Evaluating the performance of sampling plans to detect hypoglycin A in ackee fruit shipments imported into the United States

Hypoglycin A (HGA) is a toxic amino acid that is naturally produced in unripe ackee fruit. In 1973, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) placed a worldwide import alert on ackee fruit, which banned the product from entering the United States. The FDA has considered establishing a regulatory limit for HGA and lifting the ban, which will require development of a monitoring program. The establishment of a regulatory limit for HGA requires the development of a scientifically based sampling plan to detect HGA in ackee fruit imported into the United States. Thirty-three lots of ackee fruit were sampled according to an experimental protocol in which 10 samples, i.e., ten 19 oz cans, were randomly taken from each lot and analyzed for HGA by using liquid chromatography. The total variance was partitioned into sampling and analytical variance components, which were found to be a function of the HGA concentration. Regression equations were developed to predict the total, sampling, and analytical variances as a function of HGA concentration. The observed HGA distribution among the test results for the 10 HGA samples was compared with the normal and lognormal distributions. A computer model based on the lognormal distribution was developed to predict the performance of sampling plan designs to detect HGA in ackee fruit shipments. The performance of several sampling plan designs was evaluated to demonstrate how to manipulate sample size and accept/reject limits to reduce misclassification of ackee fruit lots.     

Frequency dependence of acoustic parameters of freshly excised tissues of Sprague Dawley rats

A modified version of the pulse echo technique was used to measure the velocity of propagation and attenuation of ultrasound in excised tissue of young-adult Sprague-Dawley rats. The measurements were made at ultrasonic frequencies of 1.0, 2.25, 5.0, 7.5 and 10.0 MHz. The temperature of the tissues was monitored continuously to within ± 0.1°C of the ambient temperature. The acoustic parameters were measured in the liver, kidney, cardiac muscle and gastrocnemius muscle. All measurements were carried out in the near field region of the ultrasonic beam. It was observed that the velocity of propagation in tissues showed a slight dispersion with frequency. The attenuation in tissues increased with increasing frequency.     

Triple-Shape Memory Polymers Based on Self-Complementary Hydrogen Bonding

Triple shape memory polymers (TSMPs) are a growing subset of a class of smart materials known as shape memory polymers, which are capable of changing shape and stiffness in response to a stimulus. A TSMP can change shapes twice and can fix two metastable shapes in addition to its permanent shape. In this work, a novel TSMP system comprised of both permanent covalent cross-links and supramolecular hydrogen bonding cross-links has been synthesized via a one-pot method. Triple shape properties arise from the combination of the glass transition of (meth)acrylate copolymers and the dissociation of self-complementary hydrogen bonding moieties, enabling broad and independent control of both glass transition temperature (T(g)) and cross-link density. Specifically, ureidopyrimidone methacrylate and a novel monomer, ureidopyrimidone acrylate, were copolymerized with various alkyl acrylates and bisphenol A ethoxylate diacrylate. Control of T(g) from 0 to 60 °C is demonstrated: concentration of hydrogen bonding moieties is varied from 0 to 40 wt %; concentration of the diacrylate is varied from 0 to 30 wt %. Toughness ranges from 0.06 to 0.14 MPa and is found to peak near 20 wt % of the supramolecular cross-linker. A widely tunable class of amorphous triple-shape memory polymers has been developed and characterized through dynamic and quasi-static thermomechanical testing to gain insights into the dynamics of supramolecular networks.     

Suppression of Dyakonov-Perel spin relaxation in high-mobility n-GaAs

We report a large and unexpected suppression of the free electron spin-relaxation in lightly doped n-GaAs bulk crystals. The spin-relaxation rate shows a weak mobility dependence and saturates at a level 30 times less than that predicted by the Dyakonov-Perel theory. The dynamics of the spin-orbit field differs substantially from the usual scheme: although all the experimental data can be self-consistently interpreted as a precessional spin-relaxation induced by a random spin-orbit field, the correlation time of this random field, surprisingly, is much shorter than, and is independent of, the momentum relaxation time determined from transport measurements.     

Dendritic incorporation of quinacridone: solubility, aggregation, electrochemistry, and solid-state luminescence

The first incorporation of quinacridone, a technologically important organic electroluminescent emitter, into dendrimers increases solubility, decreases aggregation, retards heterogeneous electron transfer, and enhances luminescence in condensed phases (powders and thin films).     

Polarized fine structure in the photoluminescence excitation spectrum of a negatively charged quantum dot

We report polarized photoluminescence excitation spectroscopy of the negative trion in single charge-tunable quantum dots. The spectrum exhibits a p-shell resonance with polarized fine structure arising from the direct excitation of the electron spin triplet states. The energy splitting arises from the axially symmetric electron-hole exchange interaction. The magnitude and sign of the polarization are understood from the spin character of the triplet states and a small amount of quantum dot asymmetry, which mixes the wave functions through asymmetric e-e and e-h exchange interactions.     

High-beta equilibria of drift-optimized compact stellarators

Compact stellarator configurations have been obtained with good neoclassical confinement that are stable to both pressure- and current-driven modes for high values of beta. These configurations are drift-optimized tokamak-stellarator hybrids with a high-shear tokamak-like rotational transform profile and /B/ that is approximately poloidally symmetric. The bootstrap current is consistent with the required equilibrium current and, while larger than that in existing stellarators, is typically only a small fraction (1/3-1/5) of that in an equivalent tokamak. These configurations have strong magnetic wells and consequently high interchange stability beta limits up to beta=23%. Because of the reduced bootstrap current, these configurations are stable to low-n ideal MHD kink modes with no wall stabilization for values of beta ( approximately 7%-11%) significantly larger than in an equivalent advanced tokamak.     

INTENSITY DEPENDENCE OF FLUOROPHORE PHOTOBLEACHING BY A STEPPED-INTENSITY SLOW-BLEACH EXPERIMENT

Abstract— We describe a simple method for determination of the dependence of fluorophore photo-bleaching on the intensity of the incident light. A sample of fluorophore is illuminated uniformly with an intensity which is sufficient only to bleach a small fraction of the fluorophore during a fluorescence lifetime period. The long-term decay of fluorescence due to photobleaching is monitored before and after a stepped increase in the incident intensity. The order of the photobleaching reaction is determined by taking the ratio of the logarithms of the limiting values of the slope of the fluorescence bleaching curve and the absolute fluorescence change. The method is applied to fluorescein, bound to dextran or ovalbumin, in aqueous solution, and the order of the reaction in both cases is shown to be unity.