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This study investigated the relationship between nutritional knowledge and dietary behaviors of students at the University of Sports Ho Chi Minh City. A questionnaire was set up to assess the nutritional knowledge and dietary behaviors of 169 student-athletes (111 males and 58 females) with age ranging from 18 to 25. The collected data revealed that there is a close relationship between nutritional knowledge and the dietary behaviors of the students. Most students are aware of the importance of eating in moderation, and a healthy diet affects exercise results. The majority of the female (84%) and male (75%) athlete-respondents have a “good” level of nutritional knowledge. Besides, the 24-hours dietary recall survey was carried out on 43 students- marathon athletes (26 males and 17 females) aged 18-25. The results showed that the student-athlete-respondents perform heavy physical activities from Monday to Saturday every week. However, the amount of energy intake is considered inadequate compared to how many calories are needed for their daily training, even though they have day-offs. Therefore, there is a need to improve nutritional knowledge and dietary nutrition for student-athletes.

In this study, Mn-doped ZnSe/ZnS core/shell quantum dots (CSQDs) were synthesized in aqueous solution using 3-Mercaptopropionic Acid as a surface stabilizer and successfully applied in the detection of Escherichia coli O157:H7 and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) for the first time. The CSQDs were conjugated with anti-E. coli antibody and anti-MRSA antibody via protein A supported by 1-ethyl-3-(-3-dimethylaminopropyl)carbodiimide hydrochloride for fluorescent labeling of the intact bacterial cells. The etection was performed for the bacterial strains cultivated in Luria-Bertani liquid medium. The obtained results indicate that E. coli O157:H7 and MRSA can be detected within 30 min at a high sensitivity of 101 CFU/mL. This labeling method based on the highly fluorescent CSQDs may have great potential for use in the food industry to check and prevent outbreaks of foodborne illness.

This work presents a thorough study on the early stage of copper electrodeposition from a choline chloride-urea deep eutectic solvent (DES). Determination of possible species in DES containing Cu2+ ions as the electrolytes has been performed using UV-Vis measurements. Kinetic and thermodynamic aspects of copper electrodeposition on glassy carbon electrode from DES were thoroughly investigated using cyclic voltammetry (CV) and chronoamperometry (CA). Both results from CA and CV have demonstrated that the copper electrodeposition could be performed directly from DES containing a small amount of water by the single potentiostatic step technique. Theoretical approach confirmed that the direct electronucleation of copper nanoparticles in the DES can be described by a model with two contributions, namely, (i) adsorption process and (ii) a three-dimensional (3D) nucleation and diffusion-controlled growth of copper nuclei, to the total current density transients. Kinetic parameters are important for controlling morphology and chemical composition of the obtained nanoparticles, which are verified by surface characterization techniques such as SEM and EDS.

The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of different dehydration conditions (sun drying; hot-air drying at 60, 80 and 100 °C; vacuum drying at 60 °C, 80 and 100 °C; infrared drying a...

Background: Extraction is an important step to obtain phytochemical compounds from natural materials. Among different extraction techniques, microwave-assisted extraction (MAE) is an advanced method with high extraction efficiency and low energy consumption. Objective: This study aimed to optimize the MAE parameters for obtaining the highest levels of phenolic compounds and antioxidant activity from cacao pod husk (CPH). Methods: The dried CPH was prepared using a microwave drying method. The CPH extract was prepared using a microwave-assisted extraction method. The powdered CPH extract was prepared using vacuum evaporation and freeze-drying methods. Phytochemical compounds and antioxidant capacity of CPH extracts were analyzed using spectrophotometric methods. Results: The optimal MAE parameters were 600 W microwave power, 5 s/min irradiation time, 30 min extraction time, and 50 mL/g solvent to sample ratio. Under these MAE parameters, total phenolic content (TPC), phenolic extraction efficiency (PEE), saponin content (SC), and DPPH radical scavenging capacity (DRSC) were achieved from the CPH to be 10.97 mg GAE/g dried sample, 76.82%, 70.10 mg EE/g dried sample, and 141.18 mg DPPH/g dried sample, respectively, which were not significantly different from the predicted values (10.38 mg GAE/g dried sample, 72.68%, 70.09 mg EE/g dried sample, and 121.49 mg DPPH/g dried sample, respectively). The residual moisture, water activity, density, water-soluble index and pH of powdered CPH extract were 9.72%, 0.38, 0.17 g/ml, 84.93% and 7.68, respectively. TPC, total flavonoid content (TFC) and SC of powdered CPH extract were 15.75 mg GAE/g dried sample, 27.03 mg CE/g dried sample and 133.67 mg EE/g dried sample, respectively. DRSC and ferric reducing antioxidant power (FRAP) of powdered CPH extract were 227.79 mg DPPH/g dried sample and 14.12 mg Fe(II)/g dried sample, respectively. Conclusion: The findings from this study reveal that the powdered extract obtained from the CPH at the optimal MAE parameters is a rich source of phytochemicals possessing great antioxidant activity. Therefore, it is a potential candidate to apply in functional foods.

In Vietnam, physical education is mostly still taught in a traditional model. Volleyball is one of the most practiced sports in Physical Education classes. The study of this article was to explore students' difficulties in the practice of volleyball in school Physical Education (PE) classes, according to the tactical principles of the sport, and to compare them with teachers' understanding of the discipline. This qualitative study was developed in two stages: a) observation of 14 hours/class PE volleyball classes in two different schools and field diary records of students' difficulties during the game according to the tactical principles of the sport, and b) application of a Linkert scale with active PE teachers to classify such problems (Thomas A.P, et al 2020). In the first stage, the following situations were identified as difficulties, in decreasing order of occurrence in the observations: building the attack, occupying spaces on the court, looking for empty spaces, intending to contact the ball, and directing serves. In the teachers' view, however, difficulties in serves were indicated as students' main problem and, on the other hand, occupying court spaces as the action they performed more easily. On this basis, it is concluded that there are differences between the researcher's and the teachers' views, possibly related to teachers' initial coaching and previous experiences based on the traditional model, whose focus is not on the teaching of tactical principles.

The cytokine storm leads to acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and multi-organ dysfunction in COVID-19 cases. One of the major cytokines is IL-6, which is positively associated with the severity of the condition. In the present study, nasal inoculation of SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid phosphoprotein (NPP) elevated IL-6 abundancy in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF) in mice. Staphylococcus epidermidis K1 (S. epidermidis K1)-colonized mice nasally administered with glycerol or FMN resulted in a reduction of NPP-induced IL-6. S. epidermidis fermented glycerol to generate a large amount of electrons which further supported bacterial colonization. Inhibition of riboflavin kinase in S. epidermidis considerably suppressed the effect of nasal S. epidermidis plus glycerol on the decrement of NPP-induced IL-6. Taken together, our results show that nasal colonization of S. epidermidis mitigates a cytokine storm caused by SARS-CoV-2 infection.

g-C3N4/BiVO4, binary component heterojunction materials, were successfully synthesized for novel photocatalytic tetracycline (TC) decomposition. In the prepared binary component heterojunction, BiVO4 was well distributed on g-C3N4 layer. In addition, BiVO4 and g-C3N4 was intimately contacted. Both BiVO4 and g-C3N4, which band gap energies were approximately 2.46 and 2.71 eV, respectively, would also absorb significant amount of visible light to excite electrons (e−) from their valence bands to conduction bands. Thus, the e− on the conduction band of the BiVO4 could quickly transfer and combine with the h+ on the valence band of the g-C3N4. Therefore, the g-C3N4/BiVO4 could be easily excited by incident visible irradiation to produce large number of h+ on the valence band of the BiVO4 and e− on the conduction band of the g-C3N4. These produced e− and h+ were strong enough for reactions with water and oxygen to product huge amounts of hydroxyl radicals for novel TC degradation. The photocatalytic performance of these g-C3N4/BiVO4 materials highly depended on weight ratio of these used precursors. The g-C3N4/BiVO4-10 material, which the g-C3N4:BiVO4 weight ratio was 10%, presented the highest tetracycline degradation efficiency (95%). This was due to these excess of g-C3N4 covered more BiVO4 surface preventing incident light reaching to the material and also represented as active sites for recombination of charges (e− and h+) decreasing photocatalytic efficiency of the system. Finally, the synthesized g-C3N4/BiVO4 presented novel durability during long-term photocatalysis.

Phytochemical investigation of the trunks of

International audience; The influence of Fe addition on thermal stability, crystallography, and magnetic properties of τ-Mn51Al47C2 was investigated. Alloys with composition Mn51-xFexAl47C2 (x = 0, 0.5, 1, 2, and 4) were synthesized by mechanical alloying method. High purity of τ-Mn(Fe)AlC up to 98% could be obtained after 10 h of milling, then annealed at 1050 °C for 1 h, and followed by an aging process at appropriate temperatures from 515 to 540 °C for 50 min. It was found that the thermal stability of both ε and τ phases was enhanced by the addition of Fe up to 4 at.% into MnAlC alloy through a shifting of ε-to-τ transformation temperature to high temperature region and a reduction in c/a ratio of Fe doped τ-MnAlC compared to iron free τ-MnAlC. While the magnetization and Curie temperature of Fe doped τ-MnAlC showed a reduction compared to iron free τ-Mn51Al47C2, coercivity seems not to be significantly affected. Ab initio calculation showed a lower magnetic moment of Fe (μFe = 1.77 μB) compared to Mn (μMn_average = 2.36 μB) in τ-Mn(Fe)AlC when Fe substituted Mn position at 1a site.

In this report, the porous NiO microspheres were fabricated by a post-simple route using α-Ni(OH)2 microflowers as precursor that were synthesized by a hydrothermal method without using surfactants. The three-dimensional (3D) NiO microspheres ranging from 2 to 10 μm in diameters composes of connected NiO nanoparticles, results in the sintering and phase transformation from primary α-Ni(OH)2 nanosheets to NiO nanoparticles during thermal procedures. The porous NiO microspheres-based sensor was tested with some toxic and flammable gases including H2S, NH3, H2, and CO. The hierarchical porous sensors exhibit high selectivity and sensitivity toward H2S in comparison with other interfering gases. The results may be related to some factors such as the catalytic effect of NiO on the oxidation of hydrosulfide, a moderately chemical affinity between Ni and S, and well-aligned porous architectures. The results exhibit the potential of hierarchical porous NiO microspheres as a gas-sensing material for excellent H2S detection.

Permanent Scatterer InSAR (PSInSAR) technique is used commonly to evaluate land subsidence for some cities in the world and the pilot project in Ho Chi Minh City has shown the capability of this technique for mapping land subsidence in the period from 2006 to 2010. The result shows that PSInSAR can be applied to study the land subsidence phenomenon more efficiently than any traditional methods. However, SAR data often are commercial images such as ERS, ALOS, COSMO SkyMed… that a large number of SAR scenes must be collected to ensure the best results. This paper introduces results of the average subsidence velocities in Ho Chi Minh City that PSInSAR technique is applied to process SAR data from Sentinel-1 and COSMO SkyMed satellite. Evaluating the preliminary result showed that the capacity of using free Sentinel-1 images to replace commercial images for monitoring land subsidence.

Objective: The aim of this study was to assess cytotoxic activity of extracts and fractions from the Paramignya trimera root (PTR) and Phyllanthus amarus (PA) against two pancreatic cancer cell lines (primary: BxPc3 and secondary: CFPAC1). Materials and Methods: The root of PT and whole plant of PA were used in this study. The extracts and fractions from the PTR and PA were prepared using microwave-assisted extraction and high-performance liquid chromatography, respectively. The cytotoxic activity was assessed using the Dojindo Cell Counting Kit-8 assay. Results: The findings showed impressive cytotoxic capacity of the PTR extract against both pancreatic cancer cells of BxPc3 and CFPAC1 in a range of concentrations from 50 to 200 μg/mL, which was higher than those of ostruthin (67 μM), gemcitabine (50 nM), and four its fractions (50 μg/mL), and to be comparable to a saponin-enriched extract from Quillaja bark at 200 μg/mL. In contrast, the cytotoxic capacity of the PA extract and nine its fractions against these pancreatic cancer cell lines was significantly lower (P < 0.05) than those of gemcitabine (50 nM) and Quillaja bark extract (200 μg/mL) and being comparable to phyllanthin (4.8 μM). The IC50 values of the PTR extract against BxPc3 and CFPAC1 cancer cells were 32.12 and 36.65 μg/mL, respectively, which was much lower than that of the PA extract against CFPAC1 cancer cells (128.81 μg/mL). Conclusion: The outcomes obtained from this study reveal that the PTR extract is a lead source for the potential development of novel antipancreatic cancer drugs and/or functional foods.

New non-equiatomic Ti(25+x)-Zr25-Nb25-Ta(25-x) (x = 0, 5, 10, 15, 20, in at%) medium entropy alloys (MEAs) have been designed using the atomic mismatch approach and fabricated through a conventional arc-melting process. These novel MEAs were derived from a recently developed equiatomic Ti-Zr-Nb-Ta MEA by gradually replacing its Ta content with Ti. Each non-equiatomic MEA solidified as a single solid-solution phase, which was characterised in detail and compared with Pandat™ simulation and empirical rules. Systematic tensile mechanical property data revealed the existence of a brittle-to-ductile transition for Ti-Zr-Nb-Ta MEAs, i.e., when 15 at% of Ta in the equiatomic Ti25-Zr25-Nb25-Ta25 MEA was replaced by Ti to become a Ti40-Zr25-Nb25-Ta10 MEA. The transition occurs corresponding to a small reduction in atomic mismatch from 4.72% to 4.65% but a signficant drop in nanoindentation hardness from 4.2 GPa to 3.5 GPa. In particular, both the as-cast Ti40-Zr25-Nb25-Ta10 and Ti45-Zr25-Nb25-Ta5 MEAs exhibited excellent tensile strain to fracture (>18%) and tensile strength (>900 MPa) with much reduced density compared to the brittle Ti25-Zr25-Nb25-Ta25 MEA. They are both among a very small number of strong and ductile (tensile strain >15%) HEAs reported to date. Their tensile mechanical properties can be further tuned by adjusting the atomic mismatch of the resulting single solid-solution phase in conjunction with the improved understanding of the microstructures of these MEAs.

Fast hydrothermal liquefaction of acid-washed Cladophora socialis macroalgae has been studied over homogeneous (KOH, K2CO3, H3PO4, HCOOH) and heterogeneous (H-ZSM-5, Raney Ni, Ru/C, Fe metal) catalysts in a batch reactor at 350 °C. Biocrude with maximum yield (36.2%) and energy density (37.1 MJ kg−1) and minimum heteroatom contents (3.8% N and 10.1% O) were achieved with metallic Fe. GC–MS indicates reduction in content of carbonyls, acids and N-containing substances and increase in levels of phenols and hydrocarbons in biocrude while 1H NMR suggests the enhanced formation of oxygenated/nitrogenous compounds in aqueous phase over Fe catalyst compared to non-catalytic test. Such carbonyls and acids removal was proposed to occur via hydride reduction and decarboxylation pathways, respectively. GPC and TAN confirm vast improvement in stability and corrosiveness properties of Fe-catalyzed biocrude. Regeneration of used catalyst has been conducted and the regenerated catalyst exhibited slight deactivation, likely due to sintering of Fe particles.