Examining cultural drifts in artworks through history and development: cultural comparisons between Japanese and western landscape paintings and drawings.

Research on cultural products suggest that there are substantial cultural variations between East Asian and European landscape masterpieces and contemporary members' landscape artwork (Masuda et al., 2008c), and that these cultural differences in drawing styles emerge around the age of 8 (Senzaki et al., 2014b).

A critical role of holistic processing in face gender perception.

Whether face gender perception is processed by encoding holistic (whole) or featural (parts) information is a controversial issue. Although neuroimaging studies have identified brain regions related to face gender perception, the temporal dynamics of this process remain under debate. Here, we identified the mechanism and temporal dynamics of face gender perception.

Usefulness of a novel system for measuring glucose area under the curve while screening for glucose intolerance in outpatients.

Aims/introduction: To realize the effectiveness of a novel system for measuring glucose area under the curve (AUC) using minimally invasive interstitial fluid extraction technology (MIET), outpatients undergoing oral glucose tolerance tests (OGTT) were investigated for the efficacy of screening for glucose intolerance using this system.

Materials And Methods: Fifty outpatients scheduled to undergo a 75-g OGTT for medical reasons were recruited to the study. An area of skin on the forearm was pretreated with microneedle arrays before the application of hydrogels for interstitial fluid extraction.

Deregulation of the actin cytoskeleton and macropinocytosis in response to phorbol ester by the mutant protein kinase C gamma that causes spinocerebellar ataxia type 14.

Several missense mutations in the protein kinase Cγ (γPKC) gene have been found to cause spinocerebellar ataxia type 14 (SCA14), an autosomal dominant neurodegenerative disease. γPKC is a neuron-specific member of the classical PKCs and is activated and translocated to subcellular regions as a result of various stimuli, including diacylglycerol synthesis, increased intracellular Ca(2+) and phorbol esters. We investigated whether SCA14 mutations affect the γPKC-related functions by stimulating HeLa cells with TPA (12-O-tetradecanoylpholbol 13-acetate), a type of phorbol ester.

Kanizsa illusory contours appearing in the plasmodium pattern of Physarum polycephalum.

The plasmodium of Physarum polycephalum is often used in the implementation of non-linear computation to solve optimization problems, and this organismal feature was not used in this analysis to compute perception and/or sensation in humans. In this paper, we focused on the Kanizsa illusion, which is a well-known visual illusion resulting from the differentiation-integration of the visual field, and compared the illusion with the adaptive network in the plasmodium of P. polycephalum.

myo-Inositol catabolism in Bacillus subtilis.

The iolABCDEFGHIJ operon of Bacillus subtilis is responsible for myo-inositol catabolism involving multiple and stepwise reactions. Previous studies demonstrated that IolG and IolE are the enzymes for the first and second reactions, namely dehydrogenation of myo-inositol to give 2-keto-myo-inositol and the subsequent dehydration to 3D-(3,5/4)-trihydroxycyclohexane-1,2-dione. In the present studies the third reaction was shown to be the hydrolysis of 3D-(3,5/4)-trihydroxycyclohexane-1,2-dione catalyzed by IolD to yield 5-deoxy-d-glucuronic acid.