NUMERICAL ANALYSIS ON MAGNETIC SHIELDING OF AXIALLY SYMMETRIC SUPERCONDUCTING PLATE

The effects of the superconducting plate shape on the magnetic shielding are investigated. The plate shape is assumed to be axially symmetric and the permeability of the plate is assumed non-zero. A numerical code to calculate the magnetostatic field around the plate is developed and the spatial distributions of the decay factors are calculated by means of the code. The results of computations show that the magnetic shielding becomes large with the increase of triangularity and with the decrease of ellipticity

Visual Place Recognition From Eye Reflection

The cornea in the human eye reflects incoming environmental light, which means we can obtain information about the surrounding environment from the corneal reflection in facial images. In recent years, as the quality of consumer cameras increases, this has caused privacy concerns in terms of identifying the people around the subject or where the photo is taken. This paper investigates the security risk of eye corneal reflection images: specifically, visual place recognition from eye reflection images. First, we constructed two datasets containing pairs of scene and corneal reflection images. The first dataset is taken in a virtual environment. We showed pre-captured scene images in a 180-degree surrounding display system and took corneal reflections from subjects. The second dataset is taken in an outdoor environment. We developed several visual place recognition algorithms, including CNN-based image descriptors featuring a naive Siamese network and AFD-Net combined with entire image feature representations including VLAD and NetVLAD, and compared the results. We found that AFD-Net+VLAD performed the best and was able to accurately determine the scene in 73.08% of the top-five candidate scenes. These results demonstrate the potential to estimate the location at which a facial picture was taken, which simultaneously leads to a) positive applications such as the localization of a robot while conversing with persons and b) negative scenarios including the security risk of uploading facial images to the public

Five Amino Acid Residues Responsible for the High Stability of Hydrogenobacter thermophilus Cytochrome c552

Five amino acid residues responsible for extreme stability have been identified in cytochrome c552 (HT c552) from a thermophilic bacterium, Hydrogenobacter thermophilus. The five residues, which are spatially distributed in three regions of HT c552, were replaced with the corresponding residues in the homologous but less stable cytochrome c551 (PA c551) from Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The quintuple HT c552 variant (A7F/M13V/Y34F/Y43E/I78V) showed the same stability against guanidine hydrochloride denaturation as that of PA c551, suggesting that the five residues in HT c552 necessarily and sufficiently contribute to the overall stability. In the three HT c552 variants carrying mutations in each of the three regions, the Y34F/Y43E mutations resulted in the greatest destabilization, by –13.3 kJ mol–1, followed by A7F/M13V (–3.3 kJ mol–1) and then I78V (–1.5 kJ mol–1). The order of destabilization in HT c552 was the same as that of stabilization in PA c551 with reverse mutations such as F34Y/E43Y, F7A/V13M, and V78I (13.4, 10.3, and 0.3 kJ mol–1, respectively). The results of guanidine hydrochloride denaturation were consistent with those of thermal denaturation for the same variants. The present study established a method for reciprocal mutation analysis. The effects of side-chain contacts were experimentally evaluated by swapping the residues between the two homologous proteins that differ in stability. A comparative study of the two proteins was a useful tool for assessing the amino acid contribution to the overall stability.This work was supported in part by grants from Hiroshima University, the Noda Institute for Scientific Research, and the Japanese Ministry of Education, Science and Culture (grants-in-aid for Scientific Research on Priority Areas)

Identification of candidate molecular targets of the novel antineoplastic antimitotic NP-10

We previously reported the identification of a novel antimitotic agent with carbazole and benzohydrazide structures: N′-[(9-ethyl-9H-carbazol-3-yl)methylene]-2-iodobenzohydrazide (code number NP-10). However, the mechanism(s) underlying the cancer cell-selective inhibition of mitotic progression by NP-10 remains unclear. Here, we identified NP-10-interacting proteins by affinity purification from HeLa cell lysates using NP-10-immobilized beads followed by mass spectrometry. The results showed that several mitosis-associated factors specifically bind to active NP-10, but not to an inactive NP-10 derivative. Among them, NUP155 and importin β may be involved in NP-10-mediated mitotic arrest. Because NP-10 did not show antitumor activity in vivo in a previous study, we synthesized 19 NP-10 derivatives to identify more effective NP-10-related compounds. HMI83-2, an NP-10-related compound with a Cl moiety, inhibited HCT116 cell tumor formation in nude mice without significant loss of body weight, suggesting that HMI83-2 is a promising lead compound for the development of novel antimitotic agents

Survey of Period Variations of Superhumps in SU UMa-Type Dwarf Novae. II: The Second Year (2009-2010)

As an extension of the project in Kato et al. (2009, arXiv:0905.1757), we collected times of superhump maxima for 61 SU UMa-type dwarf novae mainly observed during the 2009-2010 season. The newly obtained data confirmed the basic findings reported in Kato et al. (2009): the presence of stages A-C, as well as the predominance of positive period derivatives during stage B in systems with superhump periods shorter than 0.07 d. There was a systematic difference in period derivatives for systems with superhump periods longer than 0.075 d between this study and Kato et al. (2009). We suggest that this difference is possibly caused by the relative lack of frequently outbursting SU UMa-type dwarf novae in this period regime in the present study. We recorded a strong beat phenomenon during the 2009 superoutburst of IY UMa. The close correlation between the beat period and superhump period suggests that the changing angular velocity of the apsidal motion of the elliptical disk is responsible for the variation of superhump periods. We also described three new WZ Sge-type objects with established early superhumps and one with likely early superhumps. We also suggest that two systems, VX For and EL UMa, are WZ Sge-type dwarf novae with multiple rebrightenings. The O-C variation in OT J213806.6+261957 suggests that the frequent absence of rebrightenings in very short-Porb objects can be a result of sustained superoutburst plateau at the epoch when usual SU UMa-type dwarf novae return to quiescence preceding a rebrightening. We also present a formulation for a variety of Bayesian extension to traditional period analyses.Comment: 63 pages, 77 figures, 1 appendix, Accepted for publication in PASJ, data correctio