unbleached

A suspicious package containing unbleached flour was received at the California secretary of state’s headquarters in Sacramento, in what appears to be the latest in a series of suspicious packages sent to election officials across the country, officials reported Thursday afternoon.

“Field testing and presumptive chemical test by state law enforcement revealed that the material contained within the package was non-hazardous and tested positive for unbleached flour,” Secretary of State Shirley Weber said in a statement, adding that federal authorities will continue to investigate the incident.

The research team, which included scientists from UH Manoa, NIOZ, Scripps Institution of Oceanography and University of California, Santa Barbara, conducted experiments on bleached and unbleached corals gathered during a bleaching event in Moorea, French Polynesia in 2019.

In a heating experiment, the team determined that both thermally stressed and bleached coral exude a different composition of organic matter in response to thermal stress as compared to unbleached coral.

The researchers used five flours that included gluten: unbleached all-purpose flour, red turkey wheat, emmer, rye and einkorn; and five gluten-free flours: teff, millet, sorghum, buckwheat and amaranth.