Cosmological tests of gravity with latest observations

We perform observational tests of modified gravity on cosmological scales following model-dependent and model-independent approaches using the latest astronomical observations, including measurements of the local Hubble constant, cosmic microwave background, the baryonic acoustic oscillations and redshift space distortions derived from galaxy surveys including the SDSS BOSS and eBOSS, as well as the weak lensing observations performed by the CFHTLenS team. Using all data combined, we find a deviation from the prediction of general relativity in both the effective Newton's constant, $\mu(a,k)$, and in the gravitational slip, $\eta(a,k)$. The deviation is at a $3.1\sigma$ level in the joint $\{\mu(a,k),\eta(a,k)\}$ space using a two-parameter phenomenological model for $\mu$ and $\eta$, and it reaches a $3.7\sigma$ level if a general parametrisation is used. This signal, which may be subject to unknown observational systematics, or a sign of new physics, is worth further investigating with forthcoming observations.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures; ApJ accepte

Identifying spatial invasion of pandemics on metapopulation networks via anatomizing arrival history

Spatial spread of infectious diseases among populations via the mobility of humans is highly stochastic and heterogeneous. Accurate forecast/mining of the spread process is often hard to be achieved by using statistical or mechanical models. Here we propose a new reverse problem, which aims to identify the stochastically spatial spread process itself from observable information regarding the arrival history of infectious cases in each subpopulation. We solved the problem by developing an efficient optimization algorithm based on dynamical programming, which comprises three procedures: i, anatomizing the whole spread process among all subpopulations into disjoint componential patches; ii, inferring the most probable invasion pathways underlying each patch via maximum likelihood estimation; iii, recovering the whole process by assembling the invasion pathways in each patch iteratively, without burdens in parameter calibrations and computer simulations. Based on the entropy theory, we introduced an identifiability measure to assess the difficulty level that an invasion pathway can be identified. Results on both artificial and empirical metapopulation networks show the robust performance in identifying actual invasion pathways driving pandemic spread.Comment: 14pages, 8 figures; Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Cybernetic

A new potential radiosensitizer: ammonium persulfate modified WCNTs

Radiotherapy plays a very important role in cancer treatment. Radiosensitizers have been widely used to enhance the radiosensitivity of cancer cells at given radiations. Here we fabricate multi-walled carbon nanotubes with ammonium persulfate, and get very short samples with 30-50 nanometer length. Cell viability assay show that f-WCNTs induce cell death significantly. We hypothesize that free radicals originated from hydroxyl and carbonyl groups on the surface of f-WCNTs lead cell damage

Apparent horizon and gravitational thermodynamics of Universe in the Eddington-Born-Infeld theory

The thermodynamics of Universe in the Eddington-Born-Infeld (EBI) theory was restudied by utilizing the holographic-style gravitational equations that dominate the dynamics of the cosmical apparent horizon $\Upsilon_{A}$ and the evolution of Universe. We started in rewriting the EBI action of the Palatini approach into the Bigravity-type action with an extra metric $q_{\mu\nu}$. With the help of the holographic-style dynamical equations, we discussed the property of the cosmical apparent horizon $\Upsilon_{A}$ including timelike, spacelike and null characters, which depends on the value of the parameter of state $w_{m}$ in EBI Universe. The unified first law for the gravitational thermodynamics and the total energy differential for the open system enveloped by $\Upsilon_{A}$ in EBI Universe were obtained. Finally, applying the positive-heat-out sign convention, we derived the generalized second law of gravitational thermodynamics in EBI universe.Comment: 23 pages, 0 figure