Establishment of gastric surface mucous cell lines from transgenic mice harboring temperature-sensitive simian virus 40 large T-antigen gene

Brown adipose tissue (BAT) is the major thermogenic organ of the human neonate. To determine whether it is also active in the peripheral conversion of T4 to T3, as shown in several animal species, interscapular BAT from 13 newborns of 25-40 weeks gestational age who survived 4 days, at most, was investigated. BAT was found to contain significant amounts of the mitochondrial uncoupling protein (UCP), the rate-limiting component of heat production. The specific content of UCP increased from 29.4 +/- 3.3 to 62.5 +/- 10.2 pmol/mg protein between 25 and 40 weeks of gestation, respectively, and the UCP/F1-ATPase molar ratio, a sensitive marker of brown fat differentiation, increased similarly. BAT was also found to contain iodothyronine 5'-deiodinase (5'D), which appears to be a type II enzyme, based on high affinity for T4 (Km, 2.9 nmol/L) and insensitivity to propylthiouracil (10% inhibition by 1 nmol/L). 5'D was active by 25 weeks gestation, and the specific activity increased from 116 +/- 15 to 417 +/- 46 fmol/h.mg protein during the period examined. The development of 5'D activity was similar to the changes in UCP content; both exhibited a major increase before 32 weeks gestation. The results indicate that thermogenic function and 5'D activity develop in human BAT rather early, during the first half of the last trimester of gestation. The activities of 5'D in human BAT are comparable with 5'D activities found in animal BAT stimulated during the perinatal period, by cold exposure, or by increased cAMP levels.     

Hot-melt adhesion and wettability between polyethylene and other polymers in the vicinity of the adherend melting point

The effect of bonding temperature on the bonding strength of polyethylene to polypropylene or other polymers was investigated. It became clear that the interfacial bonding strength reached maximum strength at a bonding temperature in the vicinity of the melting point of the adherend (i.e., the polymer having the higher melting point). The effect of temperature on the contact angle of the molten polymer having the lower melting point on the adherend surface was also investigated. The wettability of the adherend by the molten polymer drop was considerably reduced at the temperature near the melting point of the adherend. The relationship of increasing adhesiveness to decreasing wettability was found out.     

Tonoko pneumoconiosis with deposition of titanium

A 56-year-old man had worked as a furniture painter and had been exposed to tonoko polishing powder for 30 years. He had complained of dyspnea on exertion for 7 years, and was admitted to our hospital in 1991. A chest X-ray film revealed large opacities and emphysematous changes in both lung fields. Tonoko pneumoconiosis was diagnosed after transbronchial lung biopsy. Home oxygen therapy was given because of progressive hypoxemia, but the patient died of respiratory failure. At autopsy, examination of the lungs showed severe emphysematous changes, and collapse of alveoli. Many gray masses resembling coating cement were seen especially in the upper lobes. Microscopical examination showed that the large opacities were composed of hyaline nodules, similar to silicotic nodules, with anthracosis. Scanning electron microscopy with X-ray microanalysis revealed a high concentration of titanium in the gray mass. A low dose of titanium would not be expected to induce fibrotic changes in the lung, but a high dose and long-term exposure might have that effect. Titanium contained in paint might have exacerbated tonoko pneumoconiosis in this patient.     

Write-once optical disk system measuring 300 mm using high-density, pit-edge recording

To meet the requirement for a second-generation digital optical disk with a larger capacity and a higher speed, the new 300-mm, write-once optical disk system described here uses pit-edge recording and the modified-constant-angular-velocity method [Maeda et al., Trans. IEICE E74, 951 (1991)]. New techniques that can use these methods together and are suitable for interchangeability-data composition and independent detection of the leading and trailing edges-have resulted in the most reliable data-storage system ever produced, we believe. The concept of this system, the characteristics of the new techniques, and the optimization of system performance are described.     

Average-case analysis for the MAX-2SAT problem

We propose a simple probability model for MAX-2SAT instances for discussing the average-case complexity of the MAX-2SAT problem. Our model is a “planted solution model”, where each instance is generated randomly from a target solution. We show that for a large range of parameters, the planted solution (more precisely, one of the planted solution pairs) is the optimal solution for the generated instance with high probability. We then give a simple linear-time algorithm based on a message passing method, and we prove that it solves the MAX-2SAT problem with high probability for random MAX-2SAT instances under this planted solution model for probability parameters within a certain range.     

Organizing the Web's Information Explosion to Discover Unknown Unknowns

This paper introduces the TORISHIKI-KAI project, which aims to construct a million-word-scale semantic network from the Web using state of the art knowledge acquisition methods. The resulting network can be browsed as a Web search directory, and we show that the directory is useful for finding “unknown unknowns” — in the infamous words of D.H. Rumsfeld: things “we don't know we don't know.” Because typically we have no way to look for information we don't even know is missing, a crucial characteristic of unknown unknowns is that they are very difficult to discover through keyword-based Web search. Some examples of the unknown unknowns we have found include unexpected troubles associated with commercial products, surprising new combinations of ingredients in new recipes, unexpected tools or methods for commiting suicide, and so on. We expect such information to be useful for risk management, innovation support, and the detection of harmful information on the Web.     

Reducibility of operation symbols in term rewriting systems and its application to behavioral specifications

In this paper, we propose the notion of reducibility of symbols in term rewriting systems (TRSs). For a given algebraic specification, operation symbols can be classified on the basis of their denotations: the operation symbols for functions and those for constructors. In a model, each term constructed by using only constructors should denote an element, and functions are defined on sets formed by these elements. A term rewriting system provides operational semantics to an algebraic specification. Given a TRS, a term is called reducible if some rewrite rule can be applied to it. An irreducible term can be regarded as an answer in a sense. In this paper, we define the reducibility of operation symbols as follows: an operation symbol is reducible if any term containing the operation symbol is reducible. Non-trivial properties of context-sensitive rewriting, which is a simple restriction of rewriting, can be obtained by restricting the terms on the basis of variable occurrences, its sort, etc. We confirm the usefulness of the reducibility of operation symbols by applying them to behavioral specifications for proving the behavioral coherence property.     

Cooperative control through objective achievement

Cooperative control is a key issue for multirobot systems in many practical applications. In this paper, we address the problem of coordinating a set of mobile robots in the RoboCup soccer middle-size league. We show how the coordination problem that we face can be cast as a specific coalition formation problem, and we propose a distributed algorithm to efficiently solve it. Our approach is based on the distributed computation of a measure of satisfaction (called Agent Satisfaction) that each agent computes for each task. We detail how each agent computes the Agent Satisfaction by acquiring sensor perceptions through an omnidirectional vision system, extracting aggregated information from the acquired perception, and integrating such information with that communicated by the teammates. We empirically validate our approach in a simulated scenario and within RoboCup competitions. The experiments in the simulated scenario allow us to analyse the behaviour of the algorithm in different situations, while the use of the algorithm in real competitions validates the applicability of our approach to robotic platforms involved in a dynamic and complex scenario.     

Augmented incremental recognition of online handwritten mathematical expressions

This paper presents an augmented incremental recognition method for online handwritten mathematical expressions (MEs). If an ME is recognized after all strokes are written (batch recognition), the waiting time increases significantly when the ME becomes longer. On the other hand, the pure incremental recognition method recognizes an ME whenever a new single stroke is input. It shortens the waiting time but degrades the recognition rate due to the limited context. Thus, we propose an augmented incremental recognition method that not only maintains the advantage of the two methods but also reduces their weaknesses. The proposed method has two main features: one is to process the latest stroke, and the other is to find the erroneous segmentations and recognitions in the recent strokes and correct them. In the first process, the segmentation and the recognition by Cocke–Younger–Kasami (CYK) algorithm are only executed for the latest stroke. In the second process, all the previous segmentations are updated if they are significantly changed after the latest stroke is input, and then, all the symbols related to the updated segmentations are updated with their recognition scores. These changes are reflected in the CYK table. In addition, the waiting time is further reduced by employing multi-thread processes. Experiments on our dataset and the CROHME datasets show the effectiveness of this augmented incremental recognition method, which not only maintains recognition rate even compared with the batch recognition method but also reduces the waiting time to a very small level.