Global warming (due to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere) has attracted much attention. Yet, predicting trends in the Earth's climate remains difficult. A more sophisticated and accurate Global Warming model can be obtained by reconstructing climatic change since the Industrial Revolution, and other past periods of warming. To this end, a promising area of research in marine science is coral skeletal climatology, which offers a unique method for accurately reconstructing marine temperature and saline concentration over the past several hundred years, with a high temporal resolution (ca. 2 weeks) based on chemical and isotope analysis of long-lived coral skeletons. This method has been successfully applied to the Little Ice Age around the 18th century and the mid-Pliocene warming period of 3.5 million years ago. It can also be applied to biological and environment studies on massive coral bleaching events caused by unusually high oceanic temperature levels and other environmental issues such as ocean acidification.

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Natural gas hydrates off the shores of Japan are valuable resources for the country. To utilize these resources, it is necessary to establish a gas production technology and investigate suitable conditions for extraction of methane from methane hydrate reservoirs. While core-scale dissociation experiments yield reproducible results on how methane hydrate dissociates under various conditions, a production test at a real gas field would provide information about the type of dissociation phenomena occurring in a geological reservoir field. The performance of natural gas production from methane hydrate reservoirs is dependent upon the size and characteristics of reservoirs, such as temperature and permeability. In other words, while a core-scale dissociation test in a laboratory can demonstrate the heat transport process, dissociation in an actual reservoir is dominated by the material flow process. Thus, I believe that it is important to couple data obtained from core-scale tests with the results of field-scale tests by using a large-scale laboratory reactor in which dissociation experiments can be conducted under similar conditions to the actual reservoir. In this paper, I report the goals of the Methane Hydrate Research and Development Program being conducted by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, Japan, and describe the research objective of a large-scale laboratory reactor for methane hydrate production tests at MHRC (Methane Hydrate Research Center) of AIST (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology).

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Integrated optimization of production in the steel industry to simultaneously minimize lead time and improve productivity is a real challenge. Lean manufacturing, recognized as a leading successful example of such optimization, is characterized by synchronization of time scale of production with that of the mainline. However, in the steel industry, it is inherently difficult to implement synchronization and reduction of production time to the same degree as in the automobile industry. This difficulty motivated our method for integrated optimization of production at the plant level in the steel industry, by modeling the production control as a multi-scale hierarchical structure in time. This paper describes an attempt to systematize production knowledge in industry by a synthesis of practical knowledge (of shop-floor engineers) and company experiences.

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Various “ unexpected ” situations caused by the Great East Japan Earthquake severely hampered disaster-control systems of Japanese national and local governments. A flexible framework for disaster information systems that is reorganizable depending on circumstances is required to mitigate such serious situations. In this article, I propose the concept of “ loose linkages ” of information systems based on data mediation and a platform for disaster mitigation information sharing. The platform enables us to link various systems quickly, so that we can reconstruct disaster information systems according to various situations in major disasters. I found that the concept was effective for the Great East Japan Earthquake along with various ad-hoc activities of information volunteers. We should spread this concept and platform to Japanese national and local governments, and support organizations to prepare for future disasters.

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Metal spinning is a plastic forming method in which rotating metal material is pushed by a roller to form a product. It is suitable for production of a wide variety of products in small quantities due to low cost forming dies. We have achieved fabrication of non-axisymmetric shapes by using robot technology, which was difficult to realize by conventional methods. A prototype of a practical spinning machine has been developed in collaboration with a spinning machinery manufacturer. In this research, we have basically set preference for commercial realization over academic contribution. This research was carried out in a bottom-up and trial-and-error manner, and the targets of this research were frequently modified depending on the situation. Bricolage, utilizing the combination of available and limited resources at hand, has played a key role in the research activity. Decision-making has reflected Three-actuality theory, which values actual field site, actual material, and actuality. We have added the increase of customer satisfaction to the criteria of value and have set the sales activities as a part of the research.

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[in Japanese]

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