Epitaxially stabilized iridium spinel oxide without cations in the tetrahedral site

Single-crystalline thin film of an iridium dioxide polymorph Ir2O4 has been fabricated by the pulsed laser deposition of LixIr2O4 precursor and the subsequent Li-deintercalation using soft chemistry. Ir2O4 crystallizes in a spinel (AB2O4) without A cations in the tetrahedral site, which is isostructural to lambda-MnO2. Ir ions form a pyrochlore sublattice, which is known to give rise to a strong geometrical frustration. This Ir spinel was found to be a narrow gap insulator, in remarkable contrast to the metallic ground state of rutile-type IrO2. We argue that an interplay of strong spin-orbit coupling and a Coulomb repulsion gives rise to an insulating ground state as in a layered perovskite Sr2IrO4.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figure

ヴェンセスラウ・デ・モラエスの日本語会話能力 : 会話能力の検証および会話内容からみえる人物像について

A Portuguese writer Wenceslau de Moraes spent his later life in Japan since 1897; he never left Japan until 1929 when he died. It is said that his speaking ability of Japanese language was not good although he lived in Japan more than thirty years. In this study, we investigated his speaking ability of Japanese based on the written memories of those who had direct discourse with him. The records of his speech were limited to the memories of his neighbors, a Buddhist nun who regularly came to his house, and a newspaper reporter from Osaka who interviewed him. Except for the words of affirmation or denial, the word that appeared most frequently in his speech was "kawaisou” or “kinodoku” that means “pity” (“piedade” in Portuguese). “Piedade” is the important key word of his masterpiece Ó-Yoné e Ko-Haru. In the preface to the book he quoted the sentence “A litteratura do futuro será a Litteratura da piedade” from Pierre Loti’s work, and he wrote Ó-Yoné e Ko-Haru as a literature of pity. Therefore, his deep sympathy for vulnerable and oppressed existence was the propensity of his character shown in both his works and his real life. “Kawaii / kawairashii” (lovely) and “shinsetsu” (kind) are also the words he used frequently in his conversation with his neighbors. As for the grammar of Japanese language, Moraes did not seem to have mastered postpositional particles and conjugation of verbs. Two persons referred to his speaking ability of Japanese as follows: a newspaper reporter who interviewed Moraes wrote that “he speaks in simple Japanese” in his article, and a pastor who sometimes visited Moraes’s house said that “his Japanese was not good, but he spoke familiar Japanese slowly”. The reason why Moraes’s Japanese did not improve is said that he did not want to associate with intellectual people here in Tokushima. On the other hand, he greeted familiarly and often exchanged gifts with his neighbors. He pointed out that Japanese people is a pleasant neighbor in his work Relance da Alma Japoneza, and he also tried to be a good neighbor to those he knew as well. There would have been no need for a formal and complicated conversation for him for that purpose

Security Analysis of Cryptosystems Using Short Generators over Ideal Lattices

In this paper, we analyze the security of cryptosystems using short generators over ideal lattices such as candidate multilinear maps by Garg, Gentry and Halevi and fully homomorphic encryption by Smart and Vercauteren. Our approach is based on a recent work by Cramer, Ducas, Peikert and Regev on analysis of recovering a short generator of an ideal in the $q$-th cyclotomic field for a prime power $q$. In their analysis, implicit lower bounds of the special values of Dirichlet $L$-functions at 1 are essentially used for estimating some sizes of the dual basis in the log-unit lattice of the $q$-th cyclotomic field. Our main contribution is to improve Cramer et al.\u27s analysis by giving explicit lower and upper bounds of the special values of Dirichlet $L$-functions at 1 for any non-trivial even Dirichlet characters modulo $q$. Moreover, we give various experimental evidence that recovering short generators of principle ideals in $2k$-th cyclotomic fields for $k \geq 10$ is succeeded with high probability. As a consequence, our analysis suggests that the security of the above cryptosystems based on the difficulty of recovering a short generator is reduced to solving the principal ideal problem under the number theoretical conjecture so-called Weber\u27s class number problem

モラエス ノ ミッツ ノ エハガキ ショカンシュウ : エハガキ ショカン カラ ミエル モラエス ノ セイカツケン リョコウ シンコウ ニツイテ

Portuguese writer Wenceslau de Moraes sent a large amount of picture postcards to Portugal from Japan. 609 of them were donated to Tokushima city in 1989, and they are stored in the Moraes Museum located at the summit of Mt. Bizan. They were published as “Moraes no Ehagaki-shokan” and “Moraes Ehagaki-shu I - IV” respectively in 1994 and 2004, in Japan. Independent from the collection in Tokushima, a book of picture postcard-collection entitled "Permanências e Errâncias no Japão" was published from Fundação Oriente in 2004 in Portugal. In this paper, we characterized these books and summarized the data of the picture postcards concerning his living areas and tourist resorts where he visited. He was outing vigorously to famous temples, shrines, and tourist resorts in holiday while he lived in Kobe. However, such opportunity extremely reduced after he moved to Tokushima when he started a cloistered life. Although Buddhism gave a significant impact on his religious piety, that is able to be understood from his writings, his feeling to Shinto has been obscured. However, some picture postcards revealed his attraction to Shinto. There is a Moraes's photo that was taken at a waterfall when he lived in Kobe. The place is often explained as “Nunobiki-no-taki (Kobe Nunobiki Waterfall)”, but we found that the it was the “Tsutsumi-ga-taki” at Arima, now it is called “Tsuzumigataki Waterfall” in the Tsuzumigataki Park in Arima, Kobe

Cloning of a Putative Vesicle Transport-related Protein, RA410, from Cultured Rat Astrocytes and Its Expression in Ischemic Rat Brain

To elucidate the role of astrocytes in the stress response of the central nervous system to ischemia, early gene expression was evaluated in cultured rat astrocytes subjected to hypoxia/reoxygenation. Using differential display, a novel putative vesicle transport-related factor (RA410) was cloned from reoxygenated astrocytes. Analysis of the deduced amino acid sequence showed RA410 to be composed of domains common to vesicle transport-related proteins of the Sec1/Unc18 family, including Sly1p and Sec1p (yeast), Rop (Drosophila), Unc18 (Caenorhabditis elegans), and Munc18 (mammalian), suggesting its possible role in vesicular transport. Northern analysis of normal rat tissues showed the highest expression of RA410 transcripts in testis. When astrocyte cultures were subjected to a period of hypoxia followed by reoxygenation, induction of RA410 mRNA was observed within 15 min of reoxygenation, reaching a maximum by 60 min. At the start of reoxygenation, the addition of diphenyl iodonium, an NADPH oxidase inhibitor, blocked in parallel astrocyte generation of reactive oxygen intermediates and expression of RA410 message. In contrast, cycloheximide did not affect RA410 mRNA levels, indicating that RA410 is an immediate-early gene in the setting of reoxygenation. Using polyclonal antibody raised against an RA410-derived synthetic peptide, Western blotting of lysates from reoxygenated astrocytes displayed an immunoreactive band of ≈70 kDa, the expression of which followed induction of the mRNA. Fractionation of astrocyte lysates on sucrose gradients showed RA410 antigen to be predominantly in the plasma membrane. Immunoelectron microscopic analysis demonstrated RA410 in large vesicles associated with the Golgi, but not in the Golgi apparatus itself, consistent with its participation in post-Golgi transport. Consistent with thesein vitro data, RA410 expression was observed in rat brain astrocytes following transient occlusion of the middle cerebral artery. These data provide insight into a new protein (RA410) that participates in the ischemia-related stress response in astrocytes

Hachisuka Mochiaki’s Overseas Achievements

Hachisuka Mochiaki (1846-1918) was the last lord of the Awa (Tokushima) domain, and he became a successful businessman and a statesman after the Meiji Restoration. He went to the UK to study when he was 25 years old, and stayed there for seven years, during which he graduated from college at the Balliol College, University of Oxford. Three years after returning to Japan, he was appointed to an envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary of Japan in France (also serving as a minister in Spain, Portugal, Switzerland and Belgium) and he stayed in Paris three years. Despite ten years of foreign life, little has been known about his overseas activities. In this study, we investigated his overseas activities using digital archives of European libraries, and could find information from British Newspaper Archive, Welsh Newspaper Online, and Gallica. He began to attend public events in the UK after graduating from the Oxford University. He received in an audience by Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales in 1877 and 1878, and attended to parties hosted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He also participated in the launching ceremony of three Japanese warships Kongo, Fuso, and Hiei in 1877. He worked variously as a diplomat in Paris during 1884-1886. He signed three treaties, the Geneva Convention, the treaty on remittance by postal money order, and the International Meter Convention. Conpared with signing the Geneva Convention remaining two have not received much attention so far. In this study we found that he encouraged the Japanese government to join the International Meter Convention and negotiated with the Comité International des Poids et Mesures many times. He organized Japanese exhibition at a museum to introduce Japanese culture to Parisians, and he contributed to the academic exchange between France and Japan with the Geographical Society. And he and his wife Yoriko participated in many social events, and they held parties, concerts and theaters in Paris and Brussels. Several French newspapers mentioned elegant behavior of his wife Yoriko at those parties. And He focused on politics and business after returning to Japan, but also worked to promote exchange with foreign countries. In particular, he established the Welcome Society, which was the first organization in Japan for attracting and accommodating foreign tourists, with other of founders, and became the chairman of the organization. His abundant overseas experience and wide-ranging personal connections helped to establish this association

Hemobilia after bile duct resection: perforation of pseudoaneurysm into intra-pancreatic remnant bile duct: a case report

Background Hemobilia occurs mainly due to iatrogenic factors such as impairment of the right hepatic or cystic artery, and/or common bile duct in hepatobiliary-pancreatic surgery. However, little or no cases with hemobilia from the intra-pancreatic remnant bile duct after bile duct resection (BDR) has been reported. Here, we report a case of massive hemobilia due to the perforation of psuedoaneurysm of the gastroduodenal artery (GDA) to the intra-pancreatic remnant bile duct after hepatectomy with BDR. Case presentation A 68-year-old male underwent extended right hepatectomy with BDR for gallbladder carcinoma. He presented with upper gastrointestinal bleeding 2 months after the initial surgery. Upper endoscopy identified a blood clot from the ampulla of Vater and simultaneous endoscopic balloon tamponade contributed to temporary hemostasis. Abdominal CT and angiography revealed a perforation of the psuedoaneurysm of the GDA to the intra-pancreatic remnant bile duct resulting in massive hemobilia. Subsequent selective embolization of the pseudoaneurysm with micro-coils could achieve complete hemostasis. He survived without any recurrence of cancer and bleeding. Conclusion Hemobilia could occur in a patient with BDR due to perforation of the pseudoaneurysm derived from the GDA to the intra-pancreatic remnant bile duct. Endoscopic balloon tamponade was useful for a temporal hemostasis and a subsequent radiologic interventional approach

Impact of Statin Therapy on Plaque Characteristics as Assessed by Serial OCT, Grayscale and Integrated Backscatter–IVUS

ObjectivesThe purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of statin treatment on coronary plaque composition and morphology by optical coherence tomography (OCT), grayscale and integrated backscatter (IB) intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) imaging.BackgroundAlthough previous studies have demonstrated that statins substantially improve cardiac mortality, their precise effect on the lipid content and fibrous cap thickness of atherosclerotic coronary lesions is less clear. While IVUS lacks the spatial resolution to accurately assess fibrous cap thickness, OCT lacks the penetration of IVUS. We used a combination of OCT, grayscale and IB-IVUS to comprehensively assess the impact of pitavastatin on plaque characteristics.MethodsProspective serial OCT, grayscale and IB-IVUS of nontarget lesions was performed in 42 stable angina patients undergoing elective coronary intervention. Of these, 26 received 4 mg pitavastatin after the baseline study; 16 subjects who refused statin treatment were followed with dietary modification alone. Follow-up imaging was performed after a median interval of 9 months.ResultsGrayscale IVUS revealed that in the statin-treated patients, percent plaque volume index was significantly reduced over time (48.5 ± 10.4%, 42.0 ± 11.1%; p = 0.033), whereas no change was observed in the diet-only patients (48.7 ± 10.4%, 50.4 ± 11.8%; p = NS). IB-IVUS identified significant reductions in the percentage lipid volume index over time (34.9 ± 12.2%, 28.2 ± 7.5%; p = 0.020); no change was observed in the diet-treated group (31.0 ± 10.7%, 33.8 ± 12.4%; p = NS). While OCT demonstrated a significant increase in fibrous cap thickness (140 ± 42 μm, 189 ± 46 μm; p = 0.001), such changes were not observed in the diet-only group (140 ± 35 μm, 142 ± 36 μm; p = NS). Differences in the changes in the percentage lipid volume index (−6.8 ± 8.0% vs. 2.8 ± 9.9%, p = 0.031) and fibrous cap thickness (52 ± 32 μm vs. 2 ± 22 μm, p < 0.001) over time between the pitavastatin and diet groups were highly significant.ConclusionsStatin treatment induces favorable plaque morphologic changes with an increase in fibrous cap thickness, and decreases in both percentage plaque and lipid volume indexes