Kyushu University

The chapter studies the transformative aesthetics of Ghérasim Luca, a Francophone poet and visual artist, whose practice, allegedly obsessive, mobilizes the body as both medium and site of metamorphosis. His “manic hand” enacts a performative gesture that disrupts normative structures, reconfiguring materiality, imagination, and affect. Through close readings of his cubomanies, Objectively Offered Objects, and handmade albums, the chapter examines how they foster emotional resilience, sensory awareness, and epistemic dissent. Luca's art resists fixed representation, instead cultivating liminal spaces where identity, perception, and relationality are continuously renegotiated. The chapter argues that his poetics constitute a participatory model of care – not through normative restoration, but through the affirmation of multiplicity, ambiguity, and imaginative freedom. In this context, well-being is redefined as a dynamic and relational state, emerging from creative engagement and the continual reconfiguration of the self in relation to others and to the environment.

Clock genes are essential for physiological homeostasis, and their dysregulation is closely linked to cancer malignancy. While inhibiting aberrantly expressed clock genes can suppress cancer cell proliferation, targeting core clock components often disrupts the fundamental circadian oscillatory system, posing potential risks to systemic physiology. CHRONO, a recently identified clock gene, functions as a unique transcriptional repressor whose deletion does not impair circadian oscillations, suggesting that it may represent a safer therapeutic target. In this study, we elucidated the clinical and pathological significance of CHRONO in cancer. Pan-cancer database analyses revealed that CHRONO expression is elevated across multiple malignancies; notably, in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), high CHRONO expression significantly correlates with poorer prognosis. Consistent with these findings, functional assays in human and murine hepatocarcinoma cells demonstrated that Chrono knockdown markedly inhibits cell proliferation. Mechanistically, suppression of CHRONO induced G1-phase arrest by decreasing the protein expression of key cell cycle regulators, including cyclin D and cyclin E. Collectively, our findings provide the first functional evidence that CHRONO acts as a pro-proliferative regulator in HCC, suggesting that modulation of CHRONO may suppress tumor growth while minimizing disruption of the core circadian oscillator.

• A geometric multigrid preconditioner is proposed for a Bi-CGSTAB solver applied in the ISPH method for multi-GPU environments. • The first restriction operation is conducted from the free-moving particles to a background cell followed by standard coarsening restrictions. • We proposed several techniques on multi-GPU programming including communication-computation overlap and communication-hiding. • The computational efficiency was evaluated in 3 supercomputer clusters yielding speedups of about 2.3 times and weak scalability around 0.85. • The method’s potential was verified by simulating the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant tsunami with 97 million particles in 16 GPUs. This paper presents the implementation of a multigrid-preconditioned asymmetric solver within the context of Incompressible Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (ISPH) method. The restriction operator maps particles to the background grid used for neighbor searching, followed by standard grid coarsening. Key contributions include the adjustment of the multigrid preconditioner to multi-GPU cluster environments, incorporating communication-computation overlap and communication-hiding techniques, and adapting a dynamic load balancer to respect the coarse-grid hierarchy for efficient domain decomposition using the slice-grid technique. The present work also shows the evaluation of the computational efficiency of the proposed method through dam-break simulations on three supercomputers–JAMSTEC’s Earth Simulator, Tongji University’s supercomputer, and the University of Tokyo’s Miyabi)–demonstrating weak-scaling efficiencies between 0.82 and 0.89. The multigrid preconditioner substantially improved solver performance, reducing the average number of iteration for solving the pressure from over 300 to nearly 60 across problem sizes ranging from 5 to 320 million particles, resulting in an overall speedup of approximately 2.3 times. Furthermore, we demonstrate the method’s capability for real-world engineering applications through the simulation of the 2011 tsunami inundation at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, involving 97 million particles on 32 GPUs. While the preconditioner proves highly effective in accelerating solver convergence, the study concludes by identifying limitations associated with coarse-grid constraints on load balancing and communication overhead, providing clear directions for future research.

Currently, there are no established treatments for esophagogastric junction outflow obstruction (EGJOO). In this study, we evaluated the efficacy and safety of acotiamide for EGJOO by targeting impaired lower esophageal sphincter (LES) function. This investigator-initiated, multicenter, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled phase II trial enrolled 35 patients with EGJOO between December 2021 and December 2023. Patients were randomized to receive either placebo (n = 11) or acotiamide (300mg/day, n = 12; 600mg/day, n = 12) for 4weeks (placebo-controlled period). Subsequently, all patients received 600mg/day acotiamide for an additional 4weeks (open-label period). As a primary endpoint, during the placebo-controlled period, the improvement rate of food-sticking symptoms in the chest was 12.5% and 0.0% in the acotiamide and placebo groups, respectively (p = 0.3092). In terms of secondary endpoints, the integrated relaxation pressure (IRP) normalization rate was significantly higher in the acotiamide group (41.7%) than in the placebo group (0.0%) (p = 0.0107). No other secondary endpoints showed significant differences between the groups. Regarding the exploratory endpoints, during the open-label period, among the 24 patients treated with ≥ 300mg/day of acotiamide for 8weeks, the improvement rate of food-sticking symptoms in the chest increased to 37.5%, and the IRP normalization rate rose to 54.2%. Acotiamide is effective in normalizing impaired LES relaxation in patients with EGJOO and may improve food-sticking symptoms in the chest. Japan Registry of Clinical Trials ( https://jrct.mhlw.go.jp/en-top ); registration number jRCT2071210072.

Tissue clearing has been widely used for fluorescence imaging of fixed tissues, but its application to live tissues has been limited by toxicity. Here we develop minimally invasive optical clearing media for fluorescence imaging of live mammalian tissues. Light scattering is minimized by adding spherical polymers with low osmolarity to the extracellular medium. A clearing medium containing bovine serum albumin (SeeDB-Live) is compatible with live cells, enabling structural and functional imaging of live tissues, such as spheroids, organoids, acute brain slices and the mouse brains in vivo. SeeDB-Live minimally affects neuronal electrophysiological properties and sensory responses in vivo, and facilitates fluorescence imaging of deep cortical layers in live animals without detectable toxicity to neurons or behavior. We further demonstrate its utility to epifluorescence voltage imaging in acute brain slices and in vivo preparations. Thus, SeeDB-Live expands both the depth and modality range of fluorescence imaging in live mammalian tissues.