Aging and Degradation Behavior Elucidated by Viscoelasticity Aiming Protection of Smart City Facilities

Polymer coatings play a crucially important role in protecting smart city facilities against the harsh factors of outdoor environments. Recent increased awareness of eco‐friendliness has led to the use of waterborne organic coatings. Research into the bulk material properties of these coatings is necessary in order to understand their degradation process in the field. The present work focuses attention on a unique rheological property, which has both elastic and viscous characteristics, as a means of assessing the stability of the coating. The viscoelastic property determines whether it presents solid‐like or liquid‐like response from the comparison of relative strengths of the relaxation time (τ) and operating time (t). In the process of degradation, both the storage (E′) and loss modulus (E″), which represent the elastic and viscous components, respectively, decrease accordingly, reflecting the deterioration of coating. The majority of the water molecules absorbed in a coating are strongly bound to the polymer network through hydrogen bonds with polar functional groups, which destroys intermolecular bonding between macromolecules and reduces the bulk materials’ ability to diffuse stress concentrations and thereby lowers a coating’s overall strength

Is this a new type of primary prosopagnosia, both progressive and apperceptive?

Prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces, has a history going back to Charcot and Hughlings-Jackson, but was first named by Bodamer in 1947. Its anatomical loci are still unclear. However, progressive prosopagnosia is normally linked to right dominant temporal lobe atrophy, and diagnosed as part of frontotemporal lobar degeneration. Here we report a case of prosopagnosia linked to posterior cortical atrophy. Although case reports of posterior cortical atrophy-prosopagnosia do already exist, it is normally described as an accessory symptom. The interest of our own posterior cortical atrophy patient, possibly the first such case, is that he had a rare apperceptive type of prosopagnosia unrelated to the associative, frontotemporal lobar degeneration-type

Phosphoserine phosphatase is required for serine and one-carbon unit synthesis in Hydrogenobacter thermophilus

Hydrogenobacter thermophilus is an obligate chemolithoautotrophic bacterium of the phylum Aquificae and is capable of fixing carbon dioxide through the reductive tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle. The recent discovery of two novel-type phosphoserine phosphatases (PSPs) in H. thermophilus suggests the presence of a phosphorylated serine biosynthesis pathway; however, the physiological role of these novel-type metal-independent PSPs (iPSPs) in H. thermophilus has not been confirmed. In the present study, a mutant strain with a deletion of pspA, the catalytic subunit of iPSPs, was constructed and characterized. The generated mutant was a serine auxotroph, suggesting that the novel-type PSPs and phosphorylated serine synthesis pathway are essential for serine anabolism in H. thermophilus. As an autotrophic medium supplemented with glycine did not support the growth of the mutant, the reversible enzyme serine hydroxymethyltransferase does not appear to synthesize serine from glycine and may therefore generate glycine and 5,10-CH2-tetrahydrofolate (5,10-CH2-THF) from serine. This speculation is supported by the lack of glycine cleavage activity, which is needed to generate 5,10-CH2-THF, in H. thermophilus. Determining the mechanism of 5,10-CH2-THF synthesis is important for understanding the fundamental anabolic pathways of organisms, because 5,10-CH2-THF is a major one-carbon donor that is used for the synthesis of various essential compounds, including nucleic and amino acids. The findings from the present experiments using a pspA deletion mutant have confirmed the physiological role of iPSPs as serine producers and show that serine is a major donor of one-carbon units in H. thermophilus

SuperMat: Construction of a linked annotated dataset from superconductors-related publications

A growing number of papers are published in the area of superconducting materials science. However, novel text and data mining (TDM) processes are still needed to efficiently access and exploit this accumulated knowledge, paving the way towards data-driven materials design. Herein, we present SuperMat (Superconductor Materials), an annotated corpus of linked data derived from scientific publications on superconductors, which comprises 142 articles, 16052 entities, and 1398 links that are characterised into six categories: the names, classes, and properties of materials; links to their respective superconducting critical temperature (Tc); and parametric conditions such as applied pressure or measurement methods. The construction of SuperMat resulted from a fruitful collaboration between computer scientists and material scientists, and its high quality is ensured through validation by domain experts. The quality of the annotation guidelines was ensured by satisfactory Inter Annotator Agreement (IAA) between the annotators and the domain experts. SuperMat includes the dataset, annotation guidelines, and annotation support tools that use automatic suggestions to help minimise human errors

2017～2019年度 関西大学研究拠点形成支援経費研究成果報告書

目次・研究成果の概要・2-1　工藤 宏人・宮前 翼・上田 正人・村山 憲弘・林 順一 "ノーリア骨格をテンプレートとした空孔内に水酸基を有する架橋化合物の合成とそれらの金属イオン包接性能" ネットワークポリマー論文集 vol.41, No.2, 65 - 71 (2020).・2-2　Mitsuaki Matsuoka, Kaho Yokoyama, Kohei Okura, Norihiro Murayama, Masato Ueda, Makio Naito " Synthesis of Geopolymers from Mechanically Activated Coal Fly Ash and Improvement of Their Mechanical Properties" Minerals 9, 791- 801 (2019).・2-3　Daisuke Shimoyama, Ryo Sekiya, Hiroto Kudo, Takeharu Haino, "Feet-to-Feet Connected Trisresorcinarenes" Organic Letters 22, 352 - 356 (2019).・2-4　Masato Ueda, Masahiko Ikeda, Shigeo Mori, Kenji Doi, Hisashi Kitagaki, Shuntaro Terauchi "Mechanical Properties of Additively Manufactured Porous Titanium with Sub-Millimetre Structural Units" Materials Transactions Vol.60, No.9, 1792 - 1798 (2019).・2-5　五十井 浩平・白杉 文香・松岡 光昭・林 順一・村山 憲弘 "種々のMg-Fe系複合酸化物を用いた希薄水溶液中のホウ素およびヒ素の除去" 環境資源工学 66, 29 - 35 (2019).・2-6　Toru Maruyama, Mitsuyoshi Tamaki, Keisuke Nakamura, Gou Nakamura "EFFECT OF MOLTEN METAL TEMPERATURE ON MOLD FILLING IN EVAPORATIVE PATTERN CASTING" International Journal of Metalcasting 13, 611–617 (2019).・2-7　Ryuta Saito, Toru Maruyama, Toshiki Nakamura, Hitoshi Yanagitani, Takahiro Sakai, Kouji Nakamoto "Influence of Tellurium Addition to Spheroidal Graphite Cast Iron on the Number of Graphite Particles" International Journal of Metalcasting Vol.13, 3, 571-577 (2018).・2-8　Masato Ueda, Rika Yamaguchi, Chika Fujita, Masahiko Ikeda "Control of Cell Adhesion on Titanium Dioxide by Light Irradiation" Materials Science Forum Vol.941, 2507 - 2512 (2018).・2-9　Hiroto Kudo, Mari Fukunaga, Kohei Shiotsuki, Hiroya Takeda, Hiroki Yamamoto, Takahiro Kozawa, Takeo Watanabe "Synthesis of hyperbranched polyacetals containing C-(4-t-butylbenz)calix[4]resorcinarene: Resist properties for extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography" Reactive and Functional Polymers 131, 361 - 367 (2018).・2-10　大隈 修・前 一廣・林 順一 "直接液化による豪州ビクトリア褐炭の高度利用 : 改新BCLプロセスによる化学原料の生産" Journal of the Japan Institute of Energy 98, 17 - 26 (2019).・2-11　Issei Suzuki, Ayako Kakinuma, Masato Ueda, Takahisa Omata "Flux growth of β-NaGaO₂ single crystals" Journal of Crystal Growth 504, 26 -30 (2018).・2-12　上田 正人、坂本 貴則、池田 勝彦 "電気抵抗率の精密測定による純チタンの組織評価" 環境資源工学 65, 74 -76 (2018).・2-13　Satoshi Imasaka, Hiroyasu Ishii, Jun\u27ichi Hayashi, Sadao Araki, Hideki Yamamoto "Synthesis of CHA-type titanosilicate zeolites using titanium oxide as Ti source and evaluation of their physicochemical properties" Microporous and Mesoporous Materials 273, 243-248 (2019).・2-14　Hiroto Kudo, Shizuya Ohori, Hiroya Takeda, Hiroki Ogawa, Takeo Watanbe, Hiroki Yamamoto, Takahiro Kozawa "Synthesis and Property of Tannic Acid Derivatives and Their Application for Extreme Ultraviolet Laser Lithography System" Journal of Photopolymer Science and Technology Vol.31, 221 - 225 (2018).・2-15　Hiroto Kudo, Tsubasa Miyamae, Kouta Kitagawa, Kohei Isoi, Norihiro Murayama, Jun\u27ichi Hayashi " Synthesis and Metal-Complexation Ability of Cross-Linking Materials Containing Noria-Templated Cavities with Pendant Carboxylic Acid Groups" Chemistry Select 3, 2223 - 2228 (2018).・2-16　上田 正人、池田 勝彦、土井 研児、 森 重雄、北垣 壽、寺内 俊太郎、関 あずさ "骨部分置換用ポーラスチタン : ポリグリコール酸 : 炭酸カルシウム複合体の開発" 高分子論文集 Vol.75, No.1, 69 - 74 (2018).・2-17　Alexandru C Sonoc, Jacob Jeswiet, Norihiro Murayama, Junji Shibata "A study of the application of Donnan dialysis to the recycling of lithium ion batteries" Hydrometallurgy 175, 133 - 143 (2018).2-3は、著作権の関係により非公開としております。2-8は、著作権の関係により非公開としております。2-9は、著作権の関係により非公開としております。2-10は、著作権の関係により非公開としております。2-11は、著作権の関係により非公開としております。2-16は、著作権の関係により非公開としております

Identification of a strong genetic risk factor for major depressive disorder in the human virome

Summary: The heritability of major depressive disorder (MDD) is reportedly 30–50%. However, the genetic basis of its heritability remains unknown. Within SITH-1, a risk factor for MDD in human herpesvirus 6B (HHV-6B), we discovered a gene polymorphism with a large odds ratio for an association with MDD. It was a sequence whose number of repeats was inversely correlated with SITH-1 expression. This number was significantly lower in MDD patients. Rates for 17 or fewer repeats of the sequence were 67.9% for MDD and 28.6% for normal controls, with an odds ratio of 5.28. For patients with 17 or less repeats, the rate for presence of another MDD patient in their families was 47.4%, whereas there were no MDD patients in the families of patients with more than 17 repeats. Since HHV-6B is transmitted primarily mother to child and within families and persists for life, this gene polymorphism could potentially influence heritability of MDD