As our knowledge of the Moon and planets increases and missions become more sophisticated, new landing techniques are needed to "land where you want to land" rather than "land where you can land. The Small Lunar Imager (SLIM) is a lunar lander currently under development by JAXA, aiming to improve the landing accuracy from several to ten kilometers to about 100 meters. In this lecture, an overview of the SLIM project will be presented.

Activities in the ocean are constantly exposed to random phenomena of wind, waves, and currents. In order to design a system that confronts the random processes of nature, a statistical description of the phenomena is required. For example, the question of how high the maximum wave that occurs with a probability of once in 100 years will be requires the wisdom of extrapolating past experience over time. In this seminar, I would like to introduce approaches to irregular phenomena in ocean applications, focusing on extreme value statistical analysis.

Proteins are an important component of the cell. Synthesis of proteins through transcription and translation is essential for biological activities, but it is surprisingly unknown that their degradation is important for maintaining cellular homeostasis. Autophagy is a large-scale proteolytic system that is widely conserved from unicellular eukaryotes such as budding yeast to mammals such as us. In this talk, I will review the state-of-the-art of autophagy research using budding yeast as a model.