Development of a Grounded Haptic Device and a 5-Fingered Robot Hand for Dexterous Teleoperation

Abstrac

Stability and safety estimates and tests of a superconducting bus-line for large-scale superconducting coils

We have been developing a flexible superconducting bus-line as a unit electrical feeder between large-scale superconducting coils and their power supplies away from the coils. The designed superconducting bus-line consists of a pair of +/- aluminum stabilized NbTi/Cu compacted strand cables and a coaxial four-channel transfer line. A full-scale model of the SC bus-line (20 m long) has been constructed and tested successfully up to 40 kA without a quench under the short-circuit condition. Stability tests were also done by inducing a forced quench with heaters. A minimum propagation current larger than 32.5 kA was confirmed. Thus, the bus-line was cryogenically stabilized at the rated current of 30 kA. We have examined the test results and evaluated the stability and safety margins of this bus-line. The design criteria for a superconducting bus-line are also shown for large-scale superconducting coils with operating current as a parameter

Surgical Treatment for Skeletal Metastases From Soft Tissue Sarcomas: Experience With 23 Lesions in 20 Patients

Purpose. This paper reports the procedures and the clinical results of a series of surgical treatments for skeletal metastases from soft tissue sarcomas

(+)-Grandifloracin, an antiausterity agent, induces autophagic PANC-1 pancreatic cancer cell death

Human pancreatic tumors are known to be highly resistant to nutrient starvation, and this prolongs their survival in the hypovascular (austere) tumor microenvironment. Agents that retard this tolerance to nutrient starvation represent a novel antiausterity strategy in anticancer drug discovery. (+)-Grandifloracin (GF), isolated from Uvaria dac, has shown preferential toxicity to PANC-1 human pancreatic cancer cells under nutrient starvation, with a PC(50) value of 14.5 μM. However, the underlying mechanism is not clear. In this study, GF was found to preferentially induce PANC-1 cell death in a nutrient-deprived medium via hyperactivation of autophagy, as evidenced by a dramatic upregulation of microtubule-associated protein 1 light chain 3. No change was observed in expression of the caspase-3 and Bcl-2 apoptosis marker proteins. GF was also found to strongly inhibit the activation of Akt, a key regulator of cancer cell survival and proliferation. Because pancreatic tumors are highly resistant to current therapies that induce apoptosis, the alternative cell death mechanism exhibited by GF provides a novel therapeutic insight into antiausterity drug candidates

A case of synchronous bilateral lung cancers: EML4-ALK positive adenocarcinoma in the right lung and adenocarcinoma in situ (the former bronchioloalveolar carcinoma) in the left lung

Abstract Background Recently it has been revealed that lung adenocarcinomas with distinct gene mutations or fusions are associated with particular histopathological entities. For example, epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) gene mutations are often associated with well differentiated adenocarcinoma of the lung with bronchioloalveolar pattern. On the other hand, echinoderm microtubule-associated protein-like 4 (EML4)-anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) fusion gene in a subset of lung adenocarcinoma is related to mucinous cribriform histology. Case presentation Reported herein is a case of synchronous EML4-ALK positive lung adenocarcinoma and adenocarcinoma in situ in the bilateral lungs of a 55-year-old Japanese woman. The woman had EML4-ALK positive lung adenocarcinoma in the right lower lung while adenocarcinoma in situ in the left upper lung, which was EML4-ALK negative. Conclusion To our knowledge, this is the first report of synchronous, bilateral lung adenocarcinomas composed of EML4-ALK positive and negative ones. </jats:sec

Migration to WebDAV in Belle II Experiment

The usage of WebDAV protocol has become more and more popular within the physics experiments using grid middleware in the last decade, and today it represents a valid alternative to the GridFTP currently supported at best-effort level after the retirement of Globus Toolkit. Belle II experiment established the adoption of WebDAV protocol as the main protocol for data access and third-party-copy transfers, without relying on Storage Resource Manager interface (SRM). The migration process, carried on with continuous and gradual steps, has required a large effort to guarantee a smooth transition maintaining the production infrastructure fully operational. In this contribution we show the transition process, the tool of support developed to monitor step by step the status of third-party-copy support with WebDAV protocol by storages of the collaboration tested in both case pull and push, the strategy adopted to configure DIRAC and the solutions put in place for the corner cases. Finally, we will present some statistics of utilization and we will analyse the achieved results