Direct Observation of Long-Term Durability of Superconductivity in YBa2_2Cu3_3O7_7-Ag2_2O Composites

We report direct observation of long-term durability of superconductivity of several YBa$_2$Cu$_3$O$_7$-Ag$_2$O composites that were first prepared and studied almost 14 years ago [J. J. Lin {\it et al}., Jpn. J. Appl. Phys. {\bf 29}, 497 (1990)]. Remeasurements performed recently on both resistances and magnetizations indicate a sharp critical transition temperature at 91 K. We also find that such long-term environmental stability of high-temperature superconductivity can only be achieved in YBa$_2$Cu$_3$O$_7$ with Ag$_2$O addition, but not with pure Ag addition.Comment: to be published in Jpn. J. Appl. Phy

Effects of Maternal Undernutrition on Glomerular Ultrastructure in Rat Offspring

BackgroundIntrauterine growth restriction (IUGR) can reduce glomerular number and increase blood pressure in rats. The aim of this study was to assess the effects of maternal undernutrition during late gestation on glomerular ultrastructure in adult rat offspring.MethodsTimed pregnant Sprague-Dawley rats were used. Control dams received regular food throughout pregnancy, while experimental dams received 50% of control food intake from days 15-21 of gestation. Glomerular ultrastructure was quantified in male offspring at 16 weeks of age.ResultsThe ultrastructure of the filtration apparatus in the IUGR rat glomeruli was indistinguishable from that in the control rat glomeruli. The relative volumes of the glomerulus occupied by podocytes, capillaries, and mesangium, and the thickness of the glomerular basement membrane (GBM), and width of the filtration slit were comparable between control and IUGR rats.ConclusionThese results indicate that glomerular ultrastructure is not affected by maternal undernutrition and suggest that altered glomerular ultrastructure is not a contributory factor to the pathogenesis of hypertension following maternal undernutrition

Endoscopic Treatment of Vesicoureteral Reflux in Children with Dextranomer/Hyaluronic Acid—A Single Surgeon's 6-Year Experience

Endoscopic treatment for vesicoureteral reflux (VUR) has become an established alternative to long-term antibiotic prophylaxis and ureteral reimplantation. We present the outcome of endoscopic treatment with dextranomer/hyaluronic acid copolymer (Deflux) for VUR in children by a single surgeon at our institute from October 2003 to October 2009. We reviewed the cases of 150 patients (total 239 ureters), 56 girls (37%) and 94 boys (63%), with a mean age of 2.2 years and a median followup of 2.5 years (range 3–68 months). Among the 239 ureters treated, 67.4% (161/239) were cured with a single injection, and a second and third injection raised the cure rate to 86.6% (207/239) and 88.3% (211/239), respectively. None had postoperative ureteral obstruction

Unifying and Merging Well-trained Deep Neural Networks for Inference Stage

We propose a novel method to merge convolutional neural-nets for the inference stage. Given two well-trained networks that may have different architectures that handle different tasks, our method aligns the layers of the original networks and merges them into a unified model by sharing the representative codes of weights. The shared weights are further re-trained to fine-tune the performance of the merged model. The proposed method effectively produces a compact model that may run original tasks simultaneously on resource-limited devices. As it preserves the general architectures and leverages the co-used weights of well-trained networks, a substantial training overhead can be reduced to shorten the system development time. Experimental results demonstrate a satisfactory performance and validate the effectiveness of the method.Comment: To appear in the 27th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 23rd European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2018. (IJCAI-ECAI 2018