Egg or sperm? The mechanism of sexual fate decision in germ cells has been a long‐standing issue in biology. A recent analysis identified foxl3 as a gene that determines the sexual fate decision of germ cells in the teleost fish, medaka. foxl3/Foxl3 acts in female germline stem cells to repress commitment into male fate (spermatogenesis), indicating that the presence of mitotic germ cells in the female is critical for continuous sexual fate decision of germ cells in medaka gonads. Interestingly, foxl3 (...) is found in most vertebrate genomes except for mammals. This provides the interesting possibility that the sexual fate of germ cells in mammals is determined in a different way compared to foxl3‐possessing vertebrates. Considering the fact that germline stem cells are the cells where foxl3 begins to express and sexual fate decision initiates and mammalian ovary does not have typical germline stem cells, the mechanism in mammals may have been co‐evolved with germline stem cell loss in mammalian ovary. (shrink)

A new field of gene expression regulation research is emerging that has previously been overlooked. This new area is concerned with distinguishing the expression of a single gene from the averaged expression of many gene copies within the cell population. This paper reviews research focused on individual genes in inducible gene expression systems. The main experimental strategy is to measure the gene expression level of a single cell containing a single reporter gene molecule. In contrast to the commonly held belief, (...) gene induction is found to be stochastic under certain conditions. The possible mechanisms and implications are discussed. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose an extension of the Minimal Generation Gap (MGG) to reduce the number of fitness evaluation for the real-coded GAs (RCGA). When MGG is applied to actual engineering problems, for example applied to optimization of design parameters, the fitness calculating time is usually huge because MGG generates many children from one pair of parents and the fitness is calculated by repetitive simulation or analysis. The proposed method called Saving MGG reduces the number of fitness evaluation by (...) estimating the promising degrees of children using individual distribution and fitness information of population, and selecting children based on the promising degree before evaluating the fitness. Experimental results show that RCGA with Saving MGG can provide large reducing effects on 20 or 30 dimensional Sphere functions, Rosenbrock functions, ill-scaled Rosenbrock functions, and Rastrigin function. (shrink)

Reversible acetylation at the ϵ‐amino group of lysines located at the conserved domain of core histones is supposed to play an important role in the regulation of chromatin structure and its transcriptional activity. One promising strategy for analyzing the precise function of histone acetylation is to block the activities of acetylating or deacetylating enzymes by specific inhibitors. Recently, two microbial metabolites, trichostatin A and trapoxin, were found to be potent inhibitors of histone deacetylases. Trichostatin A reversibly inhibits the mammalian histone (...) deacetylase, whereas trapoxin causes inhibition through irreversible binding to the enzyme. The histone deacetylase from a trichostatin A‐resistant cell line is resistant to trichostatin A, indicating that the enzyme is the primary target. Both of the agents induce a variety of biological responses of cells such as induction of differentiation and cell cycle arrest. Trichostatin A and trapoxin are useful in analyzing the role of histone acetylation in chromatin structure and function as well as in determining the genes whose activities are regulated by histone acetylation. (shrink)

Kripke completeness of some infinitary predicate modal logics is presented. More precisely, we prove that if a normal modal logic above is -persistent and universal, the infinitary and predicate extension of with BF and BF is Kripke complete, where BF and BF denote the formulas pi pi and x x, respectively. The results include the completeness of extensions of standard modal logics such as , and its extensions by the schemata T, B, 4, 5, D, and their combinations. The proof (...) is obtained by extending the correspondence between the representation of modal algebras and the completeness of propositional modal logic to infinite. (shrink)

教養と学問が関係することは、実は自明ではない。教養とは何か。また学問と思想はどのように関わるのか。知識人として、学者として、丸山が発し続けた問いと思考の展開を、遺された言葉の総体から精緻に読み解き、「 丸山論」をこえて現代日本に提示。.

It is known that for any subdirectly irreducible finite Heyting algebra A and any Heyting algebra, B, A is embeddable into a quotient algebra of B, if and only if Jankov's formula ${\rm{\chi A}}$ A for A is refuted in B. In this paper, we present an infinitary extension of the above theorem given by Jankov. More precisely, for any cardinal number ${\rm{\kappa }}$, we present Jankov's theorem for homomorphisms preserving infinite meets and joins, a class of subdirectly irreducible complete (...) ${\rm{\kappa }}$ - Heyting algebras and ${\rm{\kappa }}$ - infinitary logic, where a ${\rm{\kappa }}$ -Heyting algebra is a Heyting algebra A with ${\rm{\# A}} \le {\rm{\kappa }}$ and ${\rm{\kappa }}$ - infinitary logic is the infinitary logic such that for any set ${\rm{\Theta }}$ of formulas with ${\rm{\# \Theta }} \le {\rm{\kappa }}$ ⌈ Θ and ‷ Θ are well defined formulas. (shrink)

November 4th-5th, 2012 at Kyoto University. Organizers: Hisashi Nakao & Pierre-Alain Braillard.

precise introduction to Advaita Vedanta, on the basis of something more.

Over the last few years, I have attended several political meetings concerned with the refugee crisis, multiculturalism or Indigenous rights in Australia, meetings at which liberal democratic–minded ‘left-wing’ people came together to discuss, or agitate for change in, governmental policies. At these meetings, I always found it difficult to accept the slogans on their placards and in their speeches: ‘Shame Australia! Reconciliation for a united Australia’, ‘Wake up Australia! We welcome refugees!’ or ‘True Australians are tolerant! Let’s celebrate multicultural Australia!’ (...) My uncomfortable feeling came not only from the fact that I was left out because of my Japanese nationality but also because I had never seen or heard words like ‘shame Japan’, ‘wake up Japan’ or ‘true Japanese are...’ at Japanese ‘left-wing’ political gatherings. In Japan, these are words used only by right-wing nationalists. Indeed it is difficult to even imagine liberal-left intellectuals in postwar Japan calling for a ‘true Japanese’ political response, such is the extent to which the idea of ‘good nationalism’ is now regarded as an oxymoron. This is my starting point for an essay in which I want to be attentive to the different roles played by national in the Japanese and Australian political environments. (shrink)