COASTAL SEA-LEVEL AND THE LARGE-SCALE CLIMATE STATE - A DOWNSCALING EXERCISE FOR THE JAPANESE ISLANDS

A major problem which is envisaged in the course of man-made climate change is sea-level rise. The global aspect of the thermal expansion of the sea water likely is reasonably well simulated by present day climate models; the variation of sea level, due to variations of the regional atmospheric forcing and of the large-scale oceanic circulation, is not adequately simulated by a global climate model because of insufficient spatial resolution. A method to infer the coastal aspects of sea level change is to use a statistical ''downscaling'' strategy: a linear statistical model is built upon a multi-year data set of local sea level data and of large-scale oceanic and/or atmospheric data such as sea-surface temperature or sea-level air-pressure. We apply this idea to sea level along the Japanese coast. The sea level is related to regional and North Pacific sea-surface temperature and sea-level air pressure. Two relevant processes are identified. One process is the local wind set-up of water due to regional low-frequency wind anomalies; the other is a planetary scale atmosphere-ocean interaction which takes place in the eastern North Pacific.

LC determination of amino acids in rat plasma with fluorescence detection: Application to exercise physiology

An LC method for the determination of 20 amino acids (AAs), using 1,2-Benzo-3,4-dihydrocarbazole-9-ethyl chloroformate (BCEOC) as fluorescent labeling reagent, has been validated and applied for the analysis of AAs in rat plasma at three different states concerning exercise physiology. Identification of AA derivatives was carried out by LC-MS with electrospray ion (ESI), and the MS-MS cleavage mode of the representative tyrosine (Tyr) derivative was analyzed. Gradient elution on a Hypersil BDS C-18 column gave good separation of the derivatives. Excellent linear responses were observed and good compositional data could be obtained from as little as 50-200 mu L of plasma samples. The contents of 20 AAs in rat plasma of three groups (24 rats, group A: quiet state, group B: at exercising exhaust, group C: 12 h after exercising exhaust) exhibited evident difference corresponding to the physiological states. Facile BCEOC derivatization coupled with LC-FLD-ESI-MS analysis allowed the development of a highly sensitive method for the quantitative analysis of trace level of AAs from plasma or other biochemical samples.

归因任务中预期强度水平对结果评价的影响

Previous researches has shown that two components of the event- related brain potential, the feedback negativity (FRN) and P300, are related to outcome evaluation. So far, the nature of the outcome evaluation reflected by FRN and the significance of P300 remains unknown. Some studies found that the process of outcome evaluation may be related to the expectation, and the FRN may be affected by the intensity levels of the expectation for the outcome. To address these issues, the present study will start on two aspects: (1)This study required 39 participants to make attribution about their performance during a task, the aim was to assess the levels of the expectations for the outcome under four conditions in the attribution task. The main finding is that, the expectations for monetary reward under four conditions are scaled. (2)Based on the results of the first study, this study also required 16 participants to make attribution about their performance during a task. A functional dissociation was observed, with the FRN affected by the intensity levels of the expectation for the outcome, while the P300 sensitive to the degree of emotion the participants experienced. Dipole source location analysis showed that the most likely neural generator of FRN and P300 is the cingulate cortex, suggesting that FRN might reflect cognitive conflict when the actual outcome is different from the expectation, and P300 is related to the emotion processing of outcome stimuli. These results suggest that there is a functional dissociation between FRN and P300.