Serpa cheese: technological, biochemical and microbiological characterisation of a PDO ewe's milk cheese coagulated with Cynara cardunculus L

Portugal has a strong tradition of cheesemaking from raw ewe's milk; most of these cheeses are still made on a traditional farmhouse scale. Their production is protected by Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) but the specific biochemical aspects of the majority still need to be characterised. Two different cheesemaking procedures, traditional and semi-industrial, were compared technologically, biochemically and microbiologically. It was observed that, despite the highly significant difference between artisanal and semi-industrial cheeses (P < 0.001), both products were within the limits of national regulations for most parameters except maturation temperature, humidity and the value for the maturation index. Although the present study was not fully representative of the region, the results obtained suggest that the specific regulations for Serpa cheese should be revised and that other parameters, such as moisture and salt-in-moisture content, which are very much dependent on the cheesemaking process, should be included in order to characterise better this traditional cheese.

Recent advances in the application of capillary electrophoresis for food analysis

This article reviews recent developments in the application of capillary electrophoresis (CE) for the analysis of foods and food components. CE has been applied to a number of important areas of food analysis and is fast becoming an established technique within food analytical and research laboratories. Papers are reviewed that were published during the two years to date following the previous review.

Chess endgame knowledge advances

This review of recent developments starts with the publication of Harold van der Heijden's Study Database Edition IV, John Nunn's second trilogy on the endgame, and a range of endgame tables (EGTs) to the DTC, DTZ and DTZ50 metrics. It then summarises data-mining work by Eiko Bleicher and Guy Haworth in 2010. This used CQL and pgn2fen to find some 3,000 EGT-faulted studies in the database above, and the Type A (value-critical) and Type B-DTM (DTM-depth-critical) zugzwangs in the mainlines of those studies. The same technique was used to mine Chessbase's BIG DATABASE 2010 to identify Type A/B zugzwangs, and to identify the pattern of value-concession and DTM-depth concession in sub-7-man play.

Robots with a gentle touch: advances in assistive robotics and prosthetics

As healthcare costs rise and an aging population makes an increased demand on services, so new techniques must be introduced to promote an individuals independence and provide these services. Robots can now be designed so they can alter their dynamic properties changing from stiff to flaccid, or from giving no resistance to movement, to damping any large and sudden movements. This has some strong implications in health care in particular for rehabilitation where a robot must work in conjunction with an individual, and might guiding or assist a persons arm movements, or might be commanded to perform some set of autonomous actions. This paper presents the state-of-the-art of rehabilitation robots with examples from prosthetics, aids for daily living and physiotherapy. In all these situations there is the potential for the interaction to be non-passive with a resulting potential for the human/machine/environment combination to become unstable. To understand this instability we must develop better models of the human motor system and fit these models with realistic parameters. This paper concludes with a discussion of this problem and overviews some human models that can be used to facilitate the design of the human/machine interfaces.

Advances in mucoadhesion and mucoadhesive polymers

Mucoadhesion is the ability of materials to adhere to mucosal membranes in the human body and provide a temporary retention. This property has been widely used to develop polymeric dosage forms for buccal, oral, nasal, ocular and vaginal drug delivery. Excellent mucoadhesive properties are typical for hydrophilic polymers possessing charged groups and/or non-ionic functional groups capable of forming hydrogen bonds with mucosal surfaces. This feature article considers recent advances in the study of mucoadhesion and mucoadhesive polymers. It provides an overview on the structure of mucosal membranes, properties of mucus gels and the nature of mucoadhesion. It describes the most common methods to evaluate mucoadhesive properties of various dosage forms and discusses the main classes of mucoadhesives.