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We have observed surface features on hydrocarbons deposited on Au(111) from the laboratory atmosphere in water and in a sodium chloride aqueous solution, using tapping mode atomic force microscopy (TMAFM). TMAFM images of the Au(111)/water interface reveal that the features are pancake-shaped structures with the range of measured dimensions of 20–150 nm in width and 0.5–20 nm in height, and that many features reappear at almost the same sites immediately after the disruption of the features by contact mode AFM imaging. The results of our TMAFM observations imply that the features are nanosized bubbles as those reported previously, and that dissolved gas nucleates at specific sites of the hydrophobized Au(111) surface at low, temporal gas supersaturations under atmospheric pressure.

Brown rice is commonly considered to have an effect on various diseases including life-style related diseases. Pre-germinated brown rice is characterized by its easier cooking properties and better taste after cooking when compared with normal brown rice. Because of the rich content of gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) in brown rice, which can prevent the increase of blood pressure, the market for brown rice is now growing. However, the taste of the cooked pre-germinated brown rice is still unsatisfactory because of the peculiar smell. We performed a study aimed at establishing a processing method for obtaining a brown rice product with more GABA accumulation than in the commercially available brown rice products by introducing a high-pressure treatment. The result was that the content of GABA in the obtained brown rice is higher than that in the commercially available brown rice products and the functional components such as ferulic acids and oryzanol are also retained. Further, such brown rice with increased GABA accumulation was found to be digested more quickly than the commercially available brown rice products when those cooked rice products were evaluated by the artificial digestion method. The GABA-increased brown rice was also found to compare favorably with commercially available normal brown rice in terms of taste after cooking.

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