Influence of Hot Spring Water on Fatty Acid Composition of Skin Surface Lipids in Hairless Mouse Model of Atopic Dermatitis.

When hairless NCN24 mice with atopic dermatitis (AD) were sprayed with a petroleum-containing alkaline salt spring water rich in metaboric acid and sodium bicarbonate, AD symptoms diminished. Reversed-phase HPLC with fluorescence detection (HPLC/FD) and online MS revealed that fatty acid (FA) composition of the skin surface lipids was similar to that in non-AD mice compared with that in AD mice. Strong negative correlations were noted between the levels of total serum immunoglobulin E (IgE) and palmitoleic acid and between the levels of total serum IgE and branched-hexadecanoic acid.

[Radioactive cesium in total diet in Hokkaido (2011-2012)].

The level of radioactive cesium (the sum of (134)cesium (Cs) and (137)Cs) was investigated in total diet samples collected from adults living in the Sapporo area, Hokkaido. They were ashed, and examined with a germanium semiconductor detector. The maximum and average radioactivities of cesium in an indivividual's daily food intake were as follows: 1.

Minimum spanning tree-based random-valued impulse noise detection for a switching median filter.

A switching median filter is effective for impulse noise elimination while preserving edges and details of an image. In the switching median filter an impulse noise detector is employed before filtering, and the detection result is used to control whether a pixel should be filtered or not. However, the conventional impulse detector tends to misjudge noise-free pixels constructing line structures to be the noises.

Simple multilevel halftoning excelled in gradation reproducibility.

A simple multilevel halftoning method, which is based on the conventional error diffusion method and realizes halftoning excelled in the distribution of dots, is proposed. The proposed method consists of three steps, e.g.