We conducted a preintervention–postintervention study to assess the effectiveness of a multimodal approach to reduce unnecessary urethral catheters in 5 Japanese intensive care units. After the intervention urethral catheter point prevalence decreased by 18%, from 79% preintervention to 61% postintervention, and catheter appropriateness increased by 28%, from 57% preintervention to 85% postintervention.

A novel and fundamental method was reported to judge states of lithium ion batteries (LIBs) using the capacitance and the voltage of the cells that were estimated from the real-time currents and voltage characteristics of the cells. We measured the differential capacitance, that is, dQ/dV or delta Q/ delta V that is equal to the currents (I) divided by differential voltages (dV/dt) calculated from the current and the voltage characteristics of the cell during the charging/ discharging, where Q is the charge that flows through the cell, V is the voltage of the cell and t is time. It is thought that the capacitance decrease with the degradation of the cell because the effective area of the electrodes is decreasing due to formation of undesirable compounds. The differential capacitance in some specific voltage range for the LIBs was approximately directly proportional to the state of the degradation of the cell. Therefore, it is concluded that the novel method is very useful to judge the state of the LIBs.

A cationic peptide dendrier, dendritic poly(L-lysine), forms complexes with oligonucleotides and can deliver them to liver after intravenous injection. Here, we tried to deliver apolipoprotein B-specific siRNA for the treatment of hypercholesterolemia and NFκB decoy for the hepatitis treatment. Significant therapeutic effects in those disease model mice were observed after intravenous injection of the oligonucleotides complexes with dendritic poly(L-lysine).

Interfacial band offset and band bending of organic semiconductors are critical to understand and improve organic photovoltaic cells. In this study, the energy level alignment of fullerene(C60) / metal-free phthalocyanine (H2Pc) interface which is one of the model interfaces of organic photovoltaic cells has been investigated using UV and X-ray photoemissions. For both ‘H2Pc on C60’ and “C60 on H2Pc' interfaces, 0.3 eV downward energy level shift was observed in XPS at the interface formation. This energy shift is quite steep in contrast to the band bending observed for C60/metal interfaces in our previous study, where thickness of 500nm was required to achieve 0.21eV band bending to get Fermi level alignment between metal electrode and C60. To clarify the origin of the band bending, the effect of the insertion of C60-H2Pc co-deposited layer between C60 and H2Pc layers was also investigated. The result suggested that possible doping of H2Pc to C60 is not main origin of the observed energy shift. We also found that the vacuum level shift at H2Pc/C60 interface is strongly dependent on the deposition sequence of the interface formation.