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Recent consumer interest in controlling and preventing chronic diseases through improved diet has promoted research on the bioactive components of agricultural products. Wheat is an important agricultural and dietary commodity worldwide with known antioxidant properties concentrated mostly in the bran fraction. The objective of this study was to determine the relative contributions of genotype (G) and growing environment (E) to hard winter wheat bran antioxidant properties, as well as correlations of these properties to growing conditions. Bran samples of 20 hard winter wheat varieties grown in two locations were examined for their free radical scavenging capacities against DPPH, ABTS cation, peroxyl (ORAC), and superoxide anion radicals and chelating properties, as well as their total phenolics and phenolic acid compositions. Results showed significant differences for all antioxidant properties tested and multiple significant correlations between these properties. A factorial designed analysis of variance for these data and pooled previously published data showed similar results for four of the six antioxidant properties, indicating that G effects were considerably larger than E effects for chelating capacity and DPPH radical scavenging properties, whereas E was much stronger than G for ABTS cation radical scavenging capacity and total phenolics, although small interaction effects (G × E) were significant for all antioxidant properties analyzed. Results also showed significant correlations between temperature stress or solar radiation and some antioxidant properties. These results indicate that each antioxidant property of hard winter wheat bran is influenced differently by genotype and growing conditions.

We study the rigidity of polyhedral surfaces and the moduli space of polyhedral surfaces using variational principles. Curvaturelike quantities for polyhedral surfaces are introduced and are shown to determine the polyhedral metric up to isometry. The action functionals in the variational approaches are derived from the cosine law. They can be considered as 2-dimensional counterparts of the Schlaefli formula.

We quantized the full Einstein equations in a globally hyperbolic spacetime $N=N^{n+1}$, $n\ge 3$, and found solutions of the resulting hyperbolic equation in a fiber bundle $E$ which can be expressed as a product of spatial eigenfunctions (eigendistributions) and temporal eigenfunctions. The spatial eigenfunctions form a basis in an appropriate Hilbert space while the temporal eigenfunctions are solutions to a second order ordinary differential equation in $\R[]_+$. In case $n\ge 17$ and provided the cosmological constant $\Lam$ is negative the temporal eigenfunctions are eigenfunctions of a self-adjoint operator $\hat H_0$ such that the eigenvalues are countable and the eigenfunctions form an orthonormal basis of a Hilbert space.

Let X be an algebraic variety and let S be a tropical variety associated to X. We study the tropicalization map from the moduli space of stable maps into X to the moduli space of tropical curves in S. We prove that it is a continuous map and that its image is compact and polyhedral. Loosely speaking, when we deform algebraic curves in X, the associated tropical curves in S deform continuously; moreover, the locus of realizable tropical curves inside the space of all tropical curves is compact and polyhedral. Our main tools are Berkovich spaces, formal models, balancing conditions, vanishing cycles and quantifier elimination for rigid subanalytic sets.