Dependence of the Build-up of the Colour-Magnitude Relation on Cluster Richness at z ~ 0.8

We present environmental dependence of the build-up of the colour-magnitude relation (CMR) at z ~ 0.8. It is well established that massive early-type galaxies exhibit a tight CMR in clusters up to at least z ~ 1. The faint end of the relation, however, has been much less explored especially at high redshifts primarily due to limited depths of the data. Some recent papers have reported a deficit of the faint red galaxies on the CMR at 0.8 < z < 1, but this has not been well confirmed yet and is still controversial. Using a deep, multi-colour, panoramic imaging data set of the distant cluster RXJ1716.4+6708 at z=0.81, newly taken with the Prime Focus Camera (Suprime-Cam) on the Subaru Telescope, we carry out an analysis of faint red galaxies with a care for incompleteness. We find that there is a sharp decline in the number of red galaxies toward the faint end of the CMR below M*+2. We compare our result with those for other clusters at z ~ 0.8 taken from the literature, which show or do not show the deficit. We suggest that the "deficit" of faint red galaxies is dependent on the richness or mass of the clusters, in the sense that poorer systems show stronger deficits. This indicates that the evolutionary stage of less massive galaxies depends critically on environment.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA

Quantum Annealing Based Difficulty Adjustable Maze Generation

In this paper, the maze generation using quantum annealing is proposed. We reformulate a standard algorithm to generate a maze into a specific form of a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization problem suitable for the input of the quantum annealer. To generate more difficult mazes, we introduce an additional cost function $Q_{update}$ to increase the difficulty. The difficulty is evaluated by the time to solve the maze. To check the efficiency of our scheme to create the maze, we investigated the time-to-solution of a quantum processing unit, classical computer, and hybrid solver.Comment: 14pages, 12figure

Growth of the Asparagus Plants Cuitured on Rockwool

ロックウール栽培と土耕栽培でのアスパラガス幼植物体の生長を比較した.栽培種‘メリーワシントン500W’,‘ポールトム’及び‘ウエルカム’の種子を1990年1月末にバーミキュライトに播種し,それぞれの実生を10cmロックウールキューブに移植した.12℃以上に保った温室におき,2,3週に1回灌水した.第2次苗条成長後,1/2濃度の大塚液肥を2,3日間隔で施与した.4月5日に10×30×90cmロックウールキューブに30cm間隔で植え付け,4時間に15分間液肥を与えた.他の小植物体は同じ温室の土に植え付け土耕区とした. 7.5又は10か月後の植物の生長を見ると,ロックウール栽培のものが,土耕のものに比較して有意に良かった.‘メリーワシントン500W’と‘ウエルカム’では平均苗条長,総苗条数,若茎数において(7.5か月),茎径,地上部重において(10か月)良かった.一方`ポールトム'では総苗条数,りん芽数で良かった. 1990年11月から翌5月23日の箇条生長は,品種差が見られた.全品種において総苗条数は有意差が無く,‘ポールトム’,‘ウエルカム’において初期の茎径,苗条長は土耕区が長かった.開花苗条率は3月23日調査では土耕区が高かったが,4月23日区は逆転し,5月23日区ではロックウール区が28～61% の開花率を示したのに対し,土耕区は無開花であった

Interconversion of Two GDP-Bound Conformations and Their Selection in an Arf-Family Small G Protein

SummaryADP-ribosylation factor (Arf) and other Arf-family small G proteins participate in many cellular functions via their characteristic GTP/GDP conformational cycles, during which a nucleotide∗Mg2+-binding site communicates with a remote N-terminal helix. However, the conformational interplay between the nucleotides, the helix, the protein core, and Mg2+ has not been fully delineated. Herein, we report a study of the dynamics of an Arf-family protein, Arl8, under various conditions by means of NMR relaxation spectroscopy. The data indicated that, when GDP is bound, the protein core, which does not include the N-terminal helix, reversibly transition between an Arf-family GDP form and another conformation that resembles the Arf-family GTP form. Additionally, we found that the N-terminal helix and Mg2+, respectively, stabilize the aforementioned former and latter conformations in a population-shift manner. Given the dynamics of the conformational changes, we can describe the Arl8 GTP/GDP cycle in terms of an energy diagram

Involvement of the cerebellum in classical fear conditioning in goldfish

To investigate the cognitive role of the cerebellum of fish, we conducted experiments examining effects of cerebellar manipulations on fear-related classical heart rate conditioning in goldfish. We performed two types of manipulations, one was total ablation of the corpus cerebelli and the other was localized cooling of the corpus cerebelli for reversible inactivation of the cerebellar function. Both the cardiac arousal response to the first presentation of the conditioned stimulus and the cardiac reflex to the aversive unconditioned stimulus were not impaired by the ablation or cooling of the corpus cerebelli. On the other hand, inactivation of cerebellar function severely impaired the acquisition of a conditioned cardiac response in the fear-related conditioning. In addition, localized cooling of the corpus cerebelli reversibly suppressed the expression of established conditioned response. We suggest that the cerebellum of fish is not only being a motor coordination center but also is involved in emotional learning

Categorical discrimination of human body parts by magnetoencephalography

Humans recognize body parts in categories. Previous studies have shown that responses in the fusiform body area (FBA) and extrastriate body area (EBA) are evoked by the perception of the human body, when presented either as whole or as isolated parts. These responses occur approximately 190 ms after body images are visualized. The extent to which body-sensitive responses show specificity for different body part categories remains to be largely clarified. We used a decoding method to quantify neural responses associated with the perception of different categories of body parts. Nine subjects underwent measurements of their brain activities by magnetoencephalography (MEG) while viewing 14 images of feet, hands, mouths, and objects. We decoded categories of the presented images from the MEG signals using a support vector machine (SVM) and calculated their accuracy by 10-fold cross-validation. For each subject, a response that appeared to be a body-sensitive response was observed and the MEG signals corresponding to the three types of body categories were classified based on the signals in the occipitotemporal cortex. The accuracy in decoding body- part categories (with a peak at approximately 48%) was above chance (33.3%) and significantly higher than that for random categories. According to the time course and location, the responses are suggested to be body-sensitive and to include information regarding the body-part category. Finally, this non-invasive method can decode category information of a visual object with high temporal and spatial resolution and this result may have a significant impact in the field of brain-machine interface research