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Abstract Background Imipenem/cilastatin (IPM/CS) has long been administered intravenously as a carbapenem antibiotic. However, since this agent is poorly soluble in liquid, occasional reports have described its use as a short-acting, temporary embolic agent. The purpose of this study was to elucidate the characteristics of IPM/CS particles, which are thought to have pain-relieving effects against osteoarthritis-related pain, as an embolic agent. Methods Three aspects of IPM/CS as an embolic agent were evaluated in vitro: particle size; particle shape; and change in particle size over time. For particle size, the long diameter was measured. Results Mean particle size (n=244) was 29.2±12.0 µm (range, 1–60 µm). Shape (n=109) was round in 18.35%, elliptical in 11.93%, and polygonal in 69.72%, showing that most particles were polygonal. In observations of changes in particle size over time (n=9), particles had decreased to 75% of their original size at 82±10.7 min, 50% at 89.3±9.14 min, 25% at 91.3±8.74 min, complete dissolved at 91.8±9.02 min. A rapid shrinkage in diameter was seen in the final period. Conclusions IPM/CS particles are ultrafine and the majority display a polygonal shape. This substance shows ultra-short embolic activity. This study revealed the characteristics of a substance that demonstrates an embolic effect not found in existing embolic materials.

Observations of tropical cyclones (TC) from aircraft and in situ platforms provide critical and unique information for analyzing and forecasting TC intensity, structure, track, and their associated hazards. This report, prepared for the tenth International Workshop on Tropical Cyclones (IWTC-10), discusses the data collected around the world in TCs over the past four years since the IWTC-9, improvements to observing techniques, new instruments designed to achieve sustained and targeted atmospheric and oceanic observations, and select research results related to these observations.In the Atlantic and Eastern and Central Pacific basins, changes to operational aircraft reconnaissance are discussed along with several of the research field campaigns that have taken place recently. The changes in the use and impact of these aircraft observations in numerical weather prediction models are also provided along with updates on some of the experimental aircraft instrumentation. Highlights from three field campaigns in the Western Pacific basin are also discussed. Examples of in-situ data collected within recent TCs such as Hurricane Ian (2022), also demonstrate that new, emerging technologies and observation strategies reviewed in this report, definitely have the potential to further improve ocean-atmosphere coupled intensity forecasts.

Timely initiation of chromosomal DNA replication in Escherichia coli is achieved by cell cycle-coordinated regulation of the replication origin, oriC, and the replication initiator, ATP-DnaA. Cellular levels of ATP-DnaA increase and peak at the time for initiation at oriC, after which hydrolysis of DnaA-bound ATP causes those to fall, yielding initiation-inactive ADP-DnaA. This hydrolysis is facilitated by the chromosomal locus datA located downstream of the tRNA-Gly (glyV-X-Y) operon, which possesses a cluster of DnaA-binding sequences and a single binding site (IBS) for the DNA bending protein IHF (integration host factor). While IHF binding activates the datA function and is regulated to occur specifically at post-initiation time, the underlying regulatory mechanisms remain obscure. Here, we demonstrate that datA-IHF binding at pre-initiation time is down-regulated depending on the read-through transcription of datA IBS initiated at the glyV-X-Y promoter. During the cell cycle, the level of read-through transcription, but not promoter activity, fluctuated in a manner inversely related to datA-IHF binding. Transcription from the glyV-X-Y promoter was predominantly interrupted at datA IBS by IHF binding. The terminator/attenuator sequence of the glyV-X-Y operon, as well as DnaA binding within datA overall, contributed to attenuation of transcription upstream of datA IBS, preserving the timely fluctuation of read-through transcription. These findings provide a mechanistic insight of tRNA transcription-dependent datA-IHF regulation, in which an unidentified factor is additionally required for the timely datA-IHF dissociation, and support the significance of datA for controlling the cell cycle progression as a connecting hub of tRNA production and replication initiation.

Abstract Although the 6 min walk test (6MWT) is well-established for assessing desaturation in patients with interstitial lung disease (ILD), it cannot be easily performed in primary healthcare settings. This retrospective observational study aimed to evaluate the usefulness of the 1 min sit-to-stand test (1STST) for assessing desaturation during 6MWT in ILD patients with normal resting blood oxygen levels. We included 116 patients, and the pulse oxygen saturation (SpO2) for both methods was analyzed. The SpO2 nadir during the 1STST and 6MWT correlated strongly (ρ = 0.82). The frequency of patients with nadir SpO2

Herein, we report the case of a 73-year-old woman with an occupational history of plaster grinding who developed autoimmune pulmonary alveolar proteinosis (PAP) during the treatment of fibrotic hypersensitivity pneumonitis with steroids and immunosuppressive drugs. Based on the changes in computed tomography imaging findings, poor response to steroid therapy, and markedly elevated KL-6 levels, PAP was suspected and diagnosed by bronchoscopy. Repeated segmental bronchoalveolar lavage under high-flow nasal cannula oxygen therapy resulted in slight improvement. Steroids and immunosuppressive treatments for other interstitial lung diseases may cause PAP or exacerbate latent PAP.

An 87-year-old man presented with dyspnea. Computed tomography revealed progressive subpleural consolidation in the apex, reticular shadows in the lower lobes, and bilateral ground glass opacifications. He died of respiratory failure on day 3. The post-mortem examination showed exudative stage diffuse alveolar damage and pulmonary edema. Intraalveolar collagenous fibrosis and subpleural elastosis were observed in the upper lobes, accompanied by interlobular septal and pleural thickening and lung architecture remodeling in the lower lobes. He was diagnosed with acute exacerbation of pleuroparenchymal fibroelastosis with lower lobe usual interstitial pneumonia, which can be fatal.

This study proposes a security-quality-metrics method tailored for the Internet of things (IoT) and evaluates conformity of the proposed approach with pertinent cybersecurity regulations and guidelines for IoT. Cybersecurity incidents involving IoT devices have recently come to light; consequently, IoT security correspondence has become a necessity. The ISO 25000 series is used for software; however, the concept of security as a quality factor has not been applied to IoT devices. Because software vulnerabilities were not the device vendors’ responsibility as product liability, most vendors did not consider the security capability of IoT devices as part of their quality control. Furthermore, an appropriate IoT security-quality metric for vendors does not exist; instead, vendors have to set their security standards, which lack consistency and are difficult to justify by themselves. To address this problem, the authors propose a universal method for specifying IoT security-quality metrics on a globally accepted scale, inspired by the goal/question/metric (GQM) method. The method enables vendors to verify their products to conform to the requirements of existing baselines and certification programs and to help vendors to tailor their quality requirements to meet the given security requirements. The IoT users would also be able to use these metrics to verify the security quality of IoT devices.

Meteorological variables are often reported by commercial aircraft flying around tropical cyclones (TCs). They are archived in Aircraft Communications, Addressing, and Reporting System/Aircraft Meteorological Data Relay (ACARS/AMDAR). Therefore, they are potentially useful for constructing a composite mean structure of TCs based on in-situ measurements. The number of temperature and wind observations are 4.0 × 106 and 1.0 × 104 within the radius of 1,200 km and 100 km from the TC center during 2010–2020, respectively. The warm-core potential temperature anomaly with respect to the climatology is 6.4 K, 9.1 K, and 14.4 K maximized around 300 hPa for weak, moderate, and strong TCs, respectively. The composite of the potential temperature anomaly potentially extends more than 1,000 km from the TC center in the upper troposphere, cautioning the typical definition of the environment. The region of significant upper-level positive potential temperature anomalies extends broadly with increasing TC intensity. Moreover, large TCs tend to have a broad and deep upper-level warm core for a given intensity. In addition, we ensured that a single observation of potential temperature around 300 hPa could be used as a proxy for minimum sea level pressure. Low-level inflow and upper-level outflow were detected in the ACARS/AMDAR data.

Abstract Air leakage is a common complication after pulmonary resection, and fibrin glue is used as a sealant to reduce postoperative air leakage. It is generally recognized that fibrin glue‐induced adverse events are rare. Herein, we report a rare case of suspected fibrin glue‐induced acute eosinophilic pneumonia (AEP). A 72‐year‐old man underwent right lower lobectomy and mediastinal lymph node dissection for right lower lung cancer. Fibrin glue was sprayed to cover the interlobar surface of the right upper and middle lobes. On postoperative day 10, computed tomography (CT) revealed ground‐glass shadows around the interlobar surface of the remaining lobes of the right lung. Although antibacterial drugs were administered for suspected bacterial pneumonia, fever spike, shortness of breath, and exacerbation of ground‐glass shadows were observed. Peripheral blood and bronchoalveolar lavage fluid showed increased eosinophil count, supporting the diagnosis of AEP. Pneumonia resolved after prednisolone administration. At one‐year follow‐up, CT showed no AEP recurrence. Drug‐induced pneumonia usually develops in the bilateral lung and rarely in the hemilateral lung. In this case, pneumonia was localized around the site covered with fibrin glue, suggesting fibrin glue‐induced AEP. Thus, the use of fibrin glue should be carefully considered during pulmonary resection.

Abstract In this report, we propose a deep learning technique for high-accuracy estimation of the intensity class of a typhoon from a single satellite image, by incorporating meteorological domain knowledge. By using the Visual Geometric Group’s model, VGG-16, with images preprocessed with fisheye distortion, which enhances a typhoon’s eye, eyewall, and cloud distribution, we achieved much higher classification accuracy than that of a previous study, even with sequential-split validation. Through comparison of t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) plots for the feature maps of VGG with the original satellite images, we also verified that the fisheye preprocessing facilitated cluster formation, suggesting that our model could successfully extract image features related to the typhoon intensity class. Moreover, gradient-weighted class activation mapping (Grad-CAM) was applied to highlight the eye and the cloud distributions surrounding the eye, which are important regions for intensity classification; the results suggest that our model qualitatively gained a viewpoint similar to that of domain experts. A series of analyses revealed that the data-driven approach using only deep learning has limitations, and the integration of domain knowledge could bring new breakthroughs.

Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) are expected to become a practical application of near-term noisy quantum computers. Although the effect of the noise crucially determines whether a VQA works, the heuristic nature of VQAs makes it difficult to establish analytic theories. Analytic estimations of the impact of the noise are urgent for searching for quantum advantages, as numerical simulations of noisy quantum computers on classical computers are heavy and quite limited to small-scale problems. In this paper, we establish analytic estimations of the error in the cost function of VQAs due to the noise. The estimations are applicable to any typical VQAs under Gaussian noise, which is equivalent to a class of stochastic noise models. Notably, depolarizing noise is included in this model. As a result, we obtain estimations of the noise level to guarantee a required precision. Our formulas show how the Hessian of the cost function, the spectrum of the target operator, and the geometry of the ansatz affect the sensitivity to the noise. This insight implies trade-off relations between the trainability and the noise resilience of the cost function. We also obtain rough estimations which can be easily calculated without detailed information of the cost function. As a highlight of the applications of the formula, we propose a quantum error mitigation method which is different from the extrapolation and the probabilistic error cancellation.

Leptin, secreted by adipocytes, directly influences the onset of puberty in mammals. Our previous study showed that leptin stimulation could promote the secretion of follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) and luteinizing hormone (LH) from pituitary cells in primary culture and ovarian development in chub mackerel. This study aimed to elucidate the detailed mechanism of leptin-induced effects on gonadotropin hormone-producing cells. We produced recombinant leptin using silkworm pupae and investigated the effects of leptin on FSH and LH secretion and gene expression in the primary culture of pituitary cells from chub mackerel. The presence or absence of co-expression of lepr mRNA, FSH and LH b-subunit mRNA in gonadotropic cells was examined by double-labeled in situ hybridization. The addition of leptin significantly increased the secretion and gene expression of FSH and LH from male and female pituitary cells in primary culture. In contrast, gonadotropin-releasing hormone 1 affected neither FSH secretion in cells from females nor fshb and lhb expression in cells from males and females. The expression of lepr was observed in FSH- and LH-producing cells of both males and females. The results indicate that leptin directly regulates gonadotropin synthesis and secretion and plays an important role in the induction of puberty in teleost fish.

Argonaute proteins are important in the silencing machinery with some regulatory RNAs. Here, the authors solve the structure of an argonaute protein in complex with both the guide RNA and target DNA and propose a mechanism for their recognition.

Formation processes of metal-rich tribofilm on the counterface during sliding against metal/diamondlike-carbon nanocomposite coatings have been investigate. The hybridization between DLC matrix and Cu or Ag provides good electric conductivity to solid lubricant films. Metal-rich tribofilms are formed on the counterface of both Cu-DLC and Ag-DLC during sliding, which is important factor to obtain excellent tribological performance as well as good electric conductivity. Such tribofilms are almost pure Cu and Ag. The origin of the tribofilm is the metal clusters in the Me-DLC, and the adhered Cu and Ag clusters on the counterfaces are possibly sintered and refined during iterative plastic deformation in the frictional interface which generates high pressure and high shear rate.

Herein, we studied correlations between crystal structures and magnetic properties of FePt1−xRux films. At room temperature, the chemical disordered A1 films with 0≤x

The largest mass extinction of biota in the Earth’s history occurred during the Permian–Triassic transition and included two extinctions, one each at the latest Permian (first phase) and earliest Triassic (second phase). High seawater temperature in the surface water accompanied by euxinic deep-intermediate water, intrusion of the euxinic water to the surface water, a decrease in pH, and hypercapnia have been proposed as direct causes of the marine crisis. For the first-phase extinction, we here add a causal mechanism beginning from massive soil and rock erosion and leading to algal blooms, release of toxic components, asphyxiation, and oxygen-depleted nearshore bottom water that created environmental stress for nearshore marine animals. For the second-phase extinction, we show that a soil and rock erosion/algal bloom event did not occur, but culmination of anoxia–euxinia in intermediate waters did occur, spanning the second-phase extinction. We investigated sedimentary organic molecules, and the results indicated a peak of a massive soil erosion proxy followed by peaks of marine productivity proxy. Anoxic proxies of surface sediments and water occurred in the shallow nearshore sea at the eastern and western margins of the Paleotethys at the first-phase extinction horizon, but not at the second-phase extinction horizon. Our reconstruction of ocean redox structure at low latitudes indicates that a gradual increase in temperature spanning the two extinctions could have induced a gradual change from a well-mixed oxic to a stratified euxinic ocean beginning immediately prior to the first-phase extinction, followed by culmination of anoxia in nearshore surface waters and of anoxia and euxinia in the shallow-intermediate waters at the second-phase extinction over a period of approximately one million years or more. Enhanced global warming, ocean acidification, and hypercapnia could have caused the second-phase extinction approximately 60 kyr after the first-phase extinction. The causes of the first-phase extinction were not only those environmental stresses but also environmental stresses caused by the soil and rock erosion/algal bloom event.

This study examines tropical cyclone (TC) activity around the Solomon Islands (SIs) using best track data from the Tropical Cyclone Warning Centre, Brisbane, and the Regional Specialized Meteorological Centre, Nadi. Analysis of long-term trends showed that the frequency of TCs has decreased in this region, while the average TC intensity has increased. Datasets were classified according to the phase of Madden–Julian Oscillation (MJO) and the index of El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), provided by Bureau of Meteorology. The MJO significantly influenced TC activity in the SIs, with TC genesis occurring most frequently in phases 6–8. In contrast, TC genesis occurred less frequently in phase 5. ENSO also influenced TC genesis; more TCs were generated in El Niño periods. The TC genesis locations during El Niño (La Niña) periods were significantly displaced to the north (south) over the SIs. TCs generated during El Niño conditions tended to be strong. This study also explores the modulation of TCs in terms of the seasonal climatic variability of large-scale environmental variables such as sea surface temperature (SST), low-level relative vorticity, vertical wind shear, and upper level divergence.

Electrically conductive tribo-coatings (i.e. Ir-DLCs) were developed using a hybrid deposition process, combining RF-PECVD with DC magnetron sputtering of Ir. Pin-on-plate tribotests in reciprocating motion were performed in air on Ir, DLC and Ir-DLC coated plates against bearing steel pins under 0.5 N load. The electrical contact resistance was measured during the tribotests, and for Ir-DLC it was below 30 Ω. Neither the pure DLC layer nor the pure Ir layer reached friction coefficients lower than 0.2, while the Ir-DLC went down to 0.05. For Ir-DLCs, however, relatively high and unstable friction was occasionally observed. Possible causes of the instability are discussed by focusing on the characteristics of the tribofilm and the formation of wear debris.

To develop a low-friction and low-wear tribo-system for engine components, the authors have been studying the ZDDP tribofilm formed on iron oxide. Tribotests on iron-oxide / steel sliding pairs were performed in PAO with 1 mass% ZDDP. It was confirmed that the friction coefficient was lower in the PAO with ZDDP than that in pure PAO. The distributions of elements on the wear track of the iron oxide were analyzed by EPMA and found that a zinc-containing layer was distributed on almost entire contact surface.

Silica nano-particles that have the average diameter of 7 nm were added to water, and their effects on friction were studied for Si3N4 self-mated sliding couples by a ball-on-disk tribotester under boundary lubricated conditions. By adding 0.01 or 0.1 wt % of silica particles to water, the running-in distance was reduced significantly in both cases at the sliding velocity of 0.21 m/s and resulted in low and stable friction (μ 0.05) under low velocity conditions (v ≤ 0.12 m/s). The optimum concentration of the silica for the low and stable friction was 0.01 wt % among those tested in this study, which is the closest to the solubility limit of silica to water.

Currently, the Regional Specialized Meteorological Center Tokyo applies the satellite-based Dvorak technique using the relationship developed by Koba et al. (1990) for one of the important sources of tropical cyclone (TC) intensity analysis. To improve TC intensity analysis, we revisited Koba's relationship used for estimating the minimum sea level pressure (MSLP) considering case selection, aircraft data treatment, current intensity (CI) numbers, and additional explanatory variables. The root mean squared difference (RMSD) of the MSLP between the aircraft data and the concurrent estimates based on the original formula of Koba et al. (1990) is approximately 13.0 hPa. The RMSD reduced by 28 % to 9.3 hPa in the revised regression model that used CI numbers analyzed through modern methods and additional explanatory parameters (development rate, size, latitude, and environmental pressure) with careful treatment of the aircraft data. The signs of the coefficients in the proposed model suggest that the actual MSLP change lags the change in the corresponding CI number. The large TC at high latitudes with lower environmental pressure has a low MSLP for a given CI number. Cross-validation results supported the superiority of the proposed model. The current approach is simple but substantially improves the quality of the TC intensity analysis, leading to improved TC forecasts through TC bogus, wave models, storm surge models, and forecast verification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Observations of tropical cyclones (TC) from aircraft and in situ platforms provide critical and unique information for analyzing and forecasting TC intensity, structure, track, and their associated hazards. This report, prepared for the tenth International Workshop on Tropical Cyclones (IWTC-10), discusses the data collected around the world in TCs over the past four years since the IWTC-9, improvements to observing techniques, new instruments designed to achieve sustained and targeted atmospheric and oceanic observations, and select research results related to these observations. In the Atlantic and Eastern and Central Pacific basins, changes to operational aircraft reconnaissance are discussed along with several of the research field campaigns that have taken place recently. The changes in the use and impact of these aircraft observations in numerical weather prediction models are also provided along with updates on some of the experimental aircraft instrumentation. Highlights from three field campaigns in the Western Pacific basin are also discussed. Examples of in-situ data collected within recent TCs such as Hurricane Ian (2022), also demonstrate that new, emerging technologies and observation strategies reviewed in this report, definitely have the potential to further improve ocean-atmosphere coupled intensity forecasts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]