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Fatty pancreas (FP) is characterized by pancreatic fat accumulation and the subsequent development of pancreatic and metabolic complications. However, FP has not been categorized in the manual for abdominal ultrasound in cancer screening and health check-ups in Japan, and the pathology of FP has not been fully elucidated. Nine hundred and nineteen people who underwent a medical check-up had the severity of their pancreatic fat accumulation categorized after transabdominal ultrasonographic examination. The relationships between FP, lifestyle-related diseases, and fatty liver disease at this time were assessed using stratification analysis. The prevalence of FP was 46.8% (430/919). People with FP were more likely to be male and had higher prevalences of lifestyle-related diseases, including fatty liver disease. Men and women were similarly represented in each tertile of pancreas brightness. Older age; high waist circumference, triglyceride and glucose index, serum low-density lipoprotein-cholesterol, hepatic steatosis index; and low serum amylase were associated with the presence of severe FP. Moreover, the group with severe liver steatosis had a higher prevalence of FP and a higher pancreatic brightness score. Logistic regression analysis showed that individuals with liver steatosis were more likely to have severe FP. The severity of FP is associated with features of lifestyle-related diseases and the severity of liver steatosis. These findings suggest that high visceral fat content is associated with more severe fatty pancreas as a phenotype of ectopic fat accumulation, as well as fatty liver disease.

The standard chemotherapies for neuroendocrine tumors (NETs) are somatostatin analog (SSA) and targeted-agents for NET G1/G2 and platinum-based chemotherapy for neuroendocrine carcinoma (NEC), classified according to the WHO criteria of 2010. We report a case of NET, in which tumors were successfully treated with platinum-containing chemotherapy after remarkable progression with SSA. A 46-year-old man with multiple lymph nodes and liver metastases of unknown primary origin was diagnosed with NET G2 based on the examination of a biopsy specimen. His tumors were stable with SSA for a year, but rapidly became enlarged. A second biopsy revealed NEC. He received cisplatin plus etoposide, and his tumors showed a marked reduction in size.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to present a novel therapeutic strategy combining use of intracellular magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) under an alternating magnetic field (AMF) and bleomycin (BLM), and to evaluate its therapeutic effect using tumor-bearing mice. Materials and Methods: MNPs (Resovist?, 1.05 mg iron) were incorporated into the hemagglutinating virus of Japan-envelope (HVJ-E) vector (~5 × 109 particles) (HVJ-E/MNPs) by centrifugation at 10,000 × g for 5 min at 4°C. Tumor-bearing mice were prepared by inoculating Colon-26 cells subcutaneously into the backs of BALB/c mice. When the tumor volume reached ~100 mm3, HVJ-E/MNPs and/or BLM were injected directly into the tumor. The AMF was applied to the mice one hour after the injection of agents (AMF treatment). The mice injected with HVJ-E/MNPs were imaged using our magnetic particle imaging (MPI) scanner immediately (13 min) before, immediately (22 min) after, and 3, 7, and 14 days after the injection of agents, and the temporal changes of the average and maximum MPI pixel values in the tumor were quantitatively evaluated. The therapeutic effect was evaluated by calculating the relative tumor volume growth (RTVG) from the tumor volumes measured each day. Transmission electron microscopic (TEM) observation of resected tumors was also performed to confirm the intracellular distribution of MNPs. Results: The AMF treatment combined with BLM significantly decreased the RTVG value compared with AMF treatment alone at 9 to 14 days, and BLM alone at 3 to 5 days after AMF treatment. The average and maximum MPI pixel values in the tumor were almost constant for 14 days. TEM observation confirmed that most of the HVJ-E/MNPs were internalized into tumor cells within one hour after injection. Conclusion: A novel therapeutic strategy with use of AMF treatment and BLM was presented, and the time-dependent change of MNPs in tumors was evaluated using MPI. The present results suggest that this novel strategy can suppress tumor volume growth over AMF treatment or BLM alone, and can be performed repeatedly with a single injection of HVJ-E/MNPs. They also suggest that HVJ-E is effective for internalizing MNPs into cancer cells and that MPI allows for longitudinal monitoring of the distribution of MNPs in tumors.

Many countries have implemented national climate policies to accomplish pledged Nationally Determined Contributions and to contribute to the temperature objectives of the Paris Agreement on climate change. In 2023, the global stocktake will assess the combined effort of countries. Here, based on a public policy database and a multi-model scenario analysis, we show that implementation of current policies leaves a median emission gap of 22.4 to 28.2 GtCO2eq by 2030 with the optimal pathways to implement the well below 2 °C and 1.5 °C Paris goals. If Nationally Determined Contributions would be fully implemented, this gap would be reduced by a third. Interestingly, the countries evaluated were found to not achieve their pledged contributions with implemented policies (implementation gap), or to have an ambition gap with optimal pathways towards well below 2 °C. This shows that all countries would need to accelerate the implementation of policies for renewable technologies, while efficiency improvements are especially important in emerging countries and fossil-fuel-dependent countries.

This paper explores the consequences of different policy assumptions and the derivation of globally consistent, national low-carbon development pathways for the seven largest greenhouse gas (GHG)–emitting countries (EU28 as a bloc) in the world, covering approximately 70% of global CO2 emissions, in line with their contributions to limiting global average temperature increase to well below 2 °C as compared with pre-industrial levels. We introduce the methodology for developing these pathways by initially discussing the process by which global integrated assessment model (IAM) teams interacted and derived boundary conditions in the form of carbon budgets for the different countries. Carbon budgets so derived for the 2011–2050 period were then used in eleven different national energy-economy models and IAMs for producing low-carbon pathways for the seven countries in line with a well below 2 °C world up to 2050. We present a comparative assessment of the resulting pathways and of the challenges and opportunities associated with them. Our results indicate quite different mitigation pathways for the different countries, shown by the way emission reductions are split between different sectors of their economies and technological alternatives.

4-story steel-frame office building was designed having approximately a rectangular plan of 50 m × 40 m (span 9.6m, 5 spans × 4 spans) in Osaka, Japan. Here, there is a risk of large-scaled earthquakes (subduction-zone earthquake and local earthquake which occurs directly underneath), and high earthquake resistance performance and flexibility as office building were required. Therefore, we designed rigid-framed structures without a brace inside the building and provided seismic elements in only outside frames. One pair of K-type buckling restraint braces and one viscoelastic damper with K-type steel braces are set up for each outside frame on each floor considering the eccentricity of this building. This viscoelastic damper controls the seismic response by the damping due to the response velocity and restrains the residual deformation of each story by ist elastic component. In addition, the viscoelastic damper functions as a fail-safe by ist hardening under the large deformation, preventing collapse under large-scaled earthquake exceeding assumptions. We show the advantage of this type of building in terms of resilience and redundancy with structural analysis results.

The standard chemotherapies for neuroendocrine tumors (NETs) are somatostatin analog (SSA) and targeted-agents for NET G1/G2 and platinum-based chemotherapy for neuroendocrine carcinoma (NEC), classified according to the WHO criteria of 2010. We report a case of NET, in which tumors were successfully treated with platinum-containing chemotherapy after remarkable progression with SSA. A 46-year-old man with multiple lymph nodes and liver metastases of unknown primary origin was diagnosed with NET G2 based on the examination of a biopsy specimen. His tumors were stable with SSA for a year, but rapidly became enlarged. A second biopsy revealed NEC. He received cisplatin plus etoposide, and his tumors showed a marked reduction in size.

New results from MAST are presented that focus on validating models in order to extrapolate to future devices. Measurements during start-up experiments have shown how the bulk ion temperature rise scales with the square of the reconnecting field. During the current ramp up models are not able to correctly predict the current diffusion. Experiments have been performed looking at edge and core turbulence. At the edge detailed studies have revealed how filament characteristic are responsible for determining the near and far SOL density profiles. In the core the intrinsic rotation and electron scale turbulence have been measured. The role that the fast ion gradient has on redistributing fast ions through fishbone modes has led to a redesign of the neutral beam injector on MAST Upgrade. In H-mode the turbulence at the pedestal top has been shown to be consistent with being due to electron temperature gradient modes. A reconnection process appears to occur during ELMs and the number of filaments released determines the power profile at the divertor. Resonant magnetic perturbations can mitigate ELMs provided the edge peeling response is maximised and the core kink response minimised. The mitigation of intrinsic error fields with toroidal mode number n>1 has been shown to be important for plasma performance., 34 pages, 10 figures. This is an author-created, un-copyedited version of an article submitted for publication in Nuclear Fusion. IoP Publishing Ltd is not responsible for any errors or omissions in this version of the manuscript or any version derived from it

This paper describes an innovative method to machine the guide rails for elevators in high efficiency and high accuracy. Guide rails are usually machined on a planer. However, the machining time is long because of the useless return motion of the table and low cutting speeds. In order to decrease the machining time, face milling with combined cutters was applied to the machining of guide faces. The trial face milling of guide rails indicated the reduction of the width of guide rails at the tool exit and deterioration of the perpendicularity of guide faces. Thus, in this research, the machining mechanism affecting the accuracy of the machined surfaces was studied. The analytical and experimental results revealed that cutter path deviation from the center of a guide rail affects the width reduction at the exit part of the guide rail, whilst the clamping stiffness of the guide rail has a much greater influence on the perpendicularity of the guide face than the cutter path deviation. It was also found that change in the number of cutting edges engaged in machining simultaneously caused wavy machined surface with a long wave length. Finally, determined based on the above findings were the critical tool path deviation and critical clamping stiffness, which permitted the efficient machining of the guide rails at a high cutting speed of 267m/min and a high feed rate of more than 1000mm/min, decreasing machining time by a factor of six.