Preliminary Study of Development of the Organization of Rare-Earth Exportation Countries (OREEC)

The largest two sectors emitting CO2 in the world are electricity generation and land-transportation. Therefore, nuclear power plays an important role in generating electricity with low CO2 emission. An important aspect needs to be considered to ensure environmental sustainability is nuclear non-proliferation and less amount of radioactive waste generated. Thus the use of "thorium" as nuclear fuel has received increasing interest because thorium produces little amount of plutonium and very little amount of long-lived minor actinide. However, thorium cannot be used immediately due to its lack of fissile isotope indispensable to start fission reaction. At the same time, electric vehicle and hybrid-vehicle become more popular as low-carbon automobiles. Rare-earth elements are indispensable for manufacturing these low-carbon automobiles. However the problem with rare-earth production is its radioactive by-product of "thorium". Since the largest potential of consuming thorium by nuclear power still needs several decades for commercializing, there becomes a discrepancy in consumption and production of thorium causing unused stockpile of thorium. Several countries have announced to supply rare-earth but this cannot be safely and economically done unless thorium problem is solved. In this paper, an international framework called the "OREEC: Organization of Rare-Earth Exportation Countries" is proposed as a solution to this issue. The OREEC has mainly three functions: (1) ThAX, which is a financial collecting method, (2) Th FREE label, which is certification of adequate treatment of thorium and (3) The Bank, which stores separated thorium

Neurolinguistic Evidence for Syntactic and Semantic Processes : A Review of the Literature

Recent investigations of syntactic and semantic aspects of language comprehension in aphasia are reviewed. It is argued that these studies support theoretical assumptions concerning the functional independence of various components of normal language processing. Studies of sentence comprehension support the existence of a syntactic mechanism that is independent of lexically based heuristic strategies for assigning meaning. There is evidence that these independent elements of language are subserved by different portions of the dominant hemisphere of the brain. Studies of aphasic language provide a valuable source of constraints on theories of normal language processing

Phonological Deficits in Aphasia Syndromes : A Neurolinguistic Approach

The purpose of the present study was to explore the notion that there are differential sources of phonological breakdown among the major aphasia syndromes. On the basis of a review of the relevant literature, the following neurolinguistic hypotheses were generated. Wernicke\u27 s aphasics have a deficit in accessing complete phonological representations. Conduction aphasics have a deficit in constructing phonemic strings. Broca\u27s aphasics have a deficit in phonetically recording phonemic strings

ゲンシロ モギ ネンリョウ シュウゴウタイジョウ オ ナガレル エキマクリュウ ニ カンスル ジッケンテキ ケンキュウ

京都大学0048新制・課程博士博士(工学)甲第9777号工博第2187号新制||工||1248(附属図書館)UT51-2002-M155京都大学大学院工学研究科原子核工学専攻(主査)教授 芹澤 昭示, 教授 吉田 英生, 教授 三島 嘉一郎学位規則第4条第1項該当Doctor of EngineeringKyoto UniversityDFA

Cloud optical thickness and effective particle radius derived from transmitted solar radiation measurements : Comparison with cloud radar observations

A method is presented for determining the optical thickness and effective particle radius of stratiform clouds containing liquid water drops in the absence of drizzle from transmitted solar radiation measurements. The procedure compares measurements of the cloud transmittance from the ground at water-absorbing and nonabsorbing wavelengths with lookup tables of the transmittance precomputed for plane-parallel, vertically homogeneous clouds. The optical thickness derived from the cloud transmittance may be used to retrieve vertical profiles of cloud microphysics in combination with the radar reflectivity factor. To do this, we also present an algorithm for solving the radar equation with a constraint of the optical thickness at the visible wavelength. Observations of clouds were made in August and September 2003 at Koganei, Tokyo, Japan, using a PREDE i-skyradiometer and a 95-GHz cloud radar Super Polarimetric Ice Crystal Detection and Explication Radar (SPIDER). The optical thickness and effective radius of water clouds were derived from the i-skyradiometer. Then, the vertical profile of the effective radius was retrieved from SPIDER, using the optical thickness determined from the i-skyradiometer. We found that the effective radii derived by using these two instruments were in good agreement

Protein and viral partitioning in two-phase aqueous micellar systems

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Chemical Engineering, 2001.Includes bibliographical references (p. 305-316).These changes included an expanded pattern of labeling and a large increase in the density of labeling. Changes were seen not only in primary auditory cortex, but also in other cortical fields that have not been studied before. In contrast, there was little change in brainstem (inferior colliculus, dorsal and anteroventral cochlear nucleus) labeling. Second, the effect of past sound exposure on brain response to sound was examined. After daily exposure to a sound, labeling evoked by that sound was markedly decreased in cortex, but not in brainstem. In two very different conditions, hearing loss and prior sound exposure, we found the same answer: cortical Fos labeling was highly changed, whereas brainstem labeling was more stable. The results suggest that the effects observed in cortex do not reflect subcortical changes and that the multiple fields of auditory cortex are malleable in ways that brainstem auditory nuclei are not. Competitive inhibition and partitioning studies were conducted to investigate possible attractive interactions between the C10E4 micelles and the tailspikes/capsids of bacteriophage P22 (model virus). These possible attractive interactions were investigated because they could counter the effect of the excluded-volume interactions. However, the attractive interactions between the bacteriophage P22 particles and the C10E4 micelles were found to be negligible.(cont.) An experimental study was also performed to examine whether all the micelle-rich and micelle-poor domains that are formed at the onset of phase separation are in their corresponding macroscopic phases prior to quantifying the viral concentrations in the two phases. In this study, the entrainment of micelle-poor domains in the top, micelle-rich phase was found to be the key factor influencing the partitioning behavior of viruses. In addition, a new theoretical description of partitioning was developed that combines the excluded-volume theory with this entrainment effect. Good agreement between the measured and the predicted viral partition coefficients was attained. It was therefore concluded that the primary mechanisms governing viral partitioning are the entrainment of micelle-poor domains in the top, micelle-rich phase and the excluded-volume interactions between the viruses and the micelles. Direction B centered around the less optimistic point-of-view that the viral partition coefficients could not decrease and approach the extreme viral partition coefficients predicted by the excluded-volume theory. However, even with the viral and protein partition coefficients that had already been achieved in the two-phase aqueous C10E4 micellar system, the virus was excluded more strongly than the protein into the bottom, micelle-poor phase. Accordingly, the volume ratio was varied in order to attain a 75% yield of lysozyme (model protein) in the top phase and a 97% yield of bacteriophage P22 in the bottom phase.(cont.) To further increase the yield of protein in the top phase, another mode of interaction was introduced to attract the protein into the top, micelle-rich phase. Specifically, a two-phase aqueous mixed (nonionic/ionic) micellar system was formed by the addition of the anionic surfactant SDS to C10E4. An experimental study was conducted to demonstrate proof-of-principle that two-phase aqueous mixed (nonionic/ionic) micellar systems could indeed be used to modulate both electrostatic and excluded-volume interactions between the proteins and the micelles. ...by Daniel Takashi Kamei.Ph.D

失語症治療における情報処理モデル

The first section argues that analysis of neuropsychological deficits in terms of processing models allows us to identify specific target functions for aphasia therapy. The next section discusses some guidelines for single-subject experimental designs to evaluate the effect of aphasia therapy