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The purpose of this study is to investigate barriers experienced by dental students when choosing professional careers. An anonymous online survey with eight questions extracted from the annual American Dental Education Association Survey for U.S. dental school seniors (UDS) and two Japan-specific questions was given to Japanese dental school seniors (JDS) in 2019, 2020, and 2021. The results were compared to UDS data. This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Harvard Medical School and included 1053 respondents. The parental education and income levels of JDS were higher than UDS, and educational debt of JDS was lower than UDS. The top reason for choosing dentistry for JDS was influence and expectation from family members, while the top reason for UDS was service to others. Although both groups showed interest in teaching in academia, the majority chose to enter private practice immediately post-graduation, and would consider teaching during their mid or late career. Barriers for dental students staying in academia varied between the two countries. For JDS, the main barrier was an anxiety around stable income. For UDS, it was their educational debt. Dental educators and policymakers need to consider these barriers to improve the sustainability of dental students choosing an academic career path.

This paper aims to clarify the talents and tastes of James Barry, R. A. (1741-1806), a Corkborn Irish Catholic “forgotten” painter, flourishing around the second half of the eighteenth century. We predominantly discuss his masterpiece portrait of Christopher Nugent, M. D., exhibited in 1773 at the London Royal Academy regarding the following points: 1) his patrons and mentors by the Burkes, 2) his continental Grand Tour in France and Italy, and 3) his evaluation at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. First, we explore the tripartite relationship among James Barry, Edmund Burke (1729-57), and Dr. Nugent (1698-1775). The sitter, old Nugent, was a famous Irish Catholic physician and Burke’s father-in-law. He was a member of the Burke family in London. They were all involved in the “Cork-Catholic connection.” Second, Edmund Burke had taken Barry to London from Ireland, and his Grand Tour was financially and mentally managed by Burke and his family in London, including Dr. Nugent. Third, after his seven-year-Grand Tour, Barry was appointed as a full Royal Academician in 1773 and exhibited a pair of the gentleman portraits of Dr. Nugent and Giuseppe Baretti, a learned Italian scholar in the same year. In the 1780s, Barry successfully received the professorship of painting at the Royal Academy and gave some lectures to students, which were not unsystematic, but extensive and illuminating to the young. Barry rejected the academic “grand manner” or “great style” established by the first R. A. president, Sir Joshua Reynolds. Unlike Reynolds, Barry finally pursued the unity of all aesthetical categories: beauty, grace, and the sublime, reflecting all the tastes of various people. Consequently, Barry was to have a relationship not only with Neo-classism, but also with Romanticism, employing social criticism with thorny satire. He became interested in large paintings such as “public art.” We conclude that the portrait of Dr. Nugent is a small-sized and personal piece with skillful delicacy. The virtue of charity or mercifulness with the old scholar is crystallized on its surface by the painter’s brush. During Barry’s painter life, this small portrait was not overwhelming and epoch-making one like his other huge “public” paintings, but one of the most fascinating and moving ones in expressing his personal affections in the utmost skills that he had learned through his Grand Tour., 本稿は、平成24～26年度のKAKEN-HI（No. 24652033）に基づく研究成果の一部である。

This paper is a final report on the symposium entitled “Joint Performance by Hiroshima University, Art Museum, and Artist in Higashihiroshima City”. This event was a part of the memorial seminar series in the establishment of the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Hiroshima University, held on December 11, 2021. The symposium was hosted by an organizer and facilitator: Hideki Kuwajima (Hiroshima University). There were two guest panelists: Aya Fujioka (Photographer) and Hiroshi Matsuda (Higashihiroshima City Museum of Art); and a special commentator from our institution: Toshihisa Asano (Hiroshima University). The topics of discussion were as follows: 1. purpose explanation and problem presentation of the event, 2. introduction of individual cases in the positions of an artist and a museum officer working in the Hiroshima area, and 3. special comments and responses based upon the eco-museum activities at the university museum of us.

The existent research details pedagogical benefits of infographics in enhancing communication, comprehension, learning, and motivation, while more research on the potential educational benefits of using infographics is needed regarding their application in second language acquisition. The aim of this study was specifically to investigate the effects of using infographics as a supplemental teaching tool in EFL classes with a focus on learning outcomes and English learning motivation. The study was conducted in two lower-intermediate English classes at a Japanese university. An infographic of the grammar points of simple past/past continuous was designed and applied as a supplement to the textbook-related content. One class was taught in a textbook-infographic order and the other vice versa. Participants’ understanding of the target grammar points and English learning motivation were measured. The findings suggested that students were able to learn effectively using the provided infographics, but it is more effective to use infographics after the textbook teaching. Students showed higher English language learning motivation after the interventions and a high interest in using infographics in their English language course. Teaching advices on using infographics in EFL classes were discussed. Article visualizations

SMN is a ubiquitously expressed protein and is essential for life. SMN deficiency causes the neurodegenerative disease spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), the leading genetic cause of infant mortality. SMN interacts with itself and other proteins to form a complex that functions in the assembly of ribonucleoproteins. SMN is modified by SUMO (Small Ubiquitin-like Modifier), but whether sumoylation is required for the functions of SMN that are relevant to SMA pathogenesis is not known. Here, we show that inactivation of a SUMO-interacting motif (SIM) alters SMN sub-cellular distribution, the integrity of its complex, and its function in small nuclear ribonucleoproteins biogenesis. Expression of a SIM-inactivated mutant of SMN in a mouse model of SMA slightly extends survival rate with limited and transient correction of motor deficits. Remarkably, although SIM-inactivated SMN attenuates motor neuron loss and improves neuromuscular junction synapses, it fails to prevent the loss of sensory-motor synapses. These findings suggest that sumoylation is important for proper assembly and function of the SMN complex and that loss of this post-translational modification impairs the ability of SMN to correct selective deficits in the sensory-motor circuit of SMA mice., Sumoylation is important for the assembly and function of the SMN complex, which plays a central role in RNA processing. Here the authors show that loss of this posttranslational modification impairs the ability of SMN to correct selective deficits in the sensory-motor circuit of animal models of spinal muscular atrophy.

Connectomics is generating an ever-increasing deluge of data, which challenges us to develop new methods for analyzing and extracting insights from these data. We introduce here a powerful method for analyzing three-dimensional reconstruction from serial section electron microscopy (3DEM) to measure synaptic information storage capacity (SISC) and apply it to data followingin vivolong-term potentiation (LTP). Connectomic researchers have focused on the pattern of connectivity between neurons. The strengths of synapses have also been studied by quantifying the sizes of synapses. Importantly, synapses from the same axon onto the same dendrite have a common history of coactivation, making them a candidate for measuring the precision of synaptic plasticity based on the similarity of their dimensions. Quantifying precision is fundamental to understanding information storage and retrieval in neural circuits. We quantify this precision with Shannon information theory, which is a more reliable estimate than prior analyses based on signal detection theory because there is no overlap between states, and outliers do not artificially bias the outcome. Spine head volumes are well correlated with other measures of synaptic weight, thus SISC can be determined by identifying the non-overlapping clusters of dendritic spine head volumes to determine the number of distinguishable synaptic weights. SISC analysis of spine head volumes in the stratum radiatum of hippocampal area CA1 revealed 24 distinguishable states (4.1 bits). In contrast, spine head volumes in the middle molecular layer of control dentate gyrus occupied only 5 distinguishable states (2 bits). Thus, synapses in different hippocampal regions had significantly different SISCs. Moreover, these were not fixed properties but increased by 30 min following induction of LTP in the dentate gyrus to occupy 10 distinguishable states (3 bits), and this increase lasted for at least 2 hours. We also observed a broader and nearly uniform distribution of spine head volumes across the increased number of states, suggesting the distribution evolved towards the theoretical upper bound of SISC following LTP. For dentate granule cells these findings show that the spine size range was broadened by the interplay among synaptic plasticity mechanisms. SISC provides a new analytical measure to probe these mechanisms in normal and diseased brains.