661 research outputs found
Development Of Climate Change Information Database And Its Use In Civic Consciousness Enlightenment
GCM outputs such as CMIP3 are available via network access to PCMDI web site. Meteorological researchers are familiar with the usage of the GCM data, but the most of researchers other than meteorology such as agriculture, civil engineering, etc., and general people are not familiar with the GCM. There are some difficulties to use GCM; 1) to download the enormous quantity of data, 2) to understand the GCM methodology, parameters and grids. In order to provide a quick access way to GCM, Climate Change Information Database has been developed. The purpose of the database is to bridge the users and meteorological specialists and to facilitate the understanding the climate changes. The resolution of the data is unified, and climate change amount or factors for each meteorological element are provided from the database. All data in the database are interpolated on the same 80km mesh. Available data are the present-future projections of 27 GCMs, 16 meteorological elements (precipitation, temperature, etc.), 3 emission scenarios (A1B, A2, B1). We showed the summary of this database to residents in Toyama prefecture and measured the effect of showing and grasped the image for the climate change by using the Internet questionary survey. The persons who feel a climate change at the present tend to feel the additional changes in the future. It is important to show the monitoring results of climate change for a citizen and promote the understanding for the climate change that had already occurred. It has been shown that general images for the climate change promote to understand the need of the mitigation, and that it is important to explain about the climate change that might occur in the future even if it did not occur at the present in order to have people recognize widely the need of the adaptation
Distance to G14.33-0.64 in the Sagittarius Spiral Arm: H2O Maser Trigonometric Parallax with VERA
We report on trigonometric parallax measurements for the Galactic star
forming region G14.33-0.64 toward the Sagittarius spiral arm. We conducted
multi-epoch phase-referencing observations of an H2O maser source in
G14.33-0.64 with the Japanese VLBI array VERA. We successfully detected a
parallax of 0.893+/-0.101 mas, corresponding to a source distance of
1.12+/-0.13 kpc, which is less than half of the kinematic distance for
G14.33-0.64. Our new distance measurement demonstrates that the Sagittarius arm
lies at a closer distance of ~1 kpc, instead of previously assumed ~2-3 kpc
from kinematic distances. The previously suggested deviation of the Sagittarius
arm toward the Galactic center from the symmetrically fitted model (Taylor &
Cordes 1993) is likely due to large errors of kinematic distances at low
galactic longitudes. G14.33-0.64 most likely traces the near side of the
Sagittarius arm. We attempted fitting the pitch angle of the arm with other
parallax measurements along the arm, which yielded two possible pitch angles of
i=34.7+/-2.7 degrees and i=11.2+/-10.5 degrees. Our proper motion measurements
suggest G14.33-0.64 has no significant peculiar motion relative to the
differential rotation of the Galaxy (assumed to be in a circular orbit),
indicating that the source motion is in good agreement with the Galactic
rotation.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, to appear in PASJ Vol. 62, No.
Trigonometric Parallax of W51 Main/South
We report measurement of the trigonometric parallax of W51 Main/South using
the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA). We measure a value of 0.185 +/- 0.010 mas,
corresponding to a distance of 5.41 (+0.31/-0.28) kpc. W51 Main/South is a
well-known massive star-forming region near the tangent point of the
Sagittarius spiral arm of the Milky Way. Our distance to W51 yields an estimate
of the distance to the Galactic center of Ro = 8.3 +/- 0.46 (statistical) +/-
1.0 (systematic) kpc by simple geometry. Combining the parallax and proper
motion measurements for W51, we obtained the full-space motion of this massive
star forming region. We find W51 is in a nearly circular orbit about the
Galactic center. The H2O masers used for our parallax measurements trace four
powerful bipolar outflows within a 0.4 pc size region, some of which are
associated with dusty molecular hot cores and/or hyper- or ultra-compact HII
regions.Comment: Accepted to ApJ; 32 pages; 6 tables; 5 figure
Aberrant expression and potency as a cancer immunotherapy target of alpha-methylacyl-coenzyme A racemase in prostate cancer
Alpha-methylacyl-CoA racemase (AMACR) is an enzyme playing an important role in the beta-oxidation of branched-chain fatty acids and fatty acid derivatives. High expression levels of AMACR have been described in various cancers, including prostate cancer, colorectal cancer and kidney cancer. Because of its cancer-specific and frequent expression, AMACR could be an attractive target for cytotoxic T-lymphocyte (CTL)-based immunotherapy for cancer. In the present study, we examined the induction of AMACR-specific CTLs from prostate cancer patients' peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) and determined HLA-A24-restricted CTL epitopes
Astrometry of Star Forming Region IRAS 05137+3919 in the far outer Galaxy
We present the results of astrometric observations with VERA toward the H2O
maser sources in IRAS 05137+3919, which is thought to be located in the far
outer Galaxy. We have derived the parallax of \pi = 0.086 +/- 0.027 mas, which
corresponds to the source distance of D=11.6+5.3-2.8 kpc. Although the parallax
measurement is only 3-sigma level and thus the distance uncertainty is
considerably large, we can strongly constrain the minimum distance to this
source, locating the source at the distance from the Sun greater than 8.3 kpc
(or 16.7 kpc from the Galaxy's center) at 90% confidence level. Our results
provide an astrometric confirmation that this source is located in the far
outer Galaxy beyond 15 kpc from the Galaxy center, indicating that IRAS
05137+3919 is one of the most distant star-forming regions from the Galaxy
center.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, to appear in PASJ vol 63. No1 (VERA special
issue
Analysis of H2O Masers in Sharpless 269 using VERA Archival data --- Effect of maser structures on astrometric accuracy
Astrometry using H2O maser sources in star forming regions is expected to be
a powerful tool to study the structures and dynamics of our Galaxy. Honma et
al. (2007) (hereafter H2007) claimed that the annual parallax of S269 is
determined within an error of 0.008 milliarcsec (mas), concluding that S269 is
located at 5.3 kpc +- 0.2 kpc from the sun, and R= 13.1 kpc. They claimed that
the rotational velocity of S269 is equal to that of the sun within a 3% error.
This small error, however, is hardly understood when taking into account the
results of other observations and theoretical studies of galactic dynamics. We
here reanalyzed the VERA archival data using the self-calibration method
(hybrid mapping), and found that clusters of maser features of S269 are
distributed in much wider area than that investigated in H2007. We confirmed
that, if we make a narrow region image without considering the presence of
multiple maser spots, and only the phase calibration is applied, we can
reproduce the same maser structures in H2007. The distribution extent of maser
spots in the feature differs 0.2 mas from east to west between our results and
H2007. Moreover, we found that change of relative positions of maser spots in
the cluster reaches 0.1 mas or larger between observational epochs. This
suggests that if one simply assumes the time-dependent, widely distributed
maser sources as a stable single point source, it could cause errors of up to
0.1 mas in the annual parallax of S269. Taking into account the internal
motions of maser spot clusters, the proper motion of S269 cannot be determined
precisely. We estimated that the peculiar motion of S269 with respect to a
Galactic circular rotation is ~20 km/s. These results imply that the observed
kinematics of maser emissions in S269 cannot give a strong constraint on
dynamics of the outer part of the Galaxy, in contrast to the claim by H2007.Comment: 33 pages, 11 figures, to be published in New Astronom
Novel large deletion involving EVC and EVC2 in Ellis–van Creveld syndrome
Ellis–van Creveld syndrome is an autosomal recessive skeletal dysplasia that is characterized by thoracic hypoplasia, polydactyly, oral abnormalities, and congenital heart disease. It is caused by pathogenic variants in the EVC or EVC2 genes. We report a case of a newborn with a compound heterozygous variant comprising NM_147127.5: c.1991dup:[p.Lys665Glufs*10] in the EVC2 gene and a novel large deletion involving exon 1 in EVC and exons 1–7 in EVC2
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