COVID-19 has brought not only fear and anxiety, but also legitimate restrictions of communication and consequential touch-deprivation in our daily lives. Couples’ relational wellbeing continues to be ...impacted by these COVID-19 related stressors. Protecting both personal and relational wellbeing is therefore particularly important at this time. Using a preventative intervention approach, the current paper argues the theoretical benefit of the Positive Massage programme and reports a qualitative analysis of stressed but healthy couples’ experience of engaging in the programme. Thirty-four participants completed 3 weekly classes and home-based practice of massage exchange. Data from an open text online questionnaire completed every week of the programme and again 3 weeks afterwards were analysed using thematic analysis. The identified themes included “holistic stress relief”, “relationship-promotion”, and “selves-care skill”. Couples perceived Positive Massage as an effective mutual support skill to relax and help one another by de-stressing, both emotionally and physically through verbal and nonverbal communication, creating gratitude, deeper connection and self-efficacy via quality time together and pleasurable touch. Theoretically and experientially, Positive Massage can be an effective preventative selves-care skill. Promoting the concept of selves-care and its practical application through Positive Massage would be beneficial for couples’ personal and relational wellbeing in a touch-deprived era.
In this study, we extracted the essential spatiotemporal dynamics that allow an amoeboid organism to solve a computationally demanding problem and adapt to its environment, thereby proposing a ...nature-inspired nanoarchitectonic computing system, which we implemented using a network of nanowire devices called 'electrical Brownian ratchets (EBRs)'. By utilizing the fluctuations generated from thermal energy in nanowire devices, we used our system to solve the satisfiability problem, which is a highly complex combinatorial problem related to a wide variety of practical applications. We evaluated the dependency of the solution search speed on its exploration parameter, which characterizes the fluctuation intensity of EBRs, using a simulation model of our system called 'AmoebaSAT-Brownian'. We found that AmoebaSAT-Brownian enhanced the solution searching speed dramatically when we imposed some constraints on the fluctuations in its time series and it outperformed a well-known stochastic local search method. These results suggest a new computing paradigm, which may allow high-speed problem solving to be implemented by interacting nanoscale devices with low power consumption.
We have been developing an embedded superconducting tunnel junction (e-STJ) for a large-format array X-ray detector. Compared with the conventional STJ array, the e-STJ array is suitable for ...enlarging the detection area effectively because the e-STJ detector utilizes a three-dimensional packaging technology. To investigate the relationship between the fabrication method and the electric characteristics of the e-STJ, we designed and fabricated three types of simplified e-STJ and measured their subgap leakage current in the temperature range from 4.2 K to 0.3 K. We found that the roughness of the embedding hole on the Si substrate and the contact part between the embedded STJ and the side of the embedding hole affected the subgap leakage current.
GroundBIRD is a ground-based experiment for a precise observation of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarizations. To achieve high sensitivity at large angular scales, we adopt three features ...in this experiment: fast rotation scanning, microwave kinetic inductance detector (MKID), and cold optics. The rotation scanning strategy has the advantage to suppress 1/
f
noise. It also provides a large sky coverage of 40%, which corresponds to the large angular scales of
l
∼
6
. This allows us to constrain the tensor-to-scalar ratio by using low
l
B-mode spectrum. The focal plane consists of 7 MKID arrays for two target frequencies, 145 GHz and 220 GHz band. There are 161 pixels in total, of which 138 are for 145 GHz and 23 are for 220 GHz. This array is currently under development, and the prototype will soon be evaluated in telescope. The GroundBIRD telescope will observe the CMB at the Teide observatory. The telescope was moved from Japan to Tenerife and is now under test. We present the status and plan of the GroundBIRD experiment.
We are developing a detector array for astronomical observations in the 100-GHz band using microwave kinetic inductance detectors (MKIDs) and a readout system for the array with frequency sweeping ...scheme, which uses a frequency sweeping probe signal instead of a fixed-frequency probe signal. This scheme enables us to simultaneously obtain the resonance spectra of MKIDs in an array and to derive the resonance frequencies corresponding to the power of incoming radiation. It has the advantage of the dynamic range being higher than the standard scheme and the derived resonance frequencies not being affected by changes of the gain or delay in the transmission line. The resonance profile measured, however, can be distorted by frequency sweeping, and hence, it is necessary to evaluate the effect of frequency sweeping on the resonance spectrum. We made measurements using the scheme with several frequency-sweep velocities and checked its effect on the resonance frequency and the quality factor. A slow frequency sweep causes only small differences in the resonance spectrum compared to an ideal profile, and hence suitable for astronomical applications.
YBCO(YBa 2 Cu 3 O 7 ) wires have superior characteristics such as high energy densities, thus allowing the fabrication of large-scale, high power-output superconducting equipment applications. A high ...voltage is desired to achieve a large power output from a superconducting coil, and is realized by improving the insulating properties of the coil with the introduction of solid insulation. However, because high temperature superconducting wires have high critical temperatures and thermal tolerance compared to metal-based superconducting wires, the benefits offered allow the insulated superconducting coil to be directly cryocooled. In a helium circulation cryocooling system, the aluminum-fabricated transmission heat shields are coated around the surface of the coils to cryocool equally, and are embedded into the transmission heat shields with the conducting pipe allowing helium gas to circulate. We manufactured a conduction cooled model coil of 600 mm class diameter, and have verified the ability to realize a cooling of more than 3 W/m 2 for coil surface heat flux at an operating temperature of 20 K using the demonstration cooling system. In addition, we have also evaluated the electric insulation performance, which is in contradiction to the cooling performance. The conduction-cooled YBCO coil withstood up to DC 13 kV voltages at 20 K.
Recent studies have revealed that vascular cells can produce reactive oxygen species (ROS) through NAD(P)H oxidase, which may be involved in vascular injury. However, the pathological role of ...vascular NAD(P)H oxidase in diabetes or in the insulin-resistant state remains unknown. In this study, we examined the effect of high glucose level and free fatty acid (FFA) (palmitate) on ROS production in cultured aortic smooth muscle cells (SMCs) and endothelial cells (ECs) using electron spin resonance spectroscopy. Exposure of cultured SMCs or ECs to a high glucose level (400 mg/dl) for 72 h significantly increased the free radical production compared with low glucose level exposure (100 mg/dl). Treatment of the cells for 3 h with phorbol myristic acid (PMA), a protein kinase C (PKC) activator, also increased free radical production. This increase was restored to the control value by diphenylene iodonium, a NAD(P)H oxidase inhibitor, suggesting ROS production through PKC-dependent activation of NAD(P)H oxidase. The increase in free radical production by high glucose level exposure was completely restored by both diphenylene iodonium and GF109203X, a PKC-specific inhibitor. Exposure to palmitate (200 micromol/l) also increased free radical production, which was concomitant with increases in diacylglycerol level and PKC activity. Again, this increase was restored to the control value by both diphenylene iodonium and GF109203X. The present results suggest that both high glucose level and palmitate may stimulate ROS production through PKC-dependent activation of NAD(P)H oxidase in both vascular SMCs and ECs. This finding may be involved in the excessive acceleration of atherosclerosis in patients with diabetes and insulin resistance syndrome.
Objectives: Although supporting preventative self-regulation and self-care activity for daily stress is important as dyadic coping, there seems a paucity of exploration of non-verbal interventions ...such as tactile communication. This preliminary experimental study assessed the efficacy of a short educational massage programme for healthy but stressed couples. The study aimed to investigate if the educational mutual massage (Positive Massage) programme has any acute and sustained effects on wellbeing, perceived stress and coping, and relationship satisfaction among couples.
Design: A pseudo randomised two group design employing a delayed treatment element assessed the effects of the Positive Massage programme and subsequent at-home application. Thirty-eight participants completed a three-week massage course.
Main Outcome Measures: Measurements of the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale, the Rhode Island Stress and Coping Inventory, and the Positive Feelings Questionnaire were collected online using Qualtrics at three time points (the start, the end, and three weeks after the course). Data were analysed with mixed ANOVAs.
Results: Mental wellbeing, and perceived stress and coping significantly improved from before to after the Positive Massage programme. There was no significant decline after the cessation of the massage programme. Relationship satisfaction did not show significant changes from the initial assessment.
Conclusions: The overall effects of the Positive Massage programme indicate the importance of developing further large scale studies of mutual massage as a safe and beneficial self-care activity. This innovative study has laid the groundwork for future studies into the possibility of mutual massage as a self-regulation dyadic coping strategy for home use to improve overall wellbeing.
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