Whole body counter surveys of Miharu-town school children for four consecutive years after the Fukushima NPP accident

Comprehensive whole-body counter surveys of Miharu town school children have been conducted for four consecutive years, in 2011-2014. This represents the only long-term sampling-bias-free study of its type conducted after the Fukushima Dai-ichi accident. For the first time in 2014, a new device called the Babyscan, which has a low $^{134/137}$Cs MDA of $< 50$ Bq/body, was used to screen the children shorter than 130 cm. No child in this group was found to have detectable level of radiocesium. Using the MDAs, upper limits of daily intake of radiocesium were estimated for each child. For those screened with the Babyscan, the upper intake limits were found to be <1 Bq/day for $^{137}$Cs. Analysis of a questionnaire filled out by the children's parents regarding their food and water consumption shows that the majority of Miharu children regularly consume local and/or home-grown rice and vegetables. This however does not increase the body burden.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figure

Bac-pool Sequencing And Assembly Of 19 Mb Of The Complex Sugarcane Genome

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)Sequencing plant genomes are often challenging because of their complex architecture and high content of repetitive sequences. Sugarcane has one of the most complex genomes. It is highly polyploid, preserves intact homeologous chromosomes from its parental species and contains 55% repetitive sequences. Although bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) libraries have emerged as an alternative for accessing the sugarcane genome, sequencing individual clones is laborious and expensive. Here, we present a strategy for sequencing and assembly reads produced from the DNA of pooled BAC clones. A set of 178 BAC clones, randomly sampled from the SP80-3280 sugarcane BAC library, was pooled and sequenced using the Illumina HiSeq2000 and PacBio platforms. A hybrid assembly strategy was used to generate 2,451 scaffolds comprising 19.2 MB of assembled genome sequence. Scaffolds of >= 20 Kb corresponded to 80% of the assembled sequences, and the full sequences of forty BACs were recovered in one or two contigs. Alignment of the BAC scaffolds with the chromosome sequences of sorghum showed a high degree of collinearity and gene order. The alignment of the BAC scaffolds to the 10 sorghum chromosomes suggests that the genome of the SP80-3280 sugarcane variety is similar to 19% contracted in relation to the sorghum genome. In conclusion, our data show that sequencing pools composed of high numbers of BAC clones may help to construct a reference scaffold map of the sugarcane genome.7[FAPESP - 10/50114-4]Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP

Pressure sensor based on freely suspended ferroelectric liquid crystal film

This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and AIP Publishing. This article appeared in S. V. Yablonskii, K. Nakano, A. S. Mikhailov, M. Ozaki, and K. Yoshino, Appl. Phys. Lett. 80, 571 (2002) and may be found at https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1430270

Solvable Optimal Velocity Models and Asymptotic Trajectory

In the Optimal Velocity Model proposed as a new version of Car Following Model, it has been found that a congested flow is generated spontaneously from a homogeneous flow for a certain range of the traffic density. A well-established congested flow obtained in a numerical simulation shows a remarkable repetitive property such that the velocity of a vehicle evolves exactly in the same way as that of its preceding one except a time delay $T$. This leads to a global pattern formation in time development of vehicles' motion, and gives rise to a closed trajectory on $\Delta x$-$v$ (headway-velocity) plane connecting congested and free flow points. To obtain the closed trajectory analytically, we propose a new approach to the pattern formation, which makes it possible to reduce the coupled car following equations to a single difference-differential equation (Rondo equation). To demonstrate our approach, we employ a class of linear models which are exactly solvable. We also introduce the concept of ``asymptotic trajectory'' to determine $T$ and $v_B$ (the backward velocity of the pattern), the global parameters associated with vehicles' collective motion in a congested flow, in terms of parameters such as the sensitivity $a$, which appeared in the original coupled equations.Comment: 25 pages, 15 eps figures, LaTe

Electromechanical effect in freely suspended liquid crystal films

This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and AIP Publishing. This article appeared in Serguei V. Yablonskii, Toshiyasu Oue, Hidetaka Nambu, Aleksey S. Mikhailov, Masanori Ozaki, and Katsumi Yoshino, Appl. Phys. Lett. 75, 64 (1999) and may be found at https://doi.org/10.1063/1.124325

The rectifying developable and the spherical Darboux image of a space curve

In this paper we study singularities of certain surfaces and curves associated with the family of rectifying planes along space curves. We establish the relationships between singularities of these subjects and geometric invariants of curves which are deeply related to the order of contact with helices