Gap junctions mediate intercellular communication and are critical for development and nervous system function. Initially thought to function solely as stand-alone molecules, it has now been shown that a stomatin-like protein regulates a gap junction channel in Caenorhabditis elegans.

With the Nasometer, this paper studies the nasality contrast of liquid initials and the intrinsic nasality of seven cardinal vowels in Beijing Mandarin. The results show that the nasality contrast degree of initial consonants is high. The intrinsic nasality of vowels is closely related to the position of the tongue. The lower and more front the tongue is, the greater the degree of nasalization;...

Freeway merge areas are recognized as the most common segment of recurrent freeway congestion as two separate traffic streams join to merge a single stream. Over the years, several studies have attempted to explain and analyze a merge capacity phenomenon, however relatively few analytical techniques have been developed to evaluate the traffic flow in these areas. This study described a new inte...

In this talk, I discuss the recent development in color superconductivity in terms of effective field theory. By investigating the Cooper pair gap equations at high density, we see that the effective theory simplifies the gap analysis very much, especially in finding the ground state, the precise form of the gap, and the critical temperature. Furthermore, the effective theory enables us to esti...

The present study was designed to explore the role of gap junctions in follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) and transforming growth factor beta1 (TGF beta1)-stimulated steroidogenesis in ovarian granulosa cells of gonadotropin-primed immature rats. There were three specific aims. First, we investigated the effect of FSH and TGF beta1 as well as lindane (a general gap junction blocker) on the leve...

An energy gap is, in principle, a dominant parameter in superconductivity. However, this view has been challenged for the case of high-Tc cuprates, because anisotropic evolution of a d-wave-like superconducting gap with underdoping has been difficult to formulate along with a critical temperature Tc. Here we show that a nodal-gap energy 2ΔN closely follows 8.5 kBTc with underdoping and is also ...

Recently experiments on high critical temperature superconductors have shown that the doping levels and the superconducting gap are usually not uniform properties but strongly dependent on their positions inside a given sample. We show here that the large diamagnetic signal above the critical temperature Tc and the unusual temperature dependence of the upper critical field Hc2 with the temperat...