The Rape of Nanking in Japanese High School Textbooks: History Texts as Closed Texts

This paper is a study of how the Rape of Nanking in December 1937 and January 1938 by the Japanese Army is reported in the 88 history textbooks used in Japanese high schools in 1995. The textbooks do, contrary to widely stated opinion, deal with the event in reasonable detail. However, an analysis of the language of the textbooks shows that they often contain this information in the form of closed text (in Eco’s sense of the term), which, I suggest, prevents students from arriving at a full understanding of the atrocity. One possible result of this is that students have no basis from which they can critically respond to denials within modern Japanese society that this well documented atrocity took place

Impact of surface treatments on the sorption and solubility of a heat-cured denture base material

Removable dentures fabricated from polymethylmethacrylate material are the most common prostheses used to treat edentulism worldwide. This research aimed to compare the sorption and solubility characteristics of a mechanically polished heat-cured acrylic denture material and a light-cured varnished material against non-treated material, all of which were soaked in distilled water. A total of 45 specimens were prepared and tested according to the ISO Standard 20795-1: 2013 (E) to test for sorption and solubility. The data were analysed through one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Tukey-Kramer multiple comparison test

Blue-Light-Emitting Color Centers in High-Quality Hexagonal Boron Nitride

Light emitters in wide band gap semiconductors are of great fundamental interest and have potential as optically addressable qubits. Here we describe the discovery of a new color center in high-quality hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) with a sharp emission line at 435 nm. The emitters are activated and deactivated by electron beam irradiation and have spectral and temporal characteristics consistent with atomic color centers weakly coupled to lattice vibrations. The emitters are conspicuously absent from commercially available h-BN and are only present in ultra-high-quality h-BN grown using a high-pressure, high-temperature Ba-B-N flux/solvent, suggesting that these emitters originate from impurities or related defects specific to this unique synthetic route. Our results imply that the light emission is activated and deactivated by electron beam manipulation of the charge state of an impurity-defect complex

World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency

Scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to “tell it like it is.” On the basis of this obligation and the graphical indicators presented below, we declare, with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from around the world, clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency

Tracking CMEs using data from the Solar Stormwatch project; observing deflections and other properties

With increasing technological dependence, society is becoming ever more affected by changes in the near-Earth space environment caused by space weather. The primary driver of these hazards are coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Solar Stormwatch is a citizen science project in which volunteers participated in several activities which characterised CMEs in the remote sensing images from the SECCHI instrument package on the twin STEREO spacecraft. Here, we analyse the results of the 'Track-it-back' activity, in which CMEs were tracked back through the COR2, COR1 and EUVI images. Analysis of the COR1, COR2 and EUVI data together allows CMEs to be studied consistently throughout the whole field-of-view spanned by these instruments (out to 15 solar radii). 4783 volunteers took part in this activity, creating a dataset containing 23,801 estimates of CME timing, location and size. We used this data to produce a catalogue of 41 CMEs, which is the first to consistently track CMEs through each of these instruments. We assess how the CME speeds, propagation directions and widths vary as the CMEs propagate through the fields of view of the different imagers. In particular, we compare the observed CME deflections between the COR1 and COR2 fields of view to the separation between the CME source region and the heliospheric current sheet (HCS), demonstrating that, in general, these CMEs appear to deflect towards the HCS, consistent with other modelling studies of CME propagation