Washington — OSHA has a new online portal for employers to submit applications to the agency’s Voluntary Protection Programs.

Applying for the SIA RISE Scholarship is open to SIA student members and employees of SIA member companies in North America who are part of the SIA RISE community.

How effective are disposable gloves for industrial applications?

Vigitron, a provider of networking solutions for security applications, has established a library for security-based network applications.

Unique color applications in confections are also popular today, such as the use of saturated pastels, and combining multiple colors and textures in a single format. Developers face several hurdles when formulating with natural colors in confections, and color manufacturers and suppliers are constantly innovating to develop more effective and stable natural colors.

Tree nuts have branched well beyond snack mixes to a new realm of premium, plant-based and better-for-you functional offerings with a health halo. For an in-depth look at this trend, we spoke with Robin Puskas, chief innovation officer at JPG Resources. Listen to the discussion!

Univar Solutions Inc. and Novozymes announced a new agreement to expand the partnership into the United States and Canadian food ingredients markets. The new food ingredients agreement takes effect May 1, 2021, one month after the companies announced an exclusive agreement expanding the partnership into the United States and Canadian beverage production, homecare, and industrial cleaning markets.

Gums and hydrocolloids are a diverse collection of polysaccharides that create gel-like formations when in contact with moisture. They are extremely versatile, improving texture, mouthfeel, and physical appearance in foods and beverages. Gums can be used to increase viscosity levels or benefit flow. They are especially prized for increasing stability in an ingredient matrix.

Prepared Foods surveys natural sweetener ingredients for use in food and beverage product development.

Changing characteristics, product and orientation effect can disrupt product signals and affect detection sensitivity if not addressed. However, digital technologies and machine learning are pushing the innovation boundaries and streamlining inspection processes.

Selecting the right pump to convey product in a food-safe manner during processing steps or to remove waste from processing operations to a waste facility is important for poultry processors.

Ava's patented coating makes STRM a great solution for heavy-traffic areas that need durability and ease of maintenance, including hospitality, retail and public spaces.

Sherwin-Williams High-Performance Flooring seamless flooring systems offer durable, chemical-resistant systems for commercial applications with moderate to heavy use. 

These extra-large, high-capacity conveyors can be engineered for grading, aligning, distributing and other specialized food handling functions.

This program includes a range of modular spiral belts tailored for various applications, including cooling, chilling, freezing, proofing and steaming. 

Building on the product’s success in the mineral processing and recycling industries, Salient Pole Rare Earth drums are now optimized to meet the stringent requirements of food processing, ensuring the purity and safety of food products.

E-Beam (electron beam) technology, a form of ionizing radiation, has emerged as a tool for enhancing food safety.

Defining the fundamentals of vacuum and discussing the utility applications of oil-sealed vacuum technology.

The post 2025-26 National Urban Fellows Program Now Accepting Applications: Fully Funded Master’s & Leadership Development was curated by information for practice.

The SPE (Sales and Partner Enablement) Infrastructure team at Arm is looking for a hardworking and enthusiastic graduate to join our team based in Cambridge with an ambition to become a crucial member of the team.

We combine people, technology and domain specific knowledge to craft tools, services and infrastructure for Arm workforce that improve their productivity. It can be challenging at times, but there are many opportunities for people who take pride in, and enjoy developing these services and systems to make a real difference. 

You will join our established team in working closely with the Sales, Technical Communications and the Arm customer support team to provide them with the tools they need to ensure the success of Arm's partners.

The Role

You will have a chance to work across a range of systems, services and tools, focusing on developing, maintaining, and running the continuous integration and testing infrastructure of our tools. This will include bespoke and third-party solutions. You will be adept at scripting, designing automated tests, and have a track record of picking up and working with different technologies, for example:

• XML, DITA CMS
• XSLT
• XPath
• JSON, YAML, Markdown
• Java
• The Document Object Model
• Systems integration using REST APIs
• Jenkins
• Azure Cloud

Key Accountabilities/Responsibilities

As a key member of a small team of engineers, you will engage with team leadership, project management, and other teams in Arm to deliver high-impact improvements and new functionality to our existing tools and code infrastructure. We use CI / CD pipelines to accommodate auto-generated documentation and varied working practises of our documentation teams across Arm, as well as more traditional CMS offerings. Your primary focus will be on the continuous integration and testing infrastructure, but you will contribute to all aspects of software development within the team; you will get involved in developing / supporting the tools used by the Sales and Application Engineering teams, Linux system administration and technical consulting with other teams in Arm to support requirement and solution definition.

The post CfP: eXtended Reality applications in health psychology and well-being: From Research to Practice (Submission deadline: April 15) was curated by information for practice.

The post BASW Student Ambassador Scheme opens for applications! (Deadline: 30 Nov) was curated by information for practice.

By Alastair Bright, freelance writer.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and Near Field Communication (NFC) are two wireless communication technologies that enable data exchange through radio waves. While NFC is primarily used in contactless payments, RFID is widely utilized for asset and location tracking. Both technologies, however, also have versatile applications beyond their primary uses.

The Ergonomic Solutions Group, the designer and manufacturer of technology mounting solutions, has launched the SpacePole Kiosk – described as a multifunctional platform with maximum flexibility for a wide range of self-service applications including self-check-in/check-out, self-ordering, endless aisle, product display & advertising, ticketing, click & collect and many more.

Advantech, provider of AIoT platforms and services, has launched ARK-3533, a compact fanless edge computer tailored for kiosk and robotics applications.

Couchbase, Inc., the cloud database platform company, has launched Capella Columnar on AWS, which helps organisations streamline the development of adaptive applications by enabling real-time data analysis alongside operational workloads within a single database platform.

The synthesis of a chiral isothiourea, namely, (4aR,8aR)-3-phenyl-4a,5,6,7,8,8a-hexahydrobenzo[4,5]imidazo[2,1-b]thiazol-9-ium bromide, C15H17N2S+·Br−, with potential organocatalytic and anti-inflammatory activity is reported. The preparation of the heterocycle of interest was carried out in two high-yielding steps. The hydrobromide salt of the isothiourea of interest provided suitable crystals for X-ray diffraction analysis, the results of which are reported. Salient observations from this analysis are the near perpendicular arrangement of the phenyl ring and the mean plane of the heterocycle. This conformational characteristic may be relevant with regard the stereoselectivity induced by the chiral isothiourea in asymmetric reactions. Furthermore, evidence was found for the existence of an S...Br− halogen bond.

Multilayer gratings are increasingly popular optical elements at X-ray beamlines, as they can provide much higher photon flux in the tender X-ray range compared with traditional single-layer coated gratings. While there are several proprietary software tools that provide the functionality to simulate the efficiencies of such gratings, until now the X-ray community has lacked an open-source alternative. Here MLgrating is presented, a program for simulating the efficiencies of both multilayer gratings and single-layer coated gratings for X-ray applications. MLgrating is benchmarked by comparing its output with that of other software tools and plans are discussed for how the program could be extended in the future.

In recent years, there is a significant interest from the crystallographic and materials science communities to have access to raw diffraction data. The effort in archiving raw data for access by the user community is spearheaded by the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) Committee on Data. In materials science, where powder diffraction is extensively used, the challenge in archiving raw data is different to that from single crystal data, owing to the very nature of the contributions involved. Powder diffraction (X-ray or neutron) data consist of contributions from the material under study as well as instrument specific parameters. Having raw powder diffraction data can be essential in cases of analysing materials with poor crystallinity, disorder, micro structure (size/strain) etc. Here, the initiative and progress made by the International Centre for Diffraction Data (ICDDR) in archiving powder X-ray diffraction raw data in the Powder Diffraction FileTM (PDFR) database is outlined. The upcoming 2025 release of the PDF-5+ database will have more than 20 800 raw powder diffraction patterns that are available for reference.

This paper introduces a new 2D representation of the orientation distribution function for an arbitrary material texture. The approach is based on the isometric square torus mapping of the Clifford torus, which allows for points on the unit quaternion hypersphere (each corresponding to a 3D orientation) to be represented in a periodic 2D square map. The combination of three such orthogonal mappings into a single RGB (red–green–blue) image provides a compact periodic representation of any set of orientations. Square torus representations of five different orientation sampling methods are compared and analyzed in terms of the Riesz s energies that quantify the uniformity of the samplings. The effect of crystallographic symmetry on the square torus map is analyzed in terms of the Rodrigues fundamental zones for the rotational symmetry groups. The paper concludes with example representations of important texture components in cubic and hexagonal materials. The new RGB representation provides a convenient and compact way of generating training data for the automated analysis of material textures by means of neural networks.

Understanding the symmetries described by subperiodic groups – frieze, rod and layer groups – has been instrumental in predicting various properties (band structures, optical absorption, Raman spectra, diffraction patterns, topological properties etc.) of `low-dimensional' crystals. This knowledge is crucial in the tailored design of materials for specific applications across electronics, photonics and materials engineering. However, there are materials that have the property of being periodic only in one direction and whose symmetry cannot be described by the subperiodic rod groups. Describing the symmetry of these materials necessitates the application of line group theory. This paper gives an overview of subperiodic groups while briefly introducing line groups in order to acquaint the crystallographic community with these symmetries and direct them to pertinent literature. Since line groups are generally not sub­periodic, they have thus far remained outside the realm of symmetries traditionally considered in crystallography, although there are numerous `one-dimensional' crystals (i.e. monoperiodic structures) possessing line group symmetry.

X-ray scattering has become a major tool in the structural characterization of nanoscale materials. Thanks to the widely available experimental and computational atomic models, coordinate-based X-ray scattering simulation has played a crucial role in data interpretation in the past two decades. However, simulation of real-space pair distance distribution functions (PDDFs) from small- and wide-angle X-ray scattering, SAXS/WAXS, has been relatively less exploited. This study presents a comparison of PDDF simulation methods, which are applied to molecular structures that range in size from β-cyclo­dextrin [1 kDa molecular weight (MW), 66 non-hydrogen atoms] to the satellite tobacco mosaic virus capsid (1.1 MDa MW, 81 960 non-hydrogen atoms). The results demonstrate the power of interpretation of experimental SAXS/WAXS from the real-space view, particularly by providing a more intuitive method for understanding of partial structure contributions. Furthermore, the computational efficiency of PDDF simulation algorithms makes them attractive as approaches for the analysis of large nanoscale materials and biological assemblies. The simulation methods demonstrated in this article have been implemented in stand-alone software, SolX 3.0, which is available to download from https://12idb.xray.aps.anl.gov/solx.html.

The Gulf Research Program (GRP) of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine is now accepting applications for its Early-Career Research Fellowships and Science Policy Fellowships for 2019.

The Gulf Research Program (GRP) of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine today announced it is accepting applications for the 2021-2022 Science Policy Fellowship.

The Gulf Research Program (GRP) of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine today announced it is accepting applications for the Environmental Protection and Stewardship track of the 2021 Early-Career Research Fellowship (ECRF).

The use of high-risk radioactive materials in medical, research, and commercial applications has increased by about 30 percent in the U.S. in the last 12 years, and the government should improve security, tracking, and accountability to reduce health and security risks — while also supporting the development of nonradioactive alternatives to replace them — says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

The Gulf Research Program (GRP) of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine today announced it is now accepting applications for the Offshore Energy Safety track of the 2021 Early-Career Research Fellowship (ECRF).

ESET analysts dissect a novel phishing method tailored to Android and iOS users

Building efficient recovery options will drive ecosystem resilience

Flakes of graphene welded together into solid materials may be suitable for bone implants, according to a study led by Rice University scientists.

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New series provides single-machine in-line inspection and quality control through a broad array of combinable technologies.

The supplier aims to give snack makers, bakers, and other food producers a range of intense, natural color options.

An expert from Quest shares the benefits of automated tech in food packaging.

Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery was recently able to talk to Richard Galloway, oils consultant, United Soybean Board, about puff pastry applications, high oleic soybean shortening, and soy-based baker's margarine

With cost-effective low usage levels and high stability performance, this kosher, vegan, and halal-certified shade can be used in snack seasonings, bakery products, frostings and decorative coatings, breadings, and more.

The ingredients open opportunities in the development of plant-based food products with cleaner labels.

BENEO, a manufacturer of functional ingredients, has announced the launch of its new precooked functional native rice starch, Remypure S52 P.

The American Bakers Association program salutes safety practices and awareness.

Ingredion Incorporated has launched a dietary fiber in the U.S.—NOVELOSE 3490.