Varietal Differences in Juice, Pomace and Root Biochemical Characteristics of Four Rhubarb (Rheum rhabarbarum L.) Cultivars.

The complex evaluation of varietal biochemical differences in rhubarb juice, pomace and roots is highly useful to develop an efficient processing technology. Research was carried out to compare four rhubarb cultivars (Malakhit, Krupnochereshkovy, Upryamets and Zaryanka) in terms of the quality and antioxidant parameters of juice, pomace and roots. The laboratory analyses showed a high juice yield (75-82%) with a relatively high content of ascorbic acid (125-164 mg L-1) and other organic acids (16-21 g L-1). Citric, oxalic and succinic acids accounted for 98% of the total acids amount. The juice of the cultivar Upryamets demonstrated high levels of the natural preservatives sorbic (36.2 mg L-1) and benzoic acids (11.7 mg L-1), which are highly valuable in juice production. The juice pomace proved to be an excellent source of pectin and dietary fiber, whose concentrations reached 21-24% and 59-64%, respectively. The total antioxidant activity decreased according to the following sequence: root pulp (161-232 mg GAE g-1 d.w.) > root peel (115-170 mg GAE g-1 d.w.) > juice pomace (28.3-34.4 mg GAE g-1 d.w.) > juice (4.4-7.6 mg GAE g-1 f.w.), suggesting that root pulp is a highly valuable antioxidant source. The results of this research highlight the interesting prospects of the complex rhubarb plant processing for the production of juice, containing a wide spectrum of organic acids and natural stabilizers (sorbic and benzoic acids), dietary fiber and pectin (juice pomace) and natural antioxidants (roots).

Limit Theorems as Blessing of Dimensionality: Neural-Oriented Overview.

As a system becomes more complex, at first, its description and analysis becomes more complicated. However, a further increase in the system's complexity often makes this analysis simpler. A classical example is Central Limit Theorem: when we have a few independent sources of uncertainty, the resulting uncertainty is very difficult to describe, but as the number of such sources increases, the resulting distribution gets close to an easy-to-analyze normal one-and indeed, normal distributions are ubiquitous. We show that such limit theorems often make analysis of complex systems easier-i.e., lead to blessing of dimensionality phenomenon-for all the aspects of these systems: the corresponding transformation, the system's uncertainty, and the desired result of the system's analysis.

Selective killing of cancer cells by nanoparticle-assisted ultrasound.

BACKGROUND: Intense ultrasound, such as that used for tumor ablation, does not differentiate between cancerous and normal cells. A method combining ultrasound and biocompatible gold or magnetic nanoparticles (NPs) was developed under in vitro conditions using human breast and lung epithelial cells, which causes ultrasound to preferentially destroy cancerous cells. RESULTS: Co-cultures of BEAS-2B normal lung cells and A549 cancerous lung cells labeled with green and red fluorescent proteins, respectively, were treated with focused ultrasound beams with the addition of gold and magnetic nanoparticles. There were significantly more necrotic A549 cells than BEAS-2 cells when gold nanoparticles were added to the culture medium [(50.6 ± 15.1) vs. (7.4 ± 2.9) %, respectively, P < 0.01]. This selective damage to cancer cells was also observed for MDA-MB231 breast cancer cells relative to MCF-10A normal breast cells after treatment with magnetic nanoparticles. CONCLUSIONS: The data obtained for different cell lines indicate that nanoparticle-assisted ultrasound therapy (NAUT) could be an effective new tool for cancer-specific treatment and could potentially be combined with conventional methods of cancer diagnosis and therapy to further increase the overall cancer cure rate.

Rate distortion optimal bit allocation methods for volumetric data using JPEG 2000.

Computer modeling programs that generate three-dimensional (3-D) data on fine grids are capable of generating very large amounts of information. These data sets, as well as 3-D sensor/measured data sets, are prime candidates for the application of data compression algorithms. A very flexible and powerful compression algorithm for imagery data is the newly released JPEG 2000 standard. JPEG 2000 also has the capability to compress volumetric data, as described in Part 2 of the standard, by treating the 3-D data as separate slices. As a decoder standard, JPEG 2000 does not describe any specific method to allocate bits among the separate slices. This paper proposes two new bit allocation algorithms for accomplishing this task. The first procedure is rate distortion optimal (for mean squared error), and is conceptually similar to postcompression rate distortion optimization used for coding codeblocks within JPEG 2000. The disadvantage of this approach is its high computational complexity. The second bit allocation algorithm, here called the mixed model (MM) approach, mathematically models each slice's rate distortion curve using two distinct regions to get more accurate modeling at low bit rates. These two bit allocation algorithms are applied to a 3-D Meteorological data set. Test results show that the MM approach gives distortion results that are nearly identical to the optimal approach, while significantly reducing computational complexity.