Kiwifruit is an excellent model in which to study events in the cell wall that lead to fruit becoming soft. In kiwifruit, softening can be separated into distinct phases, with the phase associated with the most extensive and rapid loss of firmness being well-separated temporally from that associated with the respiratory climacteric and ethylene production. This contrasts with tomato, avocado, a...

In self-consistent N -body simulations of collisionless systems, gravitational interactions are modified on small scales to remove singularities and simplify the task of numerically integrating the equations of motion. This ‘gravitational softening’ is sometimes presented as an ad-hoc departure from Newtonian gravity. However, softening can also be described as a smoothing operation applied to ...

Phonon density-of-states curves were obtained from inelastic neutron scattering spectra from the three crystalline phases of uranium at temperatures from 50 to 1213 K. The alpha-phase showed an unusually large thermal softening of phonon frequencies. Analysis of the vibrational power spectrum showed that this phonon softening originates with the softening of a harmonic solid, as opposed to vibr...

We report the capacitive spring softening effect observed in single-walled carbon nanotube (SWNT) nanoelectromechanical (NEM) resonators. The nanotube resonators adopt a dual-gate configuration with both bottom-gate and end-gate capable of tuning the resonance frequency through capacitive coupling. Interestingly, downward resonance frequency shifting is observed with increasing end-gate voltage...

Fresh-cut banana slices have a short shelf-life due to fast browning and softening after processing. The effects of atmospheric modification, exposure to 1-MCP, and chemical dips on the quality of fresh-cut bananas were determined. Low levels of O2 (2 and 4 kPa) and high levels of CO2 (5 and 10 kPa), alone or in combination, did not prevent browning and softening of fresh-cut banana slices. Sof...

a constitutive model based on two–dimensional unstructured galerkin finite volume method (gfvm) is introduced and applied for analyzing nonlinear behavior of cracked concrete structures in equilibrium condition. the developed iterative solver treats concrete as an orthotropic nonlinear material and considers the softening and hardening behavior of concrete under compression and tension by using...

-The results of an experimental study of a sudden change in loading rate on the fracture behavior of normaland high-strength concrete specimens of three different sizes are reported. Geometrically similar three-point bend specimens were subjected to either a sudden 1000-fold increase or a 10-fold decrease of the loading rate. It was observed that for a large increase of the loading rate, the po...