Occipitocervical fusion by Luque loop rod instrumentation in Down syndrome

Four children with Down syndrome who had developed atlantoaxial dislocation and myelopathy underwent occipitocervical fusion with Luque loop rod instrumentation and decompressive laminectomy of C1. The postoperative results are presented and the indications discussed. This procedure provides many advantages in the surgical treatment of Down syndrome compared with the conventional procedures, because of the associated mental retardation that makes the postoperative management very complicated.     

Electrically induced protein release from Schizosaccharomyces pombe cells in a hyperosmotic condition during and following a high electropulsation

A high-electric-field application of fission yeast cells under hyperosmotic conditions improved the electro-induced release of protein and cytoplasmic enzymes. A cell suspension was pulsed at 12.5 kV/cm for 10 ms in a batch system and immediately postincubated at 30 degrees C. The total protein release rate from cells increased in the hypertonic solutions of 1.5-2.5 M sorbitol to approximately threefold higher than those in the hypotonic and isotonic solutions of 0-0.5 M sorbitol. The protein release rate in 2.0 M sorbitol greatly increased up to 4.5 h and then gradually increased after 7.5 h. The maximum activities of cytoplasmic enzymes, such as alcohol dehydrogenase and 3-phosphoglycerate kinase, were obtained at 7.5 h after electropulsation in 2.0 M sorbitol, yielding approximately 90% of the enzyme activity levels found in spheroplast lysate. On the other hand, the release rates of protease in vacuoles and invertase in periplasmic space did not depend on osmotic solutions during electric pulse application.     

Role of Additives in the Combustion of Ammonium Dinitramide

The thermal decomposition behavior and combustion characteristics of mixtures of ammonium dinitramide (ADN) with additives were studied. Micrometer‐sized particles of Al, Fe₂O₃, TiO₂, NiO, Cu(OH)NO₃, copper, CuO, and nanometer‐sized particles of aluminum (Alex) and CuO (nano‐CuO) were employed. The thermal decomposition was measured by TG‐DTA and DSC. The copper compounds and NiO lowered the onset temperature of ADN decomposition. The heat value of ADN with Alex was larger than that of pure ADN in closed conditions. The burning rates and temperature of the pure ADN and ADN/additives mixtures were measured. CuO and NiO enhance the burning rate, particularly at pressures lower than 1 MPa, because of the catalyzed decomposition in the condensed phase; the other additives lower the burning rate. This negative effect on the burning rate is explained based on the surface temperature measurements by a physicochemical mechanism, which involves a chemical reaction, a phase change of the ammonium nitrate, and the blown‐off droplets of the condensed phase.     

Evaluating uncertainty in accident rate estimation at hydrogen refueling station using time correlation model

Hydrogen, as a future energy carrier, is receiving a significant amount of attention in Japan. From the viewpoint of safety, risk evaluation is required in order to increase the number of hydrogen refueling stations (HRSs) implemented in Japan. Collecting data about accidents in the past will provide a hint to understand the trend in the possibility of accidents occurrence by identifying its operation time However, in new technology; accident rate estimation can have a high degree of uncertainty due to absence of major accident direct data in the late operational period. The uncertainty in the estimation is proportional to the data unavailability, which increases over long operation period due to decrease in number of stations. In this paper, a suitable time correlation model is adopted in the estimation to reflect lack (due to the limited operation period of HRS) or abundance of accident data, which is not well supported by conventional approaches. The model adopted in this paper shows that the uncertainty in the estimation increases when the operation time is long owing to the decreasing data.     

Introducing inductive bias on vision transformers through Gram matrix similarity based regularization

Artificial Life and Robotics - In recent years, the transformer achieved remarkable results in computer vision related tasks, matching, or even surpassing those of convolutional neural networks...