The term alkaliphile is used for microorganisms that grow optimally or very well at pH values above 9, but cannot grow or grow only slowly at the near neutral pH value of 6.5. Alkaliphiles include prokaryotes, eukaryotes, and archaea. Alkaliphiles can be isolated from normal environments such as garden soil, although viable counts of alkaliphiles are higher in samples from alkaline environments. The cell surface plays a key role in keeping the intracellular pH value in the range between 7 and 8.5, allowing alkaliphiles to thrive in alkaline environments. Alkaliphiles have made a great impact in industrial applications. Biological detergents contain alkaline enzymes, such as alkaline cellulases and/or alkaline proteases that have been produced from alkaliphiles. Another important application is the industrial production of cyclodextrin with alkaline cyclomaltodextrin glucanotransferase. This enzyme reduced the production cost and paved the way for cyclodextrin use in large quantities in foodstuffs, chemicals and pharmaceuticals. It has also been reported that alkali-treated wood pulp could be biologically bleached by xylanases produced by alkaliphiles.

(Communicated by Masanao MATSUI, M.J.A.)

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In this paper, we describe the information transmission system that uses the contact between users and ball devices as an information channel in interactive contents. When the ball device with built-in transmitter comes in contact with the user who wear the receiver, this system transmits information with the human body communication through user's body. We aim at the improvement of the augmentation of the interaction in such a way that presenting information on user's body according to the contact between each ball device and each user by this method. This system also enables use in a wide range field in the same network by managing contact information of both collectively. We realize the application development mixed the contents environment of the real world with the virtual space by regarding ball devices as input interface. Moreover, we developed a interactive game content intended for children with this system, and conduct a user study.

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The cell-immobilization technique is used for the physical and chemical fixation of cells onto a solid support in order to increase their stability and capacity of substrate uptake. However, there is no apparatus to observe the microbial community's structure inside cell immobilizing polymeric carrier. In order to satisfy the demand of monitoring for the microbial distribution inside the carrier, we developed an automatic phase contrast microscopic monitoring system capable of determining the microbial density and distribution inside a cell-entrapped carrier automatically.

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meta-Cleavage dioxygenase genes were isolated from the benzoate-assimilating bacteria Pseudomonas stutzeri A401 and Pseudomonas mendocina KC37. The gene products had the enzymatic activity of 2, 3-dihydroxy-biphenyl-1, 2-dioxygenase. Phylogenetic analysis based on the alignment of amino acid sequences suggests that these enzymes are distantly related to other metacleavage enzymes and may be members of a new family of extradiol dioxygenases.

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We report on the superhydrophobicity of self-organized surfaces of polyethylene (PE) nanowire arrays that are fabricated by a nano-injection moulding technique. The highly-aligned PE nanofibers with high aspect ratio are formed after the infiltration of polymer melts into the alumina nanopores by wetting action and fluid vibrational perturbation. The self-organized surfaces of polymer nanowire arrays are found to have micro-to-nanoscale hierarchical nanostructures, and have superhydrophobicity of >150° contact angles. The present superhydrophobic surfaces may be quite promising due to its simple but massive production with high quality.

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The performance of speech translation systems combining automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation (MT) systems is degraded by redundant and irrelevant information caused by speaker disfluency and recognition errors. This paper proposes a new approach to translating speech recognition results through speech consolidation, which removes ASR errors and disfluencies and extracts meaningful phrases. A consolidation approach is spun off from speech summarization by word extraction from ASR 1-best. We extended the consolidation approach for confusion network (CN) and tested the performance using TED speech and confirmed the consolidation results preserved more meaningful phrases in comparison with the original ASR results. We applied the consolidation technique to speech translation. To test the performance of consolidation-based speech translation, Chinese broadcast news (BN) speech in RT04 were recognized, consolidated and then translated. The speech translation results via consolidation cannot be directly compared with gold standards in which all words in speech are translated because consolidation-based translations are partial translations. We would like to propose a new evaluation framework for partial translation by comparing them with the most similar set of words extracted from a word network created by merging gradual summarizations of the gold standard translation. The performance of consolidation-based MT results was evaluated using BLEU. We also propose Information Preservation Accuracy (IPAccy) and Meaning Preservation Accuracy (MPAccy) to evaluate consolidation and consolidation-based MT. We confirmed that consolidation contributed to the performance of speech translation.

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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of the ambient pressure on the overall spray characteristics of dimethyl ether (DME) and biodiesel fuel spray in a high-pressure combustion chamber. In order to investigate the spray performance under the various ambient pressure conditions, the high-pressure combustion chamber, which can be controlled by nitrogen gas to obtain the ambient pressure conditions, was applied. To determine the macroscopic structure of the spray, such as the spray development process and the axial/radial distance, frozen images of the spray can be obtained directly using a high-speed camera with a light source according to the elapsed time after energizing begins. At the same time, the results from the DME and biodiesel spray under atmospheric conditions were compared with the results from the spray under various ambient pressure conditions in the chamber. According to the spray characteristics, the axial and maximum radial distances of the biodiesel and DME spray decreased with an increase in the ambient pressure. Also, it was shown that the SMD (Sauter mean diameter) of droplets becomes smaller than that of the spray under the atmosphere condition as the ambient pressure in the high pressure chamber increases.

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With the increasing requirements for charging speed of portable electronic products and the demand for portable performance, the fast-charging adapter industry is facing challenges. Adapters mainly have the problems of being too large in volume, low power density and low charging efficiency. This paper introduces an ultra-density adaptor for type-c power delivery (PD) applications. The principle of active clamp flyback converter (ACF) is explained briefly. Advanced technology with Gallium nitride (GaN) devices and novel ACF controller are applied. Power density is increased by current mirror integration method. It can achieve high efficiency, especially at low line input. Finally, a 28.4cc 65W prototype based on GaN Power IC and ACF controller was made with EMI CE passing. The efficiency at full load reaches about 93% with current mirror integration method.

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リスクマネジメントはプロジェクトの開始から終了までの不確定要素によって生じるブレや問題を予め予測し,その影響がプロジェクトの成功に及ぼす影響をコントロールするマネジメント活動であり,リスクの特定,評価,対策(アクションプラン)と実行結果のモニタリングからなる一連のマネジメント活動である.しかしプロジェクトを取り巻く環境変化が激しい現代において,リスクを予め特定する事さえ難しく,リスクへの対策が第2,第3の新たなリスクを誘発する恐れもある.それにも関わらず,実際に行われているリスクマネジメント活動はリスクへの対応策の影響分析が,ほとんどされないのが一般的である.本稿はプロジェクトのリスクマネジメントにおいて,システム思考の考え方ををとりいれてリスクへのアクションプランが及ぼす影響までを対象とするリスクマネジメントを提案する.

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This work is to simulate the droplet interactions and collision in spray-to-spray systems except for the jet-to-jet of liquid fuel and jet dispersion induced by mutual impingement. In the spray field, the realistic collision event results in various possible collision regimes, for instance bouncing, coalescence, reflexive separation, and stretching separation. Especially in the dense spray systems like inter-spray impingement systems, atomization characteristics is outcome of competition between these collision event and the droplet breakup. Therefore, in order to simulate the dense spray systems with accuracy, it is necessary to consider as many collision outcomes as possible. Hence, the aim of the current study is to evaluate the predictive model for binary droplet collisions. To get the goal of the study, the atomization characteristics of the inter-spray systems was simulated by using the KIVA code which adopts a collision model that considers the possible collision outcomes.

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In order to establish a system to facilitate the systematic collection, preservation, and provision of laboratory rats (Rattus norvegicus) and their derivates, the National BioResource Project-Rat (NBRP-Rat) was launched in July 2002. By the end of 2008, more than 500 rat strains had been collected and preserved as live animals, embryos, or sperm. These rat resources are supplied to biomedical scientists in Japan as well as in other countries. This review article introduces NBRP-Rat and highlights the phenome project, recombinant inbred strains, BAC clone libraries, and the ENU-mutant archive, named the Kyoto University Rat Mutant Archive (KURMA). The future direction of rat resources are also discussed.

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We previously found that cathepsin K (CTSK) played an important role in adipocyte differentiation. However, the underlying molecular mechanism is not clear. Through the time window study, it was observed that CTSK activities were required mainly in the early phases of adipogenic process. At the same time, the expression of type I collagen disappeared. However, type I collagen can still be observed during the whole process when the CTSK inhibitor-E64 was added. The mRNA levels of peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor γ (PPAR- γ) and CCAAT/enhancer binding protein α (C/EBP- α) was also declining. These imply that CTSK may play a role in adipogenesis in early differentiation phases and produce an effect at least partly by degrading type I collagen, which may provides a basis for developing novel therapeutic approaches to treat obesity and the diseases associated with it.

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Purpose: The objective of this study was to evaluate renal function and pathologic injury in chronic kidney disease (CKD) using T1 mapping.

Methods: We recruited fifteen healthy volunteers (HV) and seventy-five CKD patients to undergo T1 mapping examination, and renal parenchymal T1 values were measured. Spearman correlation analysis was used to evaluate the relevance between the pathologic injury score, estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR), and renal parenchymal T1 values. The diagnostic efficiency of T1 value in evaluating renal pathologic impairment was assessed.

Results: In all subjects, renal cortical T1 value was remarkably lower than renal medullary T1 value (P < 0.01). The renal medullary T1 value of HV was considerably lower than that of CKD patients in all stages (P < 0.05). The T1 values were negatively correlated with eGFR (cortex, r = –0.718; medulla, r = –0.645). The T1 values were positively correlated with glomerular injury score (cortex, r = 0.692; medulla, r = 0.632), tubulointerstitial injury score (cortex, r = 0.758; medulla, r = 0.690) (all P < 0.01). The area under the curve (AUC) of renal cortical and medullary T1 values were 0.914 and 0.880 to distinguish moderate–severe from mild renal injury groups. To differentiate mild renal injury group from control group, the AUC values of renal cortical and medullary T1 values were 0.879 and 0.856.

Conclusion: T1 mapping has potential application value in non-invasively assessing renal pathologic injury in CKD.

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Nitrate and its precursor (gaseous HNO₃) in China are generally overestimated by current chemical transport models in comparison to in-situ observations. In this study, we used an observation-based box model and in-situ measurements at a rural site in southern China to investigate possible missing sinks of nitrate. We found that a heterogeneous reaction of HNO₃ to NO_x on soot can better balance the NO_x/HNO₃ chemistry in models and improve model performance with regard to nitrate, particularly where an additional HONO source (the heterogeneous reaction of NO₂ on soot) is incorporated into current models. Through a series of sensitivity simulations, the uptake coefficients of heterogeneous reactions were suggested to be 3.0 × 10⁻³ and 1 × 10⁻⁴ for HNO₃ and HONO over southern China in fall, respectively. A 3-D simulation with the suggested uptake coefficients further confirmed that heterogeneous reactions significantly decreased the nitrate concentrations (PNO₃) in southern China, by up to 10 μg m⁻³ (50%-80% of simulated PNO₃) in polluted regions (e.g., the Yangtze River). In contrast to nitrate and HNO₃, NO_x concentrations in China were enhanced, which partly explained the underestimation of NO₂ in current models compared to satellite observations.

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The ectopic expression of transcription factors for reprogramming human somatic cells to a pluripotent state represents a valuable resource for the development of in vitro-based models for human disease and has great potential in regenerative therapies. However, the majority of studies have used skin fibroblasts to generate induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) that typically require the enforced expression of several transcription factors, thereby posing a mutagenesis risk by the insertion of viral transgenes. To reduce this risk, iPSCs have been generated with OCT4 and KLF4 from human neural stem cells that endogenously express the remaining reprogramming factors. However, human neural stem cells are rare and difficult to obtain. Here, we show that iPSCs can be generated from human amniotic fluid cells (hAFCs) with two transcription factors: OCT4 and KLF4. Furthermore, iPSCs can be readily derived from hAFCs in a feeder-free conditions, thereby eliminating the potential variability caused by using feeder cells. Our results indicate that hAFCs represent an accessible source of cells that can be reprogrammed into pluripotent stem cells with two Yamanaka factors. Therefore, hAFCs may become a preferred cell type in the future for safe reprogramming without any exogenous genetic material.

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Vehicle logo detection technology is one of the research directions in the application of intelligent transportation systems. It is an important extension of detection technology based on license plates and motorcycle types. A vehicle logo is characterized by uniqueness, conspicuousness, and diversity. Therefore, thorough research is important in theory and application. Although there are some related works for object detection, most of them cannot achieve real-time detection for different scenes. Meanwhile, some real-time detection methods of single-stage have performed poorly in the object detection of small sizes. In order to solve the problem that the training samples are scarce, our work in this paper is improved by constructing the data of a vehicle logo (VLD-45-S), multi-stage pre-training, multi-scale prediction, feature fusion between deeper with shallow layer, dimension clustering of the bounding box, and multi-scale detection training. On the basis of keeping speed, this article improves the detection precision of the vehicle logo. The generalization of the detection model and anti-interference capability in real scenes are optimized by data enrichment. Experimental results show that the accuracy and speed of the detection algorithm are improved for the object of small sizes.

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