525 research outputs found
Magnetic variation anomalies in northern England and southern Scotland
Single-station transfer functions linking the time variations of the vertical and horizontal components of the magnetic ïŹeld at stations in northern England and southern Scotland have been compiled into a uniform data set. From hypothetical event analysis we show here that there are two distinct anomalies in the Borders region. One runs south-west to north-east, immediately to the south-east of the Southern Uplands Fault; the second follows the Northumberland Basin, and seems to exist because the conductive sedimentary rocks ïŹlling the basin create a link between the Irish and North Seas. If the Iapetus suture is marked by a conductivity anomaly, as has been suggested, these results place it beneath the Southern Uplands, unless it is masked by the surface conductor in the Northumberland Basin
Voltammetric behaviour of drug molecules as a predictor of metabolic liabilities
© 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. Electron transfer plays a vital role in drug metabolism and underlying toxicity mechanisms. Currently, pharmaceutical research relies on pharmacokinetics (PK) and absorption, distribution, metabolism, elimination and toxicity (ADMET) measurements to understand and predict drug reactions in the body. Metabolic stability (and toxicity) prediction in the early phases of the drug discovery and development process is key in identifying a suitable lead compound for optimisation. Voltammetric methods have the potential to overcome the significant barrier of new drug failure rates, by giving insight into phase I metabolism events which can have a direct bearing on the stability and toxicity of the parent drug being dosed. Herein, we report for the first time a data-mining investigation into the voltammetric behaviour of reported drug molecules and their correlation with metabolic stability (indirectly measured via t1/2), as a potential predictor of drug stability/toxicity in vivo. We observed an inverse relationship between oxidation potential and drug stability. Furthermore, we selected and prepared short-(2 h) drug molecules to prospectively survey the relationship between oxidation potential and stability
Incompressible Fluids of the de Sitter Horizon and Beyond
There are (at least) two surfaces of particular interest in eternal de Sitter
space. One is the timelike hypersurface constituting the lab wall of a static
patch observer and the other is the future boundary of global de Sitter space.
We study both linear and non-linear deformations of four-dimensional de Sitter
space which obey the Einstein equation. Our deformations leave the induced
conformal metric and trace of the extrinsic curvature unchanged for a fixed
hypersurface. This hypersurface is either timelike within the static patch or
spacelike in the future diamond. We require the deformations to be regular at
the future horizon of the static patch observer. For linearized perturbations
in the future diamond, this corresponds to imposing incoming flux solely from
the future horizon of a single static patch observer. When the slices are
arbitrarily close to the cosmological horizon, the finite deformations are
characterized by solutions to the incompressible Navier-Stokes equation for
both spacelike and timelike hypersurfaces. We then study, at the level of
linearized gravity, the change in the discrete dispersion relation as we push
the timelike hypersurface toward the worldline of the static patch. Finally, we
study the spectrum of linearized solutions as the spacelike slices are pushed
to future infinity and relate our calculations to analogous ones in the context
of massless topological black holes in AdS.Comment: 27 pages, 8 figure
Future Boundary Conditions in De Sitter Space
We consider asymptotically future de Sitter spacetimes endowed with an
eternal observatory. In the conventional descriptions, the conformal metric at
the future boundary I^+ is deformed by the flux of gravitational radiation. We
however impose an unconventional future "Dirichlet" boundary condition
requiring that the conformal metric is flat everywhere except at the conformal
point where the observatory arrives at I^+. This boundary condition violates
conventional causality, but we argue the causality violations cannot be
detected by any experiment in the observatory. We show that the bulk-to-bulk
two-point functions obeying this future boundary condition are not realizable
as operator correlation functions in any de Sitter invariant vacuum, but they
do agree with those obtained by double analytic continuation from anti-de
Sitter space.Comment: 16 page
Vacuum Ambiguity in de Sitter Space at Strong Coupling
It is well known that in the weak coupling regime, quantum field theories in
de Sitter space do not have a unique vacuum, but a class of vacua parametrized
by a complex parameter , i.e., the so-called -vacua. In this
article, using gauge/gravity duality, we calculate the symmetric two-point
function of strongly coupled supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory on
. We find that there is a class of de Sitter invariant vacua,
parametrized by a set of complex parameters .Comment: 17 pages in JHEP style, references adde
The hidden horizon and black hole unitarity
We motivate through a detailed analysis of the Hawking radiation in a
Schwarzschild background a scheme in accordance with quantum unitarity. In this
scheme the semi-classical approximation of the unitary quantum - horizonless -
black hole S-matrix leads to the conventional description of the Hawking
radiation from a classical black hole endowed with an event horizon. Unitarity
is borne out by the detailed exclusive S-matrix amplitudes. There, the fixing
of generic out-states, in addition to the in-state, yields in asymptotic
Minkowski space-time saddle-point contributions which are dominated by
Planckian metric fluctuations when approaching the Schwarzschild radius. We
argue that these prevent the corresponding macroscopic "exclusive backgrounds"
to develop an event horizon. However, if no out-state is selected, a distinct
saddle-point geometry can be defined, in which Planckian fluctuations are
tamed. Such "inclusive background" presents an event horizon and constitutes a
coarse-grained average over the aforementioned exclusive ones. The classical
event horizon appears as a coarse-grained structure, sustaining the
thermodynamic significance of the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy. This is
reminiscent of the tentative fuzzball description of extremal black holes: the
role of microstates is played here by a complete set of out-states. Although
the computations of unitary amplitudes would require a detailed theory of
quantum gravity, the proposed scheme itself, which appeals to the metric
description of gravity only in the vicinity of stationary points, does not.Comment: 29 pages, 4 figures. Typos corrected. Two footnotes added (footnotes
3 and 5
Arabs and Atheism: Religious Discussions in the Arab Twittersphere
Most previous research on online discussions of atheism has focused on
atheism within a Christian context. In contrast, discussions about atheism in
the Arab world and from Islamic background are relatively poorly studied. An
added complication is that open atheism is against the law in some Arab
countries, which may further restrict atheist activity on social media. In this
work, we explore atheistic discussion in the Arab Twittersphere. We identify
four relevant categories of Twitter users according to the content they post:
atheistic, theistic, tanweeri (religious renewal), and other. We characterise
the typical content posted by these four sets of users and their social
networks, paying particular attention to the topics discussed and the
interaction among them. Our findings have implication for the study of
religious and spiritual discourse on social media and provide a better
cross-cultural understanding of relevant aspects.Comment: Accepted as a full paper at Socinfo 2019. Please cite the Socinfo
version. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Social
Informatics (SocInfo 2019
Bi-local Construction of Sp(2N)/dS Higher Spin Correspondence
We derive a collective field theory of the singlet sector of the Sp(2N) sigma
model. Interestingly the hamiltonian for the bilocal collective field is the
same as that of the O(N) model. However, the large-N saddle points of the two
models differ by a sign. This leads to a fluctuation hamiltonian with a
negative quadratic term and alternating signs in the nonlinear terms which
correctly reproduces the correlation functions of the singlet sector. Assuming
the validity of the connection between O(N) collective fields and higher spin
fields in AdS, we argue that a natural interpretation of this theory is by a
double analytic continuation, leading to the dS/CFT correspondence proposed by
Anninos, Hartman and Strominger. The bi-local construction gives a map into the
bulk of de Sitter space-time. Its geometric pseudospin-representation provides
a framework for quantization and definition of the Hilbert space. We argue that
this is consistent with finite N grassmanian constraints, establishing the
bi-local representation as a nonperturbative framework for quantization of
Higher Spin Gravity in de Sitter space.Comment: 1 figur
The Effect of Pre-Analytical Variability on the Measurement of MRM-MS-Based Mid- to High-Abundance Plasma Protein Biomarkers and a Panel of Cytokines
Blood sample processing and handling can have a significant impact on the stability and levels of proteins measured in biomarker studies. Such pre-analytical variability needs to be well understood in the context of the different proteomics platforms available for biomarker discovery and validation. In the present study we evaluated different types of blood collection tubes including the BD P100 tube containing protease inhibitors as well as CTAD tubes, which prevent platelet activation. We studied the effect of different processing protocols as well as delays in tube processing on the levels of 55 mid and high abundance plasma proteins using novel multiple-reaction monitoring-mass spectrometry (MRM-MS) assays as well as 27 low abundance cytokines using a commercially available multiplexed bead-based immunoassay. The use of P100 tubes containing protease inhibitors only conferred proteolytic protection for 4 cytokines and only one MRM-MS-measured peptide. Mid and high abundance proteins measured by MRM are highly stable in plasma left unprocessed for up to six hours although platelet activation can also impact the levels of these proteins. The levels of cytokines were elevated when tubes were centrifuged at cold temperature, while low levels were detected when samples were collected in CTAD tubes. Delays in centrifugation also had an impact on the levels of cytokines measured depending on the type of collection tube used. Our findings can help in the development of guidelines for blood collection and processing for proteomic biomarker studies
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