Administration of Canagliflozin for the Remission of Metabolic Syndrome in Nondiabetic Adults

Metabolic syndrome is a critical risk factor for the development of type 2 diabetes mellitus and cardiovascular disease, two of the leading causes of death in the United States. With over one third of the adult population currently affected, this syndrome poses a serious health and economic burden. Lifestyle modification is the primary treatment, however only 50% maintain adherence. A single pharmacological therapy such as canagliflozin may overcome this lack of treatment adherence. Our purpose is to establish a difference between canagliflozin 300 milligrams daily plus lifestyle modification education and lifestyle modification education alone for the remission of metabolic syndrome in nondiabetic adults after one year. We will conduct a double-blind, randomized placebo-controlled trial in order to assess for this primary endpoint. This study has the capability to improve the current treatment of metabolic syndrome and potentially prevent the development of type 2 diabetes mellitus and cardiovascular disease

Reconnection in pulsar winds

The spin-down power of a pulsar is thought to be carried away in an MHD wind in which, at least close to the star, the energy transport is dominated by Poynting flux. The pulsar drives a low-frequency wave in this wind, consisting of stripes of toroidal magnetic field of alternating polarity, propagating in a region around the equatorial plane. The current implied by this configuration falls off more slowly with radius than the number of charged particles available to carry it, so that the MHD picture must, at some point, fail. Recently, magnetic reconnection in such a structure has been shown to accelerate the wind significantly. This reduces the magnetic field in the comoving frame and, consequently, the required current, enabling the solution to extend to much larger radius. This scenario is discussed and, for the Crab Nebula, the range of validity of the MHD solution is compared with the radius at which the flow appears to terminate. For sufficiently high particle densities, it is shown that a low frequency entropy wave can propagate out to the termination point. In this case, the "termination shock" itself must be responsible for dissipating the wave.Comment: LaTeX 13 pages, 3 figures, typos remove

Transients and saturation in synchronous machines

The synchronous machine can be regarded as the most important electrical device in today\u27s industry and civilization. Although many improvements in the development of powerful electronic devices have been made, in recent years, the importance of the electrical power engineering field can never be overlooked in any way. Most of electrical power engineering problems have been studied in the first quarter of the present century, and the results applied to industry for the betterment of electrical power production. As distribution and transmission systems used become extensively large, new problems such as the stability of interconnected power systems, have been introduced. The exact mathematical analysis of complicated power systems is possible to-day by applying tensorial analysis, or by using differential analyzers. Many apparatus, such as relays, circuit breakers, lightening arresters, have been developed and improved in order to protect the alternators and transformers, and to provide a reliable and stable operation of power plants, Stability problems have necessitated the introduction of high speed relays and relays equipped with rapid reclosing devices. The design of such equipments and of many others, and the analysis of stability problems requires an extensive study of transients which will be present after occurrence of a system disturbance. It is well known that the initial short circuit current for a fault at the bus can be four or five times as large as the steady state short circuit current; the open phase voltage for an unbalanced short circuit at the high voltage transmission line up to 10 times the rated voltage; the initial current of a transformer which is connected to the bus, as high as five to six times the rated current. The study of such problems is called transients and the scope of this work is to study the Transients in Synchronous machines --Introduction, pages vi-vii

The effect of photo-electric absorption on space-charge limited flow in pulsars

Photo-electric absorption of blackbody photons is an important process which limits the acceleration of ions under the space-charge limited flow boundary condition at the polar caps of pulsars with positive corotational charge density. Photo-electric cross-sections in high magnetic fields have been found for the geometrical conditions of the problem, and ion transition rates calculated as functions of the surface temperatures on both the polar cap and the general neutron-star surface. The general surface temperature is the more important and, unless it is below 10^5 K, limits the acceleration electric field in the open magnetosphere to values far below those needed either for electron-positron pair creation or slot-gap X-ray sources. But such ion beams are unstable against growth of a quasi-longitudinal Langmuir mode at rates that can be observationally significant as a source of coherent radio emission.Comment: 7 pages; to be published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Societ

Relativistic Precessing Jets and Cosmological Gamma Ray Bursts

We discuss the possibility that gamma-ray bursts may result from cosmological relativistic blob emitting neutron star jets that precess past the line of sight. Beaming reduces the energy requirements, so that the jet emission can last longer than the observed burst duration. One precession mode maintains a short duration time scale, while a second keeps the beam from returning to the line of sight, consistent with the paucity of repeaters. The long life of these objects reduces the number required for production as compared to short lived jets. Blobs can account for the time structure of the bursts. Here we focus largely on kinematic and time scale considerations of beaming, precession, and blobs--issues which are reasonably independent of the acceleration and jet collimation mechanisms. We do suggest that large amplitude electro-magnetic waves could be a source of blob acceleration.Comment: 15 pages, plain TeX, accepted to ApJ

Superluminal waves in pulsar winds

The energy lost by a rotation-powered pulsar is carried by a relativistic flow containing a mixture of electromagnetic fields and particles. In the inner regions, this is thought to be a magnetically dominated, cold, electron-positron wind that is well described by the MHD equations. However, beyond a critical radius r_{cr}, the same particle, energy and momentum fluxes can be transported by a strong, transverse electromagnetic wave with superluminal phase speed. We analyze the nonlinear dispersion relation of these waves for linear and circular polarization, and find the dependence of r_{cr} on the mass-loading, magnetization and luminosity of the flow, as well as on the net magnetic flux. We show that, for most isolated pulsars, the wind lies well outside r_{cr}, and speculate that superluminal modes play an important role in the dissipation of electromagnetic energy into nonthermal particles at the termination shock.Comment: Submitted to Ap

The role of multipolar magnetic fields in pulsar magnetospheres

We explore the role of complex multipolar magnetic fields in determining physical processes near the surface of rotation powered pulsars. We model the actual magnetic field as the sum of global dipolar and star-centered multipolar fields. In configurations involving axially symmetric and uniform multipolar fields, 'neutral points' and 'neutral lines' exist close to the stellar surface. Also, the curvature radii of magnetic field lines near the stellar surface can never be smaller than the stellar radius, even for very high order multipoles. Consequently, such configurations are unable to provide an efficient pair creation process above pulsar polar caps, necessary for plasma mechanisms of generation of pulsar radiation. In configurations involving axially symmetric and non-uniform multipoles, the periphery of the pulsar polar cap becomes fragmented into symmetrically distributed narrow sub-regions where curvature radii of complex magnetic field lines are less than the radius of the star. The pair production process is only possible just above these 'favourable' sub-regions. As a result, the pair plasma flow is confined within narrow filaments regularly distributed around the margin of the open magnetic flux tube. Such a magnetic topology allows us to model the system of twenty isolated sub-beams observed in PSR B0943+10 by Deshpande & Rankin (1999, 2001). We suggest a physical mechanism for the generation of pulsar radio emission in the ensemble of finite sub-beams, based on specific instabilities. We propose an explanation for the subpulse drift phenomenon observed in some long-period pulsars.Comment: 19 pages, 13 figures, MNRAS, in pres

Conocimiento de derecho ambiental y desempeño laboral de los abogados litigantes en un distrito judicial, Perú 2019-2022

La presente tesis, tuvo como finalidad y objetivo general determinar la relación entre el nivel de conocimiento en derecho ambiental y el desempeño laboral de abogados litigantes dedicados al patrocinio de las distintas causas ambientales de un Distrito Judicial, Perú 2019-2022. Fue de tipo Básica, con enfoque cuantitativo, cuyo diseño es no experimental, correlacional, transversal, la muestra estuvo conformada por 70 abogados litigantes. Los resultados señalaron que, un 55,8% de los encuestados manifestaron que el conocimiento en derecho ambiental se percibió en un nivel regular y 49,6% de los encuestados consideraron que el desempeño laboral alcanzo el nivel regular. Concluyó que, la prueba de correlación Rho Spearman, el cual obtuvo como resultado de 0.483, manteniendo una relación positiva moderada entre el conocimiento en derecho ambiental y el desempeño laboral, así como la proporcionalidad directa de las mismas. Por otro lado, se halló una significancia de 0.000<0.05, la cual se acepta la hipótesis de investigación que dicta que el conocimiento en derecho ambiental se relaciona significativamente con el desempeño laboral de abogados litigantes dedicados al patrocinio de las distintas causas ambientales de un Distrito Judicial, Perú 2019-2022

Intrinsic Variability of the Vela Pulsar: Lognormal Statistics and Theoretical Implications

Individual pulses from pulsars have intensity-phase profiles that differ widely from pulse to pulse, from the average profile, and from phase to phase within a pulse. Widely accepted explanations for pulsar radio emission and its time variability do not exist. Here, by analysing data near the peak of the Vela pulsar's average profile, we show that Vela's variability corresponds to lognormal field statistics, consistent with the prediction of stochastic growth theory (SGT) for a purely linear system close to marginal stability. Vela's variability is therefore a direct manifestation of an SGT state and the field statistics constrain the emission mechanism to be linear (either direct or indirect), ruling out nonlinear mechanisms like wave collapse. Field statistics are thus a powerful, potentially widely applicable tool for understanding variability and constraining mechanisms and source characteristics of coherent astrophysical and space emissions.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures. In press at ApJ Letters - scheduled for December 10 issu