This is the research report which was sent to the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science, JSPS. It is a documentation of traveling as well as research activities, conferences, people I met, discussions, etc., during my JSPS postdoctoral fellowship at Tokyo Institute of Technology.

Sixty-one patients operated on for spinal stenosis, without a fusion, were studied retrospectively. Preoperative instability, as revealed by functional myelography, was found to predict a poor prognosis (P less than 0.01). Women had less favorable results (P less than 0.05). The "slipping" group was significantly more often radically decompressed than the "nonslipping" group (P less than 0.01). Po

We present two methods for variable-rate trellis quantization. Both methods utilize trellis codes based on linear congruential (LC) recursions. LC code trellises have good pseudo-random properties and are easily adapted to serve reconstruction alphabets of different sizes. The first method finds an entropy-constrained code only by optimizing over a scale factor. The scale factor modifies an initia

The objective was to study sex differences in adolescence regarding prevalence of asthma and current wheeze and to explore the association between respiratory symptoms and hereditary, lifestyle and socioeconomic factors. Young-HUNT included data comprehensive questionnaire on health, disease, lifestyle and social factors from 8817 teenagers 13-19 years conducted in 1995/97 (89% response rate). Que

Context. Manganese is an iron-peak element and although the nucleosynthesis path that leads to its formation is fairly well understood, it remains unclear which objects, SN II and/or SN Ia, that contribute the majority of Mn to the interstellar medium. It also remains unclear to which extent the supernovae Mn yields depend on the metallicity of the progenitor star or not. Aims. By using a well stu

The main topic of the thesis is the generalization of some traditional module-theoretic homological applications to complexes of modules and to differential graded modules over differential graded rings. We introduce three possible generalizations of the classical notion of annihilator of an R-module. For linear functors D (R) -> D (R), preserving the triangulation, certain inclusion results for

High-spin states in the proton-rich nucleus V-45 have been identified for the first time. A comprehensive gamma-ray decay scheme has been established following an experiment performed at the Vivitron accelerator at IReS Strasbourg by using the Euroball gamma-ray detector array coupled to the Neutron Wall and Euclides detector arrays. The natural (negative-) parity scheme is identified up to the f(

A review of recent research, as well as new results, are presented on transition metal oxide clusters, surfaces, and crystals. Quantum-chem. calcns. of clusters of first row transition metal oxides have been made to evaluate the accuracy of ab initio and d. functional calcns. Adsorbates on metal oxide surfaces have been studied with both ab initio and semi-empirical methods, and results are presen

Objective A European concerted action (the EuroNatal study) investigated the background of differences in perinatal mortality between countries of Europe. The study aimed to determine the contribution of differences in quality of care, by looking at differences in the presence of suboptimal factors in individual cases of perinatal death. Design Retrospective audit study. Setting Regions of 10 E

José Asunción Silva is a Colombian poet most known for having renewed the metrics in Spanish poetry during the 19th century. José Asunción Silva’s only novel, De sobremesa 1887-1896 [After dinner, 1887-1896] written in 1896 is a significant and representative modernist novel in the tradition of Latin-American modernismo. Silva’s novel has been considered as a structureless, narratively disordered

High-spin states in Kr-76(36)40 have been populated in the Ca-40 (Ca-40,4p) Kr-76 fusion-evaporation reaction at a beam energy of 165 MeV, and studied using the GAMMASPHERE and MICROBALL multi-detector arrays. The ground-state band and two signature-split negative-parity bands of Kr-76 have been extended to similar to 30h. Lifetime measurements using the Doppler-shift attenuation method indicate t

We compared methane oxidation activity in laboratory incubations of samples from a podzolic soil profile to the microbial community structure of the soil, determined as the content and composition of phospholipid fatty acids (PLFAs). The abundances of two fatty acids considered unique for methanotrophs (and the abundances of all other quantified PLFAs) were very weakly related to methane oxidation

Recent and ancient carbonate platforms are major marine ecosystems, built by various carbonate-secreting organisms with different sensitivity for environmental change. For this reason, carbonate platforms are excellent sensors for changes in contemporaneous marine environments. A variety of ecosystem changes in carbonate platforms have previously been recognised in the aftermath of mass extinction

Background: The purpose is to evaluate the accuracy of computed tomography (CT) in the pulmonary staging of osteosarcoma. Patients and methods: Fifty-one patients presenting with osteosarcoma and at initial CT considered metastatic to the chest had lung surgery. Two teams of two senior radiologists independently reviewed all CT examinations. Their results were compared to the histological studies.