Neighborhood Deprivation and Adverse Birth Outcomes among Diverse Ethnic Groups

Living in a socioeconomically deprived neighborhood has been associated with an increased risk of adverse birth outcomes. However, variation in the effect of neighborhood deprivation among diverse ethnic groups has not been studied

Large-scale assessment of 7-11-year-olds’ cognitive and sensorimotor function within the Born in Bradford longitudinal birth cohort study [version 2; peer review: 3 approved, 1 approved with reservations]

Background: Cognitive ability and sensorimotor function are crucial aspects of children’s development, and are associated with physical and mental health outcomes and educational attainment. This paper describes cross-sectional sensorimotor and cognitive function data collected on over 15,000 children aged 7-10 years, collected as part of the Born in Bradford (BiB) longitudinal birth-cohort study. Methodological details of the large-scale data collection process are described, along with initial analyses of the data involving the relationship between cognition/sensorimotor ability and age and task difficulty, and associations between tasks. Method: Data collection was completed in 86 schools between May 2016 and July 2019. Children were tested at school, individually, using a tablet computer with a digital stylus or finger touch for input. Assessments comprised a battery of three sensorimotor tasks (Tracking, Aiming, & Steering) and five cognitive tasks (three Working Memory tasks, Inhibition, and Processing Speed), which took approximately 40 minutes. Results: Performance improved with increasing age and decreasing task difficulty, for each task. Performance on all three sensorimotor tasks was correlated, as was performance on the three working memory tasks. In addition, performance on a composite working memory score correlated with performance on both inhibition and processing speed. Interestingly, within age-group variation was much larger than between age-group variation. Conclusions: The current project collected computerised measures of a range of cognitive and sensorimotor functions at 7-10 years of age in over 15,000 children. Performance varied as expected by age and task difficulty, and showed the predicted correlations between related tasks. Large within-age group variation highlights the need to consider the profile of individual children in studying cognitive and sensorimotor development. These data can be linked to the wider BiB dataset including measures of physical and mental health, biomarkers and genome-wide data, socio-demographic information, and routine data from local health and education services

Disorder-to-order transition in the magnetic and electronic properties of URh_2Ge_2

We present a study of annealing effects on the physical properties of tetragonal single--crystalline URh_2Ge_2. This system, which in as-grown form was recently established as the first metallic 3D random-bond heavy-fermion spin glass, is transformed by an annealing treatment into a long-range antiferromagnetically (AFM) ordered heavy-fermion compound. The transport properties, which in the as-grown material were dominated by the structural disorder, exhibit in the annealed material signs of typical metallic behavior along the crystallographic a axis. From our study URh_2Ge_2 emerges as exemplary material highlighting the role and relevance of structural disorder for the properties of strongly correlated electron systems. We discuss the link between the magnetic and electronic behavior and how they are affected by the structural disorder.Comment: Phys. Rev. B, in print (scheduled 1 Mar 2000

Evaluation of different drug classes on transient sciatic nerve injury-depressed marble burying in mice

A great need exists for the identification of new effective analgesics to treat sustained pain. However, most preclinical nociceptive assays measure behavioral responses evoked by noxious stimuli (i.e., pain-stimulated behavior), which presents a challenge to distinguish between motor impairing and antinociceptive effects of drugs. Here, we demonstrate that chronic constriction injury of the sciatic nerve (CCI) elicits common pain-stimulated responses (i.e., mechanical allodynia and thermal hyperalgesia) as well as reduces marble burying/digging behaviors that occur during the early stages of the neuropathy and resolve within one week. Whereas drugs representing distinct classes of analgesics (i.e., morphine, valdecoxib, and gabapentin) reversed both CCI-induced and CCI-depressed nociceptive measures, diazepam lacked antinociceptive effects in all assays and the kappa opioid receptor agonist U69593 reversed pain-stimulated, but not pain-depressed behaviors. In addition, we tested drugs targeting distinct components of the endocannabinoid system, including agonists at cannabinoid receptors type 1 (CB1) and type 2 (CB2), as well as inhibitors of the endocannabinoid regulating enzymes fatty acid amide hydrolase (FAAH), monoacylglycerol lipase (MAGL). Each of these drugs reversed all CCI-induced nociceptive measures, with the exception of the FAAH inhibitor that reversed pain-stimulated behaviors, only. These findings support the use of the mouse marble-burying assay as a model of pain-depressed behavior within the first week of sciatic nerve injury to examine candidate analgesics. These data also support existing preclinical research that cannabinoid receptor agonists and inhibitors of endocannabinoid regulating enzymes merit consideration for the treatment of pain.Molecular Physiolog

Measuring CMB Polarization with BOOMERANG

BOOMERANG is a balloon-borne telescope designed for long duration (LDB) flights around Antarctica. The second LDB Flight of BOOMERANG took place in January 2003. The primary goal of this flight was to measure the polarization of the CMB. The receiver uses polarization sensitive bolometers at 145 GHz. Polarizing grids provide polarization sensitivity at 245 and 345 GHz. We describe the BOOMERANG telescope noting changes made for 2003 LDB flight, and discuss some of the issues involved in the measurement of polarization with bolometers. Lastly, we report on the 2003 flight and provide an estimate of the expected results.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, To be published in the proceedings of "The Cosmic Microwave Background and its Polarization", New Astronomy Reviews, (eds. S. Hanany and K.A. Olive). Fixed typos, and reformatted citation

Upper critical field for underdoped high-T_c superconductors. Pseudogap and stripe--phase

We investigate the upper critical field in a stripe--phase and in the presence of a phenomenological pseudogap. Our results indicate that the formation of stripes affects the Landau orbits and results in an enhancement of $H_{c2}$. On the other hand, phenomenologically introduced pseudogap leads to a reduction of the upper critical field. This effect is of particular importance when the magnitude of the gap is of the order of the superconducting transition temperature. We have found that a suppression of the upper critical field takes place also for the gap that originates from the charge--density waves.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure

Dark Energy and Gravity

I review the problem of dark energy focusing on the cosmological constant as the candidate and discuss its implications for the nature of gravity. Part 1 briefly overviews the currently popular `concordance cosmology' and summarises the evidence for dark energy. It also provides the observational and theoretical arguments in favour of the cosmological constant as the candidate and emphasises why no other approach really solves the conceptual problems usually attributed to the cosmological constant. Part 2 describes some of the approaches to understand the nature of the cosmological constant and attempts to extract the key ingredients which must be present in any viable solution. I argue that (i)the cosmological constant problem cannot be satisfactorily solved until gravitational action is made invariant under the shift of the matter lagrangian by a constant and (ii) this cannot happen if the metric is the dynamical variable. Hence the cosmological constant problem essentially has to do with our (mis)understanding of the nature of gravity. Part 3 discusses an alternative perspective on gravity in which the action is explicitly invariant under the above transformation. Extremizing this action leads to an equation determining the background geometry which gives Einstein's theory at the lowest order with Lanczos-Lovelock type corrections. (Condensed abstract).Comment: Invited Review for a special Gen.Rel.Grav. issue on Dark Energy, edited by G.F.R.Ellis, R.Maartens and H.Nicolai; revtex; 22 pages; 2 figure

Search for a W' boson decaying to a bottom quark and a top quark in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV

Results are presented from a search for a W' boson using a dataset corresponding to 5.0 inverse femtobarns of integrated luminosity collected during 2011 by the CMS experiment at the LHC in pp collisions at sqrt(s)=7 TeV. The W' boson is modeled as a heavy W boson, but different scenarios for the couplings to fermions are considered, involving both left-handed and right-handed chiral projections of the fermions, as well as an arbitrary mixture of the two. The search is performed in the decay channel W' to t b, leading to a final state signature with a single lepton (e, mu), missing transverse energy, and jets, at least one of which is tagged as a b-jet. A W' boson that couples to fermions with the same coupling constant as the W, but to the right-handed rather than left-handed chiral projections, is excluded for masses below 1.85 TeV at the 95% confidence level. For the first time using LHC data, constraints on the W' gauge coupling for a set of left- and right-handed coupling combinations have been placed. These results represent a significant improvement over previously published limits.Comment: Submitted to Physics Letters B. Replaced with version publishe