Localization of Myosin and Actin in the Pelage and Whisker Hair Follicles of Rat

The combined effects of myosin II and actin enable muscle and nonmuscle cells to generate forces required for muscle contraction, cell division, cell migration, cellular morphological changes, the maintenance of cellular tension and polarity, and so on. However, except for the case of muscle contraction, the details are poorly understood. We focus on nonmuscle myosin and actin in the formation and maintenance of hair and skin, which include highly active processes in mammalian life with respect to the cellular proliferation, differentiation, and movement. The localization of nonmuscle myosin II and actin in neonatal rat dorsal skin, mystacial pad, hair follicles, and vibrissal follicles was studied by immunohistochemical technique to provide the basis for the elucidation of the roles of these proteins. Specificities of the antibodies were verified by using samples from the relevant tissues and subjecting them to immunoblotting test prior to morphological analyses. The myosin and actin were abundant and colocalized in the spinous and granular layers but scarce in the basal layer of the dorsal and mystacial epidermis. In hair and vibrissal follicles, nonmuscle myosin and actin were colocalized in the outer root sheath and some hair matrix cells adjoining dermal papillae. In contrast, most areas of the inner root sheath and hair matrix appeared to comprise very small amounts of myosin and actin. Hair shaft may comprise significant myosin during the course of its keratinization. These results suggest that the actin-myosin system plays a part in cell movement, differentiation, protection and other key functions of skin and hair cells

Role of Antarctic Circumpolar Current in decadal climate variability over southern Africa

第6回極域科学シンポジウム分野横断セッション：[IG] 全球環境変動を駆動する南大洋・南極氷床11月17日（火）　国立極地研究所 2階 大会議

High-count Multi-Core Fibers for Space-Division Multiplexing with Propagation-Direction Interleaving

By introducing a square lattice structure for bidirectional core assignments in multi-core fibers, the e ectiveness of propagation-direction interleaving for crosstalk reduction can be increased, realizing a 24-core fiber with-30.6 dB crosstalk over 100 km

Selective hydrogenation of arenes to cyclohexanes in water catalyzed by chitin-supported ruthenium nanoparticles

The selective hydrogenation of arenes to cyclohexanes is promoted by Ru/chitin under aqueous conditions without the loss of C–O/C–N linkages.This work was financially supported by the Ichihara International Scholarship Foundation (to H. N.), the Institute for Quantum Chemical Exploration (to H. N.), MEXT (Japan) through its program “Integrated Research on Chemical Synthesis” (to H. N.) and the Royal Society through its International Exchange Scheme (to A. E. H. W. and H. N.). K. B. and B. R. K. thank the UK EPSRC (EP/J500380/1). Y. M. and A. M. acknowledge the IGER program at NU. We thank Professors R. Noyori (NU), S. Saito (NU) and K. Shimizu (Hokkaido U) for their helpful comments.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Royal Society of Chemistry at http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/C6CY00899B

LHR band emissions at mid-latitude and their relationship to ionospheric ELF hiss and relativistic electrons

LHR band emissions observed at mid-latitude were investigated using data from the EXOS-C (Ohzora) satellite. A typical feature of the LHR band emissions is a continuous banded structure without burst-like and cut-off features whose center frequency decreases as the satellite moves to higher latitudes. A statistical analysis of the occurrence characteristics of the phenomena showed that mid-latitude LHR emissions are distributed inside the plasmapause during magnetically quiet periods, and the poleward boundary of the emission region moves to lower latitudes as the magnetic activity increases. The altitude distribution of the waves suggests that the propagation in the LHR duct formed horizontally in the mid-latitude upper-ionosphere. The emission is closely related to the occurrence of ionospheric ELF hiss. It is also shown that LHR emissions are commonly observed in the slot region of the radiation belt, and they sometimes accompany the enhancement of the ionospheric electron temperature. The generation of the LHR band emissions is discussed based on the observed characteristics

New Perspectives in Sinographic Language Processing Through the Use of Character Structure

Chinese characters have a complex and hierarchical graphical structure carrying both semantic and phonetic information. We use this structure to enhance the text model and obtain better results in standard NLP operations. First of all, to tackle the problem of graphical variation we define allographic classes of characters. Next, the relation of inclusion of a subcharacter in a characters, provides us with a directed graph of allographic classes. We provide this graph with two weights: semanticity (semantic relation between subcharacter and character) and phoneticity (phonetic relation) and calculate "most semantic subcharacter paths" for each character. Finally, adding the information contained in these paths to unigrams we claim to increase the efficiency of text mining methods. We evaluate our method on a text classification task on two corpora (Chinese and Japanese) of a total of 18 million characters and get an improvement of 3% on an already high baseline of 89.6% precision, obtained by a linear SVM classifier. Other possible applications and perspectives of the system are discussed.Comment: 17 pages, 5 figures, presented at CICLing 201

On the Brightness and Waiting-time Distributions of a Type III Radio Storm observed by STEREO/WAVES

Type III solar radio storms, observed at frequencies below approximately 16 MHz by space borne radio experiments, correspond to the quasi-continuous, bursty emission of electron beams onto open field lines above active regions. The mechanisms by which a storm can persist in some cases for more than a solar rotation whilst exhibiting considerable radio activity are poorly understood. To address this issue, the statistical properties of a type III storm observed by the STEREO/WAVES radio experiment are presented, examining both the brightness distribution and (for the first time) the waiting-time distribution. Single power law behavior is observed in the number distribution as a function of brightness; the power law index is approximately 2.1 and is largely independent of frequency. The waiting-time distribution is found to be consistent with a piecewise-constant Poisson process. This indicates that during the storm individual type III bursts occur independently and suggests that the storm dynamics are consistent with avalanche type behavior in the underlying active region.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, 1 table. Accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal Letter