Commentary: Actions to end violence against women : a multi-sector approach

Many forms of violence affect women and girls, such as physical and sexual abuse, trafficking, female genital mutilation, early and forced marriage, murders in the name of honour or dowry, and sexual harassment and abuse by authority figures. Prevention is imperative, and promising programmes exist that need to be tested and scaled up. The UN’s post-2015 global agenda, currently under discussion, must include a target to eliminate violence against women and girls, which supports the actions outlined in this article

Global and regional estimates of violence against women

The report presents a global systematic review of scientific data on the prevalence of two forms of violence against women: violence by an intimate partner (intimate partner violence) and sexual violence by someone other than a partner (non-partner sexual violence). It shows global and regional estimates of the prevalence of these two forms of violence, using data from around the world. The report details the effects of partner and non-partner sexual violence on several aspects of women’s health. It shows that women who have experienced intimate partner violence have higher rates of depression, HIV, injury and death, and are more likely to have low birth weight babies, than those who haven’t. Though research on the health effects of non-partner sexual violence is more limited, the evidence clearly shows that sexual violence has both long- and short-term debilitating effects on women’s mental health and well-being. Report developed by the World Health Organization (WHO), the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and the South African Medical Research Council (MRC)

The primordial explosion of a false white hole from a 5D vacuum

We explore the cosmological consequences of some possible big bang produced by a black-hole with mass $M$ in an 5D extended SdS. Under these particular circumstances, the effective 4D metric obtained by the use of a constant foliation on the extra coordinate is comported as a false white-hole (FWH), which evaporates for all unstable modes that have wavelengths bigger than the size of the FWH. Outside the white hole the repulsive gravitational field can be considered as weak, so that the dynamics for fluctuations of the inflaton field and the scalar perturbations of the metric can be linearized.Comment: Final version to be published in PLB. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1304.698

Randall-Sundrum brane cosmology: modification of late-time cosmic dynamics by exotic matter

In this paper we show, through the study of concrete examples, that, depending on the cosmic dynamics of the energy density of matter degrees of freedom living in the brane, Randall-Sundrum (RS) brane effects can be important not only at short distances (UV regime), but also at large cosmological scales (IR regime). Our first example relies on the study, by means of the dynamical systems tools, of a toy model based in a non-linear electrodynamics (NLED) Lagrangian. Then we show that other, less elaborated models, such as the inclusion of a scalar phantom field, and of a tachyon phantom field -- trapped in the brane -- produce similar results. The form of the RS correction seems to convert what would have been future attractors in general relativity into saddle points. The above "mixing of scales" effect is distinctive only of theories that modify the right-hand-side (matter part) of the Friedmann equation, so that, for instance, DGP-brane models do not show this feature.Comment: Latex, 12 pages, 9 eps figures. Title changed, discussion improved. Version that matches the one published in CQ

Self accelerating solutions in a DGP brane with a scalar field trapped on it: the dynamical systems perspective

We apply the dynamical systems tools to study the linear dynamics of a self-interacting scalar field trapped on a DGP brane. The simplest kinds of self-interaction potentials are investigated: a) constant potential, and b) exponential potential. It is shown that the dynamics of DGP models can be very rich and complex. One of the most interesting results of this study shows that dynamical screening of the scalar field self-interaction potential, occuring within the Minkowski cosmological phase of the DGP model and mimetizing 4D phantom behaviour, is an attractor solution for a constant self-interaction potential but not for the exponential one. In the latter case gravitational screening is not even a critical point of the corresponding autonomous system of ordinary differential equations.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures. Version that matches the one published by PL

Present accelerated expansion of the universe from new Weyl-Integrable gravity approach

We investigate if a recently introduced formulation of general relativity on a Weyl-integrable geometry, contains cosmological solutions exhibiting acceleration in the present cosmic expansion. We derive the general conditions to have acceleration in the expansion of the universe and obtain a particular solution for the Weyl scalar field describing a cosmological model for the present time in concordance with the data combination Planck + WP + BAO + SN.Comment: Version to be published in Eur. Phys. J.