Sustainable Smart Packaging from Protein Nanofibrils.

Smart packaging technologies are revolutionizing the food industry by extending shelf life and enhancing quality monitoring through environmental responsiveness. Here, a novel smart packaging concept is presented, based on amyloid fibrils (AM) and red radish anthocyanins (RRA), to effectively monitor food spoilage by color change. A protein nanofibrils biofilm is developed from whey protein, which is functionalized with RRA to endow the resulting films with advanced monitoring capabilities.

Leveraging Machine Learning for Size and Shape Analysis of Nanoparticles: A Shortcut to Electron Microscopy.

Characterizing nanoparticles (NPs) is crucial in nanoscience due to the direct influence of their physiochemical properties on their behavior. Various experimental techniques exist to analyze the size and shape of NPs, each with advantages, limitations, proneness to uncertainty, and resource requirements. One of them is electron microscopy (EM), often considered the gold standard, which offers visualization of the primary particles.

Phasor-FLIM-guided unraveling of ATRA supramolecular organization in liposomal nanoformulations.

Here we use fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM) to study the supramolecular organization of nanoencapsulated liposomal all- retinoic acid (ATRA), exploiting ATRA's intrinsic fluorescence as a source of signal and phasor transformation as a fit-free analytical approach to lifetime data. Our non-invasive method is suitable for checking for the presence of a fraction of ATRA molecules interacting with liposomal membranes. The results are validated by independent small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) and nano-differential scanning calorimetry (NanoDSC) measurements, probing ATRA's putative position on the membrane and effect on membrane organization.

Antioxidant Capacity of Carotenoid Extracts from the Haloarchaeon .

Herein, we report on the production, characterization, and antioxidant power assessment of carotenoids from the haloarchaeon . It was grown at 37 °C and 180 rpm agitation in halobacteria medium supplemented with glucose, fructose, and xylose, each at concentrations of 0.2%, 1%, and 2%, and the carotenoid yield and composition were investigated.

Fashion-Oriented Image Captioning with External Knowledge Retrieval and Fully Attentive Gates.

Research related to fashion and e-commerce domains is gaining attention in computer vision and multimedia communities. Following this trend, this article tackles the task of generating fine-grained and accurate natural language descriptions of fashion items, a recently-proposed and under-explored challenge that is still far from being solved. To overcome the limitations of previous approaches, a transformer-based captioning model was designed with the integration of external textual memory that could be accessed through -nearest neighbor (NN) searches.

Semirigid Ligands Enhance Different Coordination Behavior of Nd and Dy Relevant to Their Separation and Recovery in a Non-aqueous Environment.

Rare-earth elements are widely used in high-end technologies, the production of permanent magnets (PMs) being one of the sectors with the greatest current demand and likely greater future demand. The combination of Nd and Dy in NdFeB PMs enhances their magnetic properties but makes their recycling more challenging. Due to the similar chemical properties of Nd and Dy, their separation is expensive and currently limited to the small scale.

Mechanical Characterization of Pharmaceutical Powders by Nanoindentation and Correlation with Their Behavior during Grinding.

Controlling the size of powder particles is pivotal in the design of many pharmaceutical forms and the related manufacturing processes and plants. One of the most common techniques for particle size reduction in the process industry is powder milling, whose efficiency relates to the mechanical properties of the powder particles themselves. In this work, we first characterize the elastic and plastic responses of different pharmaceutical powders by measuring their Young modulus, the hardness, and the brittleness index via nano-indentation.

From Show to Tell: A Survey on Deep Learning-Based Image Captioning.

Connecting Vision and Language plays an essential role in Generative Intelligence. For this reason, large research efforts have been devoted to image captioning, i.e.

Electoral campaign contributions: an obstacle to sugary drink industry regulation in Brazil?

Objective: To assess corporate electoral campaign contributions from industries related to sugary drinks production and the characteristics of the elected officials financed by the sector.

Design: Cross-sectional analysis of electoral campaign contributions from corporations related to sugary drinks production (sugary drink industries and sugary drink input industries) to candidates to the Chamber of Deputies, Brazil.

Setting: Elections to the 55 Congress (2015-2019), held in October 2014.

Working Memory Connections for LSTM.

Recurrent Neural Networks with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) make use of gating mechanisms to mitigate exploding and vanishing gradients when learning long-term dependencies. For this reason, LSTMs and other gated RNNs are widely adopted, being the standard de facto for many sequence modeling tasks. Although the memory cell inside the LSTM contains essential information, it is not allowed to influence the gating mechanism directly.

Quantitation of Commercially Available API Solid Forms by Application of the NMR-qSRC Approach: An Optimization Strategy Based on Simulations.

Physical forms of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) play a crucial role in drug discovery since 85% of API molecules exhibit polymorphism and sometimes complicated phase behavior, often resulting in important differences in the respective biochemical and physical properties. Characterization and quantitation of the different forms are becoming more and more essential in the pharmaceutical industry: once these characteristics are known, it is easier to choose the best solid form for development, formulation, manufacturing, and storage. Time domain-nuclear magnetic resonance (TD-NMR) has recently been used to develop a quantitation protocol for solid mixtures, named qSRC, based on the linear combination of saturation recovery curves (SRCs) collected on a bench-top instrument.

Effectiveness of an intervention focusing on diet and walking during pregnancy in the primary health care service.

Interventions during prenatal care can mitigate negative outcomes of a sedentary lifestyle and unhealthy diet during pregnancy. We aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention that promoted healthy diet and leisure-time walking during antenatal care in a pragmatic, controlled, non-randomized intervention study. Physicians and nurses from all health care units of the Family Health Strategy model of health assistance participated in educational training to promote leisure-time walking and healthy diet during antenatal care visits.

Factors associated with diet changes during the COVID-19 pandemic period in Brazilian adults: Time, skills, habits, feelings and beliefs.

This study aimed to identify individual, household and sociodemographic factors associated with changes in food consumption that lead to changes in the diet quality, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic concerning Brazilian adults. Improvements or worsening in diet quality (IDQ or WDQ) were verified using an exploratory online survey which investigated whether participants (n = 4780) increased or decreased their consumption of food subgroups that mark positive or negative food patterns. Respondents also agreed or disagreed with their beliefs about food safety, cooking skills, family support, home characterization, feelings and behaviors.

Dietary guidelines training may improve health promotion practice: Results of a controlled trial in Brazil.

Background: The double burden of malnutrition points to an urgent need to develop strategies to promote healthy diets. Health professionals are key elements for health promotion and must be prepared to deal with these issues in health services.

Aim: This study aimed to evaluate the impact of an educational intervention based on Brazilian Dietary Guidelines in the practice of multidisciplinary teams working in primary health care.

Associations between ultraprocessed food consumption and total water intake in the US population.

Background: Longitudinal studies have shown significant dose-response associations between dietary share of ultraprocessed foods and the incidence of several noncommunicable diseases and all-cause mortality. Several attributes of ultraprocessed foods are potential mechanisms for their link with health outcomes, including their typically unbalanced nutrient profile, high glycemic loads, high energy intake rate, and the presence of food additives, neoformed substances, and substances released by synthetic packaging materials. However, no studies have assessed the plausibility of reduced water intake as an additional association of diets rich in ultraprocessed foods.

Correction: Prevention of obesity in toddlers (PROBIT): a randomised clinical trial of responsive feeding promotion from birth to 24 months.

In the original Article, Dr. Laura Fontana's name was missing from the author list. This has been corrected (Dr.

Spaghetti Labeling: Directed Acyclic Graphs for Block-Based Connected Components Labeling.

Connected Components Labeling is an essential step of many Image Processing and Computer Vision tasks. Since the first proposal of a labeling algorithm, which dates back to the sixties, many approaches have optimized the computational load needed to label an image. In particular, the use of decision forests and state prediction have recently appeared as valuable strategies to improve performance.

Prevention of obesity in toddlers (PROBIT): a randomised clinical trial of responsive feeding promotion from birth to 24 months.

Introduction: The aims of the PROBIT trial (clinicaltrials.gov: NCT03131284) were to prevent overweight or obesity occurring at two years of life, and improve feeding patterns during infancy.

Methods: The trial compared 252 northern Italian newborns whose paediatricians offered their parents an educational programme from the child's birth to the age of two years (intervention arm) with 216 newborns whose parents did not undergo the programme (control arm).

Ultra-processed foods: what they are and how to identify them.

The present commentary contains a clear and simple guide designed to identify ultra-processed foods. It responds to the growing interest in ultra-processed foods among policy makers, academic researchers, health professionals, journalists and consumers concerned to devise policies, investigate dietary patterns, advise people, prepare media coverage, and when buying food and checking labels in shops or at home. Ultra-processed foods are defined within the NOVA classification system, which groups foods according to the extent and purpose of industrial processing.

Predicting Human Eye Fixations via an LSTM-based Saliency Attentive Model.

Data-driven saliency has recently gained a lot of attention thanks to the use of Convolutional Neural Networks for predicting gaze fixations. In this paper we go beyond standard approaches to saliency prediction, in which gaze maps are computed with a feed-forward network, and present a novel model which can predict accurate saliency maps by incorporating neural attentive mechanisms. The core of our solution is a Convolutional LSTM that focuses on the most salient regions of the input image to iteratively refine the predicted saliency map.

Consumption of ultra-processed foods and associated sociodemographic factors in the USA between 2007 and 2012: evidence from a nationally representative cross-sectional study.

Objectives: To compare ultra-processed food consumption across sociodemographic groups and over time (2007-2008, 2009-2010, 2011-2012) in the USA.

Design: Cross-sectional study.

Setting: National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2007-2012.

Ultra-processed foods, protein leverage and energy intake in the USA.

Objective: Experimental studies have shown that human macronutrient regulation minimizes variation in absolute protein intake and consequently energy intake varies passively with dietary protein density ('protein leverage'). According to the 'protein leverage hypothesis' (PLH), protein leverage interacts with a reduction in dietary protein density to drive energy overconsumption and obesity. Worldwide increase in consumption of ultra-processed foods (UPF) has been hypothesized to be an important determinant of dietary protein dilution, and consequently an ecological driving force of energy overconsumption and the obesity pandemic.

Effects of reducing processed culinary ingredients and ultra-processed foods in the Brazilian diet: a cardiovascular modelling study.

Objective: To estimate the impact of reducing saturated fat, trans-fat, salt and added sugar from processed culinary ingredients and ultra-processed foods in the Brazilian diet on preventing cardiovascular deaths by 2030.

Design: A modelling study.

Setting: Data were obtained from the Brazilian Household Budget Survey 2008/2009.

Ultra-processed foods and added sugars in the US diet: evidence from a nationally representative cross-sectional study.

Objectives: To investigate the contribution of ultra-processed foods to the intake of added sugars in the USA. Ultra-processed foods were defined as industrial formulations which, besides salt, sugar, oils and fats, include substances not used in culinary preparations, in particular additives used to imitate sensorial qualities of minimally processed foods and their culinary preparations.

Design: Cross-sectional study.