Japan as a Clean Energy Leader

Over the past several decades, Japan’s energy strategy had positioned it as the world’s leader in clean and efficient electricity production and usage. This strategy, heavily dependent on nuclear energy, was essentially destroyed by one of history’s largest earthquakes, followed by a tsunami which overwhelmed five nuclear reactors on March 11, 2011. As of April 2012, all of Japan’s 54 nuclear reactors have been shut down and it is uncertain when and how many may be restarted. This paper examines Japan’s options for crafting a new way forward with an energy policy to power the world’s third largest economy while taking into account the lack of domestic sources of fuel, high government debt, antinuclear sentiments and looming power shortages

Sodium channel inactivation kinetics of rat sensory and motor nerve fibres and their modulation by glutathione

Na+ channel currents of rat motor and sensory nerve fibres were studied with the patch-clamp technique on enzymatically demyelinated axons. Differences between motor and sensory fibres in multi-channel inactivation kinetics and the gating of late single-channel currents were investigated. In the axon-attached mode, inactivation of multi-channel Na+ currents in sensory axons was best fitted with a single time constant while for motor axons two time constants were needed. Late single-channel currents in sensory axons were characterized by short openings whereas motor axons exhibited additional long single-channel openings. In contrast, in excised, inside-out membrane patches, no differences between motor and sensory fibres were found: in both types of fibre inactivation of multi-channel Na+ currents proceeded with two time constants and late single-channel currents showed short and long openings. After application of the reducing agent glutathione to the cytoplasmic side of excised inside-out patches, inactivation of Na+ currents in both motor and sensory fibres proceeded with a single, fast exponential time constant and late currents appeared with short openings only. These data indicate that the axonal metabolism may contribute to the different inactivation kinetics of Na+ currents in motor and sensory nerve fibres

Robust Padé approximation via SVD

Padé approximation is considered from the point of view of robust methods of numerical linear algebra, in particular the singular value decomposition. This leads to an algorithm for practical computation that bypasses most problems of solution of nearly-singular systems and spurious pole-zero pairs caused by rounding errors; a Matlab code is provided. The success of this algorithm suggests that there might be variants of Padé approximation that would be pointwise convergent as the degrees of the numerator and denominator increase to infinity, unlike traditional Padé approximants, which converge only in measure or capacity