National Institute of Science and Technology Policy

FOXO1, a member of the FOXO forkhead type transcription factors, is markedly up-regulated in skeletal muscle in energy-deprived states such as fasting and severe diabetes, but its functions in skeletal muscle have remained poorly understood. In this study, we created transgenic mice specifically overexpressing FOXO1 in skeletal muscle. These mice weighed less than the wild-type control mice, had a reduced skeletal muscle mass, and the muscle was paler in color. Microarray analysis revealed that the expression of many genes related to the structural proteins of type I muscles (slow twitch, red muscle) was decreased. Histological analyses showed a marked decrease in size of both type I and type II fibers and a significant decrease in the number of type I fibers in the skeletal muscle of FOXO1 mice. Enhanced gene expression of a lysosomal proteinase, cathepsin L, which is known to be up-regulated during skeletal muscle atrophy, suggested increased protein degradation in the skeletal muscle of FOXO1 mice. Running wheel activity (spontaneous locomotive activity) was significantly reduced in FOXO1 mice compared with control mice. Moreover, the FOXO1 mice showed impaired glycemic control after oral glucose and intraperitoneal insulin administration. These results suggest that FOXO1 negatively regulates skeletal muscle mass and type I fiber gene expression and leads to impaired skeletal muscle function. Activation of FOXO1 may be involved in the pathogenesis of sarcopenia, the age-related decline in muscle mass in humans, which leads to obesity and diabetes.

Climate change has emerged as one of the most important issues of the twentyfirst century. Recent opinion polls show rising public awareness of climate change. Yet considerable cross-national variation exists in the intensity of public concern and in public willingness to pay for addressing climate change. Drawing on twelve multinational surveys, we examine two aggregate conditions—a country's affluence and its vulnerability to climate risks—as key factors underlying cross-national differences in public support for and commitment to costly climate policies. In contrast to the post-materialism thesis, we find “strong” concern about climate change to be higher in developing countries. Contrary to expectation, climate vulnerability had little effect on public concern, but did have significant impact on some measures of personal commitment and support for climate policies. The analysis indicates that, in most countries examined, high concern about climate change is only beginning to translate into personal commitment to action.

Staphylococcal enterotoxins (SEs) are a common causative agent of food poisoning. Recently, many new SE-like (SEl) toxins have been reported, although the role of SEls in food poisoning remains unclear. In this study, the emetic potentials of SElK, SElL, SElM, SElN, SElO, SElP, and SElQ were assessed using a monkey-feeding assay. All the SEls that were tested induced emetic reactions in monkeys at a dose of 100 μg/kg, although the numbers of affected monkeys were significantly smaller than the numbers that were affected after consuming SEA or SEB. This result suggests that these new SEs may play some role in staphylococcal food poisoning.

Despite their recognized agricultural sustainability benefits, mixed crop-livestock farms have declined in the Northern hemisphere. As such, crop-livestock integration beyond the farm level is a promising alternative to this trend, but the knowledge of critical factors and strategies towards its successful implementation is still lacking. We developed an analytical framework to assess the critical determinants of the emergence and outcomes of integration, which helped us understand farmers’ collective strategies for reducing integration transaction costs. The resulting framework distinguishes between three types of transaction costs: information gathering, collective decision-making, and operational and monitoring costs. These costs are influenced by several factors: external environment attributes, resources engaged in crop-livestock integration, and participating actors and their arrangements. Application of the framework onto six case studies all across the world (Asia, Europe and America) demonstrated it can be utilized for various projects implemented at multiple organizational levels (farm-to-farm, local groups, and regional levels) over distinct farming systems (conventional and organic). Specific policies should be developed to strengthen social networks through the mutual understanding of such integration benefits, since they play a key role in lowering the costs of information gathering and collective decision-making. A legal framework to establishing a formal contract should contribute to lower long-term monitoring costs, especially when trust among actors developing. Operational costs largely depend on the spatial proximity of farms, but this can be overcome by extending the scale of integration in terms of covered area and number of participants. Here, appropriate coordination by third-party entities is essential, and should be targeted by financial and technical support.

Ho Chi Minh City faces significant and growing flood risk. Recent risk reduction efforts may be insufficient as climate and socio-economic conditions diverge from projections made when those efforts were initially planned. This study demonstrates how robust decision making can help Ho Chi Minh City develop integrated flood risk management strategies in the face of such deep uncertainty. Robust decision making is an iterative, quantitative, decision support methodology designed to help policy makers identify strategies that are robust, that is, satisfying decision makers' objectives in many plausible futures, rather than being optimal in any single estimate of the future. This project used robust decision making to analyze flood risk management in Ho Chi Minh City's Nhieu Loc-Thi Nghe canal catchment area. It found that the soon-to-be-completed infrastructure may reduce risk in best estimates of future conditions, but it may not keep risk low in many other plausible futures. Thus, the infrastructure may not be sufficiently robust. The analysis further suggests that adaptation and retreat measures, particularly when used adaptively, can play an important role in reducing this risk. The study examines the conditions under which robust decision making concepts and full robust decision making analyses may prove useful in developing countries. It finds that planning efforts in developing countries should at minimum use models and data to evaluate their decisions under a wide range of conditions. Full robust decision making analyses can also augment existing planning efforts in numerous ways.

The DNA Data Bank of Japan Center (DDBJ Center; http://www.ddbj.nig.ac.jp) maintains and provides public archival, retrieval and analytical services for biological information. The contents of the DDBJ databases are shared with the US National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) within the framework of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC). Since 2013, the DDBJ Center has been operating the Japanese Genotype-phenotype Archive (JGA) in collaboration with the National Bioscience Database Center (NBDC) in Japan. In addition, the DDBJ Center develops semantic web technologies for data integration and sharing in collaboration with the Database Center for Life Science (DBCLS) in Japan. This paper briefly reports on the activities of the DDBJ Center over the past year including submissions to databases and improvements in our services for data retrieval, analysis, and integration.

Novelty is a core value in science, and a reliable measurement of novelty is crucial. This study proposes a new approach of measuring the novelty of scientific articles based on both citation data and text data. The proposed approach considers an article to be novel if it cites a combination of semantically distant references. To this end, we first assign a word embedding-a vector representation of each vocabulary-to each cited reference on the basis of text information included in the reference. With these vectors, a distance between every pair of references is computed. Finally, the novelty of a focal document is evaluated by summarizing the distances between all references. The approach draws on limited text information (the titles of references) and publicly shared library for word embeddings, which minimizes the requirement of data access and computational cost. We share the code, with which one can compute the novelty score of a document of interest only by having the focal document's reference list. We validate the proposed measure through three exercises. First, we confirm that word embeddings can be used to quantify semantic distances between documents by comparing with an established bibliometric distance measure. Second, we confirm the criterion-related validity of the proposed novelty measure with self-reported novelty scores collected from a questionnaire survey. Finally, as novelty is known to be correlated with future citation impact, we confirm that the proposed measure can predict future citation.

Extant literature on firm–university collaboration has emphasized two different strategies that firms in science-based industries adopt to source scientific knowledge and expertise. On one hand, firms engage in direct research collaborations with universities. On the other hand, firms establish indirect, mediated, ties to universities by engaging in research collaborations with dedicated biotech firms that are themselves strongly linked to universities—with the dedicated biotech firm taking the role of “broker.” We argue that the relative benefits of direct and mediated ties depend on the extent to which firms have organized their research and development to facilitate the absorption, assimilation, transformation, and exploitation of scientific knowledge, which we coin “scientific absorptive capacity.” Drawing on patent and publication data in a panel of 33 vertically integrated pharmaceutical firms, we find that direct university collaboration is more beneficial for firms with relatively high scientific absorptive capacity, while only mediated ties are associated with greater innovative performance for firms with relatively low scientific absorptive capacity. The latter association is reduced if the mediated ties are with top universities. Our findings are suggestive of the importance of a “fit” between the nature of a firm’s research and development organization and its strategy to access scientific knowledge.

Abstract The boundaries of the firm are an important issue in relation not just with the make‐or‐buy decision in production but also with research and development (R&D). Firms depend on universities to gain scientific knowledge, outsource some of their R&D works, purchase patented technologies, commission research, and participate in consortia. In this paper, we take the case of the 10 major pharmaceutical companies in Japan and show that they employ various types of research alliances with various partners, domestic or foreign. Two major theories to explain the boundaries, the transaction‐cost theory and the capability theory, are discussed and we argue that the observed pattern of research alliance is more consistent with the capability theory. Discussion is also made on the consortia and national projects these firms participate. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Electronic states of normal graphene, the defective graphene (one carbon atom is removed from the normal graphene), the defective graphene anion (defective graphene plus an excess electron), and the defective graphene cation (defective graphene plus one hole) have been investigated by means of density functional theory (DFT) and direct molecular orbital−molecular dynamics (MO-MD) methods in order to elucidate the effect of vacancy defect on the electronic states of graphene. The HOMO and LUMO of normal graphene were widely delocalized as π-conjugated orbitals over the graphene surface in the normal graphene. On the other hand, the excess electron in defective graphene anion was localized in the defect site, indicating that the excess electron on the graphene circuit is efficiently trapped and stabilized by the vacancy defect site of graphene. The direct MO-MD calculations showed that the trapped electron in the defect site is stable at low temperature. Around room temperature (300 K), the structural change of the graphene backbone was found and the vacancy defect was reconstructed by thermal activation. The excess electron escaped from the defect site of the reconstructed graphene, while the spin density delocalized the graphene.

An ( n ,1, p )-quantum random access (QRA) coding, introduced by Ambainis et al (1999 ACM Symp. Theory of Computing p 376), is the following communication system: the sender which has n -bit information encodes his/her information into one qubit, which is sent to the receiver. The receiver can recover any one bit of the original n bits correctly with probability at least p , through a certain decoding process based on positive operator-valued measures. Actually, Ambainis et al shows the existence of a (2,1,0.85)-QRA coding and also proves the impossibility of its classical counterpart. Chuang immediately extends it to a (3,1,0.79)-QRA coding and whether or not a (4,1, p )-QRA coding such that p > 1/2 exists has been open since then. This paper gives a negative answer to this open question. Moreover, we generalize its negative answer for one-qubit encoding to the case of multiple-qubit encoding

Japan is one of the few rabies-free countries. Although 3 imported cases of human rabies were seen in 1970 and 2006, no other cases have been reported for approximately 50 years. The elimination of rabies in Japan is attributed to not only its geographic isolation but also to effective prevention and control measures, such as registration and vaccination of domestic dogs, required quarantine of susceptible imported animals, and national plans of action based on scientific research. Countermeasures against rabies have been upgraded; an improved management system for domestic dogs under the amended Enforcement Regulations of the Rabies Prevention Law has been in effect since April 2007. The latest regulatory systems for preventing and controlling rabies provide an effective model for elimination of the disease worldwide.

In Japan, the Delphi method is applied since 1971 to foresee possible technological developments. The same approach was used in Germany in 1992 for the first time. The German expert survey about the d

Spinocerebellar ataxia type 6 (SCA6) is dominantly inherited neurodegenerative disease, caused by an expansion of CAG repeat encoding a polyglutamine (PolyQ) tract in the Cav2.1 voltage-gated calcium channel. Its key pathological features include selective degeneration of the cerebellar Purkinje cells (PCs), a common target for PolyQ-induced toxicity in various SCAs. Mutant Cav2.1 confers toxicity primarily through a toxic gain-of-function mechanism; however, its molecular basis remains elusive. Here, we studied the cerebellar gene expression patterns of young Sca6-MPI(118Q/118Q) knockin (KI) mice, which expressed mutant Cav2.1 from an endogenous locus and recapitulated many phenotypic features of human SCA6. Transcriptional signatures in the MPI(118Q/118Q) mice were distinct from those in the Sca1(154Q/2Q) mice, a faithful SCA1 KI mouse model. Temporal expression profiles of the candidate genes revealed that the up-regulation of genes associated with microglial activation was initiated before PC degeneration and was augmented as the disease progressed. Histological analysis of the MPI(118Q/118Q) cerebellum showed the predominance of M1-like pro-inflammatory microglia and it was concomitant with elevated expression levels of tumor necrosis factor, interleukin-6, Toll-like receptor (TLR) 2 and 7. Genetic ablation of MyD88, a major adaptor protein conveying TLR signaling, altered expression patterns of M1/M2 microglial phenotypic markers in the MPI(118Q/118Q) cerebellum. More importantly, it ameliorated PC loss and partially rescued motor impairments in the early disease phase. These results suggest that early neuroinflammatory response may play an important role in the pathogenesis of SCA6 and its modulation could pave the way for slowing the disease progression during the early stage of the disease.

Several lines of evidence demonstrate that oxidative stress is involved in the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson's disease. Potent antioxidants may therefore be effective in the treatment of such diseases. Cabergoline, a dopamine D2 receptor agonist and antiparkinson drug, has been studied using several cell types including mesencephalic neurons, and is recognized as a potent radical scavenger. Here, we examined whether cabergoline exerts neuroprotective effects against oxidative stress through a receptor-mediated mechanism in cultured cortical neurons. We found that neuronal death induced by H₂O₂ exposure was inhibited by pretreatment with cabergoline, while this protective effect was eliminated in the presence of a dopamine D2 receptor inhibitor, spiperone. Activation of ERK1/2 by H₂O₂ was suppressed by cabergoline, and an ERK signaling pathway inhibitor, U0126, similarly protected cortical neurons from cell death. This suggested the ERK signaling pathway has a critical role in cabergoline-mediated neuroprotection. Furthermore, increased extracellular levels of glutamate induced by H₂O₂, which might contribute to ERK activation, were reduced by cabergoline, while inhibitors for NMDA receptor or L-type Ca²⁺ channel demonstrated a survival effect against H₂O₂. Interestingly, we found that cabergoline increased expression levels of glutamate transporters such as EAAC1. Taken together, these results suggest that cabergoline has a protective effect on cortical neurons via a receptor-mediated mechanism including repression of ERK1/2 activation and extracellular glutamate accumulation induced by H₂O₂.

This paper discusses how open science can be interlinked with community-based participatory research (CBPR) to address socio-environmental issues. By reviewing three case studies in Japan, the authors developed a theoretical framework to span these inter-actor boundaries by (1) discovering and sharing goals that actors with different interests could tackle together (the transcend method); (2) considering ethical equity with special attention to empowering marginalized (or ‘small voice’) actors; (3) developing fair data visualization based on the FAIR Data Principles and (4) facilitating dialogue. A civic tech approach, in which civic engineers develop a solution to local issues by using open governmental data and information and communication technologies, is applied. This framework will reflectively be tested using case studies.

The issue of international student mobility has had a profound effect on policy decision-making in the higher education system of essentially every country; however, the statistical data on this subject are insufficient, especially for graduate students. The purposes of this study are to substantiate the state of international mobility among talented graduate students in the sciences and engineering who will publish scholarly research in their future career and to present the mechanism of their moves between institutions. This paper quantitatively analyzes the trajectories of more than 7,000 scientists and engineers beginning at graduate school, obtained from the biographical notes attached to journal articles for authors in the fields of computer vision, robotics, and electron devices. The results suggest that mobility in various engineering fields at world-class research universities is subject to varied pull and push factors. In the fields of computer vision and robotics, a high world university ranking is a significant pull factor in the global mobility of graduate students, which may promote a US-dominated stratification between institutions of higher education, since the institutions at the top end of these rankings are generally in the United States. In contrast, in the field of electron devices, employment for highly skilled workers in domestic industries seems to act as an alternative pull factor for talented graduate students. This article also sheds light on the status of the universities that underpin first-tier research universities by providing undergraduate students to them, an important role that tends to be concealed in the world university rankings. Furthermore, this article suggests the existence of complementary relationships between the globally top-ranked research universities and the exporting top national research universities in various countries, a relationship that is key to the shape of the current global higher education system.

As novelty is a core value in science, a reliable approach to measuring the novelty of scientific documents is critical. Previous novelty measures however had a few limitations. First, the majority of previous measures are based on recombinant novelty concept, attempting to identify a novel combination of knowledge elements, but insufficient effort has been made to identify a novel element itself (element novelty). Second, most previous measures are not validated, and it is unclear what aspect of newness is measured. Third, some of the previous measures can be computed only in certain scientific fields for technical constraints. This study thus aims to provide a validated and field-universal approach to computing element novelty. We drew on machine learning to develop a word embedding model, which allows us to extract semantic information from text data. Our validation analyses suggest that our word embedding model does convey semantic information. Based on the trained word embedding, we quantified the element novelty of a document by measuring its distance from the rest of the document universe. We then carried out a questionnaire survey to obtain self-reported novelty scores from 800 scientists. We found that our element novelty measure is significantly correlated with self-reported novelty in terms of discovering and identifying new phenomena, substances, molecules, etc. and that this correlation is observed across different scientific fields.

This paper revisits two cases of new technology and product foresight and assessment in Japanese companies and industries. The case studies show that technology forecasting or roadmapping that integrates corporate strategy and technology strategy plays an important role in economic success. Integrated technology roadmapping provides a practical instrument for developing long-range technology and strategy by aligning internal resources and social marketing factors.

Ph.D. training in academic labs offers the foundation for the production of knowledge workers, indispensable for the modern knowledge-based society. Nonetheless, our understanding on Ph.D. training has been insufficient due to limited access to the inside of academic labs. Furthermore, early careers of Ph.D. graduates are often difficult to follow, which makes the evaluation of training effects challenging. To address these limitations, this study aims to illustrate the settings of Ph.D. training in academic labs and examine their impact on several training outcomes, drawing on a national survey of a cohort of 5000 Ph.D. graduates from Japanese universities. The result suggests that a supervising team structure as well as the frequency of supervision, contingent to a few contextual factors, determine the Ph.D. graduates' career decisions, performance, and degrees of satisfaction with the training programs.