23,940 research outputs found
Radiative corrections in bumblebee electrodynamics
We investigate some quantum features of the bumblebee electrodynamics in flat
spacetimes. The bumblebee field is a vector field that leads to a spontaneous
Lorentz symmetry breaking. For a smooth quadratic potential, the massless
excitation (Nambu-Goldstone boson) can be identified as the photon, transversal
to the vacuum expectation value of the bumblebee field. Besides, there is a
massive excitation associated with the longitudinal mode and whose presence
leads to instability in the spectrum of the theory. By using the
principal-value prescription, we show that no one-loop radiative corrections to
the mass term is generated. Moreover, the bumblebee self-energy is not
transverse, showing that the propagation of the longitudinal mode can not be
excluded from the effective theory.Comment: Revised version: contains some more elaborated interpretation of the
results. Conclusions improve
Prospective genetic screening decreases the incidence of Abacavir hypersensitivity reactions in the Western Australian HIV cohort study
Abacavir therapy is associated with significant drug hypersensitivity in ∼8% of recipients, with retrospective studies indicating a strong genetic association with the HLA-B*5701 allelle. In this prospective study, involving 260 abacavir-naive individuals (7.7% of whom were positive for HLA-B*5701), we confirm the usefulness of genetic risk stratification, with no cases of abacavir hypersensitivity among 148 HLA-B*5701–negative recipients
Scaling in a continuous time model for biological aging
In this paper we consider a generalization to the asexual version of the
Penna model for biological aging, where we take a continuous time limit. The
genotype associated to each individual is an interval of real numbers over
which Dirac --functions are defined, representing genetically
programmed diseases to be switched on at defined ages of the individual life.
We discuss two different continuous limits for the evolution equation and two
different mutation protocols, to be implemented during reproduction. Exact
stationary solutions are obtained and scaling properties are discussed.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure
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