This article provides a critical, integrated analysis of the role of salt (NaCl) in the microbial ecology of salted food matrices, including meat, dairy, fish, and vegetable products, with particular emphasis on the emerging technologies capable of reconciling sodium reduction with microbiological safety. Salt acts as a fundamental selective agent, inhibiting sensitive microorganisms through increased osmotic pressure and reduced water activity while favoring beneficial microbial successions in fermentative processes; however, osmotolerant pathogens such as Listeria monocytogenes, Staphylococcus aureus, and Clostridium botulinum not only survive this barrier but may exhibit cross-protection phenomena that increase thermal resistance in the presence of salt, revealing a structural tension between sodium reduction and food safety. The diversity of specialized halophilic and halotolerant communities, including bacteria, fungi, and archaea, is examined in relation to their functional roles in spoilage, fermentation, and sensory quality across different food matrices. The article places central focus on advances in microbial analysis and control as the principal pathway for addressing this tension: metagenomics and next-generation sequencing are shown to overcome a key limitation of culture-based methods, the underdetection of pathogens in the viable but non-culturable (VBNC) state induced by osmotic stress, while biopreservation strategies, protective starter cultures, and CRISPR-Cas-engineered strains offer barriers independent of sodium concentration capable of compensating for reduced salt content. It is concluded that these approaches function as complementary components of a multi-barrier system rather than standalone solutions, and that future research should prioritize the quantitative modeling of how reduced salt, protective cultures, and non-thermal treatments interact, providing a stronger scientific basis for control systems such as HACCP and for the development of safer, lower-sodium salted foods.
Distribution utilities have started using shunt capacitors installed in low voltage (LV) systems to provide reactive power compensation to the circuit at a lower cost. Such installation, however, creates risk of harmonic resonances in the LV circuit. This raises concern for engineers responsible for LV system planning as they do not normally perform resonance assessment in LV systems. Thus, it is important to develop a tool that assists these engineers in quickly identifying if a capacitor connection presents risk of resonance. This paper proposes three charts to map parameter combinations that cause problematic resonance in the circuit according to three different scenarios of data availability and study goals. If the LV system is out of problematic regions of the chart, the capacitor can be safely installed without running any simulation study. Otherwise, more detailed investigations must be performed. This is an attractive approach for quick first-screening analyses as the charts can be obtained through simple equations and use only information that is readily available in practice to engineers. They also enable LV systems to be assessed comparatively, so that the safest capacitor location within a pre-defined region can be identified. Single-phase distributed energy resources connected on LV systems are evaluated and the proposed charts are proven to be effective even in their presence. The charts are validated in more than 36,000 real Brazilian LV systems.
The growth in rooftop photovoltaic systems (PVs) installation can lead to violations of technical and regulatory limits in electric power distribution systems, such as overload and overvoltage issues, creating challenges for utilities and regulators. Traditionally, the solution has been to upgrade the network, incurring non-recurring capital expenses. To avoid or delay these expenses, the use of smart inverter controls has been explored, transforming capital expenses into yearly operating expenses (recurring expenses). To inform related decisions, this work proposes a “breakeven” time index (equivalence time) that expresses how long it takes for the recurring expenses to equal the avoided non-recurring expenses. The studies present a utility-scale techno-economic comparative assessment including four control approaches: Volt/Watt, Volt/var, Volt/var with an oversized inverter, and Volt/Watt with Volt/var. The results demonstrate that for the evaluated cases the lowest operating expenses were achieved with Volt/var curves with 10%-oversized inverters.
Fluctuation theorems, such as the Jarzynski equality and the Crooks relation, are effective tools connecting non-equilibrium work statistics and equilibrium free energy differences. However, detailed hands-on, reproducible protocols for implementing and analyzing these relations in real experiments remain scarce. This tutorial provides an end-to-end workflow for measuring, validating, and applying fluctuation theorems using a single-beam optical tweezers setup. It introduces the foundational ideas and consolidates practical calibration (PSD-based trap stiffness and position sensitivity), protocol design (forward/reverse finite-time drives over multiple amplitudes and durations), and robust estimators for free-energy difference and dissipated work, highlighting finite-sampling and rare-event effects. We demonstrate the procedures using an extensive set of measured trajectories under different conditions and provide openly accessible datasets and Python code, enabling new researchers or educators to reproduce the results with minimal effort. Beyond pedagogical validation, we discuss how these recipes translate to broader soft-matter and mesoscopic contexts. By combining user-friendly instruments with clear and transparent analysis, this work promotes the education and reliable adoption of stochastic thermodynamic methods in the curricula of physics and chemistry, as well as among emerging research teams.
The Tanque Novo-Ipira Complex is an ultra-high-temperature metavolcano-sedimentary succession located in the northern portion of the Itabuna-Salvador-Curaca Orogen, in the S & atilde;o Francisco Craton, but little is known about the provenance and tectonic significance of these rocks. The Tanque Novo-Ipira Complex is mostly composed of granulite facies paragneiss containing cordierite, sapphirine, orthopyroxene, clinopyroxene, spinel, sillimanite, garnet and biotite, along with calc-silicate rocks and kinzigite. Although previously interpreted as an Archean sedimentary succession, new U-Pb (LA-SF-ICP-MS) data on detrital zircons show that the sedimentary units were deposited during the Rhyacian. From all detrital grains, the age range 2800-2400 Ma is the most abundant, with a peak around 2580 Ma. The second highest age concentration lies in the 2260-1900 Ma cluster, followed by the 2450-2260 and >2690 Ma age ranges. The U-Pb zircon age for an amphibole quartz-feldspar gneiss from the Tanque Novo Complex is 2127 +/- 49 Ma, while two metagabbros intrusive into this gneiss yielded an age of 2096 +/- 9 Ma. These results suggest that the metasedimentary succession of the Tanque Novo-Ipira Complex was deposited between 2120 and 2095 Ma in a foreland to collisional tectonic setting, with implications for understanding the earliest collision stage of the Rhyacian-Orosirian S & atilde;o Francisco-Congo Orogeny in the Columbia Supercontinent.
