%), and the highest for Serama (18.92%). All parameters studied except WHC differed significantly (p < 0.05) among at least some of the different egg yolk powders. Egg yolk powder from Serama chicken had the highest protein content (40.77%), lowest fat content (51.96%), highest solubility (20.20 oBrix), and lowest WHC (79.78 %). Egg yolk powder from Fighting chicken had the highest emulsion activity (54.13%) and that from Leghorn chicken had the highest emulsion stability (48.41%). Egg yolk powder from Guineafowl had the highest yellowness intensity (72.21), whereas the value was lowest (35.84) for commercial egg yolk powder. In conclusion, physicochemical properties of egg yolk powder depend on the source of the eggs

Influence of secondary forest canopy towards interception rate in hydrological cycle of Tasik Chini, Pahang, Malaysia

Part of a rainfall is captured by the crowns of the trees and other surfaces as interception, which is then evaporated back into the atmosphere. Water moves down through the forest canopy via two mechanisms; stemflow and throughfall processes. Stemflow refers to the total quantity of rain water which reach the ground through tree stems and branches. Throughfall in the other hand, is the tendency of the rainfalls to penetrate the forest canopy directly through the spaces between the leaves or by dripping from the leaves, twigs, and branches. Both components were measured in an interception plot size 100 ¥100 m2 in a secondary tropical forest at Tasik Chini. Thirty tree samples were used and each tree was well-identified based on their species, family, diameter breast height (DBH), canopy size and its density. In this study, the data were collected based on two rainfall events, namely in November 2007(44.51% in throughfall form and 55.49% in stem flow form) and rainfall distribution on December 2007 (39.65% in throughfall form and 60.35% in stem flow form). This interception study provided essential information on how the function of the forest can affect the crucial hydrological cycle occurring within this forest ecosystem and the wetland water balance

Development of flight control for UGS tri-copter MAV

This paper presents our flight control development for the University of Glasgow Singapre (UGS) tilting tri-copter. The tilting tri-copter has the capability of high cruising speed by tilting the main rotors. The drawback of this design is that it causes instability during rotors transition and flight stability. As such, the development of a new flight control system is required to make this system stable. The first phase involves the designing & building of the tilting tri-copter for the investigation of its flight behaviour, and researching on different control systems to select the suitable control system for the tri-copter. The next phase is be to design the flight control system using the Simulink program. The final phase is to analyse and discuss the simulation result and compare with the test flights. There are discovery from the simulation result that after the main rotor had titled, the roll effect become less responsive and the roll mode will caused the tri-copter to yaw. This can be resolved by changing the design of the main rotor tilting into an independent tilting rotor system to improve the performance. With the new develop flight control system, it can use for future in deep research or even use it to combine with other controller such as LQR controller

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National Research Foundation, Prime Minister's Office, Singapore, under its International Research Centres in Singapore Funding Initiativ

Full-sky ray-tracing simulation of weak lensing using ELUCID simulations: exploring galaxy intrinsic alignment and cosmic shear correlations

The intrinsic alignment of galaxies is an important systematic effect in weak-lensing surveys, which can affect the derived cosmological parameters. One direct way to distinguish different alignment models and quantify their effects on the measurement is to produce mocked weak-lensing surveys. In this work, we use full-sky ray-tracing technique to produce mock images of galaxies from the ELUCID $N$-body simulation run with the WMAP9 cosmology. In our model we assume that the shape of central elliptical galaxy follows that of the dark matter halo, and spiral galaxy follows the halo spin. Using the mocked galaxy images, a combination of galaxy intrinsic shape and the gravitational shear, we compare the predicted tomographic shear correlations to the results of KiDS and DLS. It is found that our predictions stay between the KiDS and DLS results. We rule out a model in which the satellite galaxies are radially aligned with the center galaxy, otherwise the shear-correlations on small scales are too high. Most important, we find that although the intrinsic alignment of spiral galaxies is very weak, they induce a positive correlation between the gravitational shear signal and the intrinsic galaxy orientation (GI). This is because the spiral galaxy is tangentially aligned with the nearby large-scale overdensity, contrary to the radial alignment of elliptical galaxy. Our results explain the origin of detected positive GI term from the weak-lensing surveys. We conclude that in future analysis, the GI model must include the dependence on galaxy types in more detail.Comment: 23 pages, 13 figures, published in ApJ. Our mock galaxy catalog is available upon request by email to the author ([email protected], [email protected]

ELUCID IV: Galaxy Quenching and its Relation to Halo Mass, Environment, and Assembly Bias

We examine the quenched fraction of central and satellite galaxies as a function of galaxy stellar mass, halo mass, and the matter density of their large scale environment. Matter densities are inferred from our ELUCID simulation, a constrained simulation of local Universe sampled by SDSS, while halo masses and central/satellite classification are taken from the galaxy group catalog of Yang et al. The quenched fraction for the total population increases systematically with the three quantities. We find that the `environmental quenching efficiency', which quantifies the quenched fraction as function of halo mass, is independent of stellar mass. And this independence is the origin of the stellar mass-independence of density-based quenching efficiency, found in previous studies. Considering centrals and satellites separately, we find that the two populations follow similar correlations of quenching efficiency with halo mass and stellar mass, suggesting that they have experienced similar quenching processes in their host halo. We demonstrate that satellite quenching alone cannot account for the environmental quenching efficiency of the total galaxy population and the difference between the two populations found previously mainly arises from the fact that centrals and satellites of the same stellar mass reside, on average, in halos of different mass. After removing these halo-mass and stellar-mass effects, there remains a weak, but significant, residual dependence on environmental density, which is eliminated when halo assembly bias is taken into account. Our results therefore indicate that halo mass is the prime environmental parameter that regulates the quenching of both centrals and satellites.Comment: 21 pages, 16 figures, submitted to Ap

ELUCID V. Lighting dark matter halos with galaxies

In a recent study, using the distribution of galaxies in the north galactic pole of SDSS DR7 region enclosed in a 500\mpch box, we carried out our ELUCID simulation (Wang et al. 2016, ELUCID III). Here we {\it light} the dark matter halos and subhalos in the reconstructed region in the simulation with galaxies in the SDSS observations using a novel {\it neighborhood} abundance matching method. Before we make use of thus established galaxy-subhalo connections in the ELUCID simulation to evaluate galaxy formation models, we set out to explore the reliability of such a link. For this purpose, we focus on the following a few aspects of galaxies: (1) the central-subhalo luminosity and mass relations; (2) the satellite fraction of galaxies; (3) the conditional luminosity function (CLF) and conditional stellar mass function (CSMF) of galaxies; and (4) the cross correlation functions between galaxies and the dark matter particles, most of which are measured separately for all, red and blue galaxy populations. We find that our neighborhood abundance matching method accurately reproduces the central-subhalo relations, satellite fraction, the CLFs and CSMFs and the biases of galaxies. These features ensure that thus established galaxy-subhalo connections will be very useful in constraining galaxy formation processes. And we provide some suggestions on the three levels of using the galaxy-subhalo pairs for galaxy formation constraints. The galaxy-subhalo links and the subhalo merger trees in the SDSS DR7 region extracted from our ELUCID simulation are available upon request.Comment: 18 pages, 13 figures, ApJ accepte

Replication and Meta-analysis of the Association between BDNF Val66Met Polymorphism and Cognitive Impairment in Patients Receiving Chemotherapy.

Cancer-related cognitive impairment (CRCI) adversely affects cancer patients. We had previously demonstrated that the BDNF Val66Met genetic polymorphism is associated with lower odds of subjective CRCI in the multitasking and verbal ability domains among breast cancer patients receiving chemotherapy. To further assess our previous findings, we evaluated the association of BDNF Val66Met polymorphism with subjective and objective CRCI in a temporally separate cohort of patients and pooled findings from both the original (n = 145) and current (n = 193) cohorts in a meta-analysis. Subjective CRCI was assessed using FACT-Cog. Objective CRCI was evaluated using computerized neuropsychological tests. Genotyping was carried out using Sanger sequencing. The association of BDNF Val66Met genotypes and CRCI was examined with logistic regression. A fixed-effect meta-analysis was conducted using the inverse variance method. In the meta-analysis (n = 338), significantly lower odds of CRCI were associated with Met allele carriers based on the global FACT-Cog score (OR = 0.52, 95% CI 0.29-0.94). Furthermore, Met allele carriers were at lower odds of developing impairment in the domains of memory (OR = 0.34, 95% CI: 0.17-0.70), multitasking (OR = 0.33, 95% CI: 0.18-0.59), and verbal ability (OR = 0.46, 95% CI: 0.24-0.88). Consistent with the previous study, lower odds of subjective CRCI among patients with the BDNF Met allele was observed after adjusting for potential confounders in the multitasking (OR = 0.30, 95% CI: 0.14-0.67) domain. In conclusion, carriers of the BDNF Met allele were protected against global subjective CRCI, particularly in the domains of memory, multitasking, and verbal ability. Our findings further contribute to the understanding of CRCI pathophysiology