1. I n t r o d u c t i o n N-body simulations employing particle-mesh codes have nowadays become a very powerful tool for investigating the dynamics of disc galaxies. In particular, two-dimensional N-body models in which the stars and the cold interstellar gas are treated as two different components have successfully been applied in studies of spiral structure (e.g., Salo 1991; Thomasson 1991)....

Removal of astringency by endogenously formed acetaldehyde, achieved by postharvest anaerobic treatment, is of critical importance for many types of persimmon fruit. Although an anaerobic environment accelerates de-astringency, it also has the deleterious effect of promoting excessive softening, reducing shelf life and marketability. Some hypoxia-responsive ethylene response factors (ERFs) part...

Pch313 was isolated as a cDNA whose RNA accumulated during the softening period of peach (Prunus persica L. Batsch) fruit development. To better understand the role of the gene, we compared the amount of pch313-related RNA detected during fruit softening and tissue wounding between cultivars with different softening characteristics. The cultivar that softened faster, "Bailey," had a significant...

Solids deform and fluids flow, but soft glassy materials, such as emulsions, foams, suspensions, and pastes, exhibit an intricate mix of solid- and liquid-like behavior. While much progress has been made to understand their elastic (small strain) and flow (infinite strain) properties, such understanding is lacking for the softening and yielding phenomena that connect these asymptotic regimes. H...

'Taishanzaoxia' fruit rapid softening and dehiscence during ripening stage and this process is very sensitive to endogenous ethylene. In this study, we cloned five ethylene signal transcription factors (ZMdEIL1, ZMdEIL2, ZMdEIL3, ZMdERF1 and ZMdERF2) and one functional gene, ZMdPG1, encoding polygalacturonase that could loose the cell connection which associated with fruit firmness decrease and...

An object-oriented application programming interface (API) must satisfy two con icting requirements. On the one hand, it is desirable to have a low-level, primitive API, in order to simplify documentation and speci cation of semantics, and to make the API accessible to a large group of potential developers. On the other hand, a particular application programmer often requires higher level acces...

It was observed by Veltman a long time ago that a special value for the Higgs boson mass could lead to a cancellation of the quadratically divergent corrections to the Higgs boson’s squared mass which appear at one loop. We present a class of low energy models that allow to soften the naturalness problem in the sense that there can be a cancellation of radiative corrections appearing at one loo...

The removal of calcium and magnesium ions (softening) from clear juice can be beneficial to downstream processes. Such benefits include reduced evaporator scaling and the improved potential for the application ofion exclusion chromatography for additional sucrose recovery. The results of experiments in the laboratory and on a pilot plant scale are presented. These show that it is possible to so...

a semi-micromechanical multilaminate model is introduced here to predict the mechanical behavior of soils. this model is like a bridge between micro and macro scale upon the satisfaction of minimum potential energy level during any applied stress/strain increments. the concept of this model is based on a certain number of sampling planes which constitute the elastic-plastic behavior of the soil...

Semi-analytical calculations for the two-body relaxation in softened potentials are presented and compared with N-body simulations. With respect to a Keplerian potential the increase of the relaxation time in the modified potentials is generally less than one order of magnitude, typically between 2 and 5, if the softening length is of the order of the mean interparticle distance. A comparison b...