The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (国土交通省, Kokudo-kōtsū-shō), abbreviated MLIT, is a ministry of the Japanese government. It is responsible for one-third of all the laws and orders in Japan, and is the largest Japanese ministry in terms of employees, as well as the second-largest executive agency of the Japanese government after the Ministry of Defense. The ministry oversees four external agencies including the Japan Coast Guard and the Japan Tourism Agency.
Destabilization of volcanic edifices can generate debris avalanches with catastrophic impacts on their environment. We present the first high-resolution muography of Mount Unzen, Japan, conducted to characterize the structure of lava lobes formed on the volcano's summit and flank during the 1990-1995 eruption. A multi-wire-proportional-chamber-based muon tracking system was operated for 203 d. The obtained high-resolution muographic image shows the internal density structure of Mount Unzen with a spatial resolution of 12 m. Mean densities were respectively measured as 2470 and 2290 kg m-3 for the base rock and a fracture zone, and both were consistent with the results of prior drilling and sampling experiments. The mean density of lava lobes was measured significantly lower value of 1570 kg m-3, indicating post-eruptive structural weakening. A comparison between the time-series of muographically measured density-lengths and daily precipitation records suggest that rainfall-induced gravitational destabilization did not occur during the observational period. This work demonstrates that long-term (multi-year) muon monitoring of the lava lobes can provide valuable complementary information for volcanic stability assessments.
The total yield of neutral D-mesons (4 π ) in central Xe + La interactions at 150 GeV per nucleon has been calculated within the Geant4 FTF model. Our results are consistent with predictions from other models based on Monte Carlo method that do not include quark-gluon plasma formation. Like those predictions, our calculation significantly underestimates the preliminary experimental data reported by the NA61/SHINE collaboration. The experimental data suggest enhanced production of charmed particles in nucleus-nucleus collisions. We also present calculations for charmed meson production in p + p , d + d , and ^4He + ^4He interactions for the future NICA/SPD experiment at √(s_NN) = 10 and 20 GeV.
