Digestion, absorption and assimilation of the meal are active processes that require start-up energy before the energy contained in a meal can be utilized. The energetic costs associated with feeding (specific dynamic action, SDA) are high in sit-and-wait foraging snakes that tolerate long fasting periods. We used (13)C-labelled prey to partition between endogenous energy sources (i.e. snakes' ...

Strand displacement amplification (SDA) is an isothermal, in vitro method for diagnostics that amplifies a target DNA sequence by using a restriction enzyme and DNA polymerase. We have combined a new thermophilic form of SDA that involves restriction enzyme BsoBI and polymerase exo-Bca with fluorescence polarization for detection of Mycobacterium tuberculosis DNA by using the IS6110 insertion e...

This paper presents methods to predict retrieval terms from relevant/surrounding words or descriptive texts in Japanese by using deep learning methods, which are implemented with stacked denoising autoencoders (SdA), as well as deep belief networks (DBN). To determine the effectiveness of using DBN and SdA for this task, we compare them with conventional machine learning methods, i.e., multi-la...

Visible/Near-infrared reflectance spectroscopy (Vis/NIRS) was applied to variety discrimination of juicy peach. A total of 75 samples were investigated for Vis/NIRS using a field spectroradiometer. Chemometrics was used to build the relationship between the absorbance spectra and varieties. Principle component analysis (PCA) was executed to reduce numerous wavebands into 8 principle components ...

Driving simulators can be used to evaluate driving performance under controlled, safe conditions. Teen drivers are at particular risk for motor vehicle crashes and simulated driving can provide important information on performance. We developed a new simulator protocol, the Simulated Driving Assessment (SDA), with the goal of providing a new tool for driver assessment and a common outcome measu...

BACKGROUND Food adulteration remains a major global concern. DNA fingerprinting has several advantages over chemical and morphological identification techniques. DNA microarray-based fingerprinting techniques have not been used previously to detect adulteration involving dried commercial samples of closely related species. Here we report amplification of low-level DNA obtained from dried commer...

Quorum sensing (QS) is a type of cell-cell communication using signal molecules that are released and detected by cells, which respond to changes in their population density. A few studies explain that QS may operate in a density-dependent manner; however, due to experimental challenges, this fundamental hypothesis has never been investigated. Here, we present a microfluidic static droplet arra...