Mounting evidence suggests that inflammatory signaling pathways are central players in the pathogenesis of insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. In this issue, Wellen et al. (2007) identify STAMP2 as a factor that integrates inflammatory and nutritional signals with metabolism.

Time-stamping protocols, which assure that a document was existed at a certain time, are applied to some useful and practical applications such as electronic patent applications and so on. There are two major time-stamping protocols, the simple protocol and the linking protocol. In the former, a time-stamp authority issues a time-stamp token that is the digital signature of the concatenated val...

We prove that there are no black-box reductions from Collision-Free Hash Functions to secure time-stamping schemes, which means that in principle secure time-stamping schemes may exist even if there exist no collision-resistant hash functions. We show that there is an oracle relative to which there exist secure time-stamping schemes but no hash function is collision-free. The oracle we use is n...

Micro-patterning tools adopted from the semiconductor industry have mostly been optimized to pattern features onto rigid silicon and glass substrates, however, recently the need to pattern on soft substrates has been identified in simulating cellular environments or developing flexible biosensors. We present a simple method of introducing a variety of patterned materials and structures into ult...

Micro-contact printing has been developed to print biomolecules, such as cell adhesive molecules, proteins, or DNAs, on a substrate, which can serve as experimental platforms for investigating biological issues and engineering biosensors. Despite the popularity of this method, it has been technically challenging to use a conventional stamp made of a hydrophobic polydimethoxysilane (PDMS) elasto...