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Sorghum is a vital cereal crop and staple food for many peoples around the globe having good nutritional and health-promoting bioactive compounds and recently received great attention as gluten-free food. However, sorghum grains contain low β-glucans contents, dietary fibre polysaccharides with great technological and disease prevention properties, and improving the concentration of these compounds in sorghum is very important. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the physicochemical and starch properties of high β-glucan sorghum inbred line (Tabat-NL) in comparison with two commercial cultivars (Wadakar and Tabat-C).

Grain samples of sorghum cultivars: white colour and low tannin cultivar (Tabat-C), red colour and high tannin sorghum, and new inbred line of white sorghum cultivar (Tabat-NL) were carefully cleaned, examined for physical properties (colour, hectolitre and 1,000 kernel weights, and endosperm texture), and ground to flour and assessed for chemical composition (moisture, protein, ash, carbohydrate, sugars, fibre and β-glucan contents). The starch was extracted and investigated for morphological characteristics and functional properties.

The results showed that Tabat-NL grains contain significantly (p=0.05) higher values of 1,000 kernel weight, hectolitre weight, total carbohydrate, amylopectin, dietary fibre and β-glucan compared to Tabat-C and Wadakar. Tabat-NL starch had greater (p=0.05) gelatinization temperature, viscosity, bulk density, and water and oil holding capacities and lower (p=0.05) acidity compared to Tabat-C and Wadakar.

The outcomes of this study demonstrated that Tabat-NL grains had an excellent marketing and milling properties, health-promoting and disease-preventing potentials, and technological features for uses in functional and speciality foods.

To the best of our understating, this is the first study on the evaluation of sorghum cultivar with high β-glucan content and could thus provide the bases for further development and application of this important food grains.

As the feature sizes of microelectronic and optoelectronic components continue to decrease, there has been increased interest in developing new techniques for etching the materials used to construct these highly integrated components. Features of the new techniques now being investigated include etching with neutral species, maskless processing, material selectivity, and reduced electrical damage.

Like aqueous corrosion of metals, atmospheric corrosion of metallic articles has also been a matter of great anxiety due to the individual and joint action of oxygen, humidity and various types of pollution gases and ions in the atmospheres. As there is no limit of oxygen availability in the open atmosphere, this type of corrosion of metals is mainly controlled by humidity. In industrial mines and marine environments, however, metal attack is controlled by aggressive gases, ions and chloride ions respectively.

This study aims to analyse the facts of the case in the judgement made by the High Court of Justice, England, UK, in the case of Dana Gas Public Joint Stock Company (PJSC) v. Dana Gas Sukuk Limited (Ltd.) and Ors.

This study uses descriptive and juristic analysis to explain the factual terms in the case of Dana Gas sukuk default. It also uses juristic opinions to analyse the underpinning argument in the Dana Gas court case between the decision of Sharjah Court, UAE, and the English Court, UK.

The study concluded that despite the position of Dana Gas PJSC that specific element of the muḍārabah sukuk is non-Sharī’ah-compliant, the English court decision which established the enforceability of the purchase undertaking seems to be fair based on the Islamic maxims such as “Difficult situation cannot violate the right of other” and “The conditional matters among Muslims are binding.”

The impact of this study is that Dana Gas sukuk default has thought stakeholders of Sukuk investment lessons on the importance of documentation and consideration of tighter clauses to ensure its bindingness in the law court. Hence, this study is expected to be a contribution towards the call for standardization of the role of Sharī’ah scholars across the globe.

This study illustrates the fact in the case of Dana Gas sukuk default and analyses the court’s decision from a fiqh perspective.

The purpose of the study was to highlight the nutritive values and evaluate the safety level of beverages formulated from selected cereal filtrates in Nigeria.

The cereals that were used for the formulation of the beverages are: 100 percent white maize, 100 percent yellow maize, 50:50; white: yellow maize, and 100 percent sorghum bicolour. All the cereals were purchased from Odo-Ogbe market in Ile-Ife, Nigeria.

The results showed that the level of the minerals present in the cereal filtrates ranged from 39.1 to 43.6; 236 to 303; 362.4 to 462; 23.6 to 68.3; 26 to 41.5; 0.66 to 2.37; and 0.5 to 2.2 mg/100 g for sodium (Na), calcium (Ca), magnesium (Mg), iron (Fe), zinc (Zn), and manganese (Mn), respectively. Microbial load ranged from 2.0 to 3.0×10−3 cfug. Results of nutritional composition such as percentage moisture, protein, fat, carbohydrate, ash and crude fibre ranged from 91 to 93, 1.5 to 1.75, 0.03 to 0.040, 0.25 to 1, 1.48 to 1.70 and 3.33 to 5.31 g/100 g, respectively, while the energy value ranged between 66.60 and 75.56 kcal. The values obtained for vitamin C and thiamin ranged from 0.30 to 0.40 and 0.56 to 0.70 mg/100 g, respectively.

The micronutrients in the formulated beverages met the minimum recommended daily allowance and also possessed antimicrobial activities. However, the results showed that the proximate composition was high in water and low in other nutrients but still compared favourably with previous findings. It was concluded that the beverage produced from selected fermented cereal filtrates waste was safe and rich in micronutrients.

The changes in tensile behavior of polycrystalline nanocopper lattice with changes in temperature, average grain size (AGS) and strain rate, have been explored. The existence of a critical AGS has also been observed which shows that the Hall–Petch relationship behaves inversely.

Nanoscale deformation of polycrystalline nanocopper has been done in this study with the help of an embedded atom method (EAM) potential. Voronoi construction method has been employed for creating four polycrystals of nanocopper with different sizes. Statistical analysis has been used to examine the observations with emphasis on the polycrystal size effect on melting point temperature.

The study has found that the key stress values (i.e. elastic modulus, yield stress and ultimate tensile stress) are significantly influenced by the considered parameters. The increase in strain rate is observed to have an increasing impact on mechanical properties, whereas the increase in temperature degrades the mechanical properties. In-depth analysis of the deformation mechanism has been studied to deliver real-time visualization of grain boundary motion.

This study provides the relationship between required grain size variations for consecutive possible variations in mechanical properties and may help to reduce the trial processes in the synthesis of polycrystalline copper based on different temperatures and strain rates.