Feeding experiments were conducted quantitatively to examine the breakdown of mineral grains by earthworm, Eisenia feida, and larva of beetle, Protaetia lugubris insperata. Crushed and sieved test minerals of K-feldspar and/or quartz were mixed with artificial humus that contained no mineral grains. The mixture was fed to the soil animals in the plastic containers. After 1-, 4and 7-day experime...

Topological indices are the mathematical tools that correlate the chemical structure with various physical properties, chemical reactivity or biological activity numerically. A topological index is a function having a set of graphs as its domain and a set of real numbers as its range. In QSAR/QSPR study, a prediction about the bioactivity of chemical compounds is made on the basis of physico-ch...

In Japan, the development and financing of infrastructure are traditionally dominated by the public sector. Learning from the failures of so called ‘‘third sector’’ projects in the 1970s and 1980s as well as based on experience from the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) in other countries, Japan introduced a PFI Promotion Law in 1999 to enhance private participation in the provision of infrastru...

Recently two new degree concepts have been defined in graph theory: ev-degree and ve-degree. Also the evdegree and ve-degree Zagreb and Randić indices have been defined very recently as parallel of the classical definitions of Zagreb and Randić indices. It was shown that ev-degree and ve-degree topological indices can be used as possible tools in QSPR researches . In this paper we d...

Recently, two Japanese clinical studies of antihypertensive drugs, supported by pharmaceutical companies and published in the Lancet by groups of Japanese investigators, were later withdrawn (Editors of the Lancet, 2009, 2013a). Four other studies of one of these drugs (Editors of the Lancet, 2013b; Uzu et al., 2008; Muramatsu et al., 2012; Narumi, Hakano, and Shindo, 2011), all funded by the S...

Since 1934 Erd} os has introduced various methods to derive arithmetic properties of blocks of consecutive integers. This research culminated in 1975 when Erd} os and Selfridge ES] established the old conjecture that the product of two or more consecutive positive integers is never a perfect power. It is very likely that the product of the terms of a nite arithmetic progression of length at lea...

In her article "Singapore, State Nationalism, and the Production of Diaspora" Cheryl Narumi Naruse examines The Straits Times series "Singaporean Abroad" and analyzes how conceptions of national time, space, and community are restructured by state concerns of economic survival within the era of globalization. In "Singaporean Abroad," readers find a curious amalgamation of feature writing, trave...

Phylogenetic study is a powerful approach for interpreting genomic sequences as well as showing evolutionary relationships. The extremely thermophilic bacterium Thermus thermophilus performs lysine biosynthesis in a unique way. However, the genes involved in this lysine biosynthetic pathway are distributed among many organisms. Which gene is characteristic of this pathway? In this paper, the ph...