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Sustainable agrifood systems are critical to averting climate-driven social and ecological disasters, overcoming the growth paradigm and redefining the interactions of humanity and nature in the twenty-first century. This Perspective describes an agenda and examples for comprehensive agrifood system redesign according to principles of sufficiency, regeneration, distribution, commons and care. This redesign should be supported by coordinated education and research efforts that do not simply replicate dominant discourses on food system sustainability but point towards a post-growth world in which agroecological life processes support healthy communities rather than serving as inputs for the relentless pursuit of economic growth.

The Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan is both wedded to tradition and influenced by the global push to modernize. In this study of the country’s path to food security, Mai Kobayashi describes its evolving national ‘middle way’ towards sustainable agriculture. She traces seed-sector dynamics over the past 70 years, as exogenous influences from India and Japan mingled with endogenous practices. First following a Green Revolution-style high-input agricultural model reflecting India’s, Bhutan joined the Colombo Plan in 1962, paving the way to autonomous economic development. Meanwhile, two Japanese specialists—agriculturalist Keiji Nishioka and seed-processing technologist Katsuhiko Nishikawa—respectively introduced open pollinated varieties and imported hybrids. The latter sited seed access within commodity relations for the first time. But Bhutan’s own National Seed Center has supported a pluralistic approach serving the seed demands of both family and market-oriented farmers, while organic agriculture became a national mandate in 2007. Bhutan, Kobayashi concludes, has shown that its evolving, idiosyncratic ‘middle way’ towards food security is likely to endure.

STUDY OBJECTIVES: Patients with sleep-disordered breathing have cyclic variation of heart rate (CVHR) in response to respiratory events. However, limited data are available regarding the utility of CVHR as a screening tool for sleep-disordered breathing in patients with mixed heart failure (HF) and those without HF. METHODS: We enrolled consecutive patients with and without HF who underwent full polysomnographies with simultaneous Holter electrocardiogram monitoring. We determined the temporal position of the individual dips comprising the CVHR score using time-domain methods. RESULTS: The data of 101 patients, including 70 with and 31 without HF, were analyzed. The CVHR score was significantly correlated with the apnea-hypopnea index (r = .667, P < .001) and limits of agreement between the apnea-hypopnea index and CVHR score were −21.8 to 35.2. The receiver operating characteristic analysis demonstrated that the CVHR score (best cut-off of 23.5 events/h) identified severe sleep-disordered breathing with a sensitivity of 83.3%, specificity of 79.5%, and the area under the curve of 0.856. In addition, there was no interaction between the presence or absence of HF and the apnea-hypopnea index–CVHR score relationship (P = .323). CONCLUSIONS: The CVHR score, determined by Holter electrocardiogram monitoring, is a useful tool for evaluating sleep-disordered breathing even in patients with mixed HF and patients without HF. CITATION: Yatsu S, Kasai T, Naito R, et al. Utility of cyclic variation of heart rate score as a screening tool for sleep-disordered breathing in patients with heart failure. J Clin Sleep Med. 2021;17(11):2187–2196.

International audience; Although evidence continues to indicate an urgent need to transition food systems away from industrialized monocultures and toward agroecological production, there is little sign of significant policy commitment toward food system transformation in global North geographies. The authors, a consortium of researchers studying the land-food nexus in global North geographies, argue that a key lock-in explaining the lack of reform arises from how most food system interventions work through dominant logics of property to achieve their goals of agroecological production. Doing so fails to recognize how land tenure systems, codified by law and performed by society, construct agricultural land use outcomes. In this perspective, the authors argue that achieving food system “resilience” requires urgent attention to the underlying property norms that drive land access regimes, especially where norms of property appear hegemonic. This paper first reviews research from political ecology, critical property law, and human geography to show how entrenched property relations in the global North frustrate the advancement of alternative models like food sovereignty and agroecology, and work to mediate acceptable forms of “sustainable agriculture.” Drawing on emerging cases of land tenure reform from the authors' collective experience working in Scotland, France, Australia, Canada, and Japan, we next observe how contesting dominant logics of property creates space to forge deep and equitable food system transformation. Equally, these cases demonstrate how powerful actors in the food system attempt to leverage legal and cultural norms of property to legitimize their control over the resources that drive agricultural production. Our formulation suggests that visions for food system “resilience” must embrace the reform of property relations as much as it does diversified farming practices. This work calls for a joint cultural and legal reimagination of our relation to land in places where property functions as an epistemic and apex entitlement.

Individual agroecological farms can act as lighthouses to amplify the uptake of agroecological principles and practices by other farmers. Amplification is critical for the upscaling of agroecological production and socio-political projects emphasizing farmer sovereignty and solidarity. However, territories are contested spaces with historical, social, cultural, and economic contexts that can present challenges to the effectiveness of farmer lighthouses in catalyzing localized agrarian change. We explore these amplification dynamics through fieldwork in a particular region of Japan employing interviews and data derived from an assessment of nine farms using ten amplification indicators. The indicators include social organization, participation in networks, community leadership, and degrees of dependency on policies or markets among others, as well as degree of adoption of on-farm agroecological practices, all of which capture farmer lighthouses' potential to amplify territorial upscaling. At the same time, we trace the historical development of a previous generation of Japanese farmer lighthouses practicing organic agriculture in alignment with agroecological principles that experienced, to varying degrees, push-back, co-option, and successful territorialization in rural communities. We find that many of the same social and cultural territorial dynamics are still influential today and affecting the amplifying effect of agroecological farmer lighthouses, but also find examples of new clustering around lighthouses that take advantage of both the historical vestiges of the previous generation's efforts as well as contemporary shifts in practice and agrarian orientation. This research calls for a detailed dissection of the dynamic and contrasting processes of agroecological territorialization and the ways in which diverse contexts shape agroecological upscaling.

Conventional policy approaches emphasize technical solutions and individual behavioral change, but practice-based policy approaches offer an alternative. This paper examines the operationalization of a practice-oriented futures policy development process. The process builds on practice theory to generate alternative sustainable future pathways and policy intervention ideas, and in doing so, extends the vocabulary for policy-focused futures work. We focus on three practices with implications for urban sustainability - food purchasing, eating out, and home cooking in Bangkok, Thailand. A multi-phase process of interlinked workshops including visioning, scenario evaluation, and transition pathways was enacted with food system actors and policy makers. Role-play and narrative elements were incorporated to elicit transformative and systems knowledge on how practices are or might be embedded in everyday life and generated policy ideas to enable such practices to emerge in the future. Different practices showed varying degrees of amenability to the process, based on participants' sense of agency and individual and community-based practice memories. This paper contributes to our understanding of how future practices are co-constructed and how policies might guide practice trajectories in the future. Practice-oriented futures policy development opens pathways for integrated policy ideas, mirroring the growing recognition for integrated governance structures.

Cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) 4 and CDK6 inhibitors are effective therapeutic options for hormone receptor (HR)-positive, human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2)-negative advanced breast cancer. Although CDK4/6 inhibitors mainly target the cyclin D-CDK4/6-retinoblastoma tumor suppressor protein (RB) axis, little is known about the clinical impact of inhibiting phosphorylation of other CDK4/6 target proteins. Here, we focused on other CDK4/6 targets, SMAD proteins. We showed that a CDK4/6 inhibitor palbociclib and activin-SMAD2 signaling cooperatively inhibited cell cycle progression of a luminal-type breast cancer cell line T47D. Palbociclib enhanced SMAD2 binding to the genome by inhibiting CDK4/6-mediated linker phosphorylation of the SMAD2 protein. We also showed that cyclin G2 plays essential roles in SMAD2-dependent cytostatic response. Moreover, comparison of the SMAD2 ChIP-seq data of T47D cells with those of Hs578T (triple-negative breast cancer cells) indicated that palbociclib augmented different SMAD2-mediated functions based on cell type, and enhanced SMAD2 binding to the target regions on the genome without affecting its binding pattern. In summary, palbociclib enhances the cytostatic effects of the activin-SMAD2 signaling pathway, whereas it possibly strengthens the tumor-promoting aspect in aggressive breast cancer.

Japanese agriculture and rural communities are in decline and fewer young people are becoming farmers. Young heritage farmers and a new generation from non-farming families face multiple barriers t...

This is the author’s version of the work. It is posted here by permission of the AAAS for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Science Signaling on 12 Nov 2019:Vol. 12, Issue 607, DOI: 10.1126/scisignal.aay4430, UTokyo FOCUS Articles "Gene causing rare heart and lung disease identified : Genomewide screening, animal studies used in long-term research on pulmonary arterial hypertension" https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/focus/en/articles/z0508_00081.html

The diagnosis of psychiatric disorders, such as major depressive disorder (MDD), depends on clinical interviews and assessment of symptoms. However, due to the fact that mental states cannot be objectively assessed, diagnosis procedures are often influenced by clinical experience of psychiatrist. Hence, the aim of this study is to develop a simple, objective, highly accurate self-check system for screening of psychiatric disorders based on heart rate variability (HRV) measured from single- lead electrocardiography (ECG) or photoplethysmogram (PPG) for home healthcare monitoring. HRV is widely used as objective biomarker for assessment of autonomic nerve system. The low frequency (LF) of HRV originates from the sympathetic and parasympathetic nerves. The high frequency (HF) originates from the parasympathetic nerves. In our previous clinical trial, we confirmed that HRV of MDD patients is less reactive than healthy subjects during a mental task (generate random numbers) condition. However, mental task alone is difficult to assess HRV accurately owing to influence of measurement condition and individual differences. In this study, we implemented a single-lead ECG system based on reactivity of HRV, and combined mental task and paced deep breathing thereby improving the screening accuracy. Moreover, support vector machine (SVM) model was applied for classification of HRV indices. We tested the system on 16 healthy subjects and 7 psychiatric patients with depression or somatoform disorder. A significant difference was found between the healthy group and the patient group for the response of the HRV indices on dual mental tasks. The SVM non-linear classification model achieved a sensitivity of 71.4% and specificity of 93.8%.

Self-control refers to the ability to execute goal-oriented behavior despite the presence of temptation(s) to do otherwise. Since self-control has a wide-range impact on our daily lives, it is of critical importance to assess individual differences of self-control with a highly reliable and valid, yet simple, measure. Toward this end, three studies were conducted to test reliability and validity of the Japanese-translated version of Brief Self-Control Scale (Tangney, Baumeister, & Boone, 2004). The scale showed good internal consistency (Study 1) and retest reliability (Study 2). The. total score of the scale was correlated with the self-reported indices of self-control (e.g., daily experience of ego-depletion, study hours) and performance in the Stop Signal Task (Study 3), indicating its high converging validity.

Since objective biomarkers for major depressive disorder (MDD) are not readily available, clinical psychiatrists diagnose patients with MDD subjectively based on clinical interviews and diagnostic criteria. It often raises various concerns, including false responses by patients, subjective factors, and inexperience of the attendants leading to incorrect diagnosis. Here, we developed a self-monitoring system for simple and objective screening of MDD using a photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor and a 24-GHz microwave radar, which was based on the analysis of heart rate variability (HRV) during paced respiration and mental task conditions. In our previous study, we assessed the reactivity of HRV measurements during a mental task (random number generation) condition in patients with MDD and healthy control subjects. The HRV indices are less reactive in patients with MDD compared to healthy subjects during the mental task, which enabled us to identify the patients at risk for depression. In this study, the reactivity of HRV was measured not only in the mental task but also during paced respiration (i.e., 5-s inhalation and 5-s exhalation) conditions, thereby assessing more detailed autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity via HRV indices. To investigate the effect of paced respiration on MDD screening, we compared the ANS activity via HRV indices in with/without paced respiration conditions in 28 drug-naïve patients with MDD and 27 healthy control subjects. The result showed that ANS significantly activated during the paced respiration condition (p;0.05). The sensitivity in detecting patients with MDD was 86% under paced respiration and mental task conditions, which was higher than the sensitivity (68%) under mental task condition alone.

Mangoes (Mangifera indica L.) are one of the most important tropical foods. The seed is one of the main by-products of mango processing. Therefore, it is important to find an economically viable use for this waste (e.g., as a food additive or supplement with high nutraceutical value). We investigated the anti-obesity effects of mango seed kernel extract with hot water (MSKE-W) in 3T3-L1 adipocytes and in a high fat diet (HFD)-induced obesity rat model. MSKE-W caused a significant decrease in the activity of glycerol 2-phosphate dehydrogenase in 3T3-L1 adipocytes without eliciting cell cytotoxicity and inhibited cellular lipid accumulation through down-regulation of transcription factors such as PPARγ and C/EBPα. In the animal model, rats fed an HFD containing 1% MSKE-W gained less weight than rats fed an HFD alone. The visceral fat mass in rats fed an HFD containing 1% MSKE-W tended to be lower than that in rats fed an HFD alone. Furthermore, histological examination of rat livers from an HFD showed steatohepatitis. However, rats on an HFD containning 1% MSKE-W showed no histopathological changes in liver tissue. Our results indicate that MSKE-W influences anti-obesity effects, both in vitro and in vivo, and suggest that MSKE-W provides a novel preventive potential against obesity.

The present research explored people’s everyday practice of counteractive control. Experience sampling was used to test our prediction that strong temptations would promote self-control. Participants were 237 Japanese citizens with ages ranging from 18 to 69. Results indicated that perceived temptation prompted stronger resistance and restraint of behaviors, compared to those cases where no conflict was perceived. In addition, multilevel path analysis revealed the underlying process such that (a) a strong desire toward temptation intensified perception of conflict; (b) perceived conflict bolstered the value of goals that were in disagreement with the temptation; and (c) highly valued goals promoted self-control (i.e., stronger resistance and hence less yielding to temptation).

Frictional force was measured on directional calcite (1 0 -1 4) surface, where triangular carbonate ions are all tilted to [4 2 -1] direction. With the normal load -[4 2 -1], was the same as that measured in nm-scale. In the higher normal load range, a new component was added to the friction in -[4 2 -1] direction, and the asymmetry was reversed. Only in the direction of stronger friction, characteristic triangular deformation patterns were formed. Microscopic observation after indentation experiments revealed that the patterns were formed by slip on c (0 0 0 1) faces on one side of the stylus, followed by cleavage on r{1 0 -1 4} faces. A mechanical model was proposed to explain why the deformation occurs only in one quadrant of the surface. The result of scratch perpendicularly in [0 1 0] direction, also supports the mechanism of deformation. The results show when and how the contribution of plastic deformation is added to intrinsic surface friction and affects the frictional asymmetry. The frictional force in the -[4 2 -1] scratch increased linearly with the total lengths of the traces of c-slip.

For the direct fabrication of densely distributed one dimensional nanostructures on Si substrates, Si (1 0 0) surfaces were bombarded by obliquely incident 3 keV Ar + ions with a simultaneous supply of Mo seed atoms at various temperatures ranging from room temperature to 400 °C. The surface sputtered at room-temperature with Mo seeding was characterized by the nanocones pointing in the direction of the incident ion beam. In addition, they possessed a so-called “web” at their acute-angle side. This web decreased in size with an increase in the sputtering temperature. Thus, the projections fabricated at elevated temperatures were featured by the nanorod-like structure rather than conical structure. With increasing the sputtering temperature, projections decreased in base diameter (from ∼90 nm at 200 °C to ∼50 nm at 400 °C) while they increased in both length (from ∼160 nm at 200 °C to ∼240 nm at 400 °C) and numerical density (from ∼5 × 10 7 mm −2 at 200 °C to ∼1.2 × 10 8 mm −2 at 400 °C). The controlled fabrication of such densely distributed one dimensional nanoprojections on Si using ion beam technique, we believe, would open up a variety of applications such as nanoelectronics and optoelectronics devices.

The Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test (IPANAT) is an instrument for the indirect assessment of positive and negative affect. A Japanese version of the IPANAT was developed and its reliability and validity were examined. In Study 1, factor analysis identified two independent factors that could be interpreted as implicit positive and negative affect, which corresponded to the original version. The Japanese IPANAT also had sufficient internal consistency and acceptable test-retest reliability. In Study 2, we demonstrated that the Japanese IPANAT was associated with explicit state affect (e.g., PANAS), extraversion, and neuroticism, which indicated its adequate construct validity. In Study 3, we examined the extent to which the Japanese IPANAT was sensitive to changes in affect by assessing a set of IPANAT items after the presentation of positive, negative, or neutral photographs. The results indicated that the Japanese IPANAT was sufficiently sensitive to changes in affect resulting from affective stimuli. Taken together, these studies suggest that the Japanese version of the IPANAT is a useful instrument for the indirect assessment of positive and negative affect.

This research investigated how to overcome temptations and protect high-order goals while pursuing a goal. We hypothesized that in order to promote self-regulation, individuals non-cousciously engage in asymmetric evaluative responses to goal-relevant and temptation-relevant stimuli. In an experiment, we manipulated either diet goal or academic goal. Then, we measured evaluations of either sugary drinks (e.g., Coke, Fanta) or healthy drinks (e.g., Healthya Green Tea, Black Oolong Tea). The results showed that participants who activated a diet goal had significantly more positive evaluations of healthy drinks than sugary drinks. In addition, this tendency was moderated by the means of dieting (i.e., only participants who cut down on sweets when going on a diet). The role of non-consious asymmetric evaluations for self-regulation is discussed.

GH secretion is mainly regulated at the hypothalamus by a dual interplay between growth hormone releasing hormone (GHRH) and somatostatin, which are modulated by various factors. We examined the regulatory mechanism of GH secretion in an apparently healthy young man without decreased IGF-1 concentration and nocturnal GH secretion, but who showed low responses to insulin tolerance (ITT) and to GHRP-2 tests. The patient also had no GH response to acute aerobic exercise. However, he had normal secretion of pituitary hormone based on hypothalamic releasing hormone tests combined with CRH, GRH as GHRH, LH-RH and TRH. In addition, he had a GH response without paradoxical secretion to TRH stimulation as well as an ACTH response to subcutaneous glucagon stimulation, and AVP secretion responded to 5% hypertonic saline infusion, though it was not adequately stimulated by ITT. MRI showed no structural abnormalities in the hypothalamus-pituitary gland. These findings indicate that this subject may have an undiscovered neurocircuit for regulating GH secretion, as well as other neurohormones, to maintain homeostasis, even though there were low responses of the hormones to ITT and GHRP-2 stimuli, probably via altered secretion of hypothalamic hormones.