The Effects of Storage Time and Environmental Storage Conditions on Flour Quality, Dough Rheology, and Biscuit Characteristics: The Case Study of a Traditional Italian Biscuit (Biscotto di Prato)

Many types of baked goods are firmly rooted in the food habits of many people in different countries. Although there have been great strides in improving milling, kneading, and baking, given the lack of essential studies, further steps forward need to be taken to understand the effects of storage time and environmental storage conditions, thus motivating this work. The aim of this study is to assess the effects of storage time, using one-way ANOVA, and environmental storage conditions (environmental temperature and humidity), using MOLS analysis, on flour composition, dough rheology, and biscuit characteristics. Seven levels of storage time were tested: T0 (control), T1, T2, T3, T4, T5, and T6. The results showed that flour storage time significantly increased dough tenacity (P) and curve configuration ratio (P/L), and decreased the biscuit volume (best at T0). However, 2–3 weeks of storage highlighted a significant increase in deformation energy (W), an essential alveograph parameter that is closely correlated to the technological success of leavened products. This optimum found for W might be considered as a great stride in understanding the effects of storage time, confirming that wheat flour can reach its optimal performance after two-three weeks of storage, in particular for W. Moreover, this information could be useful, not only for biscuits production, but also for bread and bakery products (and, thus, the entire bakery industry). MOLS analysis highlighted that dough rheology and biscuit characteristics are mainly affected by flour composition (primarily from starch content) rather than environmental storage parameters. In conclusion, to optimize the biscuit characteristics, it is necessary to use flours with a low content of damaged starch by selecting the most suitable milling technique and carefully managing the operative parameters.

New Jersey’s Leave of Absence

This past June, Governor Phil Murphy helped take a great stride in making sure that every day counts for the students within New Jersey’s Public Schools when he signed a new bill into law. This new policy will work to ensure that schools and districts understand the level to which chronic absenteeism occurs and guarantee that schools disproportionately afflicted have plans to help fight absenteeism. Specifically, the policy identifies schools who have a greater than 10% absentee rate and requires them to establish a plan for improving attendance. It also requires schools to report the percent of students who are absent more than ten percent of the time on their School Report Card. Attendance is one of the most important aspects in ensuring a successful education for students of all ages. The Governor and state legislature, alongside advocacy groups like Advocates for Children of New Jersey (ACNJ), have taken the first steps in fighting one of the largest issues within New Jersey schools. With that being said, it is still extremely important to consider how the state board of education, along with individual districts and schools, will interpret and comply with the law.

Sustainable Development in China: How to Realize a Breakthrough

Although China enjoys a good tradition of sustainability, and has made great stride at addressing pressing environmental problems, it still lacks a substantial environmental base for sustainable development. The national ecological condition seriously deteriorated in the 1990s. This paper examines major ecological challenges and explores a new path towards sustainable development. THe paper points out that the weakness of sustainability in CHina is primarily determined by the fragility of the national ecological geography and the huge population. However, the present underdeveloped market is a key driving force for ecological problems, because it maintains a powerful mechanism that delivers a higher pressure on the land. The prospect of CHina's sustainable development depends on the transformation of the market mechanism. However, realizing sustainable development necessitates taking a Chinese approach, which is aimed at a modest development oriented towards a comfortable lifestyle and based on a harmony of the society with nature. Sustainable development is in the mainstream of today's ideology. As one of the largest developing countries in the world, CHina has paid a great attention to ti. It is still one of the top pressing issues, and it is an arduous task for China to approach sustainable development in the new century. As a contribution to the UN Summit of Rio+10, this paper examines the progress and problems on the subject of sustainable development in China. The original concept and primary principles of sustainable development is introduced in Section 2. However, China should have its own deeper understanding of sustainable development because of its long history and cultural tradition in sustainability. This history is narrated in Section 1. Major actions taken in the past decade and their achievements are summarized in SEction 3. Today's national pressing ecological problems are introduced in Section 4, and explained in Section 5. A chinese path towards sustainable development is explored in Section 6. The last section gives a general conclusion for the paper.

General Information & Statistics

China Made Great Stride in Biotechnology Over Last 15 Years. First Asian Biotech Summit to be Held in China. International Biotechnology Exhibition to Kick off in Beijing. Sino-Canadian Bioscience Lab Set up in Xinjiang. China Join Hands with Russia, Belarus and Ukraine in Science and Technology. Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China Urged to Cooperate in Bio-Pharmaceutical Development. India Seeks More US Funds for Farm R&D. Incidence of Pulmonary Disease Diagnosed as Asthma High in India. Japanese Biotech Industry Seeking to Establish Ties with Europe. Korea Spends Half the Agriculture Budget to Subsidize Farming Sector. NZ Biotech Sector to Overtake Meat Industry in Eight Years. Singapore and Japan Strengthen R&D Ties. Biotechnology in Asia 2002 to be Held in Singapore. Singapore Sets up New Infectious Diseases Center.

Energy-Filtered Electron Microscopy (EFEM) of Frozen Hydrated Biological Specimens

The preparation of hydrated biological specimens for the use in a TEM has made a great stride foreward due to the work of Dubochet et al. on vitrification and Muller et al. on high pressure freezing. Transfer units and cryo stages for the microscopes allow imaging of specimens in the 100K range. Due to simple physical reasons, however, contrast of such kinds of specimen is still a problemm in conventional transmission electron microscopes (CTEM). Solutions as they are provided by an EFEM will be shown and explained in the following.Ice is the main constituent of frozen hydrated specimens. The large ratio of inelastic-to-elastic total cross section of 4.0 in case of ice which is even more than that for carbon results in an unavoidable high amount of inelastically scattered electrons. Blurred images and lacking contrast are due to that fact. The EEL spectra from a frozen hydrated section of biological material before and after freeze drying in the microscope document this fact. (Figure 1). Increased scattering probability and thickness contribute to the inelastic loss. In Figure 2 the EEL spectrum from a thin pure ice layer without any support is compared to the spectrum from thin freeze dried cryo section on a thin support. In case of ice the maximum of the low loss range is clearly shifted towards zero loss, mainly due to oxygen low loss and plasmon and to hydrogen core loss. Thus for the images shown in the following Figures a narrow energy window of 10 eV is used really to cut off all the inelastically scattered electrons.