Breast feeding and resilience against psychosocial stress

BACKGROUND: Some early life exposures may result in a well controlled stress response, which can reduce stress related anxiety. Breast feeding may be a marker of some relevant exposures. AIMS: To assess whether breast feeding is associated with modification of the relation between parental divorce and anxiety. METHODS: Observational study using longitudinal birth cohort data. Linear regression was used to assess whether breast feeding modifies the association of parental divorce/separation with anxiety using stratification and interaction testing. Data were obtained from the 1970 British Cohort Study, which is following the lives of those born in one week in 1970 and living in Great Britain. This study uses information collected at birth and at ages 5 and 10 years for 8958 subjects. Class teachers answered a question on anxiety among 10 year olds using an analogue scale (range 0–50) that was log transformed to minimise skewness. RESULTS: Among 5672 non‐breast fed subjects, parental divorce/separation was associated with a statistically significantly raised risk of anxiety, with a regression coefficient (95% CI) of 9.4 (6.1 to 12.8). Among the breast fed group this association was much lower: 2.2 (−2.6 to 7.0). Interaction testing confirmed statistically significant effect modification by breast feeding, independent of simultaneous adjustment for multiple potential confounding factors, producing an interaction coefficient of −7.0 (−12.8 to −1.2), indicating a 7% reduction in anxiety after adjustment. CONCLUSIONS: Breast feeding is associated with resilience against the psychosocial stress linked with parental divorce/separation. This could be because breast feeding is a marker of exposures related to maternal characteristics and parent–child interaction

Using Ancient Samples in Projection Analysis.

Projection analysis is a tool that extracts information from the joint allele frequency spectrum to better understand the relationship between two populations. In projection analysis, a test genome is compared to a set of genomes from a reference population. The projection's shape depends on the historical relationship of the test genome's population to the reference population. Here, we explore in greater depth the effects on the projection when ancient samples are included in the analysis. First, we conduct a series of simulations in which the ancient sample is directly ancestral to a present-day population (one-population model), or the ancient sample is ancestral to a sister population that diverged before the time of sampling (two-population model). We find that there are characteristic differences between the projections for the one-population and two-population models, which indicate that the projection can be used to determine whether a test genome is directly ancestral to a present-day population or not. Second, we compute projections for several published ancient genomes. We compare two Neanderthals and three ancient human genomes to European, Han Chinese and Yoruba reference panels. We use a previously constructed demographic model and insert these five ancient genomes to assess how well the observed projections are recovered

Feedback Control of Traveling Wave Solutions of the Complex Ginzburg Landau Equation

Through a linear stability analysis, we investigate the effectiveness of a noninvasive feedback control scheme aimed at stabilizing traveling wave solutions of the one-dimensional complex Ginzburg Landau equation (CGLE) in the Benjamin-Feir unstable regime. The feedback control is a generalization of the time-delay method of Pyragas, which was proposed by Lu, Yu and Harrison in the setting of nonlinear optics. It involves both spatial shifts, by the wavelength of the targeted traveling wave, and a time delay that coincides with the temporal period of the traveling wave. We derive a single necessary and sufficient stability criterion which determines whether a traveling wave is stable to all perturbation wavenumbers. This criterion has the benefit that it determines an optimal value for the time-delay feedback parameter. For various coefficients in the CGLE we use this algebraic stability criterion to numerically determine stable regions in the (K,rho) parameter plane, where rho is the feedback parameter associated with the spatial translation and K is the wavenumber of the traveling wave. We find that the combination of the two feedbacks greatly enlarges the parameter regime where stabilization is possible, and that the stability regions take the form of stability tongues in the (K,rho)--plane. We discuss possible resonance mechanisms that could account for the spacing with K of the stability tongues.Comment: 33 pages, 12 figure

Study of passive optical techniques for detecting clear air turbulence

Passive optical techniques evaluated for detecting clear air turbulence

Encapsulation process sterilizes and preserves surgical instruments

Ethylene oxide is blended with an organic polymer to form a sterile material for encapsulating surgical instruments. The material does not bond to metal and can be easily removed when the instruments are needed

Process for preparing sterile solid propellants Patent

Using ethylene oxide in preparation of sterilized solid rocket propellants and encapsulating material

Chow's theorem and universal holonomic quantum computation

A theorem from control theory relating the Lie algebra generated by vector fields on a manifold to the controllability of the dynamical system is shown to apply to Holonomic Quantum Computation. Conditions for deriving the holonomy algebra are presented by taking covariant derivatives of the curvature associated to a non-Abelian gauge connection. When applied to the Optical Holonomic Computer, these conditions determine that the holonomy group of the two-qubit interaction model contains $SU(2) \times SU(2)$. In particular, a universal two-qubit logic gate is attainable for this model.Comment: 13 page

Symmetry Reduction of Optimal Control Systems and Principal Connections

This paper explores the role of symmetries and reduction in nonlinear control and optimal control systems. The focus of the paper is to give a geometric framework of symmetry reduction of optimal control systems as well as to show how to obtain explicit expressions of the reduced system by exploiting the geometry. In particular, we show how to obtain a principal connection to be used in the reduction for various choices of symmetry groups, as opposed to assuming such a principal connection is given or choosing a particular symmetry group to simplify the setting. Our result synthesizes some previous works on symmetry reduction of nonlinear control and optimal control systems. Affine and kinematic optimal control systems are of particular interest: We explicitly work out the details for such systems and also show a few examples of symmetry reduction of kinematic optimal control problems.Comment: 23 pages, 2 figure