The Hayabusa2 spacecraft arrived at the near-Earth carbonaceous asteroid 162173 Ryugu in 2018. We present Hayabusa2 observations of Ryugu’s shape, mass, and geomorphology. Ryugu has an oblate ‘spinning top’ shape with a prominent circular equatorial ridge. Its bulk density, 1.19 ± 0.02 g cm–3, indicates a high porosity (>50%) interior. Large surface boulders suggest a rubble-pile structure. Surface slope analysis shows Ryugu’s shape may have been produced if it once spun at twice the current rate. Coupled with the observed global material homogeneity, this suggests that Ryugu was reshaped by centrifugally induced deformation during a period of rapid rotation. From these remote-sensing investigations, we identify a suitable sample collection site on the equatorial ridge.

Theoretical study is presented on the wetting behaviors of water droplets over a lotus leaf. Experimental results are interpreted to clarify the trade-offs among the potential energy change, the local pinning energy, and the adhesion energy. The theoretical parameters, calculated from the experimental results, are used to qualitatively explain the relations among surface fractal dimension, surface morphology, and dynamic wetting behaviors. The surface of a lotus leaf, which shows the superhydrophobic lotus effect, was dipped in ethanol to remove the plant waxes. As a result, the lotus effect is lost. The contact angle of a water drop decreased dramatically from 161° of the original surface to 122°. The water droplet was pinned on the surface. From the fractal analysis, the fractal region of the original surface was divided into two regions: a smaller-sized roughness region of 0.3-1.7 μm with D of 1.48 and a region of 1.7-19 μm with D of 1.36. By dipping the leaf in ethanol, the former fractal region, characterized by wax tubes, was lost, and only the latter large fractal region remained. The lotus effect is attributed to a surface structure that is covered with needle-shaped wax tubes, and the remaining surface allows invasion of the water droplet and enlarges the interaction with water.

Although pain is a common symptom of various diseases and disorders, its contribution to disease pathogenesis is not well understood. Here we show using murine experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE), a model for multiple sclerosis (MS), that pain induces EAE relapse. Mechanistic analysis showed that pain induction activates a sensory-sympathetic signal followed by a chemokine-mediated accumulation of MHC class II+CD11b+ cells that showed antigen-presentation activity at specific ventral vessels in the fifth lumbar cord of EAE-recovered mice. Following this accumulation, various immune cells including pathogenic CD4+ T cells recruited in the spinal cord in a manner dependent on a local chemokine inducer in endothelial cells, resulting in EAE relapse. Our results demonstrate that a pain-mediated neural signal can be transformed into an inflammation reaction at specific vessels to induce disease relapse, thus making this signal a potential therapeutic target.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.08733.001

Impact of stress on diseases including gastrointestinal failure is well-known, but molecular mechanism is not understood. Here we show underlying molecular mechanism using EAE mice. Under stress conditions, EAE caused severe gastrointestinal failure with high-mortality. Mechanistically, autoreactive-pathogenic CD4+ T cells accumulated at specific vessels of boundary area of third-ventricle, thalamus, and dentate-gyrus to establish brain micro-inflammation via stress-gateway reflex. Importantly, induction of brain micro-inflammation at specific vessels by cytokine injection was sufficient to establish fatal gastrointestinal failure. Resulting micro-inflammation activated new neural pathway including neurons in paraventricular-nucleus, dorsomedial-nucleus-of-hypothalamus, and also vagal neurons to cause fatal gastrointestinal failure. Suppression of the brain micro-inflammation or blockage of these neural pathways inhibited the gastrointestinal failure. These results demonstrate direct link between brain micro-inflammation and fatal gastrointestinal disease via establishment of a new neural pathway under stress. They further suggest that brain micro-inflammation around specific vessels could be switch to activate new neural pathway(s) to regulate organ homeostasis.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.25517.001

KDEL receptors are responsible for retrotransporting endoplasmic reticulum (ER) chaperones from the Golgi complex to the ER. Here we describe a role for KDEL receptor 1 (KDELR1) that involves the regulation of integrated stress responses (ISR) in T cells. Designing and using an N-ethyl-N-nitrosourea (ENU)-mutant mouse line, T-Red (naïve T-cell reduced), we show that a point mutation in KDELR1 is responsible for the reduction in the number of naïve T cells in this model owing to an increase in ISR. Mechanistic analysis shows that KDELR1 directly regulates protein phosphatase 1 (PP1), a key phosphatase for ISR in naïve T cells. T-Red KDELR1 does not associate with PP1, resulting in reduced phosphatase activity against eIF2α and subsequent expression of stress responsive genes including the proapoptotic factor Bim. These results demonstrate that KDELR1 regulates naïve T-cell homeostasis by controlling ISR.

A series of miktoarm star polymers, [poly(nhexyl isocyanate)(12K)]−[poly(ε-caprolactone) 1−3 (5K)] (PHIC−PCL 1−3 ) (composed of a rigid self-assembling PHIC arm and one to three flexible crystallizable PCL arms), were investigated to examine the polymers' thermal properties and nanoscale thin film morphologies. The miktoarm polymers were stable up to 180 °C. The PHIC and PCL arm components underwent phase separation during the solution casting, drying, and post toluene-annealing processes, forming interesting but very complex thin film morphologies. The resulting thin film morphologies were examined in detail for the first time using synchrotron grazing incidence X-ray scattering (GIXS) measurements and quantitative data analysis. All of the miktoarm star polymer films formed vertically well-oriented lamellar structures, regardless of the number and length of PCL arms. These structures were quite different from the cylindrical structures commonly observed in conventional flexible diblock copolymer films having comparable volume fractions. The individual PHIC and PCL lamellar domains self-assembled to form their own respective morphological structures. The PHIC lamellae consisted of a mixture of horizontal and vertical multibilayer structure domains, as observed in the PHIC homopolymer film. The PCL lamellae formed fringed micelle-like crystals and/or highly imperfect folded crystals that differed significantly from the structures found in a PCL homopolymer film composed of typical folded lamellar crystals. These PCL crystals were formed with a mixture of vertical and horizontal orthorhombic lattices. Overall, the GIXS analysis revealed that the parameters that characterized the hierarchical structures in the thin films depended significantly on the number and length of the PCL arm and its crystallization characteristics as well as the chain rigidity and multibilayer structure formation characteristics of the PHIC arm.

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GPU exhibits the capability for applications with a high level of parallelism despite its low cost. The support of integer and logical instructions by the latest generation of GPUs enables us to implement cipher algorithms more easily. However, decisions such as parallel processing granularity and memory allocation impose a heavy burden on programmers. Therefore, this paper presents results of several experiments that were conducted to elucidate the relation between memory allocation styles of variables of AES and granularity as the parallelism exploited from AES encoding processes using CUDA with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX285 (Nvidia Corp.). Results of these experiments showed that the 16 bytes/thread granularity had the highest performance. It achieved approximately 35 Gbps throughput. It also exhibited differences of memory allocation and granularity effects around 2%-30% for performance in standard implementation. It shows that the decision of granularity and memory allocation is the most important factor for effective processing in AES encryption on GPU. Moreover, implementation with overlapping between processing and data transfer yielded 22.5 Gbps throughput including the data transfer time.