马萨诸塞大学

Plant-based (PB) milk alternatives often fail to accurately replicate the physicochemical properties and functionality of dairy milk, restricting their application in PB-dairy products. In this study, PB-milk analogs were constructed using a bottom-up approach by integrating PB-milk fat globule (PB-MFG) and PB-casein micelle (PB-CM) analogs. The mixed systems exhibited characteristics resembling those of whole dairy milk, including physicochemical properties, storage stability, and pH-responsive behavior. Polysaccharide incorporation and pasteurization significantly affected the properties and stability of the milk analogs, exhibiting both positive and negative effects depending on the type used. Notably, pasteurization consistently improved the stability of the milk analogs. Pasteurized PB milks containing high-acyl gellan gum exhibited the highest creaming stability, showing no visible phase separation after 28 days of storage. Moreover, these samples exhibited pH-dependent behavior similar to whole milk, with aggregation near pH 4 and stable dispersions formed from pH 6 to 9. These findings provide insights into the design of PB-milk analogs with improved functionality and highlight their potential for application in plant-based yogurt and cheese products.

Oral administration of lipophilic bioactives remains challenging because systems that provide effective protection during food processing and gastrointestinal exposure may also restrict subsequent lipid digestion and absorption. In this study, we fabricated β-carotene-loaded core-shell microgels consisting of a lipid core and a biopolymer shell. The core-shell microgels were prepared by coaxial extrusion of a lipid inner phase (β-carotene and corn oil) and a biopolymer outer phase (potato protein and sodium alginate), followed by Ca2+-induced gelation. This procedure generated uniform spherical core-shell microgels with a lipid core diameter of around 653-671 μm and a biopolymer shell thickness of around 95-109 μm. Shell thickness increased slightly with increasing potato protein (PP) concentration. Confocal microscopy and protein loading analysis confirmed the successful incorporation of the potato protein into the alginate shell. The β-carotene encapsulation efficiency increased from around 88.9% in the PP-free control to 96.3% at 3.0% PP, with clear improvement from 1.0% PP onward. PP incorporation also altered shell responsiveness by enhancing acid-induced contraction and suppressing swelling at neutral pH (p < 0.05), indicating changes in shell structure and water uptake. Compared with alginate-only microgels, PP-incorporated microgels exhibited improved accelerated storage stability, slower β-carotene degradation, and higher β-carotene retention after gastric digestion, with degradation behavior best described by the Weibull model (R2 ≥ 0.9885). PP incorporation did not impair intestinal digestion but instead promoted free fatty acid release and moderately increased β-carotene bioaccessibility. These findings indicate that PP can serve as a shell-structuring co-biopolymer to improve β-carotene protection while maintaining intestinal lipid digestion and micellar solubilization in plant-based core-shell delivery systems.

The James Webb Space Telescope has ushered in an era of abundant high-redshift observations of young stellar populations characterized by strong emission lines, motivating us to integrate nebular emission into the new Maraston stellar population model which incorporates the latest Geneva stellar evolutionary tracks for massive stars with rotation. We use the photoionization code CLOUDY to obtain the emergent nebular continuum and line emission for a range of modelling parameters, then compare our results to observations on various emission line diagnostic diagrams. We carry out a detailed comparison with several other models in the literature assuming different input physics, including modified prescriptions for stellar evolution and the inclusion of binary stars, and find close agreement in the H beta, H alpha, [N II]lambda 6583, and [S II]lambda 6716, 6731 luminosities between the models. However, we find significant differences in lines with high ionization energies, such as He II lambda 1640 and [OIII]lambda 5007, due to large variations in the hard ionizing photon production rates. The models differ by a maximum of Delta Q([OIII]lambda 5007) approximate to 10(44) s(-1) M-circle dot(-1) ,where these differences are mostly caused by the assumed stellar rotation and effective temperatures for the Wolf Rayet phase. Interestingly, rotation and uncorrected effective temperatures in our single star population models alone generate [O III ] ionizing photon production rates higher than models including binary stars with ages between 1 to 6 Myr. These differences highlight the dependence of derived properties from SED fitting on the assumed model, as well as the sensitivity of predictions from cosmological simulations.

Time-reversal (TR) symmetry is crucial for understanding a wide range of physical phenomena, and plays a key role in constraining fundamental particle interactions and in classifying phases of quantum matter. In this work, we introduce an ensemble of random quantum circuits that are representative of the dynamics of generic TR-invariant many-body quantum systems. We derive a general statistical mechanics model describing entanglement, many-body quantum chaos, and quantum information dynamics in such TR-invariant circuits. As an example of application of our formalism, we study the universal properties of measurement-induced phase transitions in monitored TR-invariant systems, with measurements performed in a TR-invariant basis. We find that TR invariance of the unitary part of the dynamics does not affect the universality class, unless measurement outcomes are postselected to satisfy the global TR invariance of each quantum trajectory. We confirm these predictions numerically and find, for both generic and Clifford-based evolutions, critical exponents in the case of “strong,” i.e., global TR invariance where each quantum trajectory is TR invariant.

Droughts, increasingly frequent under human-driven climate change, are expected to intensify globally. Both pulsed and prolonged droughts can strongly affect organismal survival and population dynamics, potentially altering terrestrial communities and ecosystems. Understanding how drought influences communities is therefore critical for predicting and mitigating its impacts. Here, we conducted two meta-analyses that evaluate two components of communities: community composition and species interactions, revealing overall negative effects of drought in both analyses. By synthesizing experimental and observational studies across terrestrial ecosystems, we show that while drought consistently restructures community composition in ways that scale with severity and duration, its effects on species interactions are more heterogeneous and do not scale predictably, revealing a decoupling between community reorganization and interaction dynamics. In particular, we found negative effects on species richness, and on plant and arthropod community composition, and predation and decomposition were more likely to be negatively affected by drought. Drought's effects also varied among biomes: community composition was most altered in grasslands and boreal forests, whereas trophic interactions in forests consistently weakened under drought, reflected as reduced rates of predation, herbivore attack, and litter consumption. Although drought is expected to harm systems across taxa and biomes, we also identified cases where drought had no overall effect, suggesting the potential resilience of some communities and stability of certain trophic interactions. Overall, our meta-analyses demonstrate that drought can disrupt ecological communities on a global scale and underscores the importance of targeted monitoring of drought effects in terrestrial ecosystems, particularly in regions of high risk.