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Hi there! Here's a link to an organic beer article, and I have tasted and enjoyed all of them that are listed. BellaOnline ALERT: Raw URLs are not allowed in these forums for security reasons. Please use UBB code. If you don't know how to do UBB code just post here for help - we will help out!
agricultural products must be produced without any artificial fertilizers, pesticides or chemicals. The fields/orchards need to have been compliant with these standards for a period of at least three years. This probably means the producers are smaller, privately owned farm operations that have a serious commitment to producing these kinds of agricultural products.

domain: food


The Scuttlebutt | Season 1 Episode 8
On this week’s episode of the Scuttlebutt, we’re going inside the Air Force. We talk to retired Air Force veteran Ben Wright about his service and how the Air Force has changed over time. We’re also joined by Gold Star Wife Becky Nyren and Marine Corps vet James Martin, who offer their perspectives. Tune in for this week’s military headlines, our conversation about the Air Force, and some Scuttlebutt, including the upcoming 35 year anniversary of Top Gun and Iron Eagle!


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Markaki, AE and Gergely, V and Cockburn, A and Clyne, TW (2003) Production of a highly porous material by liquid phase sintering of short ferritic stainless steel fibres and a preliminary study of its mechanical behaviour. COMPOS SCI TECHNOL, 63. pp. 2345-2351. ISSN 0266-3538Full text not available from this repository.
|Divisions:||Div C > Biomechanics|
Div E > Production Processes
|Depositing User:||Cron Job|
|Date Deposited:||09 Dec 2016 17:44|
|Last Modified:||23 Feb 2017 05:05|

domain: chemistry


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Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan shares the view that all details of the recent war unleashed by Azerbaijan against Artsakh should be revealed.
The PM commented on the proposal of opposition Bright Armenia faction head Edmon Marukyan to create a fact-finding commission which will study the recent Artsakh War during the Q&A session today in the Parliament.
“According to your proposal that commission should be formed by 70% from those political forces who have already given the answers to your questions from different tribunes. We have tried to invite you to a discussion on that topic, but you didn’t come. At this moment over 1000 criminal cases relating to the war are under investigation”, the PM said.
He added that the political mechanism of investigation is clearly put on the current legislation and that mechanism is the Parliament’s investigative committee.
“It can be formed in accordance with the respective regulations of the legislation. As for the truth about the war, I think it has been discussed quite a lot, I absolutely agree that all the details should be revealed”, he said.
On November 19, 2020, the Bright Armenia faction of the Parliament has proposed to create a fact-finding commission which will study the circumstances of the recent war.

domain: politics


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THERE’S NO DENYING IT and folks in the Right might want to reconsider fanship of Mr. Spock, with his pseudological wittering, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few — and the one.”
No, Mr. Spock. That is despicable. Every call for sacrifice for the greater good — demanded of an individual and involuntary — is an abomination. There is no situation in which it is good, meet, and proper for a group to do to an individual what every individual in that group is forbidden to do.
Nor can needs be proper determinants of deserts. What one needs has no bearing on what one deserves. If one is not willing to provide for one’s wants, then one’s needs must needs go unprovided for, absent charity. And forced charity is — I am sorry — either theft or slavery. Take your pick as to the name you give it — either is intolerable.

domain: sociology


Total organic carbon (TOC) determination is an indirect measure of organic molecules present in waters for health care product use. Organic molecules are introduced into the water from the source water, from purification and distribution system materials, and from biofilm growing in the system. TOC can also be used as a process control attribute to monitor the performance of water system operations in the manufacture of pharmaceuticals and medical devices.
Pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers using water for manufacturing with a define water quality of Purified Water, Pure Steam and Water for Injection must meet the requirements of United States Pharmacopoeia (USP) Chapter <643> for TOC content along with Conductivity and Bioburden Count to ensure that the end product is not contaminated for its intended use.
LexaMed uses state-of-the-art equipment that achieves very low TOC detection limits with rapid turnaround time to assist you with your critical water testing objectives.


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I like da (soda)crackah stickers!! This sticker is inspired by the secret taste test skit (scroll right) written by the beloved Rap Reiplinger. If you haven’t gotten the chance to watch Mr. Okata in action I suggest watching “Raps Hawaii - Secret Taste Test” on YouTube (or Raps Hawaii). An absolute classic.
This sticker measures 3" x 2.5".
UV and water proof
Locally inspired, designed, and made in Hawaiʻi for the people of Hawaiʻi

domain: artistic


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It looks like fans were waiting for the return of "Dallas."
The Wednesday night premiere of TNT's updated version of the '80s smash scored 6.8 million viewers, which makes it the top scripted cable series debut of the year, according to Entertainment Weekly.
"If you were a fan of the original 'Dallas,' once you hear that iconic theme song start in the new TNT iteration — complete with split-screen images — resistance may be futile," Boston Globe critic Sarah Rodman said of the show.
Did you watch "Dallas"? If so, what did you think? Let us know!
About Viewer Discretion
ContributorsKatie McLeod is Boston.com's features editor.
Rachel Raczka is a producer for Lifestyle and Arts & Entertainment at Boston.com.
Emily Wright is an Arts & Entertainment producer at Boston.com.
Sarah Rodman is a TV and music critic for the Boston Globe.
Meghan Colloton is a Things to Do and Arts & Entertainment producer at Boston.com.
Michael Brodeur is the assistant arts editor for the Boston Globe, covering pop music, TV, and nightlife.


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Trade Ed. Penguin Audio 2013
CD ISBN 9781611762372 $17.95 Two CDs
DD ISBN 978-0-6981-4993-9 $26.95
Anne Lamott explores the possibility of putting our lives back together "stitch by stitch" and finding peace and solace in the wake of painful circumstances. Lamott's narration of her inspirational work falls a bit flat; at times her tone lacks vocal variation. Despite this drawback, her message is down to earth and positive, imbuing her spiritual and hopeful outlook with a touch of humor and offering comfort to those who are in need. She cites personal examples from the challenges she has faced in her own life and also offers her views on taking away meaning from tragedies recently in the headlines. S.E.G. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine [Published: DECEMBER 2013]
Let us recommend your next great audiobook!
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domain: literature


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6 hours ago Crock Pot Backstrap Venison Recipes 2 hours ago Cover and cook on Low for 3 hours. Combine a few tablespoons cooking liquid and cornstarch in a small bowl; stir until cornstarch is dissolved. Add cornstarch mixture to slow cooker and stir well. Cook until sauce has thickened and venison is tender, about 1 more hour, stirring a …
See Also: Instant pot venison tenderloin recipesShow details
Venison pot roast used to be a weekend only thing for me due to the 10 hours of slow cooking it took to get it tender. Then there was the guess work of when to add the veggies. If you added them in the beginning, they became mush. If you waited too long to add them, they were underdone and to get them done, the venison got overdone. Instant Pot® to the rescue! The …
See Also: Crock pot venison backstrap recipesShow details
Instant Pot Venison Backstrap Recipe. 7 hours ago Instant Pot Deer Backstrap Recipes 5 hours ago Instant Pot Low Carb Pork Tenderloin Stylish Cravings. 5 hours ago Place oil in the Instant Pot and set to saute. Add the pork tenderloin when the oil is hot and brown on each side, about 3-4 minutes each before flipping.
See Also: Cooking venison in instant potShow details
Instant Pot Venison Roast is an easy, comforting dinner recipe with only 15 minutes of prep time for you! All cooking time is hands off, as the pressure cooker cooks your venison to a tender perfection. This Instant Pot venison stew uses backstrap, potatoes and carrots, cooked in a rosemary and garlic broth. Venison is tenderized with salt and vinegar, then flavored with …
See Also: Instant pot venison steak recipesShow details
An instant-read thermometer inserted into the center should read at least 160 degrees F (70 degrees C). Meanwhile, stir 3/4 cup barbecue sauce, 2 tablespoons brown sugar, and 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce in a sauce pan over medium heat. Simmer 5 minutes, whisking constantly. Pour the sauce over the cooked meatloaf, and let rest 5 minutes before serving.
See Also: Deer backstrap recipes for ovenShow details
In a small bowl combine the soup mix and the soup; mix together and pour mixture over venison. Cook on Low setting for 6 hours. Nutrition Facts : Calories 313.7 calories, Carbohydrate 10 g, Cholesterol 171.3 mg, Fat 8 g, Fiber 0.7 g, Protein 48 g, SaturatedFat 2.6 g, Sodium 1881.7 mg, Sugar 2.5 g VENISON TENDERLOIN IN THE SLOW COOKER
See Also: Slow cooker deer backstrap recipesShow details
Set the pot on Manual, High Pressure, and set the timer to 120 minutes. After a few seconds, the pot will start the cooking process and you don’t have to do anything else till it’s done. Note: meat will cook in MUCH less time than this in an Instant Pot. For example, when I cook frozen chicken breasts, I only set it to 20 minutes.
See Also: Instant pot deer backstrap recipesShow details
The Instant Pot has officially become part of our family with this venison steak recipe. Yes, there is a cultural trend associated with it, but unlike most trends, I cannot foresee this one going away! The Instant Pot makes so much sense. I’ve always known that pressure cookers create the most tender meat, but to have one that plugs into the wall where the user can walk …
See Also: Steak Recipes, Tea RecipesShow details
Eating low-carb or keto doesn't have to mean boring. The Instant Pot is a magical appliance that uses the pressure cooking method to transform common ingredients into delicious meals that are low in carbohydrates, but don't skimp even a little on flavor. We've rounded up our favorite low-carb recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and beyond that you can make in the …
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These Instant Pot meatballs are so easy and quick to make–no stove or oven required–and are the ideal paleo and Whole30 comfort food. You can leave out the carrot to make them even lower carb. 9 g carbs/7 g net carbs per serving. Recipe from A Calculated Whisk. Garlic Butter Instant Pot Short Ribs
The Best Low Carb Instant Pot Recipes. I’ve teamed up with a bunch of fellow instant pot lovers to bring you this hefty list of our favorite keto instant pot recipes. Now even though it says Instant Pot, you can also make these recipes in any electric pressure cooker. You can even modify them to be cooked in a slow cooker but the cooking time
See Also: Keto Recipes, Low Carb RecipesShow details
Venison Backstrap Recipe. Push the steam button on the ip and set time for 10 minutes. Layer more corn husks on top and place lid on and lock in place. Stuffed Venison Backstrap Legendary Whitetails from community.legendarywhitetails.com. Once done, use the quick. The liver is a filter for the blood. 2 hours ago low carb instant pot tamales with pork panko masa …
Turn your Instant Pot on using the sauté setting. When the display says HOT add in oil and stir to cover bottom. Add in the onion and green bell pepper and sauté for 4-5 minutes. Pour in the chicken broth and scrape the bottom of the pot to deglaze. Turn Instant Pot off. Place chicken in pot as evenly as possible.
6 hours ago Instant Pot® Venison Pot Roast Recipe Allrecipes best www.allrecipes.com Step 1. Turn on a multi-functional pressure cooker (such as Instant Pot®) and select Saute function. Add olive oil and let heat for 1 minute. Place venison roast in the hot oil and cook for 2 minutes. Flip roast over and sear for 2 minutes more. Cancel Saute mode.
Instant Pot Deer Backstrap Recipes. 5 hours ago Instant Pot Venison Backstrap Recipe. 7 hours ago 6 hours ago This Instant Pot Spaghetti Squash Recipe is tossed with garlic, herbs, parmesan cheese, and olive oil, and cooks up in only a few minutes in your pressure cooker! This is the perfect low-carb alternative to pasta or a delicious … Preview / Show more See Also: …
How to cook venison tenderloin in instant pot? Cut the venison, onion, and peppers into slices. Mix the onion powder, garlic powder, cayenne pepper, salt and black pepper together and season the meat. Set the Instant Pot to saute on high. Once ready, add the oil and venison. Cook for 5 minutes or until browned.
Then there was the guess work of when to add the veggies. If you added them in the beginning, they became mush. If you waited too long to add them, they were underdone and to get them done, the venison got overdone. Instant Pot® to the rescue! The end result is perfectly tender venison roast and perfectly crisp-tender veggies, all in 3 hours.
Add in ground venison and cook until browned. Transfer to slow cooker. Stir in the broth, chili powder, tomato paste, red wine vinegar, cumin, salt, optional pepper, and optional bay leaves. Cover and cook on high 2 to 4 hours or low 6 to 8 hours.
Remove butcher paper or plastic wrapping from frozen venison and place inside the pot. Sprinkle over one Tablespoon of onion soup mix per pound of meat. Pour one 14.5 oz. can of quality beef broth into the inner pot and lock the lid. Press the “Manual” button using high pressure and set the time for 90 minutes.
Instructions Remove butcher paper or plastic wrapping from frozen venison and place inside the pot. Sprinkle over one Tablespoon of onion soup mix per pound of meat. Pour one 14.5 oz. can of quality beef broth into the inner pot and lock the lid. Press the “Manual” button using high pressure and set the time for 90 minutes.


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Dhanalakshmi Jewellers is a one-stop destination for stunning Indian Jewellery designs. We try to bring the best jewelry designs from different states and cultures. We post various jewelry designs, some of which have the brand name mentioned while others are just for reference purposes so that you can get your favorite jewelry designed from any jewelry store rather than depending only on a particular store for buying them.
We usually post gold, and diamond jewellery designs with a few fashion and imitation jewellery designs as well. We even share celebrity wedding jewellery, and their jewelry collections as well. In spite of being the storehouse of some of the most expensive Gold and Diamond Jewelleries, when it comes to affordability, we assure you that we have something for everybody.
We welcome applications for all departments, from candidates, looking forward to a challenging career with plenty of opportunities for self-development, learning, and contribution to society.
Face-to-Face technical Round
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RICH PICKINGS: Can't buy me love
When it comes to the things that keep the super rich up at night, divorce is right at the top of the list. And as both Paul McCartney and Greg Norman can attest, it can be a very high-priced affair.
There are many reasons for the rich to talk themselves down. Some hope to steer clear of the public glare associated with being on the list, while others want to make themselves a smaller target for the tax office or for charities. Some – though not many – are genuinely modest.
Occasionally there’s an excuse from left field.
"Look mate, can we just knock a few million off this year?” one Queensland entrepreneur pleaded. "I’m getting a divorce and the ex-wife’s lawyer will be all over me."
Greg Norman probably wishes he had been able to bump a few zeros off his bank balance before going through a messy divorce from Laura Andrassy last year. Documents filed last week in a Florida court last week revealed that Norman’s divorce from cost him a whopping $US103 million.
Andrassy received a first payment as part of the settlement in September last year: a cheque for $US50 million, her half of an investment fund. Andrassy is scheduled to receive another $US30.2 million over 15 years as well as $US17.5 million from the sale of the former couple's beachfront home; a $US4 million home in Palm Beach; $US466,000 from a retirement account; $US500,000 worth of jewellery; a $US250,000 investment in an interior design company; and the family Christmas decorations.
The size of the settlement would make Andrassy one of the 20 wealthiest women in Australia. That group contains a number of divorcees, including Iris Lustig, who remains jointly listed on the Rich 200 with her ex-husband Max Moar. The pair’s combined fortune is $379 million and they continue to operate a property development company together called Lustig & Moar.
While Nicole Kidman commands up to $17 million for a movie role and owns an extensive property portfolio, a large part of her $289 million fortune comes from her divorce from actor Tom Cruise in 2001. The settlement was reportedly around $US109 million.
Another wealthy divorcee is Lynette Harvey, the first wife of Gerry Harvey. Though the couple split in 1982, Lynette retains a large stake in retail giant Harvey Norman, worth around $155 million at the current (deflated) share price.
Gerry took a very dignified approach to divorce. "Certainly the man [if that is the person who created the wealth] should ensure the wife and children are still living in the save sort of lifestyle as they were when he was there,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald a few years ago. "I get jack of these blokes skiting in the pubs about they’ve given the missus nothing.”
But not every wealthy individual shares Harvey’s philosophy. Many are prepared to fight to the bitter end in divorce courts – often a great financial and reputational cost.
Paul McCartney’s divorce from Heather Mills cost the former Beatle $52 million. But the court battle that led to the payout exacted a huge price in terms of his privacy and reputation, with wild accusations about the behaviour of both parties.
The judge’s decision in the case – which mercilessly bagged Mills as giving evidence that "was not just inconsistent and inaccurate but also less than candid” – laid bare the precise details of McCartney’s $790 million fortune, including the value of every property he owns, his art collection and even his bank account.
According to Forbes, the biggest divorce settlement on record was paid by US mobile phone industry pioneer Craig McCaw, who sold a group of mobile phone assets to AT&T in 1994 for $US11.5 billion. Less than a year later, Craig and his wife Wendy split. In the bitter divorce battle that followed, everyone from Craig’s elderly mother to Bill Gates was called to give evidence. Eventually, Wendy walked away with $US460 million worth of shares in telco Nextel. Unfortunately for her, those shares later tanked during the tech wreck of 2001.
With the economy starting to slow, it seems some of the world’s wealthy are bracing for a jump in matrimonial splits.
According to an article in The Times this week, divorce lawyers in New York are reporting an increase in the number of divorce cases as a result of the credit crunch.
Raoul Felder, a divorce lawyer to the extremely wealthy, told the newspaper that his company's caseload had soared from 250 to 300 in the past year, the biggest jump since 1980, when New York state law was changed, adding four new grounds for divorce to the sole existing one, adultery.
Apparently Wall Street bankers and property magnates are struggling to tell their spouses about the big falls in their fortunes. When spouses do find out, it is apparently putting big strain on some relationships.
Let’s hope the husbands and wives of those Australian investors whose portfolios are taking a hammering can be a bit more understanding.
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domain: news


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What is Uranium ?
Uranium is a heavy metal, containing 92 protons and 92 electrons. And like other elements, uranium has different ‘isotopes’. These isotopes contain different number of neutrons in their nucleus. The uranium found in the Earth is a mixture of two isotopes: uranium-238 (U-238) which has the highest percentage (99.3%) and uranium-235 (U-235) which has a very low percentage (about 0.7%).
The half life of U-238 is about 4500 million years which is almost equal to the age of the earth, so Uranium-238 is barely radioactive. The most important uranium isotope is Uranium-235 which has a half life about 700 million years, so it decays faster and it split giving a big amount of energy.
The uranium is a radioactive series that begins with the natural isotope of uranium (U-238). This radioactive chain consists of unstable heavy atomic nuclei that decay with the formation of a sequence of alpha and beta decays until a stable nucleus is formed. In this case, the stable nucleus of the uranium-238 is lead-206. The total energy released from uranium-238 to lead-206, is almost 51.7 MeV.
Where can we find Uranium ?
Uranium is found naturally in the earth’s crust.
Uranium is naturally present in the world’s environment. It is commonly found in plants, rock, soil, water, and animals in small quantities.
Uses of uranium
When talking about nuclear energy and uranium, many of us think only about the nuclear reactors and the nuclear bombs and weapons. But few people realise the importance of radioactivity in our life, we have to know that the use of radioisotopes has changed our lives. Uranium is now used to power commercial nuclear reactors that produce electricity, and it has some medical uses as well as industrial uses.


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Evidence In 140 Characters Or Less
By Bernard LaganAugust 30, 2012
Not so long ago, sketch artists and reporters’ notebooks were the only means to convey courtroom proceedings. Along with much of the old world, justice is struggling to keep up with a smartphone-toting social-media here and now.
If ever there was a murder trial that rivets barristers' chambers from Phillip Street in Sydney to Perth's St Georges Terrace, it would be that of the former Western Australian Director of Public Prosecutions lawyer Lloyd Rayney — accused of killing his wife, Corryn, a lawyer and senior Supreme Court registrar.
Now in its seventh week, the trial astounds daily. It draws its cast from the gilded interior of the Western Australian justice system. Friends and colleagues from the Bar are now icy witnesses. The unravelling insides of a marriage — that of the vivacious Supreme Court Registrar to the lawyer in a love-at-first-sight tale — are searingly exposed.
The accused was an ambitious and tenacious prosecutor whose bigger cases included his prosecution of the great man of letters, Robert Hughes, after Hughes crashed in his car while returning from a fishing trip in Western Australia. Lloyd Rayney went on to sue Hughes, who nearly died in the crash, for defamation, after Hughes railed at his treatment by the Western Australian justice system. (That matter was settled out of court.)
So great is the media interest that court authorities have set up a room for reporters, away from the court, that offers a live electronic feed of the trial. Reporters are able to tweet, instantaneously, evidence and events as they unfold in the courtroom. On offer at Twitter (#rayneytrial) are instant scraps of evidence from the trial, or direct links to evidence — including a tape of a phone call between Lloyd Rayney and a technician he allegedly paid to bug his home telephone while his wife was still alive.
Of course, the trial has also captivated the internet's darker regions, where the trial judge, prosecutors and defence are routinely savaged and defamed in terms that would result in swift retribution had they appeared in mainstream media.
You might call it trial by Twitter.
Welcome to the technological frontline, then, as an ancient judicial system, forged in centuries of practice and precedent, rubs up against a bursting, grasping and still ill-formed social media. Suddenly there are new dilemmas about how a closeted, cautious judicial system deals with anyone with an iPhone and a will to write. The bench must even decide, perhaps, what defines a journalist within this new world. Will courts allow coverage of trials by Twitter? What about live streaming? And what to do with those who describe themselves as live bloggers?
The challenges posed by social media have cascaded down through judicial systems everywhere. Australia's responses — so far — range from an extremely tolerant social-media policy within the New South Wales District and Supreme Courts — one that permits reporters to instantaneously tweet proceedings — to a policy that will come into effect on September 3 in the Victorian judicial system, which bans instantaneous tweeting and live blogging, unless permission is expressly given.
The fact that there are widely varying policies within Australia's two largest judicial systems is perhaps not so surprising; it merely reflects the diversity of views within the law about the role of social media.
The Sydney barrister Mark Polden is a defamation specialist who has given much thought to the emerging new platforms. In his view there is a good argument that the use of Twitter in courts should be encouraged because, unlike the televising or filming of court proceedings, Twitter is unobtrusive and uninfluenced by proprietorial agendas, a reporting medium "which flows directly from the right of members of the public to be present in court and to report to others what they see and hear."
But Polden also is acutely aware of Twitter's limitations as a court reporting medium. Whilst Twitter's 140-character limit is capable of providing and promoting what Polden terms "headline coverage", a single tweet also is unlikely to stand up as a fair, protected report of court proceedings in the event of a challenge to its author.
He even sees a risk that Twitter will lead to a more closed court system, if non-journalists are allowed to provide tweeted reports.
"It may lead to more applications for closed courts, for example in extortion cases or those involving police informers both — of which are presently heard in open court, subject to the making of non-publication or suppression orders which allow the proceedings to be reported with relatively minor changes and by which journalists and the media generally abide," says Polden.
"Whether the courts have sufficient confidence that amateur court tweeters are aware of the rules, are prepared to abide by them, or can be identified if they fail to do so, remains to be seen," says Polden.
Even for experienced, professional court reporters such as The Sydney Morning Herald's Louise Hall, social-media platforms — especially Twitter — must be treated with great caution. Hall frequently tweets courtroom verdicts for which there is a wide audience but she says she is extremely wary of tweeting evidence as it unfolds in court despite the liberal rules in NSW which allow her to. Her greatest concern, she says, is that non-publication or suppression orders will be made after evidence has been given. While tweets can be deleted, they will have been published.
Hall also likes to know the Herald's lawyers have cast their eyes over her more demanding reports prior to publication.
"Obviously the lawyers cannot see your tweets before you send them off," she says.
Mark Pearson is a legal academic and professor of journalism at Bond University. This year he released his safety guide book for bloggers and tweeters, Blogging and Tweeting Without Getting Sued; A guide to the law for anyone writing online.
He is now leading a research project that is designing a social-media policy for adoption by Australia's various courts. Pearson is fond of pointing out the enormity of the consequences of getting things wrong on social media; every tweet or blog may be subject to the laws of more than 200 different jurisdictions.
He believes that anything that enhances the ancient principles of open justice should be welcomed and that there is no better tool to improve social justice than social media.
But he cautions: "The fact is we have an ancient judicial system that is quite conservative in its uptake of new technologies. Basically they are 19th-century procedures and practices that evolved for very good reason but don't necessarily suit social media."
Examples of court procedures and rules that risk compromise by social media, says Pearson, are the integrity of the jury process, the quarantining of witnesses from each other and the testing of evidence for admissibility. Live tweeting, he says, has the potential to prejudice any of those processes.
Pearson believes that courts will in future need to adopt specific social-media policies that accord with the kind of cases they are deciding. Some, such as the Family Court, will need to remain relatively secretive and closed. But for lower courts, there will be real advantages in the use of social media to demonstrate that minor crimes are being dealt with.
It is likely that Australian jurisdictions will look abroad when considering what social-media policies to adopt for courtrooms. They will find in Britain, at least, the unexpectedly open policy announced some 18 months ago by the Lord Chief Justice, Igor Judge, who proclaimed: "Twitter as much as you wish."
Not only do the guidelines brought down by the Chief Justice of England and Wales allow accredited court reporters to tweet from the courts, they also allow members of the public to tweet from the courts — provided they first obtain permission.
In his guidance, Lord Judge said: "The normal, indeed almost invariable, rule has been that mobile phones must be turned off in court. There is however no statutory prohibition on the use of live text-based communications in open court."
By contrast, the policy now applying in the Victorian Magistrates Court states: "Upon entering a Magistrates Court Victoria courtroom you must not use any electronic device where such use constitutes instantaneous publication (for example social media, such as Twitter or live blogging)."
This policy may be varied upon application to individual magistrates.
Yet in New South Wales journalists are allowed to take their mobile phones or "personal digital assistants" into court and use them for "electronic note-taking, text messaging or emailing".
Nowhere does the policy mention Twitter or Facebook. It was drawn up four years ago by the then Chief Justice, James Spigelman — at a time when smart phones had barely arrived and when Twitter was just about to catching on.
Intended — or not — the Spigelman policy has become the country's most liberal and Twitter thrives in NSW courtrooms.

domain: law


text:
Battery produces electrical energy for the devices that is basically known as electrochemical reaction. There has been huge improvement in the efficiency and quality of batteries since its inception in 1799. Today manufacturers, suppliers and exporters provide a wide range of batteries suitable for different devices. These are available in different sizes, voltage, design, weight and operating temperature with varied capacities.
Here you get access to a number of battery traders and wide spectrum of devices such as auto battery, Crain batteries, traction batteries and truck batteries, among others. You can contact the suppliers through different communication mediums: enquiry form, phone call, SMS or email.


text: On 19 September 2007, the European Commission put forward a package of measures intended to facilitate the further opening of EU electricity and gas markets to competition. Arguably, the most controversial of the measures proposed are those concerning the requirement for the "unbundling" or separation of electricity and gas transmission networks from supply and/or generation activities. This would effectively mean that energy networks would no longer be affiliated to part of a group which is active in supply, generation and production (although the new rules would not prevent the holding of minority, non-controlling interests). However, by way of derogation and of compromise for those to whom this solution is unacceptable, network assets would remain in the hands of vertically-integrated groups provided that network activities are regulated and controlled by an Independent Systems Operator. The Commission has also proposed rules governing ownership and control of transmission systems by non-EU companies to ensure that the objectives of independence are respected.


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Imagine if every time you walked into Starbucks, the barista already knew you wanted a dry skim vanilla latte with an extra shot of vanilla. Starbucks would be a smart coffee retailer in the same way Nest is a smart thermostat, so that it not only read your tired, uncaffeinated mind, but also had a customized, steaming cup waiting for you by the time you park your car and arrive at the barista counter.
And you could do this in the middle of the night, while cramming for a client deadline.
This isn’t in the works at Starbucks, as far as we know, but rather Austin-based upstart Briggo, which has created an autonomous automated version of a high-end coffee retailer. While the concept of a coffee vending machine brings to mind those ancient aluminum hospital waiting room boxes that spew out a questionable watery brown substance, Briggo Coffee Haus aims to replicate the quality, skill, and artistry produced by the finest baristas.
By employing sophisticated robotics, mobile technology, coffee sourcing from a former Starbucks vet, and UX design by fuseproject’s Yves Behar, the Briggo claims to offer a coffee consuming experience akin to Starbucks, without ever having to wait on a tedious, snaking line. “We basically have a champion barista at your fingertips 24-7,” says Briggo CEO Kevin Nater, a former Dell executive.
Throughout history, vending machines have managed to serve everything from the ambitious (coin-operated full-service restaurants) to the grim (in the 1950s, airlines offered self-service life insurance policies before boarding). Coffee made its initial debut on the vending machine circuit in the 1940s, and since has experienced the full spectrum of coffee treatments. The worst might be the machines populating many office cafeterias, serving “instant cappuccinos” cocktails made with instant coffee, non-dairy creamers, and dried corn syrup. Meanwhile, in Italy the self-service espresso machines lining train stations are almost as good as the ones being flipped by nearby coffee bars.
The concept for the artisanal coffee kiosk first came to electrical engineer Charles Studor, who spent 20 years at a Motorola, in 2008. With 150 million cups of coffee consumed outside the home every day in the U.S. alone, he recognized a financial opportunity in populating coffee deserts–one that could be bolstered by mobile technology. “Coffee has improved everywhere: at home, in coffeehouses, at restaurants. But where it hasn’t improved are in hospitals, universities, airports–high-traffic places that need service 24 hours a day,” says fuseproject’s Behar, imagining a doctor who gets out of surgery and wants a personalized, gourmet cup of joe waiting for them. “Briggo can bring quality to places where you could never have imagined.”
With the Briggo, coffee drinkers can optimize their perfectly calibrated cup of coffee (or cappuccino, chai latte, hot chocolate, cold brew, steamer, etc.) and replicate it again and again, no matter which machine they purchase from. Through its app, customers locate the Briggo closest to them, draw up past orders, and tweak them based on their previous cup–say, more milk, less syrup, or another shot of espresso (eventually, it will be able to customize down to foam thickness and coffee temperature). “What Briggo does is ensure the exact specs and your preferences are the same in any experience, any location, which is not the case when different baristas make each cup differently,” says Behar. Once a customer submits their order, they are informed the wait time, and then receive a text when it’s ready to be picked up. Upon arrival, they punch a code into the kiosk’s touchscreen, and the customized drink is served to order.
To ensure it’s not just a fancy contraption spitting out mediocre drinks, Briggo claims to have put equal sweat into making sure its robotics replicate the exact techniques of the best coffee professionals. “We invented our frothing wand and it stretches milk just like a barista,” says Scott McMartin, Briggo’s coffee sourcing advisor who spent 20 years at Starbucks. “The way we’ve built the robot is it can reject the drink if there’s a problem with milk temperature. Our technology is about–how do you eliminate some of the human variables of the barista?” While the company roasts its own coffee beans, its flavors (and prices) are more comparable to Starbucks, than to a third wave roaster like Stumptown or Intelligentsia. “It’s not going to be as good as Blue Bottle,” admits Behar. “But that’s like comparing a five hour eating experience at a Thomas Keller restaurant with a pretty good restaurant in a high traffic area.”
For his part, Blue Bottle founder James Freeman attributes coffee tech like this to a masculine impulse to build cooler gadgets. “This whole manual thing people see as a problem. That it takes a person to do it,” says Freeman. “People don’t care that no one has figured out how to automate the cooking of a perfect steak.”
Briggos is still far from challenging the corner café. The company’s first machine was recently piloted at the University of Texas’s Austin student center, with plans to roll it out in Austin next year, then nationally by 2016. While the startup has raised $11 million in funding, it says it’s not looking to compete with Starbucks, but compliment it. But it doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to picture a near future where, if confronted with a Starbucks and a Briggo, a caffeine junkie will ultimately opt for efficiency–assuming taste is up to par. “It’s disruptive,” says Behar, “just like Uber is disruptive to taxis.”


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26th September 2023 |
In a significant stride toward bolstering Tasmania's native seed resilience, Landcare Tasmania recently hosted the Seed Resilience and Community Seed Bank Meeting. This forms part of our Seed Resilience Project supported by the Tasmanian Government.
We were joined by panellists James Wood (Royal Botainical Gardens Tasmania), Dan Frost (Seeding Victoria), Ruth Mollison (Island Seeds) and Sally & Herbert Staubmann (Habitat Plants) who shared their expertise and experiences with the Landcare community. This meeting was a great start to the discussion on how to move forward with seed resilience in Tasmania, with several options raised as to the future of native seed supply.
The possibility of a Tasmanian native seed bank was addressed in detail. Climate change and the importance of provenance came up as important factors to consider in seed collection for revegetation projects, as well as the need for collectors to have training. If you missed the meeting, don't fret, you can watch the recording below.
Image: Seed collection workshop in 2022. Photo by Yasmin Mund
Over the past three years, Landcare Tasmania has held 10 very popular seed collection and propagation workshops across the state. These workshops contribute to our Seed Resilience Project, aiming to build capacity within local communities to grow and share native seed to meet the demand of revegetation projects in Tasmania.
Do you collect native seeds? Join our new Native Seed Collectors Network (Tasmania) Facebook group
Our next step in this project is creating a network of people who are involved and skilled in the collection, storage and distribution of native seed. We started this Facebook group as a network of people across Tasmania who are involved and skilled in the collection, storage and distribution of native seed to meet the demand of revegetation projects in Tasmania
Are you interested in Seed Resilience? Take our survey!
Your insights matter! The aim of this survey is to identify trends, issues and opportunities in the seed collection of native seed in Tasmania. The information collected from this survey will be used to inform a report on the state of native seed in Tasmania.
This project is part of Landcare Tasmania's Landscape Restoration and Community Outreach programs supported by the Tasmanian Government's Landcare Action Grants.

domain: agronomy


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** The album "Merlin's Descendants" is based on the works of Irene Radford.
** The album
Alexander is a transgender man who went by "Heather Alexander" until 2006. His last performance as Heather was in OryCon 2006 (a scifi/fantasy convention). He still credits songs done during that period as being by Heather Alexander and says that [[ChangelingTale he was a changeling child]].
Showing 12 edit(s) of 12


Whether you are out in the professional world taking major orchestral auditions or getting ready to try for your first high school honor band position, there are basic steps that can help you score that amazing job you’ve always dreamed of. However, for most of us the process of taking auditions can be a long road fraught with trial and many errors. The brave few who forge to the final blessed round will tell you that years of persistence and fortitude cleared the path to their dream—not relying only on natural talent and/or luck. The moral of the story is that consistent and purposeful practice and reflection is the only way to land that next gig—well, for most of us at least!!
The following is a list of some things I have learned (mostly the hard way…) to implement each time I set out for a new audition. This is the method that works for me—if you are seasoned enough to know what works for you, modifying the list to suite your needs will be the best plan. If you are younger and/or new to the auditioning, I encourage you to follow this technique closely for several auditions until you get a better handle on what the process is all about.
1. Make a list of all excerpts, deadlines, fee requirements, and travel plans if applicable.
My biggest advice for this one is to triple check the audition information as soon as you receive it. I’ve wasted so much time and money simply because I failed to simply follow the directions! Here is a great introductory article on how to prepare the most frequently requested orchestral excerpts.
2. Locate the music if the organization doesn’t provide it for you.
IMSLP Petrucci Music Library is a wonderful online source of free PDF downloads of music that is under public domain. While you are at it, print a copy of the scores—piano or orchestral—and organize them with the audition excerpts in a thin three-ring binder. I prefer to use clear sheet protectors to keep everything nice and neat. You’ll be thankful on audition day when your music isn’t falling all over the place. If you’re like me, you’ll be nervous enough without this added stressor.
3. Plan out your practice time.
Using the length of time you have left until the audition, make weekly goals for learning the music including gradually increasing goal tempos. This may go without saying, but it’s really important to divide longer and/or more difficult pieces into small manageable sections. This reduces frustration when learning a difficult excerpt. Sometimes I only work a measure at a time (ahem—Firebird!). I've designated a small notebook to keep track of my progress—and also to keep me from getting distracted. It’s also helpful for me to actually write down how many minutes I will spend on each piece, and then set the stopwatch on my iPhone to help me know when my time is up. Your time is a precious resource, so be deliberate in how you spend it!
4. Listen to recordings.
In my pre-graduate studies, I was reluctant to listen to recordings. Maybe it was the desire to figure it all out on my own, but I’m fairly certain it was just plain stubbornness. It took several years, but I have seen the light! Not only does listening to a great performance inspire you to create a more beautiful tone and artistic interpretation, it is crucial in learning how the piece fits together.
Please remember that the excerpt of music you are practicing is much more than your individual part. Most likely you have a pianist, other wind instruments, or an entire orchestra full of various colors, harmonies, and rhythms to coordinate. This can be very complicated—especially when you rehearse the actual piece for an actual performance. Even though you will be the only musician playing during the audition (though this isn’t always true…), your job is to show the committee/adjudicator that you fully understand the piece of music and are prepared to rehearse it with actual live musicians.
Resources I use to find great recordings are iTunes, YouTube, and Naxos. Be careful that you are listening to recordings of professional flutists with tones and technique you admire--especially on YouTube. If you tend to get distracted while listening like I do, plan to do so with either the score or your part in front of you. A pencil to mark notes in the music is also helpful.
5. Record yourself.
When it feels more comfortable to play the music at or near the indicated tempo with appropriate style, start recording yourself.. I use the iTalk app on my iPhone and my Zoom Q2 HD video recorder. I recommend sending some of your better takes to a trusted colleague or teacher and ask them for their feedback. Also, study the recordings on your own to evaluate where you should focus your energy while practicing. More often than not, the sound we think we are producing isn’t what is projecting from the flute. Recording yourself is sometimes the only way to get a true sense of what is going on. It will most likely be intimidating (or possibly depressing...) at first, but just keep trying---I promise you will improve!
6. Practice being nervous.
Maybe you are someone who never experiences the wretched nervousness (shaking/sweating/blacking out) that often accompanies the audition process, but for the rest of us, getting used to playing well despite our bodily functions is an important skill to acquire. To learn more about this process, click HERE.
7. Plan for the audition day.
The worst thing to realize while you are waiting hours to audition is that you didn’t bring enough to eat. When it comes to food and water, OVER prepare. If your blood sugar is low and your stomach is rumbling, you will not be able to think well enough to withstand the mental pressure. I usually pack a banana and a Larabar or two. Also bring something to occupy your mind (a book, magazine, or game) while you are waiting around. If listening to other flute players psyches you out, bring really great earplugs. Lastly, this is a great opportunity to triple check the audition information one last time. Be sure to know where you are going, where to park, where to walk in, and what time to be there. Wear professional but comfortable clothes, and go win that audition!!
The Blog Vault


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The Council hosted several remarkable guests this spring to bring us a timely discussion around Mr. Putin's War. The recording of the event is available below.
Politico-Military Panel - Governor/Ambassador James Gilmore, LT. General Keith Kellogg, Michael O'Hanlon, and Ambassador Bill Taylor
The first panel's discussion was around the topic of Politico-Military implications from Russia's actions against Ukraine.
Moderator: Governor/Ambassador Jim Gilmore - was the Ambassador to the Organization for Security and Co-operation (OSCE) and 68th Governor of Virginia.
Panelist: LT. General Keith Kellogg (AFPI): is a highly decorated retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General, serves as co-Chair of the Center for American Security at America First Policy Institute. Most recently, he served as the National Security Advisor to Vice President Mike Pence.
Michael O'Hanlon (Brookings): is a senior fellow and Director of Research in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, where he specializes in U.S. defense strategy, and use of military force, and American national security policy.
Ambassador Bill Taylor (USIP): is the vice president, Russia and Europe at the U.S. Institute of Peace. He served as the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine from 2006-2009. In 2019, he served as charge d'affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv.


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Sympathies and antipathies of “administrative resource” in the Lugansk oblast
From the beginning of July heads of the Lugansk oblast position themselves in their public speeches as adherents of Viktor Yanukovich. For instance, on 6 July Viktor Tikhonov, the head of the oblast council, very frankly expressed his opinion in the newspaper “Gazeta v gazete”: “I do not conceal my sympathy for Viktor Yanukovich. He as an experienced man; he embodies the continuity of the course of economic stability, to which our country confidently goes during the recent years. He pays attention to the development of relations with Russia, he also does not forget about the “European house”, where we want to be inhabitants with equal rights. Not the very fact of joining the European Union is important to us, but the achievement of proper living standard in our country! I also like that he originates from working-class. He attained everything by his own efforts, without aid and patronage of relatives. The only criterion of assessment of his work is the high quality of this work. I believe that Viktor Yanukovich can become and will become a real ruler, able to augment the successes and liquidate the existing shortcomings”.
Yet, the more significant fact is that the organs of local power and self-government completely assumed the organization of the election campaign of Viktor Yanukovich in the Lugansk oblast. On 7 July Aleksandr Efremov, the head of the oblast state administration, and Viktor Tikhonov, the head of the oblast council, were present at the conference of the Lugansk oblast public organization “Region”, in which all heads of towns and districts of the oblast took part. The conference was held in labor hours, and about 500 persons were present there. The conference adopted the appeal to voters on the support of Yanukovich and the decision about the organization of work in his support. After this the mass process started of creation of Yanukovichs headquarters and conduction of agitation actions.
The oblast headquarters of the “only candidate” is headed by Mikhail Golubovich, the head of the main directorate of culture of the oblast state administration. Similar headquarters in some towns and districts are headed by the leaders of the organs of local self-government, for example, the secretary of Severodonetsk town council. Some headquarters are headed by pensioners, but, in fact, they are ruled by corresponding executive committees and the members of “Region”.
As a result, the administrative resource is used widely in course of agitation actions, and especially – of the collection of signatures in support of V. Yanukovich.
So, the newspaper “Luganchane” made public the facts of using the administrative resource in the Lugansk oblast. The newspaper informs that in many labor collectives the meetings were conducted in labor hours, where medics, teachers, state employees and militiamen learned that they unanimously endorsed Yanukovich. On 21 July general Krizhanovski gathered his subordinates in the oblast directorate of the Ministry of Interior and informed them, whose side militia had to take. An agitation brigade consisting of veterans of the Ministry of Interior was urgently created, a car was rendered to them. Enterprises and organizations get the orders on the number of people that should be “provided” for participation in meetings. They are also forced to make stands and placards in favor of the “only candidate”, naturally, at the expense of these establishments… The newspaper also wrote about an absurd case in one of villages of the Kremenskoy district, where the village headman gathered local dwellers and laconically enlightened them on the current needs: “If anybody of you, sons-of-a-bitch, would vote against Yanukovich – I will bury everybody”.
Owing to the use of means of the organs of local power and local self-government, the agitation campaign of Yanukovich is the most powerful one: it has almost complete support of communal mass media and significant advantages in the commercial mass media; the free of charge newspaper “Region-Post” is issued (run – 600 thousand copies), which publishes materials in his favor. Many placards and billboards with agitation for Yanukovich can be seen in every town and settlement of the oblast. The financial sources of these actions are not known. In August leaflets in support of the Prime Minister began to appeal in mailboxes of voters.
Numerous mass actions have been held in favor of Viktor Yanukovich, by the way, identical by the methods of organization. For example, on 26 July the oblast forum of democratic forces took place on the Teatralnaya square of Lugansk. After this similar forums were conducted in all towns and district centers of the oblast. However, there were some local “inventions”. For example, before the beginning of the forum of democratic forces in Kremennoy a peculiar registration of participants was held: the organizers recorded the name of a “collective participant” (enterprise or establishment) and fixed the number of people from this collective, who came to the forum.
On 26 July, at 16:00, a meeting of adherents of Viktor Yanukovich was conducted near the building of state enterprise “Luganskugol”. The participants of this action were transported gratis by buses of a communal transport enterprise. Later similar meetings were held in other towns and district centers of the Lugansk oblast. According to the information made public at the forum by Andrey Cherkasov, the chairman of the Lugansk oblast organization of the NDP, gatherings of labor collectives in support of V. Yanukovich took place at many enterprise of the oblast center. There were no meetings in support of other candidates.
Yet, the administrative resource was used most actively during the collection of signatures in the support of V. Yanukovich. As many as 500 thousand signatures were collected in the Lugansk oblast during two weeks! Severodonetsk enterprise “Azot” can be considered as an example of using the administrative resource for the collection of signatures within the legal bounds. Workers of “Azot” appended their signatures not inside the enterprise, but in immediate proximity to it: at the entrance checkpoints of the plant. Before this the workers were warned that the lists would get to the personnel department. As a result, the process of collection of signatures was rather active – queues formed near the tents. The workers were also warned that it was inadmissible to sign for other candidates. Thus, the collection of signatures for V. Yanukovich was completed in the shortest possible time.
It should be noted that in August the headquarters of Yanukovich in the Lugansk oblast started to use new approaches, such as creation of public reception offices with the system of daily reporting, which permits to learn the problems and, what is most important, to get the benevolence of the paternalistically oriented electoral segment. An interesting new idea is realized since the end of August. This is the project “New interaction”, which is able to attract the attention of electorate with collectivistic propensity.
Thus, we have the reasons to state that the Lugansk oblast power mobilized all possible administrative resource for the support of V. Yanukovich. And we have no reasons to reckon that the team of Aleksandr Efremov “put eggs in different basket” – there is no information about the contacts of representatives of the oblast state administration with “Our Ukraine”.
However, it is noteworthy that, in spite of the “positive” interference of power into the election process in the oblast, we almost did not fix the actions, which obstructed the activities of the teams endorsing other candidates to the post of President of Ukraine. As a result, the oblast headquarters of Viktor Yushchenko, headed by Aleksey Danilov, a former mayor of Lugansk, realized several successful agitation projects, such as the campaign “Truth from hands to hands” (subscription to and distribution of the editions that supported Yushchenko), project “Grad” (the mobile group that carried out the agitation in rural areas) and the campaign for collecting signatures in support of V. Yushchenko. In the opinion of A. Danilov, these actions have raised the level of credence to Yushchenko in several times, and today 19-20% of voters are ready to vote for him (the rating of Yanukovich is 27-28%). Some representatives of regional headquarters acknowledge that Yushchenkos rating appeared unexpectedly high for the Lugansk region, but the data, which are adduced, are essentially less than the results of calculations made by the head of Yushchenkos headquarters.
Certainly, the Lugansk oblast is still one of the most “red” in Ukraine, and the number of votes, which will be given for Simonenko, will be significant there, although the agitation campaign of communists is rather passive that time.


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- Table of Contents
Journal of Spectroscopy
Volume 2013 (2013), Article ID 149615, 9 pages
Comparative Studies on the Interaction of Cochinchinenin A and Loureirin B with Bovine Serum Albumin
1Third Class Laboratory about Ethno-Medicine of State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine, College of Pharmacy, South-Central University for Nationalities, Wuhan 430074, China
2Key Laboratory of Catalysis and Materials Science of the State Ethnic Affairs Commission & Ministry of Education, College of Chemistry and Materials Science, South-Central University for Nationalities, Wuhan 430074, China
Received 9 March 2013; Accepted 7 May 2013
Academic Editor: Renata Diniz
Copyright © 2013 Tianming Yang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This paper describes the simple, sensitive, and effective spectrophotometric methods based on ultraviolet, fluorescence and circular dichroism for revealing the interactional mechanism of Cochinchinenin A (CA) and Loureirin B (LB) with bovine serum albumin (BSA). Under simulated physiological conditions, it was demonstrated that the fluorescence quenching mechanisms between CA (or LB) and BSA as a static quenching mode, or a combined quenching (dynamic and static quenching) mode were related to concentration level of CA (or LB). The binding distance (, ) and the quenching efficiency (), especially for the binding constants value of ligands to BSA, were affected by the methoxyl group at position 4 at different temperatures. The corresponding thermodynamic parameters were also obtained and indicated that electrostatic forces play a major role in the formation of the LB-BSA complex, but probably a combined force for CA-BSA complex. Furthermore, synchronous fluorescence spectroscopy and circular dichroism spectra demonstrated that the secondary structures of BSA were changed to varying degrees by the binding of CA (or LB).
Cochinchinenin A (CA) and Loureirin B (LB) are important bioactive ingredients of Dragon’s blood, which is a deep red resin and has been used as a famous traditional medicine since ancient times by many cultures. The deep red resin of Dracaena cochinchinensis (Lour.) S. C. Chen (Agavaceae), believed to be the original source of Chinese dragon’s blood, has been widely used in traditional Chinese medicine for promoting blood circulation, treating trauma, relieving pain, visceral hemorrhages, antimicrobial, mainly for the treatment of coronary heart disease, cerebral infarction, and other thrombotic diseases [1–4]. CA (4′-hydroxy-2,6-dimethoxydihydrochalcone) and LB (4′-hydroxy-2,4,6-trimethoxydihydrochalcone) (Figure 1) as the synergistic bioactive ingredients of Dragon’s Blood extracts were shown to have certain antithrombotic effects, antiplatelet aggregation effects, anti-inflammatory, and analgesic effects [5–8]. In spite of these broad pharmacological actions of CA and LB mentioned earlier, their effects on proteins and the mechanisms of actions are poorly understood. Additionally, the interaction between drugs and proteins could significantly affect the transportation and distribution of CA and LB and also affect their therapeutic activity and toxicity [9, 10]. As seen in Figure 1, the only difference in structure is that there is one more methoxyl group in 4-substitution of LB. Consequently, studies on the protein-drug binding are clearly important for the explanation of the reaction mechanisms, providing a pathway to understand the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamic mechanisms of CA and LB in vivo.
Among all proteins, serum albumin is the most abundant protein constituent in blood plasma and plays important roles in the disposition and transport of various exogenous and endogenous ligands to particular biological targets. The effectiveness of a few compounds as pharmaceutical agents depends on their binding ability to serum albumin [11–13]. In recent years, the binding properties of serum albumin and drugs were investigated by many researchers and human serum albumin (HSA) has been usually used as a model protein in evaluating protein-drug interactions [14–16]. On the other hand, bovine serum albumin (BSA) and HSA exhibit similar binding chemistry due to the high percentage of sequence identities between the two proteins. So BSA has been commonly used because of its ready availability and affordability [17–19].
In the present study, the fluorescence spectroscopy, ultraviolet spectroscopy, and circular dichroism (CD) techniques were employed to explore the influence of methoxyl group on the interactions of CA or LB with BSA under simulative physiological conditions . These researching results not only reveal the mechanism of interaction of CA (or LB) and BSA, but also help to discover the transportation and distribution of the Dragon’s blood drugs in vivo and explain the toxicity at the molecular level. Moreover, this study may provide some available information for drug design and pharmaceutical research.
All fluorescence spectra were measured on LS-55 (PerkinElmer, USA) spectrofluorometer equipped with a thermostatic bath (PerkinElmer, USA), a xenon lamp, and a 1.0 cm quartz cell. UV-vis absorption spectra were measured on a LAMBDA-35 (PerkinElmer, USA) spectrophotometer with the use of a 1.0 cm quartz cell. CD spectra were measured on a J-810 spectropolarimeter (Jasco, Tokyo, Japan) with a 0.1 cm quartz cell under constant nitrogen flush. All pH measurements were made with a pHs-3C digital pH meter (Jinmai, Shanghai, China). All experiments, unless specified otherwise, were carried out at room temperature.
BSA was obtained from Sigma (USA) and was dissolved in a Tris/HCl (0.05 mol, pH 7.40) buffer to form a BSA solution with a concentration of and was kept in dark at 277 K (4°C). Tris/HCl buffer (0.05 mol , pH 7.40) containing 0.10 mol NaCl was selected to keep the pH constant and to maintain the ionic strength of the solution. CA and LB were provided by Professor Wenjie Lu (Guangxi Institute of Traditional Medicine and Pharmaceutical Sciences) and were prepared in ethanol as stock solution . All other reagents were of analytical grade and all the water used in the experiments was double-distilled.
2.3.1. Fluorescence Spectroscopy
A working solution containing 1.0 mL BSA stock solution was titrated manually by successive additions of 1.0 mL CA (or LB) stock solution and Tris/HCl buffer with micropipette, and then the mixture was diluted to the standard volumetric flask with water and incubated for 20 min to equilibrate the system. Fluorescence quenching measurements were carried out by keeping the concentration of BSA fixed at and that of CA (or LB) varied from 0 to . The fluorescence emission spectra were measured at 288, 298, and 310 K; the width of the excitation and emission slits was set at 6.0 and 10.0 nm, respectively. An excitation wavelength of 282 nm was chosen and the emission wavelength was recorded from 300 to 450 nm while the scanning rate was 1500 nm/min. On the other hand, the excitation and emission slits were also set at 6.0 and 10.0 nm for the synchronous fluorescence spectra measurements, respectively. Blanks corresponding to the buffer were subtracted to correct background fluorescence. And the , excitation wavelength was set from 200 to 350 nm; experiments were carried out at the temperature 310 K.
2.3.2. UV-Vis Absorbance and CD Spectroscopy
The UV-vis absorption spectra of CA (or LB) solution with the concentration of were measured in the range of 300–450 nm at 310 K. CD measurements were performed at 0.2 nm intervals over a wavelength range of 190–280 nm and the scanning speed was set at 200 nm/min. The concentration of BSA was kept at and the molar ratio of BSA to AC (LB) was varied as 1 : 0, 1 : 5, and 1 : 10.
3. Results and Discussion
3.1. Fluorescence Quenching of BSA by CA or LB
Proteins are considered to have intrinsic fluorescence due to the presence of amino acid residues, mainly two tryptophan (Trp) residues, Trp-212 and Trp-134 for BSA. Similar to HSA, Trp-212 is located in subdomain IIA whereas Trp-134 is localized in the subdomain IA . Fluorescence quenching is the decrease of the quantum yield of fluorescence from a fluorophore induced by a variety of molecular interactions such as excited-state reactions, molecular rearrangements, energy transfer, ground-state complex formation, and collision quenching [22, 23]. Different mechanisms of fluorescence quenching are usually classified as dynamic quenching and static quenching, which are caused by diffusion and ground-state complex formation, respectively. And they have different dependence on temperature; it is known that higher temperatures result in larger diffusion coefficients, and the dynamic quenching constants are expected to increase when there is a rise in temperature. In contrast, increased temperature is likely to result in decreased stability of complexes and thus lower values of the static quenching constants. Dynamic and static quenching can be distinguished by the emission spectra before and after two samples interact as well .
In this work, the fluorescence quenching spectra of BSA in the presence of different concentrations of CA (or LB) were measured to elucidate the quenching mechanism in Figure 2. As shown in Figure 2, BSA exhibited strong fluorescence emission at about 350 nm on excitation at 282 nm, while CA and LB showed very weak intrinsic fluorescence under the same experimental conditions. Furthermore, when BSA was added with increasing amounts of CA (or LB), a remarkable intrinsic fluorescence decrease of BSA was observed as well as the slight blue shift of the maximum emission wavelength. This suggested that the intrinsic fluorescence of the tryptophan residues was quenched and the microenvironment around BSA was changed after the addition of CA or LB.
Fluorescence quenching is described by the well-known Stern-Volmer equation which can also classify the type of fluorescence quenching process as static or dynamic . Consider where and are the steady-state fluorescence intensities of the protein in the absence and presence of the quencher (CA or LB), respectively; is the Stern-Volmer quenching constant; is the bimolecular quenching rate constant; is the average lifetime of the molecule without the quencher and its value is about s ; is the concentration of the quencher. was acquired from the slope of linear regression of a plot of versus . In many cases, the fluorophore can be quenched by both mechanisms with the same quencher, while the Stern-Volmer plot exhibits an upward curvature for the distinct situation, concave toward the -axis at high [27, 28]. Accordingly, the is related to by the following modified Stern-Volmer equation: where and are the static and dynamic quenching constants, respectively. It is second order in and thus leads to upward curve plots of versus at higher arising from a combined quenching (both dynamic and static) process.
Figure 3 displays the Stern-Volmer plots of the quenching of BSA tryptophan residues fluorescence by CA or LB at different temperatures (288, 298, 310 K) and the corresponding results at different temperatures are shown in Table 1. As seen the little plots (insert in Figure 3) of for BSA versus the low concentrations of CA (or LB), ranging from to , are linear and they exhibit a good linear relationship. However, the quenching constant in Table 1 decreased with the increasing temperature and constant (such as and , 310 K) is much larger than , which is the value of the maximum diffusion collision quenching rate constant . Therefore, the interaction between BSA and CA (or LB) at low concentrations is a static quenching process resulting from the formation of BSA-CA (BSA-LB) complex. For the quenching constants of LB are greater than that of CA at the identical external experimental conditions, so quenching efficiency of LB is more than that of CA. Lastly, the upward curves showed in Figure 2 further verify that the fluorescence quenching mechanism of CA and LB at high concentrations is a combined one.
3.2. Binding Constant and the Number of Binding Sites
It has been reported that there are independent binding sites in the bimolecular, and the binding constant as well as number of binding site could be determined using the equation [30, 31] where is the difference value of fluorescence in the absence and presence of the quenching compound at concentration ; is the binding constant of interaction between CA (or LB) and BSA; is the number of binding sites. The plots of versus log presented in Figure 4 at different temperatures are linear. Based on (3), the values of and can be calculated by the slope and intercept of the double-logarithmic regression curves in Figure 4 and the corresponding results were listed in Table 2.
In Table 2, the results suggest that the binding constants for the LB-BSA system decrease with the increasing temperatures and indicate that the capacity of LB binding to BSA was reduced for the increasing temperature leading to the increasing diffusion coefficient and the lower stability of the complex. Conversely, the binding constants for the CA-BSA systems do not decrease with the increasing temperature, which may be due to the influence of combined quenching (both dynamic and static) process. Furthermore, the (LB-BSA) at different temperatures are much larger than (CA-BSA), which indicated that LB has a much higher affinity than CA for binding to BSA. The larger implies the increased stability of the BSA-drug complex, which suggests that the addition of methoxyl group has effected on the interaction between LB and BSA. The binding numbers () vary in the ranges from 0.837 to 0.863 and 1.139 to 1.152 for CA-BSA and LB-BSA, respectively. The values of are approximately equal to 1, indicating that there is one binding site in BSA for both CA and LB during their interaction .
3.3. Thermodynamic Parameters and Nature of the Binding Forces
The interaction forces between small molecules and biological macromolecules may include hydrogen bonds, van der Waals forces, hydrophobic and electrostatic interactions, and so forth . Generally, free energy change reflects the possibility of reaction, while enthalpy change and entropy change are the main quantities for judging the nature of the binding forces. Therefore, the thermodynamic parameters (, and ) of interaction are important to characterize the interaction force between CA (or LB) and BSA . From the viewpoint of thermodynamics, and suggest hydrophobic forces; and imply van der Waals forces and hydrogen bonds; and reflect electrostatic forces. The thermodynamic parameters of BSA-LB complexes were calculated using the following Van’t Hoff equation : If the temperature does not vary significantly, can be regarded as a constant. And the free energy changes at different temperatures can be calculated from the following equation: where is the gas constant and is the binding constant at the corresponding experimental temperature . According to the binding constants of LB-BSA obtained at the three temperatures (288, 298, and 310 K), the values of Δ and Δ are obtained from the slope and intercept of the fitted curves of versus 1/, respectively. But to CA, the does not decrease with the increasing temperature , and then the and 1/ of CA dissatisfies the Van’t Hoff equation. As seen in Table 2, the values of thermodynamic parameters (Δ, Δ and Δ) are obtained and presented.
From Table 2, it shows that the negative values of Δ indicate that the binding processes are spontaneous for both CA-BSA and LB-BSA complex. The negative Δ and positive Δ values indicate that electrostatic forces play a major role in the formation of the LB-BSA complex [32, 34]. But to CA, it did not meet one of the three situations of the viewpoint of thermodynamics, so we deduced that it is probably a combined force in the formation of the CA-BSA complex. Furthermore, the values of the thermodynamic parameters and the nature of the binding forces for these two systems are very different, which can be attributed to their different molecular structure and the different molecular weight.
3.4. Energy Transfer from BSA to CA and LB
The purpose of study on the energy transfer in biochemistry is that the efficiency of transfer can be used to calculate the distance between the ligands and the tryptophan residues in the protein. According to Förster’s nonradioactive energy transfer theory , the energy transfer will take place under the following conditions: first, the donor can produce fluorescence; second, fluorescence emission spectrum of the donor and UV-vis absorbance spectrum of the acceptor must overlap significantly; and third, the distance between the donor and the acceptor is lower than 8 nm. Based on this theory, the energy transfer efficiency is not only related to the distance between the donor and receptor, but also Förster’s critical distance . The values of are calculated using the equation where and are the same as previously mentioned and is the critical distance when the energy transfer efficiency is 50%. The value of was calculated using the equation where is the spatial orientation factor of the dipole, is the refractive index of medium, is fluorescence quantum yield of the donor, and is overlap integral of the fluorescence emission spectrum of donor and absorption spectrum of the acceptor (Figure 5). And can be calculated by the following equation: where is the fluorescence intensity of the donor at wavelength , and is the molar absorption coefficient of the acceptor at wavelength . According to (6)–(8), , , and can be obtained; so the value of also can be calculated.
Figure 6 is the overlap of the fluorescence spectra of BSA and the UV absorption spectra of CA or LB when the molar ratio is 1 : 1 and at 310 K. The values of are obtained by integrating the overlap in the spectra (Figure 4), and for CA-BSA and LB-BSA, respectively. In the present case, , and [36, 37]. Combined with (6)–(8), we can calculate that , and (310 K) for CA-BSA system and and (310 K) for LB-BSA system. Hence, the donor to acceptor distance in either system is less than 7 nm and 0.5, which indicates the energy transfer from BSA to CA or LB occurred with high possibility . In accordance with Förster’s nonradiative energy transfer theory, it is proved once again that the static quenching was presence in the interaction between CA (or LB) and BSA. And the donor to acceptor distance of LB is closer than that of CA, which indicates that the addition of methoxyl group is helpful for LB binding to BSA.
3.5. Effect of CA and LB on Conformational Changes of BSA
3.5.1. Synchronous Fluorescence Spectroscopy Studies
Synchronous fluorescence spectroscopy is a useful method to provide some information about the changes of molecular microenvironment and the environment of amino acid residues . This is carried out by measuring the shift of maximum emission wavelength , which corresponds to the changes of polarity around the chromophore molecule. When the wavelength shift between excitation and emission wavelength set at 60 nm, the characteristic information of tryptophan residues in protein was given . And the synchronous fluorescence spectra of BSA upon addition of CA or LB at 310 K are shown in Figure 7. It shows that the fluorescence intensity of tryptophan decreased regularly with increasing CA (or LB) concentration, with the maximum emission wavelength removed from 278 to 280 nm for CA and from 279 to 281 nm for LB. These two shifts indicate that the conformations of the BSA proteins have been changed on the addition of CA or LB. Furthermore, the red-shift effects demonstrate that the polarity around the tryptophan residues increased and the hydrophobicity decreased with CA and LB.
3.5.2. Circular Dichroism Studies
In order to further investigate the conformational changes, the CD which is sensitive to variation of the structure of biological macromolecules was used to monitor the secondary structural change of protein upon interaction with CA and LB. And the CD spectra of BSA in the range of 185 nm to 260 nm were measured in the absence and addition of CA or LB, as shown in Figure 7. The CD results are expressed in terms of mean residue ellipticity (MRE) in degree that can be calculated by following equation : where is the molar concentration of the protein, is the number of amino acid residues, and is the path length. The quantitative analysis of the α-helix content of BSA was calculated from MRE values at 208 nm by the following equation :
As seen in Figure 7, the CD spectra of BSA exhibit two negative bands in UV region at 208 and 220 nm, which are characteristic of α-helix structure of protein . The interaction between CA (or LB) and BSA causes a slight decrease in band intensity at all wavelengths of the UV region but without any significant shift in the peak position. The α-helix content of BSA increased with the addition of CA or LB when the molar ratio of drug/BSA was 5 : 1 and 10 : 1. Furthermore, the increase of α-helix of LB was slightly less than CA, which further confirms that the interaction between LB and BSA can be influenced by methoxyl group at 4-substitution. From the previous results, it is evident that the effect of CA or LB on BSA caused secondary structure changes of the protein with the increase of helical stability.
In this work, the interaction between CA and BSA, LB, and BSA had been studied using fluorescence spectroscopy, ultraviolet spectroscopy, and circular dichroism at different temperatures under imitated physiological conditions. The results showed that the quenching mechanism of fluorescence of BSA by CA (or LB) was static quenching at low concentrations of CA (or LB), while a combined quenching (dynamic and static quenching) at higher concentrations of CA (or LB). Moreover, the quenching efficiency, binding affinity of LB to BSA, was more than that of CA and the donor to acceptor distance (1.73) is less than (2.01), which indicated that the 4-methoxyl group was more helpful to the ligands binding to proteins. The values of were approximately equal to 1, so there was one binding site between CA and BSA, LB, and BSA. The corresponding thermodynamic parameters were also obtained and indicated that electrostatic forces play a major role in the formation of the LB-BSA complex, but probably a combined force for CA-BSA complex. The results of synchronous fluorescence spectroscopy demonstrated that the polarity around tryptophan residues was increased and the hydrophobicity was decreased when CA (or LB) interacted with BSA, and CD spectra demonstrated that the secondary structures of BSA were changed to varying degrees by the binding of CA (or LB). This study is expected to provide some valuable data for the transportation and distribution of CA and LB in vivo and to be helpful to drug design and pharmaceutical research.
|BSA:||Bovine serum albumin|
|HAS:||Human serum albumin|
This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (nos. 21205145, 21276006, and 21036009), the Open Funds of State Key Laboratory of Chemo/Biosensing and Chemometrics of Hunan University (no. 201111), the Special Fund for Basic Scientific Research of Central Colleges, South-Central University for Nationalities (nos. CZZ10005, CZQ11012, and XTZ10001), the “Five-Twelfth” National Science and Technology Support Program (2012BAI27B00).
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Folks – I am planning a long road trip around the US and I would appreciate your input.
The purpose of this trip is to get to see some of this big country of ours and not spend the majority of my time on the Interstate (which is pretty much the same view where ever you drive).
I would like to take in some places that are specific to my passion of cars. For example, I’d like to be sure to drop by Midland, TX and see the Jim Hall Chaparral Museum. I would like to be sure and drive some interesting roads like parts of Route 66.
If you have any suggestions or if you have found some special places to visit please let me know by commenting on this entry.

domain: geography


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For the second year in a row, voters did not agree to pass a General Obligation (GO) bond that would help Mt. Hood Community College pay off debts, upgrade areas to withstand seismic activity, and replace the current applied technology center. This year, the college was asking for $75 million, instead of $125 million.
According to official county voting results, 54.7 percent of voters in Multnomah County were against it, 57.9 percent were against it in Clackamas, and 56.98 opposed it in Hood River County. In total, the three counties were against Mt. Hood’s bond by 55.2 percent, last year, voters were against it by 55.3 percent. The college has not passed a bond since 1974, making this the sixth failed attempt.
College officials held a gathering at Mojave’s in Downtown Gresham to celebrate efforts of all participants, and to watch voting results on television.
MHCC President Debbie Derr kicked off the event with some words, “I have to say this was the epitome of grassroots efforts. We made a decision through our board to move forward with a bond this May, we made that decision in February. We had very little money left in the piggy from our PAC – friends of Mt. Hood community college,” she said.
Derr recognized a few of the volunteers that helped with bond efforts. Awards were presented to Aurora and Ed del Val, Cheryl Johnson, Jim Zordich, Dale Gronso, and David Strohl.
Aurora del Val, got involved with the efforts through the encouragement of her husband Ed, an instructor at MHCC. She had experience with campaigning against Nestle’s water bottling plant in Hood River county. Through her efforts, 69 percent of voters were not in favor of Nestle.
The grassroots aspect of this year’s bond was what sparked Aurora’s interest. “I actually thought, ‘you know, there is a fighting chance,’ people are tired and I think this is an opportunity to energize the base. I think what was unfortunate with last year is there were so many big issues people were talking about,” she said.
Aurora said she wants to debrief different groups on campus about the most recent efforts. “I personally would love to have the opportunity to debrief with both, the foundation, and the PAC, and the faculty association, classified, and with students,” she said. “The fact is, we’re going to go after more bonds, and I would love to just be able to give my input.”
John Hamblin said “we stay the course. We’ve done a lot of work over the last few years rebuilding and renewing relationships and building new relationships, and that doesn’t stop.” He said the college needs to continue working on reinforcing relationships with the community.
Board Member Kenny Polson said that to boost support for the bond, the college needed to reach out to the Latino community. “If you don’t appeal to the Latinos, they don’t feel like you’ve reached out to them,” he said. “Write stuff in Spanish, (then) they feel like you’re reaching out to them – you got those votes.” Polson said the Latino community is the strongest minority group when it comes to swaying elections.
President Derr said the college will pursue a bond measure again, and newly elected board members Diane Mckeel and Annette Matson have a lot of experience with similar campaign efforts. “I think we’ve got some opportunity to utilize expertise that perhaps we haven’t had before,” said Derr.
Tammie Arnold, who believed that pursuing a bond this year was too early for a retry, was also disappointed that voters didn’t favor Mt. Hood’s bond. “I was positively hopeful that it would (pass) because our community needs this, and I’m optimistic that if we have more time to prepare and create a strategy, that we’ll be successful in the future.”
Along with the failure of the bond, voters decided to bring in new members to the Mt. Hood Community College District Board of Education. Diane McKeel will be the new representative for District 1, earning 66.8 percent of votes replacing Susie Jones who got elected to the Multnomah Education Service District with 63.4 percent of all votes, Jim Zordich has been reelected for Zone 2 running unopposed with 3 percent of votes against him, and Annette Mattson is the new representative for Zone 4 with 79.4 percent of votes replacing George Sonny Yellott.