Transporters in the neurohypophysial neuroendocrine system, with special reference to vesicular glutamate transporters (BNPI and DNPI): a review.

Recent advances in gene technology have helped to identify novel proteins and allowed study of their distribution and functions in the mammalian brain. One class of these proteins is that of transporters, which exist in plasma and organellar membranes of neurons and other cells to move substances selectively across membranes. These transporters can be categorized further into subclasses by their structural property, substrate selectivity, and site of action. Some of them have been identified in the hypothalamus, which is the only brain site where a neural signal is converted to a humoral one, namely, a hormone for a target organ. This unique neural mechanism has long attracted attention as the neuroendocrine system, part of which has been extensively studied as the hypothalamic-neurohypophysial system involved in secretion of vasopressin and oxytocin. However, transporters in this system have been less well studied. A morphological examination of novel transporters would give us cues to a better understanding of the neuronal organization and function of the system. In this review, we first summarize recent findings on expression of transporter gene and immunoreactivity in the hypothalamus. In the second part, we explain our observations on two vesicular glutamate (inorganic phosphate) transporters (BNPI and DNPI) in the supraoptic and paraventricular nuclei and neurohypophysis. Further study of these and other transporters will provide a basis on which to reevaluate the organization and function of the hypothalamic-neurohypophysial system.     

Gas absorption accompanied by an instantaneous irreversible reaction in laminar falling films of pseudoplastic liquids

Gas absorption accompanied by an instantaneous irreversible chemical reaction into laminar falling films of power-law liquids was studied theoretically. The convective-diffusion equations for a solute gas and a liquid-phase reactant were solved numerically and the numerical solution for the reaction factor was obtained as a function of the Graetz number, the concentration ratio, the diffusivity ratio and the power-law index of the liquid.     

Excessive closure of the right eye: a new sign of infarction in the territory of the ipsilateral right middle cerebral artery

In right middle cerebral territory infarction a new sign, excessive closure of the right eye ipsilateral to the lesion and mild closure of the left eye on command, was noted. The excessive ipsilateral eye closure was not observed on spontaneous eye closure.     

Accelerator Analysis of Tributyltin Adsorbed onto the Surface of a Tributyltin Resistant Marine Pseudoalteromonas sp. Cell

Tributyltin (TBT) released into seawater from ship hulls is a stable marine pollutant and obviously remains in marine environments. We isolated a TBT resistant marine Pseudoalteromonas sp. TBT1 from sediment of a ship’s ballast water. The isolate (10^{9.3 ± 0.2} colony-forming units mL⁻¹) adsorbed TBT in proportion to the concentrations of TBTCl externally added up to 3 mM, where the number of TBT adsorbed by a single cell was estimated to be 10^8.2. The value was reduced to about one-fifth when the lysozyme-treated cells were used. The surface of ethanol treated cells became rough, but the capacity of TBT adsorption was the same as that for native cells. These results indicate that the function of the cell surface, rather than that structure, plays an important role to the adsorption of TBT. The adsorption state of TBT seems to be multi-layer when the number of more than 10^6.8 TBT molecules is adsorbed by a single cell.     

Effect of changing groundwater levels caused by land-use changes on greenhouse gas fluxes from tropical peat lands

Monthly measurements of carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄) and nitrous oxide (N₂O) fluxes in peat soils were carried out and compared with groundwater level over a year at four sites (drained forest, upland cassava,upland and lowland paddy fields) located in Jambi province, Indonesia. Fluxes from swamp forest soils were also measured once per year as the native state of this investigated area. Land-use change from drained forest to lowland paddy field significantly decreased the CO₂ (from 266 to 30 mg C m^–2 h^–1) and N₂O fluxes (from 25.4 to 3.8 g N m^–2 h^–1), but increased the CH₄ flux (from 0.1 to 4.2 mg C m^–2 h^–1) in the soils. Change from drained forest to cassava field significantly increased N₂O flux (from 25.4 to 62.2 g N m^–2 h^–1), but had no significant influence on CO₂ (from 266 to 200 mg C m^–2 h^–1) and CH₄ fluxes (from 0.1 to 0.3 mg C m^–2 h^–1) in the soils. Averaged CO₂ fluxes in the swamp forests (94 mg C m^–2 h^–1) were estimated to be one-third of that in the drained forest. Groundwater levels of drained forest and upland crop fields had been lowered by drainage ditches while swamp forest and lowland paddy field were flooded, although groundwater levels were also affected by precipitation. Groundwater levels were negatively related to CO₂ flux but positively related to CH₄ flux at all investigation sites. The peak of the N₂O flux was observed at –20 cm of groundwater level. Lowering the groundwater level by 10 cm from the soil surface resulted in a 50 increase in CO₂ emission (from 109.1 to 162.4 mg C m^–2 h^–1) and a 25% decrease in CH₄ emission (from 0.440 to 0.325 mg C m^–2 h^–1) in this study. These results suggest that lowering of groundwater level by the drainage ditches in the peat lands contributes to global warming and devastation of fields. Swamp forest was probably the best land-use management in peat lands to suppress the carbon loss and greenhouse gas emission. Lowland paddy field was a better agricultural system in the peat lands in terms of C sequestration and greenhouse gas emission. Carbon loss from lowland paddy field was one-eighth of that of the other upland crop systems, although the Global Warming Potential was almost the same level as that of the other upland crop systems because of CH₄ emission through rice plants.     

A content search system considering the activity and context of a mobile user

People routinely carry mobile devices in their daily lives and obtain a variety of information from the Internet in many different situations. In searching for information (content) with a mobile device, a user’s activity (e.g., moving or stationary) and context (e.g., commuting in the morning or going downtown in the evening) often change, and such changes can affect the user’s degree of concentration on his or her mobile device’s display and information needs. Therefore, a search system should provide the user with an amount of information suitable for the current activity and a type of information suitable for the current context. In this study, we present the design and implementation of a content search system that considers a mobile user’s activity and context, with the goal of reducing the user’s operation load for content search. The proposed system switches between two kinds of content search systems according to the user’s activity: the location-based content search system is activated when the user is stationary (e.g., standing and sitting), while a menu-based content search system is activated when the user is moving (e.g., walking). Both systems present information according to user context. The location-based system presents detailed information via menus and a map according to location-based categories. The menu-based system presents only a few options to enable users to get content easily. Through user experiments, we confirmed that participants could get desired information more easily with this system than with a commercial search system.     

FENECIA: failure endurable nested-transaction based execution of composite Web services with incorporated state analysis

Interest in the Web services (WS) composition (WSC) paradigm is increasing tremendously. A real shift in distributed computing history is expected to occur when the dream of implementing Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is realized. However, there is a long way to go to achieve such an ambitious goal. In this paper, we support the idea that, when challenging the WSC issue, the earlier that the inevitability of failures is recognized and proper failure-handling mechanisms are defined, from the very early stage of the composite WS (CWS) specification, the greater are the chances of achieving a significant gain in dependability. To formalize this vision, we present the FENECIA (Failure Endurable Nested-transaction based Execution of Composite Web services with Incorporated state Analysis) framework. Our framework approaches the WSC issue from different points of view to guarantee a high level of dependability. In particular, it aims at being simultaneously a failure-handling-devoted CWS specification, execution, and quality of service (QoS) assessment approach. In the first section of our framework, we focus on answering the need for a specification model tailored for the WS architecture. To this end, we introduce WS-SAGAS, a new transaction model. WS-SAGAS introduces key concepts that are not part of the WS architecture pillars, namely, arbitrary nesting, state, vitality degree, and compensation, to specify failure-endurable CWS as a hierarchy of recursively nested transactions. In addition, to define the CWS execution semantics, without suffering from the hindrance of an XML-based notation, we describe a textual notation that describes a WSC in terms of definition rules, composability rules, and ordering rules, and we introduce graphical and formal notations. These rules provide the solid foundation needed to formulate the execution semantics of a CWS in terms of execution correctness verification dependencies. To ensure dependable execution of the CWS, we present in the second section of FENECIA our architecture THROWS, in which the execution control of the resulting CWS is distributed among engines, discovered dynamically, that communicate in a peer-to-peer fashion. A dependable execution is guaranteed in THROWS by keeping track of the execution progress of a CWS and by enforcing forward and backward recovery. We concentrate in the third section of our approach on showing how the failure consideration is trivial in acquiring more accurate CWS QoS estimations. We propose a model that assesses several QoS properties of CWS, which are specified as WS-SAGAS transactions and executed in THROWS. We validate our proposal and show its feasibility and broad applicability by describing an implemented prototype and a case study.