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SPIE Organic Photonics + Electronics, 2018, San Diego, California, United States, H. Yoshida, M. Takahashi, T. Ohkawa, J.-i. Fukuda, H. Kikuchi, and M. Ozaki "Three-dimensional crystal orientation of blue phase liquid crystals on surfaces", Proc. SPIE 10735, Liquid Crystals XXII, 107350I (14 September 2018). https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2323159, Liquid crystalline cholesteric blue phases (BPs) are of high interest for tunable electro-optic applications owing to their fast response times and quasi-polarization-independent phase modulation capabilities. Various approaches have recently been proposed to control the crystal orientation of BPs on substrates, but their basic orientation properties on standard, unidirectionally orienting substrates had not been investigated in detail. Here, detailed studies have been made on the Kossel diagrams of BPs on unidirectionally orienting substrates to understand the three-dimensional crystal orientation of BPs. We find that BPs show strong thermal hysteresis and that the structure of the preceding phase determines the orientation of BPs. Specifically, the BP II – I transition is accompanied by a rotation of the crystal such that the crystal direction defined by certain low-value Miller indices transform into different directions, and within the allowed rotations, different azimuthal configurations are obtained in the same cell depending on the thermal process. Our findings demonstrate that, for the alignment control of BPs, the thermal process is as important as the properties of the alignment layer.

It is well-known that prenatal chronic intermittent stress affects the reproductive system of both sexes. Investigating the effects of an acute maternal stress on the fetal neuroendocrine system, parameters such as hypothalamic catecholamines. CRF, GRF, LH-RH, beta-endorphin, hypophysial beta-endorphin and beta-LPH as well as plasma LH, corticosterone and androstenedione were measured. Pregnant rats of Wistar strain were exposed to restraint stress at day 22 of gestation or to forced immobilization at day 20 of gestation, respectively, and were sacrificed before stress and 10, 30, 60, and 120 min after starting stress. A decrease of fetal hypothalamic catecholamines and an increase of LH-RH content of the hypothalamus as well as of plasma catecholamines were observed under stress on day 22 of gestation. On day 20 of gestation hypothalamic beta-endorphin was depleted in male and unchanged in female fetuses under stress. A depletion of hypothalamic CRF was observed in male fetuses, whereas female fetuses showed an increase of hypothalamic CRF. An increase of GRF was found in fetuses of both sexes. Pituitary opioid content increased in fetuses of both sexes initially, but was depleted secondarily in male fetuses. The LH plasma level was markedly reduced in male, the corticosterone level was elevated in fetuses of both sexes as well as the androstenedione level in female fetuses. A simultaneous treatment of mother animals with tyrosine--a catecholamine precursor--prevented the depletion of hypothalamic and pituitary beta-endorphin as well as in part the reduction of plasma LH levels in male fetuses. Hypothalamic GRF content does not increase under tyrosine treatment in male fetuses, whereas in female fetuses the stress-induced increase of GRF content was rather pronounced under tyrosine than attenuated. These results indicate that fetal hypothalamic neurotransmitters and neurohormones (such as LH-RH, CRF, GRF and opioids) are involved in changing circulating hypophysial and adrenal hormones in fetuses exposed to maternal stress in late pregnancy, whereby sex-specific different pathways might be effective in fetal stress processing. The prenatal administration of tyrosine prevented at least in part--those neurohormonal changes which are affecting the sex-specific brain differentiation.

A passive UHF RF identification (RFID) tag IC with embedded 2-KB ferroelectric RAM (FeRAM) for rewritable applications enables a 2.9 times faster read-and-write transaction time over EEPROM-based tag ICs. The resulting FeRAM-based tag has a nominally identical communication range for both read and write operations, which is indispensable for data write applications. The evaluated tag communication range with a folded dipole antenna is from 0 m to 4.3 m, at the 953-MHz carrier frequency with 4-W transmitting Effective Isotropic Radiated Power (EIRP) from a reader/writer. The developed tag IC features two circuit blocks to maximize the communication range in 0.35-mum CMOS/FeRAM technology. First is a CMOS-only full-wave rectifier, which can improve the measured efficiency by up to 36.6% by reducing the input parasitic capacitances and optimization of multiplier structure. This efficiency is more than twice that of previously-published results. Second is a low-voltage current-mode ASK demodulator to accommodate a low-breakdown voltage of FeRAM, which converts the ASK power modulation into a linearly modulated current over an incoming power range of 27 dB, corresponding to the entire communication range. The developed demodulator can thus resolve the primary design tradeoff issue between device protection and detection sensitivity in the conventional voltage-mode demodulator

Objective. The objective was to determine the changes in the prenatal detection rate of congenital heart diseases and the emergency neonatal transfer rate due to conducting a fetal cardiac screening using a checklist.Methods. A checklist with 40 items, including eight items regarding the fetal heart, was used by registered medical sonographers conducting ultrasonic screenings on all pregnant women who were scheduled for delivery.Results. The prenatal detection rate of congenital heart diseases was 13.8% prior to the checklist and increased to 34.2% after its implementation. Regarding major congenital heart diseases, the detection rate is now 89.5%, and most diseases can be detected before birth. For five years prior to implementation of fetal cardiac screening, there were 14 cases of newborns (0.14%) requiring emergency neonatal transfer due to a major congenital heart disease that was not detected before birth. For five years after implementation, the emergency transfer rate decreased by 1/7 to 0...

A method for rapid identification of binding sites of covalent adducts was developed using delta bilirubin as a model compound. Delta bilirubin, containing intact human serum albumin (HSA), was digested with trypsin and the peptide fragments were monitored at 436 nm, but no predominant peaks were detected indicating the instability of the digested peptides containing bilirubin-related compounds. Therefore, the high-performance liquid chromatography time-of-flight mass spectrometer (LC-TOFMS) data of digested fragments of delta bilirubin were compared with those of control digests of HSA, revealing a characteristic peptide in the digest mixture of delta bilirubin. This peptide was sequenced by high-performance liquid chromatography time-of-flight tandem mass spectrometry (LC-TOFMS/MS) and identified as LDELRDEGKASSAK (Leu182 to Lys195) with a modification of a 178 Da increase at Lys190. This indicated the Lys190 to be a predominant covalent binding site of BGs on HSA via the imine mechanism and the binding between the bilirubin moiety and the glucuronic acid moiety to be unstable to digestion with trypsin. The method of comparing LC-TOFMS data requires no specific detection such as fluorescence or radioactivity for every compound. This should accelerate the structure elucidation of covalent adducts and be helpful for studying the relationship between the structure of ligands and specific binding sites.

Ions in a plasma may be radially separated according to mass using a combination of an axial magnetic field and either a radial or azimuthal electric field. The separation is qualitatively different from that obtained by a plasma centrifuge and the characteristics of confined and unconfined ion orbits are analogous to the phenomenon of band gaps in semiconductors.

To ascertain the safety of repeat apheresis donation, hematological and biochemical tests were performed on 511 donors with a donation rate of over 6 times per year for a period of 12-19 months.Repeat donors who had apheresis more than 6 times in the previous year were chosen. Data for the repeat donors at the start of the experiments were compared with those at the end of the study. Blood samples were taken prior to donation. Serum protein, albumin, immunoglobulin G, A, and M, serum ferritin levels were determined by biochemical tests.When compared to prospective donors of 400 ml, WBC, lymphocytes, and serum ferritin levels were lower in a roughly frequency-dependent manner in female and male donor groups at the beginning of the study. All the data for the male group remained almost constant with increasing frequency of apheresis donation. However, in the female group, ferritin levels significantly decreased with over 21 donations.The present data showed that the serum ferritin level of the female donors decreased the most with increasing frequency of apheresis donation. The cumulative RBC left in the collecting chamber and for the laboratory test is discussed in relation to a possible cause of iron deficiency in frequent apheresis donors.

In 1986 an albino mouse with cream yellow coat color was discovered in a breeding colony of strain CAL20, which is an IgH-C congenic strain of BALB/c mice, supported by the Institute for Experimental Animals, Faculty of Medicine, Kanazawa University. Genetic analysis revealed that the cream yellow coat color phenotype was controlled by a single recessive mutant gene on chromosome 13. A preliminary study with biochemical and histologic examinations showed that cream yellow hair contained more fatty acid than unaffected normal hair and a large number of lipid droplets accumulated in parenchyma cells of the liver in mutant mice, as early as the age of 32 days old, suggesting that the cream yellow coat color was due to unusual lipid metabolism. The locus was designated cream fur locus and was given the gene symbol crf. In addition, it was found that recombination frequencies in the vicinity of the region of the crf locus were markedly different between male and female meiosis.

The influence of plasma flow inhomogeneity on the magnetic surface, which is driven by anisotropic hot ions, on the micro-turbulence of the low/negative magnetic shear tokamak is investigated. It is found that the poloidal inhomogeneity is effective in suppressing the current-diffusive ballooning mode turbulence which has a large nonlinear growth rate. This new mechanism of turbulence suppression provides the model of improved confinement associated with the reversed magnetic shear.

This report had its beginnings at the Third International Symposium on Toroidal Plasma Confinement held in Garching/Munich, Federal Republic of Germany, March 26–30, 1973. The American scientists who attended this conference agreed to assist in preparing a summary of the status of the field. Since that time, the authors of this report have had the opportunity to incorporate progress reported at the VI European Conference on Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, held in Moscow, U.S.S.R., from July 29 to August 3, 1973. The report has been available previously only as U.S. Atomic Energy Commission Report WASH-1295 (1974). It was the first comprehensive survey of the status of the tokamak fusion research concept, which was to become the cornerstone of the world fusion effort for the next quarter century. It provided the basis for the rapid buildup of the U.S. tokamak program during the latter half of the 1970's and is published now to archive its historical significance.

The central cervical nucleus (CCN) of the cat receives input from upper cervical muscle afferents, particularly primary spindle afferents. Its axons cross in the spinal cord, and while in the contralateral restiform body give off collaterals to the vestibular nuclei. In order to study the connections between CCN axons and vestibular neurons, we stimulated the area of the CCN in decerebrate cats while recording intra- or extracellularly from neurons in the contralateral vestibular nuclei. CCN stimulation evoked excitatory postsynaptic potentials (EPSPs) or extracellularly recorded firing in the lateral, medial and descending vestibular nuclei. The latency of EPSPs (mean 1.6 ms) was on average 0.4 ms longer than the latency of antidromic spikes evoked in the CCN by stimulation of the contralateral vestibular nuclei (mean 1.2 ms), demonstrating that the excitation was typically monosynaptic. The results provide further evidence that the CCN is an important excitatory relay between upper cervical muscle afferents and neurons in the contralateral vestibular nuclei.

Today, many plants built in the 1960s will probably be replaced or maintained. However, it is difficult to replace or maintain them because the installed sequential control logic documents are seldom still in existence. Therefore, we have proposed an automatic regeneration method (SPAIR) in order to solve this problem. SPAIR regenerates sequential control logic that is expressed on a ladder diagram from the input and output data of a target control unit and its supplementary specifications, which indicate the information about timers and interior coils. Time series data is compressed and translated into training data using the specifications. The training data are processed by inductive learning and transformed into control logic. We have developed the SPAR-System in order to edit all kinds of data, generate target logic for plants, and to easily verify the inferred logic simulation plant. Simulation experiments confirmed that control logic that is regenerated by SPAIR behaves in the same way as the installed control logic of a target plant model.

Electron density profiles across the 90–270 A depth of Al/C multilayers on Ge substrates are determined from anomalous-dispersion X-ray specular reflectivity data collected at the Ge K edge and away from it. Refractive index parameters for Ge are determined by fits of reflectivity profiles observed from a Ge surface without the Al/C film at the two photon energies and used in the calculation of electron densities for single and triple Al/C bilayers deposited on Ge substrates. The layer structures are clearly resolved and the Al/C interfaces are found to be considerably broader than expected.

Chain terminator sequencing is usually performed on single-stranded DNA. We propose a technique to determine a DNA sequence by sequencing both strands of a double strand in two four-lane gels. The first set of four lanes will contain a superposition of sequence information from the two complementary strands. The second set of four lanes will contain a different superposition in which one of the two single strands is "shifted" relative to the other. This technique provides redundant information sufficient for error correction--not just the error detection achieved by the standard approach of separately sequencing a single strand and its complement. The information content per four-lane gel is more than 50% higher in this double-stranded approach. Using this technique, the number of chain sequencings--including chain syntheses and gel separations--required to achieve a desired level of accuracy can be reduced by up to a factor of two. Unlike the ordinary single-stranded sequencing, some analysis is required to obtain the single-stranded sequence information from the double-stranded data, particularly in the presence of sequencing errors. This analysis and a computer simulation of double-stranded sequencing in the presence of errors are presented.

Effects of heat treatment (100-250 °C, 1 hour) on the solubilization of particulate organic matter and methane production were examined using human wastes concentrates with a view to applying an anaerobic digestion technology to human wastes. In batch studies, the heat treatments above 150 ° C were found to inhibit methane production to a severe degree as the temperature was raised. The addition of powdered activated carbon (PAC) or calcium to the heat-treated concentrates showed a complete reduction of the inhibition. This remedial effect of calcium and measurements on volatile fatty acids make long-chain fatty acids suspected as the inhibitory substances produced. The effectiveness of the heat treatment at 150 and 175 ° C was demonstrated in a continuous study which simulated a high-rate digestion process having a solids separation device, and was conducted at a HRT of 2.5 days and SRT of about 15 days and at a mesophilic operating temperature of 35 ° C : the fraction of particulate substrates solubilized increased about two-fold, and methane production increased 40% when combined with the PAC addition.

The paper describes a novel, highly elongated, ellipsoidal shell tokamak (EST) configuration which has favourable high pressure magnetohydrodynamic Mercier and bellooning stability properties for a range of shell geometries. Calculations of the magnetic field (|B|) contours also suggest that an EST can be broadly omnigenous. The considerations leading to the choice of an ellipsoidal shell configuration, the equilibrium and ballooning stability properties and the axisymmetric stability are discussed and the parameters of a sample design for a modest proof-of-principle EST are presented.

The physics of enhanced confinement regimes in tokamaks is reviewed and some directions for further enhancements are assessed. The H‐mode confinement regime is examined. A number of other observations of enhanced confinement, having in common peaked density profiles, are compared to the theory of ion temperature gradient modes. Two schemes of promise in enhancing confinement, second stability and control of electric fields, are discussed. The contributions of alternate concepts to understanding tokamak transport are described.

It is shown that a steady‐state current can be sustained by the injection of wave helicity. In generalizing to waves of arbitrary polarizations and damping directions, the wave helicity has to include both a magnetic and a kinetic component. A physical picture is presented describing competing effects on current generation, and a generalized helicity conservation equation is derived that encompasses all the results discovered.

For ω≪Ωi, where Ωi is the ion cyclotron frequency, circularly polarized waves can drive current far exceeding the current resulting from linearly polarized waves. Further, the efficiency can be independent of plasma density. In some cases, this circular polarization may be interpreted in terms of helicity injection. For tokamak applications, where the wavenumber in the toroidal direction is a real quantity, wave helicity is injected only with finite Ez waves, where z is the direction of the static magnetic field. The Alfven waves are possible current drive candidates but, in the cylindrical model considered, the compressional wave is weakly damped because Ez =0, while the shear Alfven wave is totally absorbed at the surface because of finite Ez. A mixture of the two modes is shown to drive an oscillatory surface current even though the efficiency is high and independent of density. A more promising current drive candidate is a fast wave that propagates to the plasma interior and is damped by the minority ...

X rays have been produced using an electron cyclotron operated at a frequency of 2.45 GHz. This cyclotron was designed such that it would operate near the relativistic detuning limit of approximately 150 keV. The design and equipment needed are simple and inexpensive. The accelerator consists of a cylindrical cavity operated in the TE111 mode. This tuned cavity is closely coupled to and powered by a magnetron from a microwave oven.

A longitudinal halo collimator has been designed for J-PARC linac. We plan to adopt a “successive collimation scheme” taking advantage of the three-fold symmetry of our arc section. Adopting this scheme, smaller momentum aperture of around 0.5 % can be achieved with larger physical horizontal aperture of the collimator. We are also expecting that this collimator system is effective in beam diagnosis in the beam commissioning.

L3BT is beam transportation line from the linac to the 3-GeV RCS which is the part of the accelerators for the High-Intensity Proton Accelerator Facility Project, J-PARC. In this paper, results of the beam simulation of the injection section of the L3BT are presented. The injection section is necessary for a successful adjustment of the transported beam to the required parameters for ring injection. The matching of rms envelopes and dispersion function for high-intensity beams are also discussed.

A passive UHF RFID tag LSI in 0.35mum CMOS with 2kb FeRAM enables the 2.9-times higher 32b read-and-write throughput over an EEPROM-based tag. A CMOS full-wave rectifier improves the power efficiency from 16.6% up to 36.6% by lossless internal Vth cancellation and mirror stack architecture. A current-mode ASK demodulator converts the 15% power modulation into linear current signal over a 27dB dynamic range of the incoming power

At the first stage of J‐PARC (Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex), the linac will accelerate a H− beam to 181 MeV with a peak current of 30mA. A normalized transverse emittance of less than 4πmm⋅mrad and a momentum spread of less than ±0.1% are required at the injection point of the the rapid cycling synchrotron (RCS) following the linac. In order to find out operating points satisfying the above requirements and develop commissioning strategies, intense simulation studies of the linac have been performed. The beam commissioning of the drift‐tube linac tank‐1 (DTL1) has been performed at KEK. Transverse emittances at the DTL1 exit, phase scan property of the DTL1, and so on have been measured to confirm the validity of the simulations and commissioning strategies.

Segmentation of lung lobes from MDCT images can provide effective information for functional assessments of each lobe and detection of pulmonary diseases such as the emphysema and lung cancers. Conventional studies have detected pulmonary fissures that located between lung lobes. However, some parts of fissures may disappear in MDCT images because of artifacts or the adhesion between lung lobes. This paper proposes a novel method for segmenting lung lobes based on tubular tissues, which are the peripheral blood vessels and bronchus. Our method estimates the boundary surface between lung lobes by fitting a curved surface. The fitting is performed with fuzzy control, and it searches the boundary where the density of tubular tissues is low. As a result of applying the proposed method to two normal subjects, we could estimate the boundary surface between lung lobes and segment lung lobes successfully.

In-plane thermal conductivity of the thermoelectric layered cobalt oxides has been measured using the Harman method, in which thermal conductivity is obtained from temperature gradient induced by applied current. We have found that the charge reservoir block (the block other than the CoO$_2$ block) dominates the thermal conduction, where a nano-block integration concept is effective for material design. We have further found that the thermal conductivity shows a small but finite in-plane anisotropy between $a$ and $b$ axes, which can be ascribed to the misfit structure., Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, J. Appl. Phys. (scheduled on July 1, 2004)

Cassette dosing is a method in which multiple drugs are administered to a single animal at the same time, and the plasma concentrations of the individual compounds are simultaneously determined. This method enables high-throughput rapid screening for pharmacokinetic assessment of new drug candidates. An available gradient method was modified for cassette dosing analysis to attain the advantages of high sensitivity and applicability to a wide range of compounds. However, two problems arose; (1). the time-consuming optimization of mobile phases for each compound group, which limited applicability and (2). the remarkable suppression of ionization by polyethyleneglycol, which is commonly used in intravenous administration. To resolve these problems, a new column switching method was established to attain wider applicability and avoid the ionization suppression. This column switching system is very simple because the trap column and the analytical column are specified and the mobile phase is selected from only two species. Method optimization requires only the selection of the mobile phase and takes only a few hours. About 200 compounds, which were administered as about 50 cassettes, were analyzed using this column switching system. Assay validation of one cassette was carried out, and good accuracy and precision were obtained. About 90% of the compounds could be determined within 20% bias. These results showed that this new column switching system for cassette dosing is accurate enough for the screening of drug candidates and offers wide applicability for various compounds. This system was shown to be very useful for the determination of cassette dosing samples, containing multiple compounds.

As corporations continue to introduce workflow systems, there come to be several different such systems-for processing of core-business tasks, administrative tasks, Ad hoc tasks-coexisting in the workplace. But workflow for core-business tasks constitutes the central business processes of the company, and certain aspects of such workflow differ from other kinds of workflow. This paper proposes a model core-business task in addition the application of this models applied to an actual system and analyzed business process by workflow aspect.

This paper presents a method of comparing protein structures based on pairwise secondary structure topology. In this method, the spatial relation (sometimes rough relation) between any two secondary structural segments in a protein is represented as an element of the matrix data. The structure comparison is achieved by comparing two matrices using a pattern matching technique. In order to confirm the validity of the proposed method, experiments on similar protein retrieval was performed which showed that the method was effective.

A new qualitative simulation method for envisioning behaviors of a system modeled by a structural model is presented. The structural model consists of qualitative causal relations between several factors in the system. For the purpose of reducing ambiguities caused by lack of quantitative information, several typical patterns are introduced, which specify primitive behaviors in equilibrium. The method presented here consists of the following processes: the target structural model is divided into sub-models based on influence propagation speed; the equilibrium in each sub-model is evaluated using typical patterns; and the results for all sub-models are integrated. >

To replace or maintain many industrial plants developed in the 1960s is quite hard, because the documents of installed sequential control logics seldom remain. SPAIR is an automatic regeneration method of control logic to cope with this problem. In SPAIR, the control logic for operating plants is automatically regenerated from the input and output data of the control unit and supplementary specification by an inductive learning algorithm. When SPAIR is applied to the regeneration of real operating plants, it is necessary to verify if the regenerated sequential control programs can accurately control such plants. For this purpose, the SPAR-System, in which SPAIR is installed, has been developed. The SPAR-System can edit the data and logic of plants and can verify the inferred logic on the simulation plant model easily.

The authors propose an algorithm for Fourier transform on a systolic array and its implementation. This systolic array is designed to be fault tolerant and to be used for Fourier transform and matrix operations. FFT is more common as the algorithm of Fourier transformation, but overhead demands for communication among processors are very high, and are therefore very expensive and limit the number of users. The proposed system is a two dimensional systolic array of processing elements (PEs) with short connecting lines between adjacent PEs, making it easy to use a large number of PEs. It is also considered to be fault tolerant. The authors propose a Fourier transform on a 2-D systolic array. Its processing speed is O(/spl radic/N), which is next to that of the FFT.

As corporations continue to introduce workflow systems, different systems have appeared for processing of core-business tasks for information processing and clerical work. A number of different models for coordination of different workflow systems have been proposed; but workflows for core-business tasks constitute the central business processes of the company, and certain aspects of coordination of such workflows differ from other kinds of coordination. This paper clarifies these differences, and proposes a model for coordination, which takes these differences into consideration. In addition the application of this model to an actual system and confirmation of its effectiveness are also reported.

The Booster Synchrotron Ring (BSR) is a part of Multi-USe Experimental Storage rings (MUSES). BSR functions exclusively for the acceleration of ion and electron beams. The maximum accelerating energy is, for example, to be 3 GeV for protons; 1.45 GeV/nucleon for light ions of q/A=1/2; 800 MeV/nucleon for heavy ions of q/A=1/3. An electron beam is accelerated to 2.5 GeV from the injection energy 300 MeV. The accelerated ion and electron beams will be fast extracted and injected into the Double Storage Rings (DSR) by one turn injection. As another operation mode, ion beams will be slowly extracted for the experiments. In this paper, results of lattice study and injection and extraction procedures of the BSR are presented.

We have proposed the stochastic qualitative simulation which can derive approximate behavior from a simple qualitative model of a target. In this method, the model must be constructed with numerous stochastic parameters. The parameter tuning process is the most difficult element of model construction. This paper outlines an automatic parameter turning by means of the steepest ascent based method. This method was used in order to generate a model of a real air conditioning system in a building.

The resistivity and dielectric constant and their dependence on frequency and temperature were measured in order to clarify the change of aggregations with carbon loading. It has been suggested that there are conducting paths related to networks and branches related to dielectric constant above the percolation threshold where resistivity shows a PTC. It has been concluded that the behavior of branches for temperature is independent of that of conducting paths and branches are formed with weak aggregations. In high carbon loading, isolated carbon aggregations change into conducting paths and branches with heating and that contributes to a part of the negative temperature coefficient of resistance and the increment of /spl epsiv/r'.

In this paper, we summarize the status of X-band PPM klystron development for the Japan Linear Collider (JLC) project. The periodic permanent magnet (PPM) klystrons are under development in the two-stage/two-year project with Toshiba. The goal is to produce 50 MW output power with efficiency >50% at 1.5 /spl mu/s pulse length at the first klystron and then to advance to 75 MW with efficiency =55% at the second one. The first PPM klystron has been tested, and it achieved 56 MW power with 50% efficiency at the standard 1.5 /spl mu/s pulse length. Neither oscillation of the parasitic mode nor gun oscillations were observed. The particle transmission was found to be 100% when no RF signal is applied. The second PPM klystron is currently under high-power testing. It has improved water cooling system of a PPM circuit and the output cavity for 150 Hz operation. The RF system was also revised for a higher efficiency. To date (June 6, 2001), the PPM-2 klystron produced 73.2 MW at 1.4 /spl mu/s pulse length and 70 MW at 1.5 /spl mu/s pulse length with the efficiency of 54.5%. The maximum efficiency reached 56% at the specified cathode voltage. The high-power testing will be continued to attain a 75 MW output power with a standard 1.5 /spl mu/s pulse. Details of these developments and measurement results are presented.

Heparan sulfate proteoglycans is a major component of the cell surface and extracellular matrix and functions as a barrier against cationic molecules and macromolecules. Heparanase is an endoglucuronidase capable of specifically degrading heparan sulfate, and its activity is associated with the metastatic potential of tumor cells. To inhibit human heparanase expression in human cancer cells, we constructed an adenoviral vector carrying a full-length human heparanase cDNA in an antisense orientation (Ad-AS/hep). Increased heparanase expression in T.Tn human esophageal cancer cells and A549 human lung cancer cells after infection with an adenovirus vector expressing the human heparanase gene (Ad-S/hep) was specifically inhibited by simultaneous infection with Ad-AS/hep in a dose-dependent manner. A modified Boyden chamber assay demonstrated that infection with Ad-AS/hep significantly inhibited in vitro invasion of A549 cells after Ad-S/hep infection. Moreover, intrathoracic administration of Ad-AS/hep reduced the number and size of heparanase-expressing A549 tumors implanted intrathoracically into BALB/c-nu/nu mice. Our results suggest that heparanase contributes to the invasive phenotype of tumor cells, and that antisense-mediated inhibition of heparanase activity may be efficacious in the prevention of pleural dissemination.

The Japanese Radiation Oncology Study Group (GROSG) which conducts multi-center trials, was organized in July, 1998 in order to establish standards' for radiation therapy. These standards must be based on the results of high quality trials, and the quality of radiotherapy must be assured in each hospital.

Microwave absorption measurements in terms of power loss per unit volume of very small liquid and solid samples (0.003-2.6 mu L) contained in capillaries inserted across the dielectric of a coaxial line have been made between 2 and 26.5 GHz. This perturbation technique makes it possible to measure small differences in the absorption of the samples in a swept fashion. The measured value of the microwave absorption of heavy and light water is within 10% of the value calculated from published values of the dielectric constant at all frequencies up to the highest frequency measured and within 5% at frequencies ( >

To determine the effect of human urine on the adhesion of calcium oxalate monohydrate (COM) crystals to Madin-Darby canine kidney (MDCK) cells in a model system in vitro.MDCK cells were exposed to COM crystals in the presence of various human urine samples. COM crystals adhering on MDCK cells were quantified by measuring the calcium concentration using atomic absorption analysis. The inhibitory activities were estimated individually for various urine samples from healthy subjects and recurrent stone formers.Human urine inhibited the adhesion of COM crystals to MDCK cells, with some variations between individual samples. The most potent inhibition of crystal adhesion was expressed by the macromolecular fraction of the urine. Pretreatment of crystals with human urine before exposure to the cells significantly reduced crystal adhesion, suggesting that human urine altered the properties of the crystal surface but not the cell surface.Coating of the crystals by some component(s) of human urine might be an important physiological event in preventing adhesion or retention of crystals in the renal tubules. Although the mechanisms by which crystal adhesion is prevented are unknown, a low potential for inhibiting adhesion may be a risk factor in stone formation because it permits crystal adhesion and retention in the tubules.