Laser–plasma interaction and hot electrons have been characterized in detail in laser irradiation conditions relevant for direct-drive inertial confinement fusion. The experiment was carried out at the Gekko XII laser facility in multibeam planar target geometry at an intensity of approximately $3\times {10}^{15}$ W/cm2. Experimental data suggest that high-energy electrons, with temperatures of 20–50 keV and conversion efficiencies of $\eta <1\%$, were mainly produced by the damping of electron plasma waves driven by two-plasmon decay (TPD). Stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) is observed in a near-threshold growth regime, producing a reflectivity of approximately $0.01\%$, and is well described by an analytical model accounting for the convective growth in independent speckles. The experiment reveals that both TPD and SRS are collectively driven by multiple beams, resulting in a more vigorous growth than that driven by single-beam laser intensity.

The COllaborative project of Development of Anthropometrical measures in Twins (CODATwins) project is a large international collaborative effort to analyze individual-level phenotype data from twins in multiple cohorts from different environments. The main objective is to study factors that modify genetic and environmental variation of height, body mass index (BMI, kg/m2) and size at birth, and additionally to address other research questions such as long-term consequences of birth size. The project started in 2013 and is open to all twin projects in the world having height and weight measures on twins with information on zygosity. Thus far, 54 twin projects from 24 countries have provided individual-level data. The CODATwins database includes 489,981 twin individuals (228,635 complete twin pairs). Since many twin cohorts have collected longitudinal data, there is a total of 1,049,785 height and weight observations. For many cohorts, we also have information on birth weight and length, own smoking behavior and own or parental education. We found that the heritability estimates of height and BMI systematically changed from infancy to old age. Remarkably, only minor differences in the heritability estimates were found across cultural–geographic regions, measurement time and birth cohort for height and BMI. In addition to genetic epidemiological studies, we looked at associations of height and BMI with education, birth weight and smoking status. Within-family analyses examined differences within same-sex and opposite-sex dizygotic twins in birth size and later development. The CODATwins project demonstrates the feasibility and value of international collaboration to address gene-by-exposure interactions that require large sample sizes and address the effects of different exposures across time, geographical regions and socioeconomic status.

A new generation of high power laser facilities will provide laser pulses with extremely high powers of 10 petawatt (PW) and even 100 PW, capable of reaching intensities of $10^{23}~\text{W}/\text{cm}^{2}$ in the laser focus. These ultra-high intensities are nevertheless lower than the Schwinger intensity $I_{S}=2.3\times 10^{29}~\text{W}/\text{cm}^{2}$ at which the theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED) predicts that a large part of the energy of the laser photons will be transformed to hard Gamma-ray photons and even to matter, via electron–positron pair production. To enable the investigation of this physics at the intensities achievable with the next generation of high power laser facilities, an approach involving the interaction of two colliding PW laser pulses is being adopted. Theoretical simulations predict strong QED effects with colliding laser pulses of ${\geqslant}10~\text{PW}$ focused to intensities ${\geqslant}10^{22}~\text{W}/\text{cm}^{2}$.

The extraction of templates such as ‘regard X as Y’ from a set of related phrases requires the identification of their internal structures. This paper presents an unsupervised approach for extracting templates on-the-fly from only tagged text by using a novel relaxed variant of the Sequence Binary Decision Diagram (SeqBDD). A SeqBDD can compress a set of sequences into a graphical structure equivalent to a minimal deterministic finite state automata, but more compact and better suited to the task of template extraction. The main contribution of this paper is a relaxed form of the SeqBDD construction algorithm that enables it to form general representations from a small amount of data. The process of compression of shared structures in the text during Relaxed SeqBDD construction, naturally induces the templates we wish to extract. Experiments show that the method is capable of high-quality extraction on tasks based on verb+preposition templates from corpora and phrasal templates from short messages from social media.

Highly alkaline environments induced by cement-based materials are likely to cause the physical and/or chemical properties of the bentonite buffer materials in radioactive waste repositories to deteriorate. Assessing long-term alteration of concrete/clay systems requires physicochemical models and a number of input parameters. In order to provide reliability in the assessment of the long-term performance of bentonite buffers under disposal conditions, it is necessary to develop and verify reactive transport codes for concrete/clay systems. In this study, a PHREEQC-based, reactive transport analysis code (MC-CEMENT ver. 2) was developed and was verified by comparing results of the calculations with in situ observations of the mineralogical evolution at the concrete/argillite interface. The calculation reproduced the observations such as the mineralogical changes in the argillite limited to within 1 cm in thickness from the interface, formation of CaCO3 and CSH, dissolution of quartz, decrease of porosity in the argillite and an increase in the concrete. These agreements indicate a possibility that models based on lab-scale (∼1 year) experiments can be applied to longer time scales although confidence in the models is necessary for much longer timescales. The fact that the calculations did not reproduce the dissolution of clays and the formation of gypsum indicates that there is still room for improvement in our model.

AAL-toxin, produced by Alternaria alternata, was investigated for its phytotoxic effects on 86 crop and weed species. On susceptible tomato leaf discs, AAL-toxin caused electrolyte leakage and chlorosis at 0.01 μM in 24 h. Plants tested exhibited a range of response. AAL-toxin damaged sensitive plants at 5 μM while other plants showed minimal damage at > 1000 μM. Cotton and the important weeds, Canada thistle, field bindweed, and velvetleaf were largely unaffected. Monocots tested were largely immune.

Silicified beyrichiocopid and podocopid ostracods from limestone nodules derived from the middle part of the Ichinotani Formation within the Hida Gaien Terrane of central Honshu Island, Japan, are associated with fusulinid foraminifera that indicate strata of the middle Moscovian (Pennsylvanian, Carboniferous). This is a rare record of ostracods from the Palaeozoic of Japan and the first systematic description of ostracods from the Carboniferous of the Hida Gaien Terrane. The fauna comprises six ostracod species (two new) assigned to the genera Amphissites, Kirkbya, Bairdia, Aechmina and Healdia, and additional material of possible cavellinids. The numerical dominance of ornamented beyrichiocopids such as Kirkbya and Amphissites, along with smaller numbers of smooth podocopids such as Bairdia, indicates an ‘Eifelian mega-assemblage’ ecotype (sensu G. Becker), that is typical of mid Palaeozoic shallow marine, high-energy environments in a fore-reef ecosystem.

The transport of relativistic electron beam in compressed cylindrical targets was studied from a numerical and experimental point of view. In the experiment, cylindrical targets were imploded using the Gekko XII laser facility of the Institute of Laser Engineering. Then the fast electron beam was created by shooting the LFEX laser beam. The penetration of fast electrons was studied by observing Kα emission from tracer layers in the target.

Theory predicts that honest signalling strategies will not always be evolutionarily stable in interspecific communication, yet to demonstrate such a transition of signalling modality between honesty and dishonesty in the wild would be difficult. An endocarp dimorphism has been found in Scaevola taccada fruits: a morph with a cork substrate that facilitates ocean current seed dispersal and a morph without the cork. Both types of fruit are covered with sugar-containing flesh, and are similar in size and colour to one another (at least from a human perspective). The apparent lack of external differences between morphotypes could potentially degrade mutualistic relations between the plant and seed-dispersing birds because the presence of a cork could lower the fruit's nutritional value. Thus, unless seed dispersers can discriminate between the different types of fruit, this system may provide an example of a transition between honest and dishonest signalling. We examined S. taccada fruit and leaf colours from an avian visual perspective. Even though the fruits and leaves were different in colour from one another to birds, there was no perceivable difference in the colours between fruit morphotypes. Therefore, fruit colour is not an honest indicator of reward to seed dispersers. Further, we propose an adoption of a statistical method in avian visual modelling studies that avoids the common statistical errors, such as violation of the congruence principle.

The energy transfer by stimulated Brillouin backscatter from a long pump pulse (15 ps) to a short seed pulse (1 ps) has been investigated in a proof-of-principle demonstration experiment. The two pulses were both amplified in different beamlines of a Nd:glass laser system, had a central wavelength of 1054 nm and a spectral bandwidth of 2 nm, and crossed each other in an underdense plasma in a counter-propagating geometry, off-set by $\def \xmlpi #1{}\def \mathsfbi #1{\boldsymbol {\mathsf {#1}}}\let \le =\leqslant \let \leq =\leqslant \let \ge =\geqslant \let \geq =\geqslant \def \Pr {\mathit {Pr}}\def \Fr {\mathit {Fr}}\def \Rey {\mathit {Re}}10^\circ $. It is shown that the energy transfer and the wavelength of the generated Brillouin peak depend on the plasma density, the intensity of the laser pulses, and the competition between two-plasmon decay and stimulated Raman scatter instabilities. The highest obtained energy transfer from pump to probe pulse is 2.5%, at a plasma density of $0.17 n_{cr}$, and this energy transfer increases significantly with plasma density. Therefore, our results suggest that much higher efficiencies can be obtained when higher densities (above $0.25 n_{cr}$) are used.

NEWAGE is a direction-sensitive dark matter search experiment with a gaseous time-projection chamber. We improved the direction-sensitive dark matter limits by our underground measurement. In this paper, R&D activities sinse the first underground measurement are described.