Topic Review
Titin and Muscle Atrophy
Titin, also called connectin, is a giant sarcomere protein, which functions as a spring for muscle extension and elasticity. Titin interconnects the contraction of actin-containing thin filaments and myosin-containing thick filaments. Recently, the N-terminal fragment of titin, which is the breakdown product of titin, has become measurable using an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay kit (27900 titin N-fragment Assay Kit; Immuno-Biological Laboratories, Fujioka, Japan). This kit has been used to evaluate muscle breakdown in muscle dystrophy, in which the level of urinary titin N-fragment was 700-times above the normal level.
  • 2.7K
  • 20 Apr 2021
Topic Review
Sustainable Agriculture and Biodiversity Conservation in Japan
Japan aims to be carbon-neutral by 2050 by targeting various sectors including agriculture. One of the main strategies in this sector to mitigate climate change effects is environmental conservation agriculture (ECA); however, ECA utilization remains low in most of Japan’s prefectures to this date. Japan has been active in promoting biodiversity conservation and sustainable agriculture, which is why it currently has a total of 11 Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) designated by FAO. Japan has been proactive in preserving endangered species, such as butterflies vascular plants, and birds
  • 2.7K
  • 19 May 2022
Topic Review
Nutritional Value of Caulerpa lentillifera
Caulerpa lentillifera is a type of green seaweed widely consumed as a fresh vegetable, specifically in Southeast Asia. Interestingly, this green seaweed has recently gained popularity in the food sector. 
  • 2.7K
  • 14 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Death Anxiety (Psychology)
Death anxiety is anxiety caused by thoughts of one's own death; it is also referred to as thanatophobia (fear of death). Death anxiety is different from necrophobia, the latter is the fear of others who are dead or dying, whereas the former concerns one's own death or dying. Popular psychotherapist Robert Langs proposed 3 different causes of death anxiety: Predatory, predator, and existential. In addition to his research, many theorists such as Sigmund Freud, Erik Erikson, Ernest Becker, and others have contemplated death and death anxiety and how it relates to human psychology. Death anxiety has been found to affect people of differing demographic groups as well; such as men versus women, young versus old, etc.    Additionally, there is anxiety caused by death-recent thought-content, which might be classified within a clinical setting by a psychiatrist as morbid and/or abnormal. This classification pre-necessitates a degree of anxiety which is persistent and interferes with everyday functioning. Lower ego integrity, more physical problems and more psychological problems are predictive of higher levels of death anxiety in elderly people perceiving themselves close to death. Death anxiety can cause extreme timidness with a person's attitude towards discussing anything to do with death. Findings from one systematic review demonstrated that death anxiety features across several mental health conditions. One meta-analysis of psychological interventions targeting death anxiety showed that death anxiety can be reduced using cognitive behavior therapy.
  • 2.7K
  • 20 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Water Footprint in Steel Industries
Steelmaking is a water-intensive process. The mean water intake against each ton of steel manufactured is ascertained as between 2 and 20 m3. Primarily, the stated requirement is in the form of make-up water to compensate for evaporation and mechanical losses and does not contribute to wastewater generation. Conversely, unit operations, such as rolling, continuous casting, pickling, etc., generate highly complex wastewater rich in polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), cyanide, ammonia, non-consumed acids, benzene, toluene, xylene, oil, grease, etc. 
  • 2.7K
  • 15 Jun 2023
Topic Review
Perceived Green Value (PGV)
Perceived Green Value (PGV) is defined as consumers’ overall evaluation and appraisal of products in regards to their perceived environmental and sustainable advantages. This concept derives from consumer perceived value (CPV) theory, which mainly considers two dimensions, which are the functional value (quality, services, price, and convenience values) and the symbolic value (aesthetic, emotional, social, and reputational values) .
  • 2.7K
  • 26 Jul 2021
Topic Review
High Entropy Alloys
High-entropy alloys (HEAs) are alloys that are formed by mixing equal or relatively large proportions of (usually) five or more elements. Prior to the synthesis of these substances, typical metal alloys comprised one or two major components with smaller amounts of other elements. For example, additional elements can be added to iron to improve its properties, thereby creating an iron based alloy, but typically in fairly low proportions, such as the proportions of carbon, manganese, and the like in various steels. Hence, high entropy alloys are a novel class of materials. The term “high-entropy alloys” was coined because the entropy increase of mixing is substantially higher when there is a larger number of elements in the mix, and their proportions are more nearly equal. These alloys are currently the focus of significant attention in materials science and engineering because they have potentially desirable properties. Furthermore, research indicates that some HEAs have considerably better strength-to-weight ratios, with a higher degree of fracture resistance, tensile strength, as well as corrosion and oxidation resistance than conventional alloys. Although HEAs have been studied since the 1980s, research substantially accelerated in the 2010s.
  • 2.7K
  • 01 Dec 2022
Topic Review
Halt and Catch Fire
In computer engineering, Halt and Catch Fire, known by the assembly mnemonic HCF, is an idiom referring to a computer machine code instruction that causes the computer's central processing unit (CPU) to cease meaningful operation, typically requiring a restart of the computer. It originally referred to a fictitious instruction in IBM System/360 computers, making a joke about its numerous non-obvious instruction mnemonics. With the advent of the MC6800, a design flaw was discovered by the programmers. Due to incomplete opcode decoding, two illegal opcodes, 0x9D and 0xDD, will cause the program counter on the processor to increment endlessly, which renders the processor useless. Those codes have been unofficially named HCF. During the design process of MC6802, engineers originally planned to remove this instruction, but kept it as-is for testing purposes. As a result, HCF was officially recognized as a real instruction. Later, HCF became a humorous catch-all term for instructions that may freeze a processor, including intentional instructions for testing purposes, and unintentional illegal instructions. Some are considered hardware defects, and if the system is shared, a malicious user can execute it to launch a denial-of-service attack. In the case of real instructions, the implication of this expression is that, whereas in most cases in which a CPU executes an unintended instruction (a bug in the code) the computer may still be able to recover, in the case of an HCF instruction there is, by definition, no way for the system to recover without a restart. The expression "catch fire" is a facetious exaggeration of the speed with which the CPU chip would be switching some bus circuits, causing them to overheat and burn.
  • 2.7K
  • 04 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Ultra-High-Purity Aluminum
Properties of high-purity aluminum are the low magnetic permeability, the absence of low-temperature brittleness, as well as the increased strength and plasticity at low temperatures. These explain the classical application of high- to ultra-high-purity aluminum for the stabilization of superconductors running at cryogenic temperatures as low as −269 °C.
  • 2.7K
  • 01 Nov 2021
Topic Review
Purple Tomatoes
Purple tomatoes represent a recent variant of tomato fruits characterized by a purple coloration, not present in the more common red fruited varieties. This peculiar pigmentation is due to the presence of anthocyanins. These are plant secondary metabolites responsible for red, purple and blue colorations of flowers, fruits and leaves in many species. They are usually assumed with the diet, being rich sources mostly represented by red and purple fruits or dark vegetables (e.g., berries, cherries, plums, grapes, black beans, red onions, eggplant, red cabbage, purple sweet potatoes). As other polyphenolic compounds, they can provide many health benefits, and, as a consequence, their consumption can be helpful in reducing the incidence of cardiovascular, metabolic and degenerative or chronic diseases and of certain types of cancer. Tomato fruits are naturally rich of carotenoids, vitamins and polyphenols, but do not contain anthocyanins, due to mutations in their specific biosynthetic pathway. However, in recent years, either through genetic engineering or introgression by breeding of specific gene variants using wild relatives, this biosynthetic block has been overcome. This allowed the production of the new tomatoes’ phenotypes characterized by purple pigmentation localized only on the fruit peel or in both peel and flesh. In purple tomatoes, the high concentrations of anthocyanins that can be achieved, and not to the detriment of other metabolites, represent a real added nutritional value of these fruits.
  • 2.7K
  • 15 Jan 2021
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