PSW statistician James Baldwin along with collaborators Richard Truex Jody Tucker and Patricia Flebbe from the Pacific Southwest Region contributed to the study.
and replicated the unique structural elements that create the bright iridescent blue color of a tropical plant's fruit.
For seeds and fruit in particular bright color is thought to have evolved to attract the agents of seed dispersal especially birds.
The fruit of the South american tropical plant Margaritaria nobilis commonly called bastard hogberry is an intriguing example of this adaptation.
The ultra-bright blue fruit which is low in nutritious content mimics a more fleshy and nutritious competitor.
Deceived birds eat the fruit and ultimately release its seeds over a wide geographic area. The fruit of this bastard hogberry plant was scientifically delightful to pick says principal investigator Peter Vukusic Associate professor in Natural Photonics at the University of Exeter.
The light-manipulating architecture its surface layer presents which has evolved to serve a specific biological function has inspired an extremely useful and interesting technological design.
The team replicated the key structural elements of the fruit to create flexible stretchable and color-changing photonic fibers using an innovative roll up mechanism perfected in the Harvard laboratories.
For our artificial structure we cut down the complexity of the fruit to just its key elements explains Kolle.
#Berries may be healthful, but some health benefits of berries may not make it past your mouthresearch has suggested that compounds that give colorful fruits their rich hues especially berries promote health
and might even prevent cancer. But for the first time scientists have exposed extracts from numerous berries high in those pigments to human saliva to see just what kinds of health-promoting substances are likely to survive
and be produced in the mouth. It's too early to name the best berry for health promotion based on this initial work.
But the researchers have discovered that two families of pigments that provide berries with their colors called anthocyanins are more susceptible to degradation in the mouth than are the other four classes of these pigments.
The Ohio State university study also showed that bacteria living in the mouth are responsible for most of the breakdown of these compounds that occurs in saliva.
whether it's the berry pigments themselves or instead the products of their degradation that actually promote health.
The researchers exposed extracts of anthocyanin pigments from blueberries chokeberries black raspberries red grapes and strawberries to the saliva collected from 14 people.
All fruits are unique because their chemical composition or fingerprint varies said Mark Failla professor of human nutrition at Ohio State and interim chair of the Department of Human sciences.
There are many different edible berries. Some might be better for providing health-promoting effects within the oral cavity
Increased intake of fruits and vegetables is associated with decreased risk of some chronic diseases. An understanding of the metabolism of these compounds and the relative activities of the compounds in the consumed fruit and their metabolic products is needed to make scientifically sound dietary recommendations
and to develop effective delivery vehicles for the mouth Failla said. The research is published in a recent issue of the journal Food Chemistry.
The five fruits selected for study allowed the scientists to test the six distinct families of the anthocyanin pigments.
Researchers purified the anthocyanins from each berry type and added the extracts to saliva. The extent of the pigment degradation in saliva was primarily a function of the chemical structure of a given anthocyanin said Failla also an investigator in Ohio State's Comprehensive Cancer Center and Food Innovation Center.
whether the health-promoting benefits associated with eating anthocyanin-rich fruits like berries are provided by the pigment itself the natural combinations of the pigments in the fruit
If on the other hand the metabolites produced by the metabolism of anthocyanins are the actual health-promoting compounds there will be greater interest in fruits that contain anthocyanins that are less stable in the oral cavity Failla said.
and testing the stability of the pigments in berry juices in the mouths of human volunteers rather than in test tubes containing their saliva.
His prediction bears fruit in the new work in which finely detailed patterns of graphene are laced into gaps created in sheets of h-BN.
Fruit on infected trees often falls to the ground before harvest and fruit that remains on trees may become misshapen
Supervisory horticulturalist Elizabeth Baldwin with USDA's Agricultural research service (ARS) in Fort Pierce is investigating the effects of HLB on the taste of orange juice produced from diseased trees.
and her colleagues at the agency's U s. Horticultural Research Laboratory evaluated fruit with or without HLB symptoms--produced over two growing seasons--for a number of fruit and juice characteristics.
They compared Midsweet Hamlin and Valencia oranges the three principal varieties harvested for processing and used gas and liquid chromatography to analyze juice compounds.
They found that orange juice from the fruit with HLB symptoms was often higher in limonin
and nomilin compounds that can give the juice a bitter taste but that the compounds were generally below levels that could be detected by human taste panels.
In another study they investigated how HLB infection affects juice quality in the same three varieties of orange with respect to cultivar maturity and processing methods.
But the researchers concluded that using some fruit that has HLB symptoms would not cause problems in commercial operations
as long as fruit with and without symptoms harvested from several varieties locations and seasons was mixed together.
#Fruit and vegetable intake is associated with lower risk of ER-breast cancerthere is no association between total fruit
The intake of fruits and vegetables has been hypothesized to lower breast cancer risk however the existing evidence is inconclusive.
and are less dependent on estrogen levels than ER+tumors account for only 15-20%of breast cancers large pooled analyses are needed to determine the suspected link to lower ER-breast cancer risk and the consumption of fruits and vegetables.
In order to determine if there is a link between the lowered risk of ER-breast cancers and the intake of fruits and vegetables Seungyoun Jung Sc.
They investigated the association of high compared to low intake of fruit and vegetables and risk of developing breast cancer in each study and then combined the study-specific estimates to generate summary estimates for all studies combined.
The researchers found that total fruit and vegetable intake was linked statistically significantly to a lower risk of ER-breast cancer but not with risk of overall breast cancer or risk of ER+breast tumors.
(and to a lesser extent fruit) to lower the risk of ER-breast cancer. However they also write that interpretation of these findings may also be challenged by the known effects of other potential confounders including the aggregation of health behaviors.
#Many apples a day keep the blues at bayeating more fruit and vegetables may make young people calmer happier
Specifically participants were asked to report the number of servings eaten of fruit (excluding fruit juice and dried fruit) vegetables (excluding juices) and several categories of unhealthy foods like biscuits/cookies potato crisps and cakes/muffins.
The results showed a strong day-to-day relationship between more positive mood and higher fruit and vegetable consumption but not other foods.
On days when people ate more fruits and vegetables they reported feeling calmer happier and more energetic than they normally did says Dr Conner.
To understand which comes first--feeling positive or eating healthier foods--Dr Conner and her team ran additional analyses
and found that eating fruits and vegetables predicted improvements in positive mood the next day suggesting that healthy foods may improve mood.
After further analysis we demonstrated that young people would need to consume approximately seven to eight total servings of fruits and vegetables per day to notice a meaningful positive change.
One serving of fruit or vegetables is approximately the size that could fit in your palm or half a cup.
and snacking on whole fruit like apples says Dr Conner. She adds that while this research shows a promising connection between healthy foods
and the authors recommend the development of randomised control trials evaluating the influence of high fruit
#New way to identify smoked grapes and wineswith climate change sparking concern about an increased risk of wildfires scientists are reporting development of a way to detect grapes exposed to smoke from those fires
which otherwise could be vented into bad-tasting wine. Their report on the method for detecting smoke taint in both grapes
and wine appears in ACS'Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. Yoji Hayasaka and colleagues point out that Australia
Smoke from those fires can travel long distances and poses a special threat for wine grapes.
Grapes exposed to smoke yield wines with unpalatable aromas and tastes sometimes described as resembling smoked meat disinfectant or a dirty ashtray.
or avoid production of smoke-tainted wines they developed a test for the substances formed in grapes after exposure to smoke.
whether grapes have been smoke-tainted before they were crushed and pressed into wine. The test also can identify smoked wines.
The authors acknowledge funding from Australia's grape growers and winemakers through their investment body the Grape and Wine Research Development Corporation with matching funds from the Australian government.
Its unusual prehensile proboscis or snout is used to reach leaves and fruit. Tapirs are found throughout tropical forests and grasslands in South america.
#Monkeys stressed from longer foraging timesendangered Mexican howler monkeys are consuming more leaves and less fruit as a result of habitat disturbance by humans
As forests are fragmented the howlers become cut off isolated on forest'islands'that increasingly lack the fruit
Fruit occurs in natural cycles and the monkeys will naturally revert to'fallback'foods including leaves
when fruit is scarce. But as habitats shrink and fruit is harder to find leaves from second-choice plants such as lianas have increased in the Mexican howlers'diet.
While leaves may sound like a plentiful resource in a rainforest many leaves are difficult to digest
The monkeys rely much more heavily on fruit than previously believed and when turning to foliage for food--as they are forced increasingly to do--they have to be highly selective in the leaves they consume visiting lots of different trees.
and planting fruit trees--particularly those species such as figs that can produce fruit during periods of general fruit scarcity--for the conservation of howler monkeys said Dr Jurgi Cristã bal-Azkarate also from Cambridge who led the research
The acorns are produced the fruits by oaks holm oaks and cork oaks that perpetuate their species move
They are autumnal fruits highly valued by wildlife because of its large size its abundance and its high calorie lipid and carbohydrate.
They are interested many animals in this fruit some of them even before they ripen and fall into the ground.
and feed inside the acorns without altering the external appearance of this fruit. After the acorns fall into the ground
and are reachable for the rest of animals that seek this fruit during the autumn days (wild boar deer and mice among others).
and they hide this fruit during autumns in order to consume them in winter time. However many acorns are forgotten in hiding places allowing them a better germination and consequently new trees.
However those acorns in which the larva was still inside the fruit were moved and stored by voles.
and offer nutrient-stingy berries to migrating birds. They even release toxins to make it less likely native plants will germinate near them.
It was seeded by birds carrying honeysuckle berries from backyards. To prevent it from turning beloved nature preserves into shrub monocultures people must remove it from their yards
. Bartlett and Andrew P. Thomas from the New jersey Medical school Newark N. J. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by University of Georgia. The original article was written by James Hataway.
The work may also help predict effects on important agricultural crops which depend on flowering to produce fruit.
Compared to the timing of spring flowering in Thoreau's day native plants such as serviceberry
when the mean spring temperature in southern Wisconsin was 48 degrees Fahrenheit black cherry bloomed on May 31.
In 2012 with a mean spring temperature of 54 degrees Fahrenheit black cherry blooms were observed as early as May 6.
--and certain types of food already linked to protective or damaging effects on healththese included meat fish fruits and vegetables pulses cereals bread and pasta rice butter margarine nuts
On the other hand fruit seemed to be protective in both age groups across all centres for all three conditions among children--both current and severe--and for current and severe wheeze and rhinitis among the teens.
while fruit is rich in antioxidants and other beneficial compounds. The authors emphasise that their results do not prove cause
The health-conscious pattern was characterized by relatively higher intakes of pasta noodles rice whole fruit poultry nuts fish and vegetables and lower intakes of fried vegetables processed meats
The Western pattern was characterized by higher intakes of bread eggs fats fried vegetables alcohol and soft drinks and the lowest intakes of milk and whole fruit.
Her research also showed that the people who would have benefitted from the shaman's knowledge practiced small-scale farming of maize manioc and arrowroot and collected palm nuts tree fruits and wild tubers.
#Strawberries, blueberries may cut heart attack risk in womenwomen who ate at least three servings of blueberries
and strawberries per week had fewer heart attacks. Blueberries and strawberries contain high levels of compounds that have cardiovascular benefits.
Eating three or more servings of blueberries and strawberries per week may help women reduce their risk of a heart attack by as much as one-third researchers reported in Circulation:
Journal of the American Heart Association. Blueberries and strawberries contain high levels of naturally occurring compounds called dietary flavonoids also found in grapes and wine blackberries eggplant and other fruits and vegetables.
A specific sub-class of flavonoids called anthocyanins may help dilate arteries counter the buildup of plaque
and provide other cardiovascular benefits according to the study. Blueberries and strawberries can easily be incorporated into
what women eat every week said Eric Rimm D. Sc. senior author and Associate professor of Nutrition and Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public health in Boston Mass.
Blueberries and strawberries were part of this analysis simply because they are eaten the most berries in the United states
. Thus it's possible that other foods could produce the same results researchers said. Scientists from the Harvard School of Public health in the United states and the University of East Anglia United kingdom conducted a prospective study among 93600 women ages 25 to 42 who were registered with the Nurses'Health Study II.
Women who ate the most blueberries and strawberries had a 32-percent reduction in their risk of heart attack compared to women who ate the berries once a month
or less--even in women who otherwise ate a diet rich in other fruits and vegetables.
We have shown that even at an early age eating more of these fruits may reduce risk of a heart attack later in life said Aedã n Cassidy Ph d. lead author
and head of the Department of Nutrition at Norwich Medical school of the University of East Anglia in Norwich United kingdom. The findings were independent of other risk factors such as age high blood pressure family history of heart attack
The American Heart Association supports eating berries as part of an overall balanced diet that also includes other fruits vegetables and whole-grain products.
For a 2012 study in the Journal of Proteome Research the scientists used nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to study the amino acid composition of juice from oranges grown on HLB-positive or HLB-negative trees.
The study yielded distinctive profiles of the kinds and amounts of 11 different amino acids in three types of oranges:
fruit from healthy trees; symptom-free fruit from HLB-positive trees; and fruit with HLB symptoms from HLB-positive trees.
With further research the profiles may prove to be a reliable rapid and early indicator of the presence of the HLB pathogen in an orchard according to Breksa.
He is with the Agricultural research service (ARS) Western Regional Research center in Albany Calif. ARS is the USDA's chief intramural scientific research agency
But the researchers found that juice squeezed from oranges of HLB-positive trees had significantly higher concentrations of phenylalanine
Furthermore orchards with wild bees had a greater proportion fruit set. These findings show that wild pollinators not only contribute directly to almond pollination
This is particularly important in almond as it flowers early in the year when the weather conditions can be unfavourable for bee flight.
and a projected 5 percent or more decrease in cattle slaughter said Derrell Peel Oklahoma State university Cooperative Extension livestock marketing specialist.
and beef exports will decrease Peel said. The decrease in per capita beef consumption in 2013 should be similar to the year-over-year decrease in 2011 compared to 2010.
percent decrease in per capita consumption compared to the lower 2013 level Peel said. Furthermore these decreases in beef production and consumption almost certainly imply higher wholesale
and a nearly 10 percent increase in retail prices Peel said. Total meat consumption decreased about 2 percent in 2011
Beyond that Peel believes it will be a question of how much and how fast retailers can pass along the higher wholesale prices to consumers.
#Study deflates notion that pear-shaped bodies more healthy than apples: Abnormal proteins from buttock fat linked to metabolic syndromepeople who are shaped apple--with fat more concentrated around the abdomen--have long been considered more at risk for conditions such as heart disease
and diabetes than those who are shaped pear and carry weight more in the buttocks hips and thighs.
But new research conducted at UC Davis Health System published in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology
and Metabolism provides further evidence that the protective benefits of having a pear-body shape may be more myth than reality.
New research provides further evidence that the protective benefits of having a pear-body shape may be more myth than reality The UC Davis study found that fat stored in the buttock area--also known as gluteal adipose tissue--secretes abnormal levels of chemerin
However a forest contributes more ecosystem services than timber production such as biological diversity carbon storage and berries.
By examining the role played by the occurrence of diverse tree species for six different ecosystem services (tree growth carbon storage berry production food for wildlife occurrence of dead wood
and the amount of pine to berry production while carbon storage was found in plots with more birch
For example high tree growth appears to be negatively related to the production of both berries and food for wildlife and to the occurrence of dead wood.
On the other hand food for wildlife was associated positively with both berry production and biological diversity in ground vegetation.
#Physics students disprove childrens author Roald Dahls peach calculationfour students from the University of Leicester Department of physics
and the Giant Peach to airlift the giant peach across the Atlantic ocean. The students used the famous novel from the 1960s
and Henry Selick's 1996 film adaptation to determine the buoyancy of the giant peach.
The physics of aircraft was applied later to calculate the number of seagulls it would have taken for the giant peach to be lifted.
but even tweets that person's Twitter account to publicly shame them if they stray uses a Raspberry Pi--a tiny single-board computer.
Raspberry Pi and Piface an add-on which powers real-life applications are the simplest and most user-friendly ways for computers to interface with the world
Raspberry Pi and Piface put the fun back into computing and academics hope to be a major influence on changing the way the schools
Raspberry Pi was developed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation with the aim of improving teaching of basic computer science in schools.
Piface devices sit on top of the Raspberry Pi to control the real world--powering motors controlling robots triggering cameras
The combination of Raspberry Pi and Piface creates a cheap personal laboratory for computer science that every child can own.
Raspberry Pi and Piface are ideal for schools to use to teach this key subject.
Workshops for teachers using Raspberry Pi and Piface have attracted more than 50 teachers from schools in the North West per session
After seeing what Raspberry Pi and Piface could do had we suggestions including an automated insulin monitor that can dial 999 and another that automatically reorders food
The team are also launching the Raspberry Pi Bake Off an international competition for schools
and hobbyists challenging entrants to create useful gadgets to change the world using Raspberry Pi computers.
The study identified two independent sets of genes responsible for making the fruit of modern commercial tomatoes 100 times larger than their wild ancestors.
for example in DNA around genes conferring larger fruit size or genes for resistance to diseases afflicting tomato plants.
Fruit mixture is not the answercan you ditch the strips and dump the dentist for whiter teeth?
From The Dr. Oz Show to Youtube videos experts say you can reclaim those pearly whites simply by mixing fruit such as strawberries with some baking soda
Unfortunately not says an University of Iowa dental researcher who compared a homemade strawberry-baking soda recipe with other remedies such as over-the-counter products professional whitening and prescribed whitening products.
The researcher associate professor So Ran Kwon found the strawberry and baking soda formula produced no whitening other than removing superficial debris. The other methods Kwon found
The only benefit of the do-it-yourself method (strawberries and baking soda) is while it seems to make your teeth look whiter they look whiter
In her experiments Kwon rubbed a mixture of California-grown organic strawberries and baking soda on 20 recently extracted teeth for five minutes followed by a gentle brushing.
The teeth brushed with the strawberry-baking soda mixture showed no real whitening based on two well-known color-measurement tests and evaluations with a spectrophotometer Kwon reports.
The main reason why strawberries don't work as teeth whiteners is their chemistry. They may taste great
Apples and lemons also popularly advocated as tooth whiteners have no hydrogen peroxide and carbamide peroxide suggesting their effectiveness as tooth whiteners would be limited as well
although Kwon did not directly test those fruits. The strawberry-baking soda remedy had another downside:
The mixture reduced the surface hardness of teeth known as microhardness by up to 10 percent due to the erosive effect of citric acid in the fruit Kwon reported in another study published in June in the journal.
These acids are not whitening agents says Kwon currently in the UI College of Dentistry
of which shows this super accuracy adds Associate professor Andrea Morello from UNSW's School of Electrical engineering and Telecommunications.
Meanwhile Morello's team has been pushing the natural phosphorus atom qubit to the extremes of performance.
Morello's research team also established a world-record coherence time for a single quantum bit held in solid state.
Coherence time is a measure of how long you can preserve quantum information before it's lost Morello says.
what is modified basically a version of a normal transistor is something that almost nobody believed possible until today Morello says.
While tomato domestication and breeding programs have focused typically on traits such as fruit weight color shape
They tested each population for total water-soluble antioxidant activity phenolic content fruit weight fruit shape fruit color and Vitamin c content.
#Did fruit contribute to Apples success? Steve jobs swore by a fruit diet as he believed it improved his ideas.
And he wasn't wrong: food with high levels of tyrosine like bananas peaches and almonds allow us to think harder and more creatively.
Leiden cognitive psychologist Lorenza Colzato published an article on the subject on 26 september in Psychological Research.
'Take a look at for instance former boss of Apple Steve jobs one of the most creative minds of our time.
He often claimed that his fruit diet formed the basis of his successes . And as fruit is rich in tyrosine that might not be such a weird statement after all.'
'The research method Colzato asked the 32 subjects participating in the research to visit the test lab twice.
It can be found in various kinds of fruit but also in soybeans spinach eggs and cottage cheese.
and the U s. The dark orange color of these corn varieties also makes them more culturally acceptable to consumers in African countries where yellow corn is fed generally only to animals Rocheford said.
Their study found that a combination of visually selecting corn with darker orange kernels and using a number of these favorable genes could be an effective way to rapidly convert white and yellow corn varieties to orange corn with higher levels of Provitamin a and total carotenoids.
#An innovative way to increase flower, seed and fruit productiona scientist from UPM has developed a method to enhance crop yield by the contact of roots aerial parts or even the substratum of the plant fungus'Colletotrichum tofieldiae'.
or weight of its seeds fruits and flower. Â This discovery has been protected by patent and its implementation could lead to cost savings
This method was patented (P201331839-A method to increase the production of flower seed and fruit of plants:
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