Shutendôji: oniwith a righteous tongue

Numa das mais famosas lendas de seres demoníacos, o herói guerreiro Minamoto no Raiko (? - 1021) derrota o diabólico oni, Shuten dôji, por manha e engano. Remontada ao Japão medieval, a história sugere que, com a ajuda das divindades os guerreiros podem derrotar até os mais monstruosos vilões. Misto de entertenimento e edificação moral /religiosa, “Shuten dôji” pertence ao género otogi zôshi. Adequadamente ao género, no momento da derrota mortal do demónio, Shuten dôji exclama, “Que tristeza, sacerdotes! Dizeis que não mentis: Não há injustiça nas palavras dos demónios”. Trata-se dum lamento justificado; vindo de um demónio que rapta e come raparigas, parece incongruente e mesmo cândido que um personagem tão diabólico não espere subterfúgios para o derrotar. Ao mesmo tempo a exclamação cria uma súbita mudança de simpatias — de pró-guerreiros para pró-oni — na narração da lenda. Esta transferência detém o fluir da história. Em última análise, põe-se, em termos de um dilema, o problema “até que ponto se pode ser corrupto na demanda de um alvo virtuoso?” Ao examinar o oni, o meu artigo explora o significado da razão de Shuten dôji

Oxygen isotope systematics and Al-Mg chronology of chondrules: Implications to protoplanetary disk evolution

第6回極域科学シンポジウム[OA] 南極隕石11月17日（火）　国立国語研究所 2階 講

Japanese Demon Lore

Oni, ubiquitous supernatural figures in Japanese literature, lore, art, and religion, usually appear as demons or ogres. Characteristically threatening, monstrous creatures with ugly features and fearful habits, including cannibalism, they also can be harbingers of prosperity, beautiful and sexual, and especially in modern contexts, even cute and lovable. There has been much ambiguity in their character and identity over their long history. Usually male, their female manifestations convey distinctivly gendered social and cultural meanings. Oni appear frequently in various arts and media, from Noh theater and picture scrolls to modern fiction and political propaganda, They remain common figures in popular Japanese anime, manga, and film and are becoming embedded in American and international popular culture through such media. Noriko Reiderýs book is the first in English devoted to oni. Reider fully examines their cultural history, multifaceted roles, and complex significance as others to the Japanese.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/1071/thumbnail.jp

Collective Quantisation of a Gravitating Skyrmion

Collective quantisation of a B=1 gravitating skyrmion is described. The rotational and isorotational modes are quantised in the same manner as the skyrmion without gravity. It is shown in this paper how the static properties of nucleons such as masses, charge densities, magnetic moments are modified by the gravitational interaction.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, minor corrections, published versio

Detection of highly ionized O and Ne absorption lines in the X-ray spectrum of 4U1820-303 in the globular cluster, NGC 6624

We searched for absorption lines of highly ionized O and Ne in the energy spectra of two Low-mass X-ray binaries, 4U1820-303 in the globular cluster NGC6624 and Cyg X-2, observed with the Chandra LETG, and detected O VII, O VIII and Ne IX absorption lines for 4U1820-303. The equivalent width of the O VII K alpha line was 1.19 +0.47/-0.30 eV (90 % errors) and the significance was 6.5 sigma. Absorption lines were not detected for Cyg X-2 with a 90 % upper limit on the equivalent width of 1.06 eV for O VII K alpha. The absorption lines observed in 4U1820-303 are likely due to hot interstellar medium, because O will be fully photo-ionized if the absorbing column is located close to the binary system. The velocity dispersion is restricted to b = 200 - 420 km/s from consistency between O VII K alpha and K beta lines, Ne/O abundance ratio, and H column density. The average temperature and the O VII density are respectively estimated to be log(T[K]) = 6.2 - 6.3 and n(OVII) = (0.7 - 2.3) x 10^{-6} cm^{-3}. The difference of O VII column densities for the two sources may be connected to the enhancement of the soft X-ray background (SXB) towards the Galactic bulge region. Using the polytrope model of hot gas to account for the SXB we corrected for the density gradient and estimated the midplane O VII density at the solar neighborhood. The scale height of hot gas is then estimated using the AGN absorption lines. It is suggested that a significant portion of both the AGN absorption lines and the high-latitude SXB emission lines can be explained by the hot gas in our Galaxy.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ. 7 pages, 9 eps figure

Chondrule age distribution and rate of heating events for chondrule formation

Chondrules are considered to be formed by flash heating events in the protoplanetary disk. In order to evaluate some basic factors in the heating mechanism, we examined the rate of heating events that explains the abundance and the observed age distribution of chondrules in unequilibrated ordinary chondrites. First, we compiled the literature data of ^(26)Al ages of chondrules from the least equilibrated ordinary chondrites (LL3.0-3.1), ranging from 1Myr to 3Myr with a peak at about 1.8Myr relative to the formation time of Ca, Al-rich inclusions (CAIs) in carbonaceous chondrites, the oldest solid materials formed in the solar system. Next, we made a simple phenomenological chondrule formation model assuming that each event heated only a small fraction of existing dust at one time and numerous heating events produced chondrules. Results indicate that (1) an average number of heating events experienced by a dust particle should be 1.2 or higher, (2) more than a half of the present chondrules were reheated, (3) chondrule formation started sometime between 0.4-1.5Myr and ended at 2.2-2.3Myr after the CAI formation, and (4) the rate of heating events has a peak at 0.1-0.8Myr earlier than the peak of the observed chondrule age distribution and should decrease monotonically with time after the peak

Clinical profile of vigabatrin as monotherapy for treatment of infantile spasms

Jason T Lerner1, Noriko Salamon2, Raman Sankar1,31Departments of Pediatrics, 2Radiological Sciences, 3Neurology, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California Los Angeles and Mattel Children’s Hospital at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USAAbstract: Vigabatrin, the first therapeutic agent to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of infantile spasms, as well as for adjunctive use in the treatment of refractory complex partial epilepsy, represents an important advance for patients with difficult-to-manage epilepsy. This review summarizes the complex history, chemistry, and pharmacology, as well as the clinical data leading to the approval of vigabatrin for infantile spasms in the US. The long path to its approval reflects the visual system and white matter toxicity concerns with this agent. This review provides a brief description of these concerns, and the regulatory safety monitoring and mitigation systems that have been put in place to enhance benefit over risk.Keywords: vigabatrin, infantile spasms, monotherap

N=2 Supersymmetric Sigma Models and D-branes

We study D-branes of N=2 supersymmetric sigma models. Supersymmetric nonlinear sigma models with 2-dimensional target space have D0,D1,D2-branes, which are realized as A-,B-type supersymmetric boundary conditions on the worldsheet. When we embed the models in the string theory, the Kahler potential is restricted and leads to a 2-dim black hole metric with a dilaton background. The D-branes in this model are susy cycles and consistent with the analysis of conjugacy classes. The generalized metrics with U(n) isometry is proposed and dynamics on them are realized by linear sigma models. We investigate D-branes of the linear sigma models and compare the results with those in the nonlinear sigma models.Comment: 23 pages, 5 figure