Two new technologies for use in the food industry are described. The first method discussed uses intense pulse of light. This pulsed light (PureBright) process uses short duration flashes of broad spectrum "white" light to kill all exposed microorganisms, including vegetative bacteria, microbial and fungal spores, viruses, and protozoan oocysts. Each pulse, or flash, of light lasts only a few h...

Pulsed electric field (PEF) processing is a emerging method of food preservation that uses short bursts of electricity for microbial inactivation (cell-lysis) and causes minimal or no detrimental effect on food quality attributes. PEF can be used for processing liquid and semiliquid food products.

Pulsed electric field treatment is now widely used in diverse biological and medical applications: gene delivery, electrochemotherapy, and cancer therapy. This minimally invasive technique has several advantages over traditional ablation techniques, such as nonthermal elimination and blood vessel spare effect. Different electrodes are subsequently developed for a specific treatment purpose. Her...

Weakly electric fish generate a periodic electric field as a carrier signal for active location and communication tasks. Highly sensitive P-type receptors on their surface fire in response to carrier amplitude modulations (AM's) in a noisy phase locked fashion. A simple generic model of receptor activity and signal encoding is presented. Its suprathreshold dynamics, memory and receptor noise re...

Weakly electric fish generate an electric field with their electric organ to navigate in space, detect objects and communicate with conspecifics. Several studies have examined how electric fish identify objects with their electroreceptors and use electric images for electrolocation. It has been argued that sensor readings from electroreceptors along the rostrocaudal line allow fish to determine...

Today's pulsed THz sources enable us to excite, probe, and coherently control the vibrational or rotational dynamics of organic and inorganic materials on ultrafast time scales. Driven by standard laser sources THz electric field strengths of up to several MVm(-1) have been reported and in order to reach even higher electric field strengths the use of dedicated electric field enhancement struct...

We introduce a new field-flow fractionation (FFF) technique, whereby molecules are separated based on their differential interaction (dielectrophoresis (DEP)) with optical electric fields, i.e. electric fields with frequencies in the visible and near-infrared range. The results show that a parallel array of axially non-uniform optical fields yielding an attractive potential (positive-DEP-FFF) i...