In addition, a paper reporting dendritic targeting of Kv4.2 mRNA should have been cited; that citation and reference (Jo et al., 2010) have now been added, and the article has now been corrected online.

Despite intensive studies on Pb(Mg(1/3)Nb(2/3))O(3) (PMN) relaxor, understanding the exact nature of its giant dielectric response and of its physical ground state is a fundamental issue that has remained unresolved for decades. Here, we report a comprehensive study of PMN relaxor crystal, and show that (i) its anomalous dielectric behavior in a broad temperature range results from the reorientation of polarization in the crystal, and (ii) the PMN relaxor is essentially a nanosized ferroelectric material with multiscale inhomogeneities of domain structure in addition to the well-known inhomogeneities of chemical composition and local symmetry. Such inhomogeneities are believed to play a crucial role in producing the huge and enigmatic physical effects in relaxor system, and may be used to design other new systems with giant effects such as a relaxor system.

Polarization measurements reveal that AgNbO3 has an extremely large polarization, which can reach a value of 52μC∕cm2 in polycrystals. Experiments also show that the large internal atom distortion in AgNbO3 is also strongly coupled to the electric field, indicating that high piezoelectric performance can be realized in AgNbO3 system. This finding opens the way to designing a new class of lead-free, high-performance piezoelectric materials based on AgNbO3.

Molecular ferroelectric crystals have attracted growing interest as potential alternatives to conventional leadbased ceramic ferroelectrics. We have recently discovered that a class of compounds known as plastic crystals can show multiaxial ferroelectricity, which allows ferroelectric performance even in polycrystalline forms. Here, we report new plastic/ ferroelectric ionic molecular crystals that exhibit remarkably small coercive electric fields at room temperature. The easily switchable ferroelectric polarization enables low-voltage switching operations and high-frequency performance. Such ferroelectric crystals can be readily processed into bulk polycrystalline forms with desired shapes that are characterized by unprecedentedly high pyroelectric figures of merit and large piezoelectricity. These multifunctional molecular crystals represent highly attractive prospects for device elements with a diverse range of applications, which will significantly boost the development of molecular ferroelectric crystals.

Abstract. We made field explosion experiments as an analogue of volcanic explosion to understand the relationship between the explosion condition and the resultant surface phenomena. The main parameters we employed were explosion depth and explosion energy. Through the experiments we confirmed that scaled depth, which is the depth divided by cube root of energy, is the main parameter determining the properties of explosive volcanism. The energy assigned to blast wave decreased exponentially against the scaled depth. The scaled crater diameter became maximum when the scaled depth was about 4x 10 -3 m/J •/3 Scaled crater diameters by nuclear, chemical subsurface and some volcanic explosions were almost the same. From the scaling law, the overpressure at crater rim was estimated to be several MPa, which corresponded to typical rock strength. Probably the ground-forming materials were broken inside the area where overpressure exceeded their strength.