The Life and Ministry of Carrie Judd Montgomery

If ever there was a woman whose life reflected the dynamic forces within key American religous movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Carrie Judd Montgomery was that woman. Before she died she participated in the rise and development of holiness, faith-healing, Christian and Missionary Alliance, and pentecostal movements. The thread of her life was interwoven into the living tapestry of these movements. A leader in her own right, she rubbed elbows with other prominent religious spokesmen of the day, such as A.B. Simpson, A.J. Gordon, Charles Cullis, W.E. Boardman, Aimee Simple McPherson, Smith Wigglesworth, Robert Craig, J.R. Flower, Mary Woodworth-Etter and a host of others. The story of Carrie Judd Montgomery\u27s life and leadership portrays the fervor and concerns that dominated the streams of evangelicalism in which she moved. The record of her development stands as an exceptional microcosm of those multitudes of people who flowed in similar channels

Constraining the expansion history of the universe from the red shift evolution of cosmic shear

We present a quantitative analysis of the constraints on the total equation of state parameter that can be obtained from measuring the red shift evolution of the cosmic shear. We compare the constraints that can be obtained from measurements of the spin two angular multipole moments of the cosmic shear to those resulting from the two dimensional and three dimensional power spectra of the cosmic shear. We find that if the multipole moments of the cosmic shear are measured accurately enough for a few red shifts the constraints on the dark energy equation of state parameter improve significantly compared to those that can be obtained from other measurements.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figure

Measuring dark energy spatial inhomogeneity with supernova data

The gravitational lensing distortion of distant sources by the large-scale distribution of matter in the Universe has been extensively studied. In contrast, very little is known about the effects due to the large-scale distribution of dark energy. We discuss the use of Type Ia supernovae as probes of the spatial inhomogeneity and anisotropy of dark energy. We show that a shallow, almost all-sky survey can limit rms dark energy fluctuations at the horizon scale down to a fractional energy density of ~10^-4Comment: 4 pages; PRL submitte

Human Borna disease virus 1 (BoDV-1) encephalitis cases in the north and east of Germany

In 2021, three encephalitis cases due to the Borna disease virus 1 (BoDV-1) were diagnosed in the north and east of Germany. The patients were from the states of Thuringia, Saxony-Anhalt, and Lower Saxony. All were residents of known endemic areas for animal Borna disease but without prior diagnosed human cases. Except for one recently detected case in the state of Brandenburg, all >30 notified cases had occurred in, or were linked to, the southern state of Bavaria. Of the three detected cases described here, two infections were acute, while one infection was diagnosed retrospectively from archived brain autopsy tissue samples. One of the acute cases survived, but is permanently disabled. The cases were diagnosed by various techniques (serology, molecular assays, and immunohistology) following a validated testing scheme and adhering to a proposed case definition. Two cases were classified as confirmed BoDV-1 encephalitis, while one case was a probable infection with positive serology and typical brain magnetic resonance imaging, but without molecular confirmation. Of the three cases, one full virus genome sequence could be recovered. Our report highlights the need for awareness of a BoDV-1 etiology in cryptic encephalitis cases in all areas with known animal Borna disease endemicity in Europe, including virus-endemic regions in Austria, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland. BoDV-1 should be actively tested for in acute encephalitis cases with residence or rural exposure history in known Borna disease-endemic areas.Peer Reviewe

The Structure of Structure Formation Theories

We study the general structure of models for structure formation, with applications to the reverse engineering of the model from observations. Through a careful accounting of the degrees of freedom in covariant gravitational instability theory, we show that the evolution of structure is completely specified by the stress history of the dark sector. The study of smooth, entropic, sonic, scalar anisotropic, vector anisotropic, and tensor anisotropic stresses reveals the origin, robustness, and uniqueness of specific model phenomenology. We construct useful and illustrative analytic solutions that cover cases with multiple species of differing equations of state relevant to the current generation of models, especially those with effectively smooth components. We present a simple case study of models with phenomenologies similar to that of a LambdaCDM model to highlight reverse-engineering issues. A critical-density universe dominated by a single type of dark matter with the appropriate stress history can mimic a LambdaCDM model exactly.Comment: 31 pages, 18 figures, RevTeX, submitted to Phys. Rev.

D3-brane Potentials from Fluxes in AdS/CFT

We give a comprehensive treatment of the scalar potential for a D3-brane in a warped conifold region of a compactification with stabilized moduli. By studying general ultraviolet perturbations in supergravity, we systematically incorporate `compactification effects' sourced by supersymmetry breaking in the compact space. Significant contributions to the D3-brane potential, including the leading term in the infrared, arise from imaginary anti-self-dual (IASD) fluxes. For an arbitrary Calabi-Yau cone, we determine the most general IASD fluxes in terms of scalar harmonics, then compute the resulting D3-brane potential. Specializing to the conifold, we identify the operator dual to each mode of flux, and for chiral operators we confirm that the potential computed in the gauge theory matches the gravity result. The effects of four-dimensional curvature, including the leading D3-brane mass term, arise directly from the ten-dimensional equations of motion. Furthermore, we show that gaugino condensation on D7-branes provides a local source for IASD flux. This flux precisely encodes the nonperturbative contributions to the D3-brane potential, yielding a promising ten-dimensional representation of four-dimensional nonperturbative effects. Our result encompasses all significant contributions to the D3-brane potential discussed in the literature, and does so in the single coherent framework of ten-dimensional supergravity. Moreover, we identify new terms with irrational scaling dimensions that were inaccessible in prior works. By decoupling gravity in a noncompact configuration, then systematically reincorporating compactification effects as ultraviolet perturbations, we have provided an approach in which Planck-suppressed contributions to the D3-brane effective action can be computed.Comment: 70 page

A non-controlled, single arm, open label, phase II study of intravenous and intratumoral administration of ParvOryx in patients with metastatic, inoperable pancreatic cancer: ParvOryx02 protocol

Background: Metastatic pancreatic cancer has a dismal prognosis, with a mean six-month progression-free survival of approximately 50% and a median survival of about 11 months. Despite intensive research, only slight improvements of clinical outcome could be achieved over the last decades. Hence, new and innovative therapeutic strategies are urgently required. ParvOryx is a drug product containing native parvovirus H-1 (H-1PV). Since H-1PV was shown to exert pronounced anti-neoplastic effects in pre-clinical models of pancreatic cancer, the drug appears to be a promising candidate for treatment of this malignancy. Methods: ParvOryx02 is a non-controlled, single arm, open label, dose-escalating, single center trial. In total seven patients with pancreatic cancer showing at least one hepatic metastasis are to be treated with escalating doses of ParvOryx according to the following schedule: i) 40% of the total dose infused intravenously in equal fractions on four consecutive days, ii) 60% of the total dose injected on a single occasion directly into the hepatic metastasis at varying intervals after intravenous infusions. The main eligibility criteria are: age ≥ 18 years, disease progression despite first-line chemotherapy, and at least one hepatic metastasis. Since it is the second trial within the drug development program, the study primarily explores safety and tolerability after further dose escalation of ParvOryx. The secondary objectives are related to the evaluation of certain aspects of anti-tumor activity and clinical efficacy of the drug. Discussion: This trial strongly contributes to the clinical development program of ParvOryx. The individual hazards for patients included in the current study and the environmental risks are addressed and counteracted adequately. Besides information on safety and tolerability of the treatment after further dose escalation, thorough evaluations of pharmacokinetics and intratumoral spread as well as proof-of-concept (PoC) in pancreatic cancer will be gained in the course of the trial. Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov-ID: NCT02653313, Registration date: Dec. 4th, 2015

Dynamics of coupled bosonic systems with applications to preheating

Coupled, multi-field models of inflation can provide several attractive features unavailable in the case of a single inflaton field. These models have a rich dynamical structure resulting from the interaction of the fields and their associated fluctuations. We present a formalism to study the nonequilibrium dynamics of coupled scalar fields. This formalism solves the problem of renormalizing interacting models in a transparent way using dimensional regularization. The evolution is generated by a renormalized effective Lagrangian which incorporates the dynamics of the mean fields and their associated fluctuations at one-loop order. We apply our method to two problems of physical interest: (i) a simple two-field model which exemplifies applications to reheating in inflation, and (ii) a supersymmetric hybrid inflation model. This second case is interesting because inflation terminates via a smooth phase transition which gives rise to a spinodal instability in one of the fields. We study the evolution of the zero mode of the fields and the energy density transfer to the fluctuations from the mean fields. We conclude that back reaction effects can be significant over a wide parameter range. In particular for the supersymmetric hybrid model we find that particle production can be suppressed due to these effects.Comment: 23 pages, 16 eps-figures, minor changes in the text, references added, accepted for publication in PR