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Enriched olive oil combines olive oil with plants for enhanced flavor and potential health benefits, offering a versatile culinary ingredient. This process combines the natural goodness of olive oil with the unique characteristics of plants. The aim of this work was to study the effect of rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis) as a food additive (E 392) in the enrichment of ripe and fallen olives on the quality of the resulting flavored olive oil. Olive fruits at different stages of maturation green (ST1), mixed (ST2), black (ST3), and fallen in the ground (FO) were crushed with rosemary at two different percentages (2 and 5% w/w). Quality parameters, fatty acid profile, antioxidant profile, and volatile composition were evaluated. For ST3 and FO, rosemary addition decreased free acidity values, peroxide index, K232, and pigment content. Total phenols increased by 34 and 55% for ST3 and FO, respectively with 2% rosemary. As for bio-phenols, this process influenced antioxidant activity. In fact, 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) activity is improved by 59 and 51%, respectively, for ST3 and FO oils flavored with 5% rosemary. As anticipated, the volatile profile changed significantly due to the rosemary addition, inducing the presence of terpene compounds, such as α-pinene, α-cymene, camphene, β-pinene, and α-terpineol. These findings prove that aromatization process improves the quality and the antioxidant profile of olive oils obtained from mature and fallen olives, and could help in solving the economic problems of oil mills. Other plants such as garlic, lemon, thyme, and others can be studied to find out if better results can be achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advancements in food science and technology have paved the way for the development of natural antimicrobial compounds to ensure the safety and quality of meat and meat products. Among these compounds, bacteriocin produced by lactic acid bacteria has gained considerable scientific attention for its ability to preserve the healthy properties of meat while preventing spoilage. This natural preservative is seen as a pioneering tool and a potent alternative to chemical preservatives and heat treatment, which can have harmful effects on the nutritional and sensory qualities of meat. Bacteriocin produced by lactic acid bacteria can be used in various forms, including as starter/protective cultures for fermented meats, purified or partially purified forms, loaded in active films/coatings, or established in encapsulate systems. This review delves into the downstream purification schemes of LAB bacteriocin, the elucidation of their characteristics, and their modes of action. Additionally, the application of LAB bacteriocins in meat and meat products is examined in detail. Overall, the use of LAB bacteriocins holds immense potential to inspire innovation in the meat industry, reducing the dependence on harmful chemical additives and minimizing the adverse effects of heat treatment on nutritional and sensory qualities. This review provides a comprehensive understanding of the potential of bacteriocin produced by lactic acid bacteria as a natural and effective meat preservative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zero liquid discharge (ZLD) technology emerges as a transformative solution for sustainable wastewater management in the textile industry, emphasizing water recycling and discharge minimization. This review comprehensively explores ZLD's pivotal role in reshaping wastewater management practices within the textile sector. With a primary focus on water recycling and minimized discharge, the review thoroughly examines the economic and environmental dimensions of ZLD. Additionally, it includes a comparative cost analysis against conventional wastewater treatment methods and offers a comprehensive outlook on the global ZLD market. Presently valued at US $0.71 billion, the market is anticipated to reach US $1.76 billion by 2026, reflecting a robust annual growth rate of 12.6%. Despite ZLD's efficiency in wastewater recovery, environmental challenges, such as heightened greenhouse gas emissions, increased carbon footprint, elevated energy consumption, and chemical usage, are discussed. Methodologies employed in this review involve an extensive analysis of existing literature, empirical data, and case studies on ZLD implementation in the textile industry worldwide. While acknowledging existing adoption barriers, the review underscores ZLD's potential to guide the textile industry toward a more sustainable and environmentally responsible future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A simple and accurate spectrophotometric technique has been presented for determining the presence of loperamide hydrochloride. The approach involves forming an ion-pair association complex with rose Bengal (RB), which results in a colored product that is analyzed spectrophotometrically at 568 nm. The validity of Beer's law was established in the range of 0.5–10 μg/L. The proposed method is specific to the analysis of loperamide and can differentiate it from its pharmaceutical products, which can be detected using HPLC. The conditions for the method were optimized, and the technique was successfully used to analyze the drug in both pure form and dosage forms. The study establishes a low limit of detection of 0.025 and a limit of quantification of 0.082. The method provides a reliable and sensitive approach for the determination of loperamide hydrochloride in pharmaceutical formulations and can be used as an alternative to other analytical methods. The results demonstrate the potential for using this method in routine quality control analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subject of this study is to determine the best solvent and optimum extraction conditions for the extraction of maximum antioxidant phenolic compounds and antioxidant activity from strawberry fruits (Fragaria x ananassa Duch.). Extractions were carried out using solvents with different polarities (water, methanol, ethanol, acetonitrile, and acetone). Box-Behnken Design was used to optimize extraction conditions, including extraction time (t), temperature (°C), and liquid/solid (L/S) ratio. In the study, extracts obtained with acetone indicated the highest total phenolic content (TPC), total flavonoid content (TFC), and antioxidant activity. The optimal extraction conditions for both responses were determined to be time of 17.5 min, temperature 52.5 °C, and liquid/solid ratio of 30:1. The maximum TPC and TFC values were found as 18.78 ± 0.22 mg of gallic acid equivalent (GAE/g) and 10.52 ± 0.35 mg of catechin equivalents (CE/g) under optimum extraction conditions. The results indicated that optimizing extraction conditions is critical for quantifying antioxidant phenolic compounds. The present model can contribute to finding a cheap way of delivering natural antioxidants in the food, cosmeceutical, and pharmaceutical industries. Furthermore, these results indicate that strawberry fruits (Fragaria x ananassa Duch.) can be a natural food colorant in dietary applications with potential health benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study was designed to measure phenolics and antioxidant properties of milk thistle seeds on optimal processing conditions. The optimized conditions (time (60 min), temperature (70 °C), solvent (ethanol 80%), and liquid solid ratio (1:10)) showed a better correlation between the hypothesized and experimental values. The results revealed that the flavonolignans purified by dynamic state (2BV) with the most favorable state for the separation of impurities and high contents of polyphenols. Silymarin (SMR) is the major compound with a molecular weight was 481 m/z present in milk thistle that was identified by optimized HPLC condition and characterized by ESI–MS/MS. The active fractions were isolated by ÄKTA purifier with 40% methanol. Furthermore, each compound had a high antioxidant capacity on RAW 264.7 cells. But the % 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl activity was found to be higher in SMR than other components. Hence, Taxifolin is the most effective com-pound of SMR due to free radical and hydroxyl radical antioxidant capacity. The SCN and SDN also showed effect as a total antioxidant activity rather than SBN and ISBN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food adulteration imposes a significant health concern on the community. Being one of the key ingredients used for spicing up food dishes. Red chilli powder is almost used in every household in the world. It is also common to find chilli powder adulterated with brick powder in global markets. We are amongst the first research attempts to train a machine learning-based algorithms to detect the adulteration in red chilli powder. We introduce our dataset, which contains high quality images of red chilli powder adulterated with red brick powder at different proportions. It contains 12 classes consists of 0%, 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%, 25%, 30%, 35%, 40%, 45%, 50%, and 100% adulterant. We applied various image color space filters (RGB, HSV, Lab, and YCbCr). Also, extracted features using mean and histogram feature extraction techniques. We report the comparison of various classification and regression models to classify the adulteration class and to predict the percentage of adulteration in an image, respectively. We found that for classification, the Cat Boost classifier with HSV color space histogram features and for regression, the Extra Tree regressor with Lab color space histogram features have shown the best performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food allergies impose a significant health concern on the community. A small number of certain food items can cause an allergic reaction within the human body. The symptoms can range from mild hives or itchiness to life-threatening anaphylaxis. In most cases, such reactions can be prevented by simply being aware of the allergen-based food items and avoiding the consumption of the same. We are among the first research attempts to train a deep learning–based object detection model to detect the presence of such food items within an image. We introduce our Allergen30 dataset, which hosts more than 6,000 annotated images of 30 commonly used food items that can trigger an adverse reaction. We report the comparison of multiple variants of the current state-of-art object detection methods, YOLOv5 and YOLOR. Furthermore, we qualitatively analyzed the performance of these methods by surveying the predictions made on the test dataset images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phytochemicals are measured in the peels and pulp of Solanum lycopersicum (tomatoes). I discovered that the peels and pulp of S. lycopersicum contain many phytochemicals. Using ethanol and water, phytochemicals were extracted from the peels and pulp of S. lycopersicum. According to early phytochemical screening data, the ethanolic and aqueous extracts of both peels and pulp are rich in phenolics, flavonoids, tannins, alkaloids, and terpenoids. Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy analysis is used to profile phytochemicals. By studying the spectra peaks of FTIR spectroscopy, the peels of S. lycopersicum contain more total phenolic chemicals than the pulp. As a result, the peels of S. lycopersicum revealed a larger level of total flavonoid components than the pulp. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to compare the peels and pulp of S. lycopersicum and characterize and quantify phenols and flavonoids using FTIR spectroscopy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Germination is an excellent green food development process for improving the nutritional content of grains. Baking with sprouted barley flour is highly recommended to get the most out of barley nutrition. Soaking and sprouting whole grains helps to release their nutrients, and then the body can absorb and use the various vitamins and minerals contained in the grain, making the grains more health-beneficial. This study was conducted to investigate the effect of germination of different barley cultivars on the improved health-benefit quality of flours. Germination of different barley cultivars resulted in a significant increase in ash, protein and fiber content, antioxidant properties (total flavonoids content, total phenolic content, antioxidant activity, metal chelating activity, and ABTS+ scavenging activity), and a*, b*, and redness intensity values related to color parameters, compared to the L* value of germinated flours which decreased. Several studies have shown that digestibility and nutrient absorption improve when grains are processed, soaked, and sprouted and that the levels of vitamins, minerals, proteins, and antioxidants also increase. The present study results are in line with highlighting the benefit of germination in helping for a better valorization and increasing potential applications of barley. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tindora or ivy gourd (Coccinia indica) is a tropical vegetable and has the potential to become popular worldwide due to its rich nutritional characteristics, adaptability to adverse environmental condition and fast fruiting nature. The fresh samples are bright green (good) in colour; it turns yellow (intermediate quality) and ultimately turns bright red (bad or inedible as vegetable). In this paper, tindora is classified using two different colour representations of the image matrix, namely RGB and HSV. In the RGB representation, intensity of the green layer versus intensity of the red layer for each pixel position is plotted. The shape of the plot enables us to identify the tindora quality. In the case of HSV representation, the hue layer is used for classification purposes. The hue layer matrix is vectorized and the Poincare plot is computed. The distribution of the Poincare plot is analysed using Cartesian quadrant system. Based on the analysis, tindora quality is determined. The accuracy of the tindora classification using RGB representation is 68.67 and HSV representation is 94.33. The classifier used in both the representations after feature extraction is primarily threshold based and hence has low computational burden. The low computational burden makes the method ideal for incorporation into smartphones in the form of an app. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Barley contains numerous bioactive compounds of immense health importance, which include β-glucans and phenolic compounds. These compounds have been reported as anti-cancerous due to their unique physicochemical compositions. However, the bioactive compounds are affected by the processing conditions that the grains are subjected to. Consumers demand for moderate processing procedures that have a lower impact on the nutrients degradation as they become more health-conscious. Toasting and roasting procedures are widely used in India to process a wide range of cereals and legumes. The study of these treatments will provide useful information to consumers and the food industry doing business in toasting and roasting of grains. The grains from different barley cultivars of commercial importance in India were subjected to mild (toasting) and strong (roasting) heat treatments. The flours were milled from these, and the effect of these heat treatments on hunter color, pasting, and antioxidant properties was investigated. The antioxidant properties studied were total phenolic content (TPC), total flavonoids content (TFC), antioxidant activity (AOA), metal chelating activity (MCA), and ABTS+ scavenging activity. Both heat treatments resulted in lowering of BD and hunter L* values. Hunter a* and b* values, however, were increased. AOA, MCA, and ABTS+ scavenging activity of flours increased after both treatments, whereas TFC was decreased. TPC of flours after toasting was increased, which upon roasting showed a decrease. Peak viscosity (PV) and final viscosity (FV) were increased, whereas the reverse was observed after roasting. Flour from cv.PL-172 was affected the most for AOA, TPC, and MCA properties when roasted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dairy cheese ball (Rasgulla) is one of the most commercially acclaimed dairy-based sweetmeat products in the Indian subcontinent. The main constrain with rasgulla export is the prediction of its shelf-life period, as there are several factors upon which the perishability of the product is dependent. Twenty-five nodes or concepts were chosen after a thorough consultation with 36 numbers of experts and stakeholders sweetmeat producers, shopkeepers, chhana producers, experts from packaging industries and an experienced tasting panel. The proposed fuzzy cognitive model (FCM) was constructed based on the linguistic variables assigned by the experts. For the defuzzification process centre of gravity, the method was used. There were 137 numbers of interconnections (within the 25 concepts) to build the FCM-based shelf-life model. Steady-state and dynamic-state FCM analysis was done considering the values of each concept to 1 and 0.01 respectively. The two most influential concepts namely freshness of chhana and moisture content were assigned to 0.01 for a better understanding of the rasgulla shelf life with varying values of the concepts. The major challenge related with the application of FCM in food science or food processing is the validation of the proposed model. In this paper, a validation scheme has been proposed to overcome this challenge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Improving the ability to interact through voice with a robot is still a challenge especially in real environments where multiple speakers coexist. This work has evaluated a proposal based on improving the intelligibility of the voice information that feeds an existing ASR service in the network and in conditions similar to those that could occur in a care centre for the elderly. The results indicate the feasibility and improvement of a proposal based on the use of an embedded microphone array and the use of a simple beamforming and masking technique. The system has been evaluated with 12 people and results obtained for time responsiveness indicate that the system would allow natural interaction with voice. It is shown to be necessary to incorporate a system to properly employ the masking algorithm, through the intelligent and stable estimation of the interfering signals. In addition, this approach allows to fix as sources of interest other speakers not located in the vicinity of the robot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent study showed that antlers have evolved a high rate of growth due to the expression of proto-oncogenes and that they have also evolved to express several tumour suppressor genes to control the risk of cancer. This may explain why deer antler velvet (DAV) extract shows anti-tumour activity. The fast growth of antler innervation through the velvet in close association to blood vessels provides a unique environment to study the fast but non-cancerous proliferation of heterogeneous cell populations. We set out to study the anti-cancer effect of DAV in glioblastoma (GB) cell lines in comparison with temozolomide, a chemotherapeutic drug used to treat high-grade brain tumours. Here we report, for the first time, that DAV extract from the tip, but not from mid-parts of the antler, exhibits an anti-tumour effect in GB cell lines (T98G and A172) while being non-toxic in non-cancerous cell lines (HEK293 and HACAT). In T98G cells, DAV treatment showed reduced proliferation (37.5%) and colony-formation capacity (84%), inhibited migration (39%), induced changes in cell cycle progression, and promoted apoptosis. The anticancer activity of DAV extract as demonstrated by these results may provide a new therapeutic strategy for GB treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's world, the corporate image of the largest companies is closely linked to their performance in the field of corporate social responsibility and the disclosure of information on that topic, specifically, on climate change. Since the Board of Directors is the body responsible for this process, the aim of this article is to show the role that companies' Boards of Directors play in the accountability process vis-à-vis stakeholders in relation to one specific aspect which has enormous significance in environmental information: practices used to monitor greenhouse gas emissions. In order to achieve this, we shall verify certain business characteristics, in addition to the size and activity of the Board of Directors, and we shall take different dependence models into consideration. These models will include variables related to the level of independence and diversity of the Board of Directors, which interact with dummy variables representing the company's litigation risks regarding environmental behavior and the institutional macro-context of the organization's country of origin. The results make it clear that Boards of Directors are basically focused on the traditional responsibility of creating economic value, instead of dealing with today's broader business world concepts, which include social responsibility. This focus, therefore, does not favor the accountability process before other stakeholders, if this makes it more difficult to protect the interests of shareholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]