No abstract

Elucidating the molecular mechanism of helix–coil transitions of short peptides is a long-standing conundrum in physical chemistry. Although the helix–coil transitions of poly-glutamic acid (PGA) have been extensively studied, the molecular details of its unfolding process still remain unclear. We performed all-atom canonical molecular dynamics simulations for a 20-residue PGA, over a total of 19 μs, in order to investigate its helix-unfolding processes in atomic resolution. Among the 28 simulations, starting with the α-helical conformation, all showed an unfolding process triggered by the unwinding of terminal residues, rather than by kinking and unwinding of the middle region of the chain. The helix–coil–helix conformation which is speculated by the previous experiments was not observed. Upon comparison between the N- and C-termini, the latter tended to be unstable and easily unfolded. While the probabilities of helix elongation were almost the same among the N-terminal, middle, and C-terminal regions of the chain, unwinding of the helix was enriched at the C-terminal region. The turn and 310-helix conformations were kinetic intermediates in the formation and deformation of α-helix, consistent with the previous computational studies for Ala-based peptides.

Recently natural disasters such as earthquake, tsunami, typhoon and hurricane in addition to annual disaster have frequently happened at many places around the world. Once disaster happened, communication network and information system are seriously damaged and communication means for residents cannot be used in the disaster area. Therefore, it is required to prepare emergency network system which can be quickly reconstructed to recover from the network failure and used to confirm resident's safety and damaged area information.In this paper, a ballooned wireless adhoc network is proposed to promptly insure communication means to grasp the information with disaster area, resident's safety and relief goods on the occurrence of disaster. By combining multiple ballooned wireless network nodes, a large adhoc network is organized in the sky on the disaster area and can cover shelters or interrupted communication area as urgent communication means. The system configuration and its function are described. A prototype system is constructed to evaluate its function and performance through several disaster applications such as WIide area Disaster Information and Sharing System(WIDIS), VoIP, and omni-directional video surveillance system.International Conference on Complex, Intelligent and Software Intensive Systems 978-0-7695-3575-3/09 $25.00

No abstract

In this paper, a ballooned wireless network is proposed to promptly insure communication means to grasp the information with disaster area, resident's safety and relief goods on the occurrence of disaster. By combining multiple ballooned wireless networks, an adhoc network is organized in the sky on the disaster area, shelters or interrupted communication area as urgent communication means.The system configuration and its function are described. A prototype system is constructed to evaluate its function and performance through several disaster applications such as WIide area Disaster Information and Sharing System, VoIP, and omni-directional video surveillance system.