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This investigation aimed to establish the geographical traceability of Malaysian rice by assessing the elemental composition in paddy soil. Multi-element determination in combination with a chemometric approach was applied to evaluate the elemental concentrations of paddy soil from granaries cultivated with the same rice variety and to assess the relationship between elements in the soil and rice (SAR) system. A total of 29 elements (aluminum, arsenic, barium, bromine, calcium, chlorine, cobalt, chromium, cesium, europium, iron, gallium, hafnium, potassium, lanthanum, lutetium, magnesium, manganese, sodium, rubidium, antimony, scandium, samarium, thorium, titanium, uranium, vanadium, ytterbium and zinc) were successfully determined in paddy soil from Kedah, Selangor and Langkawi by neutron activation analysis. A significant difference (P < 0.05) between 18 elements in the soil samples was obtained. The chemometric approaches of principal component and linear discriminant analyses demonstrated clear discrimination and highly corrected classification (100%) of the soil samples. A high classification (98.1%) was also achieved by assessing 10 elements (aluminum, arsenic, bromine, chlorine, potassium, magnesium, manganese, sodium, rubidium and zinc), which similarly applied to rice geographical origin determination. Similar elements in SAR were also observed for differences in the pattern of correlation and bioaccumulation factor between the granaries. Furthermore, the generalized Procrustes analysis showed a 98% consensus between SAR and clear differences between the studied regions. The canonical correlation analysis demonstrated a significant correlation between the chemical profile of SAR (r 2 = 0.88, P < 0.001). Therefore, the current work model provides a reliable assessment to establish rice provenance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the field of industrial non-destructive testing, the three-dimensional imaging technology of ultrasonic testing can intuitively represent the three-dimensional spatial characteristics of defects, making it convenient for non-destructive testing personnel to make accurate judgments on the internal defect information of the tested workpiece. This article conducts a comprehensive study on multi element synthetic aperture focused ultrasound imaging. Based on the radiation theory of sound field, the sound pressure distribution of multi element aperture was derived, and the sound field and defect response of single element, multi element focused, and multi element unfocused were simulated. It was found that multi element unfocused sound field is more suitable for synthetic aperture focused ultrasound imaging. The results indicate that in far-field conditions, multi element synthetic aperture focused ultrasound imaging can achieve higher imaging quality and resolution than single element synthetic aperture focused imaging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concentrations of metals (Ag, Al, Ba, B, Be, Bi, Cd, Co, Cr, Cu, Fe, Ga, Hg, Li, Mn, Mo, Ni, Pb, Rb, Sr, Tl, U, V, Zn), As and Se were analyzed in water and sediments from three sites of Río Tercero Reservoir (Córdoba, Argentina) during the wet and the dry season. The dynamics of metals in six fish species ( Hoplias malabaricus, Oligosarcus jenynsii, Rhamdia quelen, Bryconamericus iheringii, Astyanax fasciatus and Odontesthes bonariensis) from the reservoir were investigated to discover the possible differential influence of habitat and diet on metal accumulation in the fish. In the abiotic matrix, the highest heavy metal concentrations were observed in sediment. The concentrations of Al, Cu and Pb in water exceeded the limits considered as hazardous for aquatic life. Potential ecological risk analysis of metal concentrations in sediment indicated a low ecological risk in Río Tercero Reservoir in all sampling periods. The enrichment factor indicated that Cu, Pb, Zn and Hg come from anthropogenic sources. Among five different organs, the highest metal levels were found in gills and intestine. Rhamdia quelen and Oligosarcus jenynsii were the species with the highest values of metal accumulation in the whole body. Our study showed that the accumulation pattern of these multi-elements in the different fish species did not respond to diet or habitat, but seemed to be related to the detoxification mechanisms and the metabolism of each organism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Ginger rhizome is a valued food, spice and an important ingredient of traditional systems of medicine of India, China and Japan. An Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS) based multi-elemental profiling was performed to assess the quantitative complement of elements, nutritional quality and toxicity of 46 ginger germplasms, collected from the north western Himalayan India. The abundance of eighteen elements quantified in the acid digested rhizomes was observed to be K>Mg>Fe>Ca>Na>Mn>Zn>Ba>Cu>Cr>Ni>Pb>Co>Se>As>Be>Cd. Toxic element, Hg was not detected in any of the investigated samples. Chemometric analyses showed positive correlation among most of the elements. No negative correlation was observed in any of the metals under investigation. UPGMA based clustering analysis of the quantitative data grouped all the 46 samples into three major clusters, displaying 88% similarity in their metal composition, while eighteen metals investigated grouped into two major clusters. Quantitatively, all the elements analyzed were below the permissible limits laid down by World Health Organization. The results were further validated by cluster analysis (CA) and principal component analysis (PCA) to understand the ionome of the ginger rhizome. The study suggested raw ginger to be a good source of beneficial elements/minerals like Mg, Ca, Mn, Fe, Cu and Zn and will provide platform for understanding the functional and physiological status of ginger rhizome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prediction of self friction-induced vibrations is of major importance in the design of dry friction systems. This is known to be a challenging problem since dry friction systems are very complex nonlinear systems. Moreover, it has been shown that the friction coefß-cients admit dispersions depending in general on the manufacturing process of dry fric-tion systems. As the dynamic behavior of these systems is very sensitive to the friction parameters, it is necessary to predict the friction-induced vibrations by taking into account the dispersion of friction. So, the main problem is to define efficient methods which help to predict friction-induced vibrations by taking into account both nonlinear and random aspect of dry friction systems. The multi-element generalized polynomial chaos formalism is proposed to deal with this question in a more general setting. It is shown that, in the case of friction-induced vibrations obtained from long time integration, the proposed method is efficient by opposite to the generalized polynomial chaos based method and constitutes an interesting alternative to the prohibitive Monte Carlo method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]