Importance of nuclear generation in the struggles to reduce CO2 emission at Kansai Electric Power Co.

It has been pointed out in recent years that the potential impacts of global warming has been becoming more and more serious because of the rapid increase of anthropogenic CO₂ emission.

Japan's annual CO₂ emissions (fiscal 1994) amounted to 343 million tons of carbon. Although CO₂ emissions caused by fossil-fuel power generation accounted for 29.4% of total, on a sector basis, those directly from the energy conversion sector accounted for only 7.7%. Most CO₂ emissions (21.7% of total) resulted from electric power use in the industrial, commercial and domestic sectors. Thus, the reduction of CO₂ emissions caused by the use of electricity is a nationwide subject.

Understanding that both supply side and demand side approaches are necessary, Kansai Electric has been deploying “New ERA Strategy” as a comprehensive strategy to seek a potential for CO₂ reduction more broadly and deeply. Among a number of action items are the promotion of nuclear power generation, and improvement of overall energy efficiency, besides such demand side measures as leveling off the peak load.

The effectiveness of action items of the New ERA Strategy was evaluated in terms of CO₂ reduction. As a result, estimated CO₂ reduction related to nuclear power amounted to 88% of the total for fiscal 1995 in comparison with 1990, and that expected in 2000 is 84%. These results reconfirm that nuclear power is always the key to practical CO₂ reduction at present and in the future.

Comparison with candidate technology alternatives revealed that photovoltaic power generation needed 7 times greater rated capacity and 280 times larger area than nuclear power, so it is not realistic as a central power station alternative. The comparison also clarified that if wind power stations were constructed at all feasible sites in the Kansai region, they would not be a viable alternative to a single nuclear unit from CO₂ reduction viewpoint.     

Vivid image projection system using e‐Paper active screen

Projected image on a screen is not always vivid enough when it is projected in a bright room. We generally have to choose either vivid image in a dark room or dull image in a bright room. We have suggested a new projection system which can realize high contrast image projection in a bright room. It is consisted of electronic paper screen, projector, and light‐emitting diode room light. The electronic paper (e‐Paper) screen alternates its whole surface white/black with 120 Hz. Room lights are controlled with the same frequency of 120 Hz with the opposite phase as that of the e‐Paper screen. We have confirmed that our new system has achieved higher contrast than the conventional projection system and also enough readability of paper documents in the room simultaneously. We have thus confirmed that our new system can bring an ideal condition, for audience, which can realize a vivid image projection in a bright room.     

A novel quarter‐wave retardation film for improving viewing angle properties in time‐sequential stereoscopic 3D‐LCDs

We have successfully developed a quarter‐wave retardation film (QWF) for wide viewing angle 3D liquid crystal displays (3D‐LCDs) that provides high luminance, low crosstalk, low color change, and low head‐tilt‐angle dependency. It was found that the out‐of‐plane retardation (Rth) of the QWF in the LCD needs to be close to 0 nm in order to improve the 3D display properties at an off‐axis position and that the in‐plane retardation (Re) needs to be adjusted from 120 to 130 nm to achieve low color change with head tilting. We adopted a coating process for making our QWF because of its potential for retardation control. 3D‐LCDs with this QWF whose Rth was nearly zero had high performance and allowed off‐axis other than on‐axis.     

Cognitive model of team cooperation in en-route air traffic control

Since controller teams are in charge of en-route air traffic control, team cooperation is a key issue for good control performance. We conducted ethnographic field observation at the Tokyo Area Control Center and then analyzed the obtained data to develop a cognitive model of team cooperation in en-route air traffic control. We segmented conversational records, behavioral records, and so on by control unit, and then clarified relations between the segments and identified expert knowledge and judgment behind them. Cognitive processes of controller teams were reconstructed based on a concept of distributed cognition. The analysis revealed that the mutual belief model is applicable to team cooperation processes, the role assignment of tasks within a controller team is implicit and that control plans are implemented smoothly once team situation awareness has been established. A cognitive model of controllers?? team cooperation has been constructed based on these findings.     

Growth of Al2O3 whiskers by vapour-phase reactions

Needle-like or wool-like Al₂O₃ whiskers can be grown on a substrate by the hydrolysis of aluminium fluoride vapour. Effects of the growth conditions on the morphology of the crystals and growth processes of the whisker were investigated, and the optimum growth condition of whiskers was examined. Adequate vapour pressure conditions of the reactant gases for the growth of the wool-like whisker were found to be . Aluminium oxyfluoride was assumed to be the most probable intermediate species for the growth of Al₂O₃ whiskers. A variety of crystal morphologies are also shown and described with respect to the experimental conditions.     

MiR-10a in Pancreatic Juice as a Biomarker for Invasive Intraductal Papillary Mucinous Neoplasm by miRNA Sequencing

New biomarkers are needed to further stratify the risk of malignancy in intraductal papillary mucinous neoplasm (IPMN). Although microRNAs (miRNAs) are expected to be stable biomarkers, they can vary owing to a lack of definite internal controls. To identify universal biomarkers for invasive IPMN, we performed miRNA sequencing using tumor-normal paired samples. A total of 19 resected tissues and 13 pancreatic juice samples from 32 IPMN patients were analyzed for miRNA expression by next-generation sequencing with a two-step normalization of miRNA sequence data. The miRNAs involved in IPMN associated with invasive carcinoma were identified from this tissue analysis and further verified with the pancreatic juice samples. From the tumor-normal paired tissue analysis of the expression levels of 2792 miRNAs, 20 upregulated and 17 downregulated miRNAs were identified. In IPMN associated with invasive carcinoma (INV), miR-10a-5p and miR-221-3p were upregulated and miR-148a-3p was downregulated when compared with noninvasive IPMN. When these findings were further validated with pancreatic juice samples, miR-10a-5p was found to be elevated in INV (p = 0.002). Therefore, three differentially expressed miRNAs were identified in tissues with INV, and the expression of miR-10a-5p was also elevated in pancreatic juice samples with INV. MiR-10a-5p is a promising additional biomarker for invasive IPMN.     

Identification of SYS1 as a Host Factor Required for Shiga Toxin-Mediated Cytotoxicity in Vero Cells

Shiga toxin (STx) or Vero toxin is a virulence factor produced by enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli. The toxin binds to the glycosphingolipid globotriaosylceramide (Gb3) for its entry, and causes cell death by inhibiting ribosome function. Previously, we performed a loss-of-function screen in HeLa cells using a human CRISPR knockout (KO) library and identified various host genes required for STx-induced cell death. To determine whether this library targeted to the human genome is applicable to non-human primate cells and to identify previously unrecognized factors crucial for STx-induced cell death, we herein performed a similar screen in the African green monkey kidney-derived Vero C1008 subline. Many genes relevant to metabolic enzymes and membrane trafficking were enriched, although the number of enriched genes was less than that obtained in the screening for HeLa cells. Of note, several genes that had not been enriched in the previous screening were enriched: one of these genes was SYS1, which encodes a multi-spanning membrane protein in the Golgi apparatus. In SYS1 KO Vero cells, expression of Gb3 and sphingomyelin was decreased, while that of glucosylceramide and lactosylceramide was increased. In addition, loss of SYS1 inhibited the biosynthesis of protein glycans, deformed the Golgi apparatus, and perturbed the localization of trans-Golgi network protein (TGN) 46. These results indicate that the human CRISPR KO library is applicable to Vero cell lines, and SYS1 has a widespread effect on glycan biosynthesis via regulation of intra-Golgi and endosome–TGN retrograde transports.     

PTCR Characteristics in Barium Titanate Ceramics with Curie Points Between 60° and 360°C

PTCR characteristics in porous semiconducting barium titanate ceramics with Curie points from 60° to 360°C were investigated. The magnitude of the PTCR effect in these cerumics decreases self-onsistently with increasing Curie point within this temperature range. A PTCR efSect of more than 4 orders of magnitude was ahserved, for a Ba_0.44Pb_0.6TiO₃ ceramic with a Curie point of 360°C .     

Domain Adaptation for Structured Regression

Discriminative regression models have proved effective for many vision applications (here we focus on 3D full-body and head pose estimation from image and depth data). However, dataset bias is common and is able to significantly degrade the performance of a trained model on target test sets. As we show, covariate shift, a form of unsupervised domain adaptation (USDA), can be used to address certain biases in this setting, but is unable to deal with more severe structural biases in the data. We propose an effective and efficient semi-supervised domain adaptation (SSDA) approach for addressing such more severe biases in the data. Proposed SSDA is a generalization of USDA, that is able to effectively leverage labeled data in the target domain when available. Our method amounts to projecting input features into a higher dimensional space (by construction well suited for domain adaptation) and estimating weights for the training samples based on the ratio of test and train marginals in that space. The resulting augmented weighted samples can then be used to learn a model of choice, alleviating the problems of bias in the data; as an example, we introduce SSDA twin Gaussian process regression (SSDA-TGP) model. With this model we also address the issue of data sharing, where we are able to leverage samples from certain activities (e.g., walking, jogging) to improve predictive performance on very different activities (e.g., boxing). In addition, we analyze the relationship between domain similarity and effectiveness of proposed USDA versus SSDA methods. Moreover, we propose a computationally efficient alternative to TGP (Bo and Sminchisescu 2010), and it’s variants, called the direct TGP. We show that our model outperforms a number of baselines, on two public datasets: HumanEva and ETH Face Pose Range Image Dataset. We can also achieve 8–15 times speedup in computation time, over the traditional formulation of TGP, using the proposed direct formulation, with little to no loss in performance.