1,721,189 research outputs found
Food Innovation in the Frame of Circular Economy by Designing Ultra-Processed Foods Optimized for Sustainable Nutrition
Full text linkDespite the large debate about the relationship between ultra-processed foods and the prevalence of some diet-related diseases, the innovative potential of various processing technologies has been evidenced in pathways that could lead to modifications of the food matrix with beneficial health effects. Many efforts have been directed toward the conjugation of a healthy diet and sustainable exploitation of natural resources for the preparation of accessible foods. This minireview highlights the possible links between processing, sustainability, and circular economy through the valorization of by-products that could be exploited to prepare nutrient-rich ingredients at lower economic and environmental costs. The assessment of the quality and safety of functional foods based on ingredients derived from food waste requires a more robust validation by means of the food-omics approach, which considers not only the composition of the final products but also the structural characterization of the matrix, as the bioaccessibility and the bioavailability of nutrients are strictly dependent on the functional characteristics of the innovative ingredient
Axion and neutrino bounds improved with new calibrations of the tip of the red-giant branch using geometric distance determinations
Full text linkThe brightness of the tip of the red-giant branch (TRGB) allows one to constrain novel energy losses that would lead to a larger core mass at helium ignition and, thus, to a brighter TRGB than expected by standard stellar models. The required absolute TRGB calibrations strongly improve with reliable geometric distances that have become available for the galaxy NGC 4258 that hosts a water megamaser and to the Large Magellanic Cloud based on 20 detached eclipsing binaries. Moreover, we revise a previous TRGB calibration in the globular cluster ω Centauri with a recent kinematical distance determination based on Gaia data release 2. All of these calibrations have similar uncertainties, and they agree with each other and with recent dedicated stellar models. Using NGC 4258 as the cleanest extragalactic case, we thus find an updated constraint on the axion-electron coupling of gae<1.6×10-13 and μν<1.5×10-12μB (95% C.L.) on a possible neutrino dipole moment, whereas ω Centauri as the best galactic target provides instead gae<1.3×10-13 and μν<1.2×10-12μB. The reduced observational errors imply that stellar evolution theory and bolometric corrections begin to dominate the overall uncertainties
Suppression of fast neutrino flavor conversions occurring at large distances in core-collapse supernovae
Full text linkNeutrinos propagating in dense neutrino media such as core-collapse supernovae and neutron star merger remnants can experience the so-called fast flavor conversions on scales much shorter than those expected in vacuum. A very generic class of fast flavor instabilities is the ones which are produced by the backward scattering of neutrinos off the nuclei at relatively large distances from the supernova core. In this study we demonstrate that despite their ubiquity, such fast instabilities are unlikely to cause significant flavor conversions if the population of neutrinos in the backward direction is not large enough. Indeed, the scattering-induced instabilities can mostly impact the neutrinos traveling in the backward direction, which represent only a small fraction of neutrinos at large radii. We show that this can be explained by the shape of the unstable flavor eigenstates, which can be extremely peaked at the backward angles
The foodomics approach for discovering biomarkers of food consumption in nutrition studies
No full textFood consumption surveys are often used to evaluate both the compliance of volunteers to the dietary intervention, and the effectiveness of a nutrient/bioactive compound. However, there is the need of selecting, within the whole food metabolome, specific dietary biomarkers as more objective measures of dietary exposure. At present, the only possibility to manage the enormous number of compounds constituting the metabolome is the non-targeted metabolite profiling as a tool of the foodomics approach. On the other hand, targeted analyses on a predetermined set of clinical biomarkers can provide important mechanistic information. Both targeted and non-targeted analyses should be considered complementary to each other, the use of the former or the latter depending on the specific scientific question at hand
NMR-Based Metabolomics: The Foodome and the Assessment of Dietary Exposure as a Key Step to Evaluate the Effect of Diet on Health
No full textNMR-based metabolomics has gained important insight into the associations between the metabolic status and health, as metabolomics signatures are found in blood, urine, stools, or saliva, differentiating healthy subjects from those affected by diseases or disorders. Although health status has been linked to diet, a measurable fingerprint is rarely found within the metabolome, demonstrating that the diet is curing or, at least, is modifying the subject metabolome away from or closer to a healthy status. The success in finding the correlation between the metabolome and a diet-related disease has, as the main obstacle, the inability to characterize the actual diet followed by the subject. Thus, a big scientific effort has been launched to find metabolite patterns which are characterizing precisely the personal food consumption in order to classify people according to their actual diet. Most of the studies based on NMR-metabolomics are focused on finding biomarkers within the dietary exposome, e.g., originating from food or gut microbiota, without a specific focus on the endogenous metabolome. The main drawback in such approach is a combination of: (i) the actual composition of the meal, (ii) the bioaccessibility of bioactive compounds, and (iii) the processing capability of the gut microbiota. In this chapter, these three aspects are illustrated,
where NMR spectroscopy (effectively or potentially) gains relevant information in the discovery of biomarkers for the true food consumption, as a preliminary step in successful “dietary effect studies.
PINGU and the neutrino mass hierarchy: Statistical and systematic aspects
No full textThe proposed PINGU project (Precision IceCube Next Generation Upgrade) is expected to collect O(105) atmospheric muon and electron neutrino events in a few years of exposure, and to probe the neutrino mass hierarchy through its imprint on the event spectra in energy and direction. In the presence of non-negligible and partly unknown shape systematics, the analysis of high-statistics spectral variations will face subtle challenges that are largely unprecedented in neutrino physics. We discuss these issues both on general grounds and in the currently envisaged PINGU configuration, where we find that possible shape uncertainties at the (few) percent level can noticeably affect the sensitivity to the hierarchy. We also discuss the interplay between the mixing angle θ23 and the PINGU sensitivity to the hierarchy. Our results suggest that more refined estimates of spectral uncertainties are needed in next-generation, large-volume atmospheric neutrino experiments
Magnetic Resonance in Food Science. Defining Food by Magnetic Resonance.
No full textMagnetic Resonance has become an established technique to improve the understanding of food systems. Capturing contributions from a whole range of applications in food and representing the latest technical innovations, this will be a contemporary book on the topic. Based on a conference which has established an international reputation as the forum for advances in applications of magnetic resonance to food, the coverage will be dedicated to multiscale definition of food, quantitative NMR (qNMR), foodomics, on-line non-invasive NMR (dedicated to Brian P. Hills), quality and safety and new developments in the area. It is aimed at academics and industrialists who are committed to the utilisation of MR tools to improve our understanding of food
Mapping reactor neutrino spectra from TAO to JUNO
Full text linkThe Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) project aims at probing, at the same time, the two main frequencies of three-flavor neutrino oscillations, as well as their interference related to the mass ordering (normal or inverted), at a distance of ∼53 km from two powerful reactor complexes in China, at Yangjiang and Taishan. In the latter complex, the unoscillated spectrum from one reactor core is planned to be closely monitored by the Taishan Antineutrino Observatory (TAO), expected to have better resolution (×1/2) and higher statistics (×30) than JUNO. In the context of ν energy spectra endowed with fine-structure features from summation calculations, we analyze in detail the effects of energy resolution and nucleon recoil on observable event spectra. We show that a model spectrum in TAO can be mapped into a corresponding spectrum in JUNO through appropriate convolutions. The mapping is exact in the hypothetical case without oscillations and holds to a very good accuracy in the real case with oscillations. We then analyze the sensitivity to mass ordering of JUNO (and its precision oscillometry capabilities) assuming a single reference spectrum, as well as bundles of variant spectra, as obtained by changing nuclear input uncertainties in summation calculations from a publicly available toolkit. We show through an χ2 analysis that variant spectra induce little reduction of the sensitivity in JUNO, especially when TAO constraints are included. Subtle aspects of the statistical analysis of variant spectra are also discussed
Model-independent diagnostic of self-induced spectral equalization versus ordinary matter effects in supernova neutrinos
No full textSelf-induced flavor conversions near the supernova (SN) core can make the fluxes for different neutrino species become almost equal, potentially altering the dynamics of the SN explosion and washing out all further neutrino oscillation effects. We present a new model-independent analysis strategy for the next galactic SN signal that will distinguish this flavor equalization scenario from a matter-effects-only scenario during the SN accretion phase. Our method does not rely on fitting or modeling the energy-dependent fluences of the different species to a known function, but rather uses a model-independent comparison of charged-current and neutral-current events at large next-generation underground detectors. Specifically, we advocate that the events due to elastic scattering on protons in a scintillator detector, which is insensitive to oscillation effects and can be used as a model-independent normalization, should be compared with the events due to inverse beta decay of νe in a water Cherenkov detector and/or the events due to charged-current interactions of νe in an argon detector. The ratio of events in these different detection channels allow one to distinguish a complete flavor equalization from a pure matter effect, for either of the neutrino mass orderings, as long as the spectral differences among the different species are not too small
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