Introduced are research activities that are under way at Seiko Epson Corporation under the company's "TFT New Age" program. The program includes R&D projects geared toward achieving high-performance TFTs, developing flexible electronic devices through the use of SUFTLA-TFT technology, and adopting a micro-liquid process for fabricating displays.

In this paper we investigate the relationship between market structure and the composition of R&D activities. We present an empirical model to demonstrate that when market structure is shuffled by an institutional discontinuity, such as liberalisation, basic and applied activities respond in opposite ways: the former decrease whereas the latter increase. As a consequence, market turmoil is like...

Understanding human activities and object affordances are two very important skills, especially for personal robots which operate in human environments. In this work, we consider the problem of extracting a descriptive labeling of the sequence of sub-activities being performed by a human, and more importantly, of their interactions with the objects in the form of associated affordances. Given a...

In Japan, since plutonium is to be used as a nuclear fuel material under the nuclear energy policy, the objective of partitioning and transmutation (P&T) is oriented to removal and transmutation of mainly MA and long-lived fission products. Under the OMEGA (option making of extra gain from actinides and fission products transmutation) programme, on the basis of the double-strata fuel cycle conc...

Vitamin D is a fat soluble vitamin with a well-known general metabolism and actions in bone structure and immune system regulation. Vitamin D exhibits direct antimicrobial activities against a spectrum of microbes, including Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria, enveloped and non-enveloped viruses, as well as fungi. An observational study showed that concentrations of 38 ng/ml or more were ...

An inherent characteristic of R&D projects is technological uncertainty, which may result in project failure, and time and resources spent without any tangible return. In pharmaceutical projects, for instance, stringent scientific procedures have to be followed to ensure patient safety and drug efficacy in pre-clinical and clinical tests before a medicine can be approved for production. A proje...

A recombinant plasmid, designated pUC1002, was constructed by ligation of a HindIII restriction endonuclease fragment of Escherichia coli chromosomal DNA to vector plasmid pMB9. Strains carrying this plasmid were selected by transformation of an E. coli strain bearing the xyl-7 mutation to a xylose-positive (Xyl+) phenotype. Strains containing pUC1002 produced coordinately elevated levels of D-...

The present study investigated the effects of co-administration of aspirin, metformin, atorvastatin and captopril on serum lipid profile and oxidative stress in the heart and kidney of streptozotocin-induced diabetic rats. In this study, rats were randomly divided into the following eleven groups: control (Cont.), and diabetic (D), as well as 9 groups that were treated with metformin (M, 300 mg...