The Global Ability to Respond: Applying SARS Knowledge to H1N1 and Beyond

Influenza outbreaks may be alarming, but they are nothing new in the 21st century. At this point, the various strains of influenza have broken into cities and homes, acted as silent killers by causing fear, death and destruction, and spreading uncontrollably. This repetitive cycle arouses the question of when people will learn how to take care of these epidemics. Well, according to Flahault and Zylberman, knowledge may not be the only factor necessary to stop influenza from disrupting lives. The authors reveal that “Influenza epidemics occur regularly and prediction of their conversion to pandemics and their impact is difficult” meaning there is no tangible definition of each strain or explanation of what it will do (319). Despite this reminder of the lack of control humans have at the viral level, there are aspects of hope that are visible from one outbreak to the next. Specifically, response to the H1N1 epidemic of 2009 was much calmer than the typical reaction to epidemics in the past. This reveals that people were able to learn from past outbreaks, such as SARS in 2003. The effectiveness of response increased in a mere six years which offers a great deal of hope for the way future outbreaks will be handled

Neutralino Dark Matter in 2005

I summarize some recent work on supersymmetric neutralinos as candidates for cold Dark Matter in the Universe. This includes a new scan of mSUGRA parameter space, with special emphasis on neutralinos annihilating predominantly through exchange of the light CP--even Higgs boson, and on bounds on sparticle masses. Next, prospects of testing models with TeV higgsino--like Dark Matter at colliders are discussed. Finally, I briefly comment on extensions of the mSUGRA model, and on scenarios with non--standard cosmology.Comment: Plenary talk at PASCOS05, Gyeongju, Korea, June 2005; 14 pages, 3 figures (included

First Hints of Jet Quenching at RHIC

At this conference first data from RHIC has been presented. Spectra of charged hadrons and identified neutral pions obtained in central collisions exhibit a depletion at large transverse momenta compared to expectations deduced from $pp$ and $\bar{p}p$ data and lower energy heavy ion data. While spectra measured in peripheral collisions exhibit the expected power-law shape, spectra from central collisions are closer to exponential. In addition, a significant azimuthal anisotropy of high momentum charged particle production has been found. All observations are in qualitative agreement with theoretical predictions that quark matter formed in heavy ion collisions quenches jet production.Comment: Proceedings of a summary talk given at the Quark Matter 2001 conferenc