Biodegradation of low-density polyethylene,polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride,and urea formaldehyde resin buried under soil for over 32 years

The biodegradation of several polymers that had been buried under soil for over 32 years was examined. No evidence of biodegradation was found for polystyrene, polyvinylchloride, and urea formaldehyde resin. A remarkable degradation was indicated for low density polyethylene thin films which were directly in contact with soil. Severely degraded parts of the film is characterized by whitening. Many small holes were recognized on the surface of the whitened part. The whitened part is specific for the growth of hyphae. FT-IR spectra of the whitened part showed a characteristic band in the vicinity of 1640 cm^?1 which was assigned to the stretching vibration of C?C bond. Although the part which was not in contact with soil was clear, it also showed evidence of degradation from the presence of carbonyl band in FT-IR. It was suggested that the degradation of the clear part is due to the usual thermo-oxidative process, while the degradation of the whitened part is due to the biotic process. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Successful aorto-circumflex coronary bypass grafting through left thoracotomy following aortic and mitral valve replacement

We report successful descending thoracic aorto-circumflex coronary artery bypass grafting using a saphenous vein graft through left thoracotomy in a 44-year-old female. The patient developed severe angina attack after aortic and mitral valve replacement. Coronary angiography showed 99% stenosis of the circumflex coronary artery. Under general anesthesia, left femoral vein to arterial partial cardiopulmonary bypass was performed via left 4 th intercostal space. Body temperature was lowered to 22 degrees centigrade, and spontaneous cardiac fibrillation occurred. After minimal exposure by pericardial dissection of the circumflex coronary artery, distal anastomosis and then proximal anastomosis at the descending thoracic aorta was carried out under cardiac fibrillation. This surgery was done with minimal intra-and postoperative bleeding. Postoperative course was very smooth, and the patient was discharged and leading a normal life for 6 months after surgery.     

Distribution of Ca2+/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase kinase alpha in the rat central nervous system: an immunohistochemical study

Ca2+/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase IV (CaM-kinase IV) is activated by CaM-kinase IV kinase. We provided a rabbit antiserum against 20 amino acid residues at the carboxyl-terminal end of CaM-kinase IV kinase, and examined regional and intracellular distribution of CaM-kinase IV kinase immunohistochemically in the central nervous system of the rat by light and electron microscopy. The immunoreactivity was found in cellular nuclei of virtually all neurons. However, the immunoreactivity was weak in the nuclei of the granule cells in the cerebellar cortex, although the nuclei of the granule cells were reported to contain high CaM-kinase IV activity. Thus, it was suggested that other types of CaM-kinase IV kinase might exist in the cerebellum, and the present CaM-kinase IV kinase was named as CaM-kinase kinase alpha.     

p53 mutations and overexpressions in Japanese breast cancer

In this paper, we explore the use of a variety of familial transmission tests (and case-control analyses) to screen for allelic associations in simulated marker data of a quality (2 cM map) that will feasibly arise from genomic scans within the next 5-10 years. We demonstrate a form of the transmission-disequilibrium test extended to multiallele systems. The methods used were log-linear and related models implemented largely using standard statistical packages.     

Performance Competitions as Research Infrastructure: Large Scale Comparative Studies of Multi-Agent Teams

Performance competitions (events that pit many different programs against each other on a standardized task) provide a way for a research community to promote research progress towards challenging goals. In this paper, we argue that for maximum research benefit, any such competition must involve comparative studies under closely controlled, varying conditions. We demonstrate the critical role of comparative studies in the context of one well-known and growing performance competition: the annual Robotic Soccer World Cup (RoboCup) Championship. Specifically, over the past three years, we have carried out annual large-scale comparative evaluations—distinct from the competition itself—of the multi-agent teams taking part in the largest RoboCup league. Our study, which involved 30 different teams of agents produced by dozens of different research groups, focused on robustness. We show that (i) multi-agent teams exhibit a clear performance-robustness tradeoff; (ii) teams tend to over-specialize, so that they cannot handle beneficial changes we make to their operating environment; and (iii) teams improve in performance more than in robustness from one year to the next, despite the emphasis by RoboCup organizers on robustness as a key challenge. These results demonstrate the potential of large-scale comparative studies for producing important results otherwise difficult to discover, and are significant both in the lessons they raise for designers of multi-agent teams, and in understanding the place of performance competitions within the multi-agent research infrastructure.     

Single midline thalamic neurons projecting to both the ventral striatum and the prefrontal cortex in the rat

The midline thalamic nuclei have been known to send projection fibres to the ventral striatum and the autonomic/limbic-associated areas of the prefrontal cortex. In the present study, we sought to determine whether or not single midline thalamic neurons project both to the ventral striatum and to the cerebral cortical areas. Experiments were performed on chloral hydrate-anaesthetized male Sprague Dawley rats; two fluorescent retrograde tracers were centred on the medial or lateral part of the nucleus accumbens--the major part of the ventral striatum--and the medial or lateral prefrontal viscerolimbic cortex. Our retrograde double-labelling study revealed that a subset of midline thalamic neurons send projection fibres to both the nucleus accumbens and the cerebral cortex. Such neurons projecting to both targets were principally identified in the paraventricular thalamic nucleus. The majority of the dually-labelled neurons in the paraventricular thalamic nucleus projected to the lateral part of the nucleus accumbens and the medial wall of the prefrontal cortex. Dually-labelled neurons were additionally found in other midline nuclei, including the paratenial, intermediodorsal, rhomboid, and reuniens nuclei, as well as in the medial part of the parafascicular thalamic nucleus. Dually-projecting neurons identified in the present study may represent a potential link between the limbic striatum and the viscerolimbic-associated cortex, thus suggesting that non-discriminative information relayed to the prefrontal cortex might exert an influence through the same neurons on the nucleus accumbens implicated in affective behaviour.     

Preparation of resins containing phenol derivatives from chloromethylstyrene-tetraethyleneglycol dimethacrylate copolymer beads and antibacterial activity of resins

Copolymer beads (RCCS-4G) with many chloromethyl groups were prepared by treating macroreticular chloromethylstyrene-tetraethyleneglycol dimethacrylate (4G) copolymer beads with chloromethylether. Copolymer beads (RAAS-4G) with benzylamino groups were prepared by treating RCCS-4G with potassium phthalimide. Then the copolymer beads containing phenol derivatives were prepared by treating RAAS-4G with p-hydroxybenzoic acid (pHBA), 2,4-dihydroxybenzoic acid (DHBA), and 3,4,5-trihydroxybenzoic acid (gallic acid, GA) in N,N-dimethylformamide. The antibacterial activity of the obtained resins was examined against Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus. Resins containing phenolic hydroxy groups of 2.3–7.7 mequiv/g were obtained. Antibacterial activity of the resins containing various phenol derivatives against E. coli or S. aureus increased in the order of RAAS-4G-GA > RAAS-4G-DHBA > RAAS-4G-pHBA. The resins containing phenol derivatives exhibited higher antibacterial activity against E. coli than against S. aureus and high activity even against bacteria in NaCl solution. Scanning electron micrographs showed that high antibacterial activity was brought about by the phenolic hydroxyl groups in the resin. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 66: 1621–1630, 1997     

A new external reference management and distributed unification for KL1

This paper describes a new external reference management scheme for KL1, a committed choice logic programming language based on GHC. The significance of the new scheme is that it realizes incremental inter-processor garbage collection. Previous distributed implementations of committed choice languages had not seriously addressed inter-processor garbage collection. Incremental inter-precessor garbage collection is realized by the Weighted Export Counting (WEC). It is a first attempt to use the weighted reference counting technique in logic programming language implementation, and is also new in that it has introduced export and import tables for making independent local garbage collection possible and reducing the number of inter-processor read requests. The problems with exhaustion of reference counts and indirect exportation are discussed. Since the binding order rule adopted in our previous implementation for avoiding creation of reference loops is insufficient in the presence of indirect exportation, a new binding order rule is introduced. We prove that avoidance of reference loops is guaranteed and also prove that the unification procedure always terminates for non-circular structures.     

Computational image sensor for on sensor compression

We propose a novel integration of image compression and sensing in order to enhance the performance of an image sensor. By integrating a compression function onto the sensor focal plane, the image signal to be read out from the sensor is significantly reduced and the pixel rate of the sensor ran consequently be increased. The potential applications of the proposed sensor are in high pixel-rate imaging, such as high frame-rate image sensing and high-resolution image sensing. The compression scheme we employ is a conditional replenishment, which detects and encodes moving areas. In this paper, we introduce two architectures for on-sensor compression; one is the pixel parallel approach and the other is the column parallel approach. We prototyped a VLSI chip of the proposed sensor based on the pixel parallel architecture. We show the design and describe the results of the experiments obtained by the prototype chip